Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
If a platform knows that a story is heavily promoted, inorganically (whether via technological intervention or just good old-fashioned grassroots organizing) in the run up to an election with the obvious hope of influencing the outcome of that election, should it do anything?
That seems like a really hard question to me. Seems like whether it is technological or organizing probably makes a difference, but in a world that includes bot farms and nearly costless sharing, that may be a very difficult thing to distinguish.
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I think to avoid what we have today, a belief among a significant number of voters that the media and big tech put a finger on the scale for Biden, I think there should be no preclusion of any stories regarding candidates. If you don’t let it rip, you get what we have now - a persistent argument that the President is illegitimate.
We’ll see this in reverse in November, when the Rs take the house, possibly in a landslide. A significant number of voters will believe that was somehow fixed. And that will be based in part on legitimate arguments re: GOP gerrymandering and fixing election rules to tamp D turnout. But an equally significant number will base this belief on nonsense they read on Twitter or FB.
There is no way to fix this. It’s what happens when the general population is unable to separate the fantastic from the real. And yeah, we’re there.
ETA: I’d submit if you believe the election of 2020 was fixed, you’re irredeemable. Limiting the crazy shit you absorb isn’t going to make much difference. Nothing is improved by stopping a man from having 30 shots of whiskey but allowing 29. (Maybe Dylan Thomas’ death, but that’s an extreme outlier.)
