Comment by augment_me
17 hours ago
I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this.
If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers. Even if you want to keep democratic elections, you need to somehow make sure that the citizens are voting in their interest. If the citizens at the same time are victims of the attention economy, their interest will be whatever foreign superpowers want it do be.
One well-tried solution is to engage and educate the population. However, this takes years, not weeks as the campaigns take, and takes immense resources as people will default to convenient attention economy tools.
Other option is to ban platforms/create country-wide firewalls. It's a lot harder in democratic societies, you ban one app and a new one takes it's place. Cat is kind of out of the bag on this one.
Last and easiest option is mass surveillance. Figure out who is getting influenced by what, and start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them. Its a massive slippery slope, but I can clearly see that it's the easiest and most cost-effective way to solve this information-assymetry
As always, the devil is in the details. How will "mass surveillance" be implemented? How will bad opinions be suppressed? How will misguided officials be blocked?
Even the vague outline you've provided has issues. You can't prevent someone from having an opinion. You can't figure out who is "influenced" vs merely "exposed" (and visible intrusion shifts people towards the former).
You should actually consider the downsides and failure modes of implemented mass surveillance, not "it prevents malicious foreign influence better than my other proposals", because it may be worse than said influence (which does not necessarily translate into control; keep in mind that Georgescu only won the primary and would've lost the runoff had it not been annulled). The world under free information is the devil you know.
I always hold that the problem with mass censorship and state overreach is, they are too powerful and people are too selfish and stupid. There's no good solution, but my prediction is that any drastic attempt to prevent foreign interference will backfire and fail at that (liberal leaders can't use authoritarian tools as effectively as authoritarians). Even Democracy, "the worst form of government except for all others that have been tried", is a better countermeasure; all you need, to prevent anti-democratic foreign capture and ultimate failure, is to preserve it.
To what end would you say the surveillance is for?
So you surveil your citizens and precog their opinions... to do what? Make them have state-sponsored opinions? Don't we already have that without the surveillance?
It's trivial to predict how a human will behave without any surveillance at all. Facebook abandoned their Beacon system not because of the backlash, but because they realized all they really needed to predict user behavior was the user's credit card statements, which they could easily buy.
At some point the constitution is the backstop, and unless we amend it, it should hold true.
Regarding banning platforms I’d say just ban the attention driven business model online by forbidding all social media platforms from serving ads entirely.
> "control of the population"
Who is doing the controlling in this take? "The Government"? Calling for more government control when some say--at least in the US--too much government is the heart of our current political strife. Unless this argument is for corporate surveillance?
As for elections in the age of social media, why not just pass Blackout laws around the date of the election? One week not sufficient? Make it two.
But instead the answer is mass surveillance? To do what? Arrest & detain people, and let the judicial system incarcerate them for months or years while the process plays out?
Thank you. Haven't seen this problem framed in quite this way before. I find the point quite persuasive.
But, I don't understand how this step could possibly work:
> start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them
A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.
> A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.
Which tools, specifically? I know none.
I mean that we are in dire need of such tools!
I also am not aware of any existing tools.
>If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers
When Georgia tried to implement a law to inhibit this type of foreign meddling from all superpowers it was widely branded a "pro russia law", presumably because the west had invested more in astroturfing Georgia.
Which is no different to what the US and Europe was already doing in Romania on an ENORMOUS scale before Russia ran its Tiktok campaign. Russia's campaign evidently resonated with the populace far more than what the NED were doing.
Democracy is a bit like freedom of speech - either you support it even when it makes decisions you dont like (e.g. in opposition to western imperialism) or you hate it. There isnt a middle ground.
If you support the Romanian secret services' decision to cancel the election over a tiktok campaign which was more convincing than better funded NED campaigns which they permit, you probably just hate democracy.
If you think "pro russia law" is an accurate designation of what Georgia was trying to implement - again, you just hate democracy.