But we all know that giving excessive power to good guys turns them rather reliably into bad guys.
It chafes me a little to see this so often phrased as something "everybody" thinks. There are enough people who feel otherwise in my social circles that it's pretty easy for me to consider this as a shockingly dumb assumption for a person to hold.
Though I do acknowledge that you're probably close to right from a purely numerical perspective.
Though from your response, I think you probably understood what I meant despite the ambiguous phrasing.
Excepting the approval of end to end encryption and residential zoning, pretty much every problem thread on HN is littered with comments about how we need more regulation and laws to solve X or Y or Z.
Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. I remember earlier- including before I had signed up for an account- when HN was much more libertarian, compared to the relative minority it seems to be now.
I think all these start around Trump's administration. Trump start calling some media/social media as fake news, and some media/social media start censoring his supporter.
After seeing the worse effects of misleading information, many free-speech-supporter back off alot.
Trump is a correlation to (not cause of) both the left and right in America turning sharply populist and inward looking in recent years. Populists tend not to be concerned with principles like freedom of speech, or the concerns of the global community.
Rather democracy supporters back off…
It is ironic that we should trust government to be an arbiter of truth, given that our government has been a source of "misinformation" for years (a.k.a. blatantly lying to support an agenda).
Trump it can be argued went so far to break basic things like US mail, and encourage corporate monopoly, the course correction in the other direction is not only reasonable but expected...turns out divisive (fascist) wannabe dictators are not a good recipe for freedom either...
The alternative to giving a democratic government power isn't 'nobody has power'.
The alternative to giving a democratic government power is ceding it to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs.
When a democratic government has it, you get some say in how it is used.
Then there is a third class of power, where it's useful for the government to have it, but abuse of it can be really bad. So you need to make it really hard to abuse that power. Maybe using the power requires a lot of people to agree. Maybe a list of difficult-to-forge and difficult-to-abuse conditions need to be met before that power can be used. Maybe the power is designed so a lot about how it is used ends up being public, so people can audit its use. And so on.
But I think if there's a power that is likely to be abused by government, and really hard to put checks on that (ab)use, then the government just should not have that power, no matter how useful that power might be.
The problem with assuming that last bit isn't a big deal because they're the "good guys" is that even if they genuinely are the good guys, you never know who is going to get elected during the next cycle (or the next-next, or the next-next-next, or...). They might not be the good guys, but they still get to use that power, and certainly won't pass laws to take that power away.
For example, we might give a democratic government the power to tap everybody's phone calls at once, but if we don't, that doesn't necessarily imply that undemocratic, unelected oligarchs, or anyone else, is tapping everybody's phone calls at once. There might just be nobody who has the power to tap phone calls, as is the case with secure free software running on trustworthy hardware, or there might be many people who have the power to tap only a few phone calls.
And we might give a democratic government the power to assign workers to jobs, for example, as the Soviets did. Alternatively, undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could assign workers to jobs, as in a coal-mining company town; but an additional possibility is that workers and employers, or unions and employers, negotiate with one another, each limiting the power of the other.
We might give a democratic government the power to decide what's for dinner each day, which sounds ridiculous but is exactly the standard practice in kibbutzim and in school lunch programs in democracies. Conceivably, undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could decide what's for dinner each day, though I don't know of any examples; the usual alternative is for each family to decide what's for dinner each day independently, though in many cases this degenerates to an undemocratic, unelected head of household deciding. Often enough, some household members prefer school cafeteria foodoid products to the results, despite having no say in that decision-making process either.
Edit; As I said I’m a libertarian and a group of whatever people talking what ever where ever is totally fine with me but manipulating people with intent is not protected by the First Amendment And shouldn’t be confused with free speech
Was it a problem a couple centuries ago, when offline media emerged and blossomed? It was the same effect, just smaller scale. Yet, free press is valued as essential for democracy.