Any scrutiny of the misleading Facebook ads that presumably swayed voters was quickly shut down, by the argument that it was somehow patronising to suggest that voters had been led astray.
Given how much hostility there was toward Facebook, the idea that somehow Facebook didn’t get scrutiny after Brexit seems pretty strange to me.
A key dynamic was that mainstream media outlets made a lot of deceptive claims about what Cambridge Analytica did, and as the fact became clearer they didn’t like talking about it.
It seems to me very unlikely that “the argument that it was somehow patronising” had a strong effect on motivating any of the stakeholders.
If we believe that democracy is good no matter what, we are lulled into a sense of complacency, with the possibility for a dysfunctional, deceptive media to steadily distort our democracy.
Media has always been partly deceptive.
The trend toward regulating media more like China does that we had in the last years to “improve democracy” is problematic.
A key reason why we don’t have vaccines that actually immunize against COVID-19 is that the media misled people about the effectiveness of the initial vaccines and was supported by censorship efforts in their deception. That prevented an honest look at the lack of effectiveness and development of better vaccines.
In a lot of ways, the shutdown of public debate produced worse policy outcomes than would have happened with less partly illegal censorship. If you want to “improve democracy” you actually need to analyze both the costs and the benefits of trying to regulate opinions that challenge the status quo away.
If there existed a deeply unfair system which nonetheless provided better outcomes for the population, I would switch to it in a heartbeat, and I think most people would too.
In ultimatum games, most people do value fairness to some extent.
The triage ward is full of injured patients, and their conditions are deteriorating by the minute. Unfortunately, the limited resources make treating all of them impossible. It certainly doesn’t seem fair to start treating people at random, or based on some arbitrary characteristic such as which side of the room they entered.
This seems strange on multiple fronts. The whole point of a triage ward is to do triage instead of treating people randomly. Secondly, random treatment with equal chances is generally not seen as unfair.
Given how much hostility there was toward Facebook, the idea that somehow Facebook didn’t get scrutiny after Brexit seems pretty strange to me.
A key dynamic was that mainstream media outlets made a lot of deceptive claims about what Cambridge Analytica did, and as the fact became clearer they didn’t like talking about it.
It seems to me very unlikely that “the argument that it was somehow patronising” had a strong effect on motivating any of the stakeholders.
Media has always been partly deceptive.
The trend toward regulating media more like China does that we had in the last years to “improve democracy” is problematic.
A key reason why we don’t have vaccines that actually immunize against COVID-19 is that the media misled people about the effectiveness of the initial vaccines and was supported by censorship efforts in their deception. That prevented an honest look at the lack of effectiveness and development of better vaccines.
In a lot of ways, the shutdown of public debate produced worse policy outcomes than would have happened with less partly illegal censorship. If you want to “improve democracy” you actually need to analyze both the costs and the benefits of trying to regulate opinions that challenge the status quo away.
In ultimatum games, most people do value fairness to some extent.
This seems strange on multiple fronts. The whole point of a triage ward is to do triage instead of treating people randomly. Secondly, random treatment with equal chances is generally not seen as unfair.