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Comment by jahvo | Hacker News Reader

Tech people are terrified of CA because CA shows them how deeply flawed their beloved liberal democracy is. They already suspected that but they swept it under the carpet, but now that they are forced to watch it because of this Facebook thing, it's time to shut everything down and shoot the messenger instead of shutting down the flawed system.

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You don't think this is more of a function of human greed and ambition rather than a consequence of liberal democracy? I seriously doubt that the use of personal data for political gain would be particularly less common under literally any other configuration of government.

How does this have anything to do with "liberal democracy" besides your strange interpretation of the "system"?

People are easily manipulable. This was the case since forever, but tech has amplified it, and tech has given us the data to back up how easy it is to manipulate people.

Sure, but how is liberalism or democracy related to your point at all?

He's a conservative. He thinks that blaming liberals is the default...

I don't think classical liberalism has anything to do with what conservatives call "liberals"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

He's probably a neoreaction type. Probably prefers an autocrat or absolute monarchy.

Wow, that's some pretty incredible mental gymnastics.

A right-wing data-mining and misinformation disseminating machine does not demonstrate any such flaws in "liberal democracy".

If anything, it just shows how sleazy conservative Republicans are, and how far they'll go to get power.

No, this is not a consequence of "liberal democracy", this happens a lot more in non democratic governments.

If you want to put it this way, which I think it's wrong, this would be a consequence of libertarian conservatism, where private companies would spy on groups of people and try to manipulate them, instead of the government.

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