The main vulnerability of the Western world isn't technical, it's that we voluntarily surrendered our communication and social fabrics to advertising-driven businesses that will happily host and promote anything as long as it generates engagement. This makes it trivial for foreign agents to sway public opinion where as back in the day influencing media required actual capital and connections.
Unfortunately, a lot of our own people (and especially politicians) make money out of this situation so there's very little incentive to change this. Just look at the reaction every time regulations designed to curtail Big Tech ad-driven monopolies (EU DMA, GDPR, etc) are discussed. Our greed is what makes us vulnerable.
Who is the "we" that you think surrendered control here? Freedom of the press necessitates that anyone can publish freely even if what they publish is foreign propaganda.
I wasn't talking about press, I was talking about how ad-driven social media became effectively the only communication tool and we still refuse to enact/enforce effective regulation to curb its hegemony.
It became the primary communication tool because that is what people chose to use when presented with the alternatives. If you want to force people to use different channels then that is a violation of freedom of the press.
Again I am not talking about press. I am talking about communication tools.
Yes the free market has decided that these tools are the "best" option as long as the negative externalities (such as exposure to malicious actors - foreign or otherwise) are not being priced in. We need adequate regulation to price in such externalities.
For that matter, press and conventional media is subject to many regulations that don't apply to social media. Conventional media wouldn't get away with even a sliver of what social media is allowed to get away with time and time again.
I am still not sure why you keep going on about press. I did not refer to press in my comment and I make no opinion on it here.
I am referring to the fact that back in the day communication used to be mediated by domestic, neutral carriers who got paid to carry communication neutrally regardless of source or content.
Nowadays, communication is primarily mediated by a handful of foreign companies that prioritize advertising revenue at all costs and will choose which media to carry and promote based on expected ad revenue. They are effectively acting as pseudo-press without the checks & balances and oversight that actual press is subject to.
> Please give an example of something social media gets away with that any other media would be punished for.
When’s the last time you saw an obvious scam advertised in a conventional print newspaper or magazine? Now check Facebook or YouTube ads. If such an ad made it through any reputable magazine heads will be rolling and they’d expose themselves to lawsuits, but social media keeps getting a pass.
Now, let’s say you’re a foreign threat actor and want to sway public opinion. You can’t just get in touch with the NYT/etc and ask them nicely. You’d need to buy and cultivate such influence over time and do so covertly because their people would get in trouble if there’s an obvious paper/money trail.
With Facebook? Create a page, make your propaganda video “engaging”, boost it with bot farms for the initial push and then Facebook will happily keep hosting and promoting your propaganda as long as its advertising revenue outweighs the costs of hosting it. That’s orders of magnitude cheaper than buying influence with traditional media.
You have to be joking. Print magazines have always been plastered with shitty scam ads for MLM pyramid schemes, bullshit weight loss treatments, psychic readings, and every other get rich quick scheme and ripoff known to man. And, of course, there were no adblockers. Were you not alive before the internet? You think they weren't full of foreign propaganda too? I'd like to introduce you to my friend AIPAC...
According to Reporters without Frontiers, the US ranks 57th out of 180 countries on press freedom. It's really not the model we should all be aspiring to.
These things are not an inevitable consequence of freedom of the press. Commercially-influenced legislation like the Communications Decency Act, which largely absolves platforms for the content of the material they publish, have pushed us in this direction. One could certainly imagine legislation which puts society's interests first to improve the situation.
The real problem is the almost total capture of the political process by money, which weaponizes the legislative branch against common citizens in the interests of corporate owners.
Being subject to the topic promotion and suppression technologies [1] and bizarre political whims of billionaire media owners is an unusual definition of "freedom."
All media is subject to the whims of its owners. That's freedom of the press. The only other option is that the government tells the owners what they can and can't publish.
Another option is that the government limits the power individuals can have. How many people control, say, 80% of the media? Do you need more than one hand to count them?
How do you define "control" here? Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.
I’d argue that social media stopped being democratic as it introduced algorithmic content selection. But today perhaps a bigger problem is bot farms shaping public opinion.
Bots don't count as people. They're not represented demographically. They also don't have voting rights. Yet they're spreading propaganda to influence how people vote. So one could argue social media is rather anti democratoc.
Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.
It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.
One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.
But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.
In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.
"All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie." - Vladimir Lenin
Yes, Vladimir Lenin is likely one of the most appropriate people to quote on the question of freedom. Maybe only his successor Joseph Stalin is better in that regard.
