Hacker News Reader

Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

> it is reasonable for governments to exercise control over the information environment their citizens experience

It's reasonable for governments that don't entertain the notion that their citizens have freedoms of association, speech, etc. For countries where those concepts are legally enshrined in the country's own founding documents, no, it's not. Part of living in a democracy is having the responsibility to inform yourself and make voting decisions based on your own understanding. Letting the government tell people who they can and cannot listen to flies in the face of the very idea of democracy.

View on HN

it's over for this form democracy. How can it survive when foreign powers can influence elections with one update of an algorithm? A document written 200 years ago does not protect against the communication media we have today. I wish it were different, but we do not have the luxury of abstraction I am afraid

i agree that this is the logical conclusion of the Democrat’s handwringing about foreign interference in the election, but I think the notion that Russian interference actually decided the 2016 election is absurd and there has never been any evidence that it did so

> Letting the government tell people who they can and cannot listen to flies in the face of the very idea of democracy.

But that's not what this is doing.

People are still free to hear the same thing on other platforms (which they can considering how much is crossposted).

It's like getting rid of AM radio because you want to use the spectrum and claiming it violates freedom of speech because stations have to close down.

Exactly.

And anyone is free to fly to China and have conversations.

Or read the state-run media from China.

These free speech arguments seem to have the prior that TicTok is literally the only communications channel.

Yet democracy was created in a time without the ability to influence millions of people, in ways that exploit the wiring of our brains, in mere seconds, at once. We cannot pretend that people will act as sovereign entities with the nation's best interests in mind, when they're not making fully informed decisions, but misinformation and propaganda instead.

Giving an enemy a direct medium to feed information to your constituents at will is just a bad move, and no amount of free speech will change that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com