The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy

By 'architecture of the internet', the authors mean the nature of social media feeds.

I couldn't read this article because Science.org left Bot Fight Mode or Super Bot Fight Mode enabled in their Cloudflare settings, causing me to be blocked by a “security verification”. If you use Cloudflare, disable bot stop modes by going to dash.cloudflare.com and selecting your domain and then clicking on “Security” and then clicking on “Settings” and then using the buttons to disable Bot Fight Mode or Super Bot Fight Mode.

Any story about threats by the Internet to democracy that revolve around Twitter has to account for the fact that only a minute portion of the electorate ever looks at Twitter.

Why not:

(1) directly fund studies and reproductions of studies (promising ahead of time to publish the results, even if negative) targeting the exact issues they're concerned about

(2) writing and publishing extensively to show people the results and help them arrive at a correct interpretation of the data

(3) make a public commitment ahead of time to change opinion based on what the data says, and not to overstate underdetermined theses

... instead of spending money trying to control the political narrative?

That would simply be science doing science -- which has always threatened the establishment because it's accountable to reality, not authority.

Science rightly done never claims authority, just reports on what the data says. Truth is powerful enough on its own.

It's not a panacea or a magic fix for human nature, but one of the root causes of this is that the underlying architecture of the HTTP(S) Web is just inadequate. The world needs (technically viable and widely-used systems of) content-addressable storage: inherently achivable, mirrorable and recoverable, properly supporting intermittent connections, providing the stability which is the necessary (though not sufficient) base for building things like annotations and back-linking. That certainly can't force people not to choose the laziest and stupid options, but it really can't hurt if at least the underlying technology doesn't make doing anything but the laziest and stupidest thing inherently hard, esoteric and unrewarding. Instead we've created TV on the computer from the visionary Doug Engelbart manifesto Don't Create TV on the Computer. Worse, some people still seem to be trying to pat themselves on the back for the supposed pragmatism and savviness of those decisions, even while at the same time using their other hand to wave a fist at the Big Tech incumbents, content farms and grifters which they gave a structural advantage to. There aren't many things which should be a higher priority, and which are a bigger blocker of general improvement, than the continuing lack of widely adopted and widely adoptable content-addressable storage. Need to do something big about that, folks, and promptly.

> Those algorithmic biases have demonstrable behavioral consequences.

The algos optimize for engagement, which can roughly translate into the people drive the algos, as they would stop watching or visiting or commenting, if it was not something they wanted to engage in.

So in some ways, is this not democracy to the max?

I wonder if articles like these don’t like the outcomes, or the reflection of society that the algos create. And thus attack them, because they would rather curate and limit conversation and expressions on the internet they don’t like or agree with.

Would social media be the bane it is, if:

1. There was no algorithm tweaking your feed. Promoting something and suppressing something else.

2. Creators were not paid.

3. Advertisements were randomly allocated irrespective of the content.

4. There were no such thing as likes.

5. Users had the option to pay for an ad-free experience.

Mainstream narrative-shapers concerned that they are losing control of the narrative. Film at 11.

So do the limitations (and requirements) of hardware and operating systems. And corporations and billionaires financing and supporting antidemocratic systems and politicians.

Modern smartphones could easily be meshnet nodes, but they don't really support P2P networking.

See: FireChat, Bitchat (removed from the Chinese app store), Airdrop (Apple limited its functionality in China)

These studies of what is suppressed on social media somehow always overlook that Facebook bans all white nationalist content, or the purges of right-wingers from reddit. Censorship the authors agree with does not "create risks for democracy".

I really haven’t trusted Nature and Science for about two decades. These are captured entities. The value of a publication in Science or Nature is questionable. This is a consequence of the corporatization of science in academics.

“Nature was, and is, a commercial enterprise, owned by the privately held company Macmillian publishers. . .”

Get off the Internet, go read a book. “Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Science Shook the Scientific World” - Eugene Samuel Reich.

The bullshit artists are at it again.

Every single one of these "internet is a threat to our democracy" takes is really about a few things, none of which is a threat to democracy.

1) Hand-wringing about information disintermediation: previously, institutional gatekeepers filtered information and interpreted it for the public. Now, the public sees raw information and forms its own judgements.

2) Social media has cut revenue streams for the sorts of organizations that bleat non-stop about how social media is a thread.

3) Weakening of ability of the institutional class to censor defectors and promulgators of inconvenient facts, which disaffected former censors call "disinformation".

Far from being a threat to "democracy", the internet is the best thing that's ever happened to it. Social media and the internet more broadly have enabled an unprecedented increase in breadth and depth of public participation in the marketplace of ideas. Those who don't like the result never liked democracy.

It's exhausting, this ceaseless cacophony of high-minded bullshit. I'm sick and tired of hearing people exclaim that the internet is a danger to "democracy" when, really, the problem is that the internet produces democratic outcomes they don't like.

TL; DR: Develop and deploy algorithms that downrank or deprioritize anti-democratic, extremist, or polarizing content.

Just call your opponents anti-democratic, extremist or polarising and here you go. Democracy!

By 'architecture of the internet', the authors mean the nature of social media feeds.

The problem is more specifically "algorithmic feeds" which isn't require by or exclusive to social media. For example, news sites and media sites like Youtube and Spotify (which arguably have social aspects, but most people don't use them like social media) also contribute in similar ways. The root problem is the algorithm optimizing for attention mixing with human nature that tends to make negative reactions more powerful than positive reactions which causes the algorithms to create a sort of polarization death spiral.

And, as usual, "risk/threat to democracy" is used to mean "support for parties I don't like"

It wasn't long ago that the Twitter shoe was on the other foot, and many of those complaining now were quite happy to endorse the right of private companies to promote/suppress speech at will (with no hint of irony regarding their alleged ideological views on private companies)

It goes beyond that. Even chat platforms can be a problem now. IMO, I'm no sociologist but I'd love the viewpoint of one, human societies were very much non flat in terms of information, and cheap infinite internet collapsed the thin hierarchical nature of information-sharing and communication.

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.

If that's what they mean, fully agreed.

Isn’t the title inappropriate then? Shouldn’t it include “social media”?

There's no clean separation between those things. The weakness and inadequacy of HTTP(S) and other protocols actively funnels people into the centralised services of big providers. It creates a world where storage is brittle and content is ephemeral, both directly due to its own failings and because it pushes people towards big providers who increasingly like things that way; and so on. Now human nature would be enough to tend to draw a lot of people towards lowest-common-denominator options, but a system which makes the alternatives frictionful and downright painful doesn't help either.

Thanks, saved me a read.

And by democracy they mean... people agreeing with each other and voting for the correct parties:

broadband reduced civic participation, eroded social trust, and boosted voting for extreme-right and populist parties in Italy and Germany.

Is the "extreme-right" party in Germany still chaired by a brown lesbian woman?

And the feeds are largely the way they are due to unregulated greed.

If we are going to be pedantic, let's do it correctly. The specific, direct problem is advertising, where the money flows. Algorithmic feeds are designed to capture attention, and the reason for attention capture is eyes on advertisements.

Having identified the true root of the problem, I would recommend directing resources towards dismantling advertising. Focusing on anything else is wasted effort.