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Comment by plastic-enjoyer | Hacker News Reader

I think there’s too much focus on the internet and social media here. We should look back to the printing press as the origin and mass media, and trace the development through to radio and television. The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.

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The thing about mass media is that there were gatekeepers due to constraints on the amount of content.

This didn’t necessarily mean the content was good or neutral, but it generally limited how “out there” stuff could be especially since you need a fairly broad audience and everyone had to see the same things.

With social media everyone can choose their own adventure, and create their own alternate realities, and that doesn’t prevent the social media companies from scaling.

before mass media we had the priests and the Church which decided what is truth and what is not.

I've come to understand religion as simply a way to share a stabilized consensus reality in the high dimensional space of all possible beliefs.

As in, it was easy for us to evolve to see the same physical reality (sight, sound, smell, etc) but we had to evolve spiritual predispositions in order to create arbitrary attractors in value space, which could pull us toward something shared. This, in turn, allowed civilizations to grow larger even as language complexified our imagined world into much higher dimensions (compared to more primitive animal minds)

So spirituality (and it's inevitable scaled system of religions) is both an oppressor and an enabler of getting here. Like a primitive form of governance that we evolved before we were thoughtful enough to invent governance ourselves :)

Yes, but things were more locally information-wise. Every iteration of mass media did not just merely enlarge the infosphere, it did lengthen the distance between the people who shape what you believe and the people who share the consequences of you believing it. The trusted village priest had some skin-in-the-game, and was at least to some degree accountable for what he said because he shared your fate. The influencer, a product of social media, is basically the worst of both worlds.

With social media everyone can choose their own adventure

isn't the issue that you can't actually choose yourself, but that it is chosen for you?

Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views.

Hence if you throw enough lines, you can catch almost anyone and lead them towards garbage.

> Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views.

I don't think this is necessarily true. A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents. The problem here is less that people are being in a filter bubble or pick their information selectively, and more that people weight information differently depending whether they trust the source, or not.

A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents.

Statistics say the opposite: left leaning persons in the US have a broader spectrum of media they consume and trust. From the selection of ~30 media presented, people on the right basically chose 1: Fox News https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/democrats-trust-more-news-...

> The risk for democracy is not social media per se, but mass media.

err not necessarily, mass media like the printing press, radio, television, the internet etc just increases visibility and expands people's understanding of the world, the risk to democracy is destabilizing economic conditions (extreme inequality). Social media just exacerbates this.

mass media influenced and dominated people's understanding. it didn't do as much to expand it. to expand your understanding you had to and still have to do your own research and look at things that do not have mass appeal.

These people believe (as did the ineffectual idiots who ran the Weimar Republic, and the later idiots who destroyed the USSR) that control of information and the social narrative will prevent the population from rebelling in the face of economic decline. They are dead wrong, and they are only making things worse by distorting the feedback loop that could correct bad policy.

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