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Comment by chroem- | Hacker News Reader

If democracy is a system where the average citizen controls the government through voting, how will we "protect democracy" by intentionally trying to control the opinions and actions of voters, with the implication that their current opinions are wrong? That kind of electorate shaping seems akin to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, where everyone still votes, but it's always influenced to be in favor of the Kim regime.

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Facebook is the one doing the controlling. You don't see the majority in the newsfeed. They pick the extreme and pump that to you so it looks like all your friends agree with you and all your enemies are awful people. This promotes engagement and silos.

It's an inadvertent global re-education scheme on a massive scale whose results we see every day. There was political collaboration and discussion in the past. Facebook essentially made that a non-starter. If the news feed was closer to what people said or even like reddit where the majority vote goes up then there wouldn't be a problem.

It’s a fine balance that doesn’t work well with hyperbolic extremes like you’re painting. We don’t let people buy materials to make bombs but we don’t prevent farmers from buying fertilizer either. The answer is somewhere in between.

Where are the checks and balances to prevent that from happening? The public discourse is the system of checks and balances in a democracy that prevents that kind of authoritarian subversion. If you prevent people from speaking out and shape their opinions, who is able to say something when it goes too far? This is not an effort to aid democracy, it's a direct attack against it.

Facebook isn't a public discourse, more of an algorithmically curated news feed. How it curates it's news feed is a business practice, and unethical business practices should be curtailed by regulation.

We don't use democracy in the correct way. The true form of democracy does not use voting to determine the leaders, but a raffle. The voting was added some time around the french revolution, when people learned that having power is great and they wanted to increase their probability to not lose it.

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