Comment by kristianc
8 days ago
> Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.
Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radical idea, I know.
We tried that, and it turns out you can't trust people to exercise their critical faculties. Haven't you been paying attention?
Ah right, yeah, because the Guardian-reading, PPE-educated, civil service "concerns have been raised" class that we trust to govern in our enlightened best interests have been doing such a fantastic job of things. My mistake.
Mass alienation didn’t begin in a troll farm in St. Petersburg, it began in think tanks, boardrooms, and editorial meetings that decided ordinary people were an obstacle to be nudged, not a public to be served.
This is a tangential argument. I want neither foreign nor domestic propaganda infesting our information streams. We seem to agree that people as a group are quite prone to systemic influence, and the fact that US corporations do it does not mean that we should allow everyone else to do it too!
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> Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties
That's not working so well in the US at least. That gave us Trump.
The failure of coastal Liberals to talk to anyone apart from themselves in successive elections gave you Trump.