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Comment by causesothere | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Building apathy erodes democracy.

It's a little more nuanced than that. Not voting can be just as democratic as voting if you're informed about your options and decide none of them represent your position.

But even in situations where someone would potentially want to vote and a tweet misleads them to believe it's not worth it, why is that worse then a tweet misleading them to believe that a certain political option will work in their favor?

I voted third party. I know all about voting with intent. Apathy, however, is caustic. It encourages people to not think they could improve things. To check out, stop listening.

"Listen to that guy" gets people listening and encourages at least the chance of someone going, "wait, actually I don't like what this guy is saying, what are other guys saying?"

If a large percentage of people are influenced to not participate, then the remaining set is a smaller group to mislead in one political direction or another.

More participation makes it harder to influence enough voters in a single direction to make a significant difference in outcomes.

And, at least in US politics, my experience is that most candidates do not stand on a single issue but rather a broad spectrum of political ideology. I think it would be pretty rare for all of the candidates to have no difference in alignment with you on any of the hundreds of issues at play. Especially if you are participating in primary elections which tend to have a greater diversity of positions.

> if you're informed about your options and decide none of them represent your position.

Literally none of "them" represent any part of your position on what is typically a wide array of different issues? Not any of the state and local candidates? Not a single national candidate? You have no position, whatsoever, on local ballot issues?

That seems deeply myopic or extraordinarily unlikely.

So do people that are easily manipulated by propaganda. Do you want such people to vote, to give the election to the best propagandists? Or do you want them to not vote, and deal with the apathy?

The fewer people who vote, the smaller the group that needs to be influenced to make a difference in the election.

Influence maxxing fixes democracy? As long as we’re flooding everyone with 24/7 political ads and building multibillion dollar industry around the associated digital surveillance, democracy will be safe. Brilliant!

That… isn’t what I said.

Having a small group to influence is bad for democracy is what I thought you were saying. That implies having more people to influence is better for democracy. If that’s not what you were saying, I apologize for misconstruing, but I see that mindset soften enough, and to me it seems like a fallacy. You just end up with a run away election industry and high paid propaganda specialists, the normalization of domestic propaganda campaigns, the unraveling of social cohesion as large swaths of the populace become convinced the other half are nazi’s, fascists, communist spies, pedos, Russian assets, etc… every new election a bit more polarizing and traumatizing to the national psyche than the prior. Yay, democracy!

My point was that a larger and more diverse voting pool makes any single influence attack less effective.

I don’t know why a smaller voting population would preclude any of the things you mention.

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