And you cannot be a prisoner of hope without engaging in a form of struggle in the present moment that keeps the best of the past alive.

These sets of conditions are immoral.

Frankly, it is a critique of each us who has to deal with this market culture and through market mechanisms try to preserve some nonmarket values.

Avaaz included web traffic from Britain, France, Germany and Italy, along with the United States, and found that the U.S. accounted for 89 percent of the comments, likes and shares of false and misleading health information.

Some of that content would be disinformation and hate speech, but other material might be offensive but true — a risk of overcensorship.

The principle of free speech has a different shape and meaning in Europe.

Forty years later, some lawyers and board members for the A.C.L.U. objected when the group defended the neo-Nazis who demonstrated in Charlottesville, Va.

Sophie Zhang, a data scientist who was fired from Facebook in September, wrote a 6,600-word memo with details about disinformation campaigns she found to influence elections in countries including Ecuador, Honduras and Ukraine. “I have blood on my hands,” she wrote.

Facebook employees have also raised questions about whether Facebook’s misinformation policy is enforced evenhandedly.

The project foundered after Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy, reportedly said at a high-level meeting, “We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” according to a source at Facebook who spoke to The Post anonymously.

As social media companies have tried to address the spread of disinformation and other toxic speech, conservatives including Trump have hurled a series of accusations that the companies are showing bias against them.

It restricted its Messenger app by preventing mass forwarding of private messages, which has done terrible damage in other countries.

Coordinated fake accounts posting about the election have also shown up on Twitter.

Online advertisers can use microtargeting to pinpoint the segments of users they want to reach.

Fact-checking and labeling are First Amendment-friendly responses.

Social media sites have leaned on First Amendment principles to keep secret the identities of people who appear to abuse their services.

Lies go viral more quickly than true statements, research shows.

The business model for the dominant platforms depends on keeping users engaged online.

As Trump’s ally and frequent platform, Fox News can help shift its audience’s behavior toward his views even when they may risk public health.

But public trusteeship for broadcast and diverse ownership began to unravel with the libertarian shift of the Reagan era.

In the past, ensuring a vibrant free press made up of competing outlets was an express aim of federal policy.

People are more likely to believe fact-checking from a source that speaks against its apparent political interest, research shows.

If Trump’s deeply conservative third Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, is confirmed, the court will most likely become more committed to its path of using the First Amendment to empower corporations.

“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” MacKinnon, now a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in “The Free Speech Century,” a 2018 essay collection.

The Supreme Court has also taken the First Amendment in another direction that had nothing to do with individual rights, moving from preserving a person’s freedom to dissent to entrenching the power of wealthy interests.

In other words, good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas.

These scholars argue something that may seem unsettling to Americans: that perhaps our way of thinking about free speech is not the best way. At the very least, we should understand that it isn’t the only way.

But it is also in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation, defined as falsehoods aimed at achieving a political goal.

But research has shown that when people are fearful, oversimplified narratives, conspiratorial explanation, and messages that demonize others become far more effective.

You can choose to target a subcategory of people as specific as women, aged between 32 and 42, who live in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, have preschoolers, have a graduate degree, are Jewish and like Kamala Harris. The company even permits you to test these ads in environments that allow you to fail privately.

The goal is that users will use their own social capital to reinforce and give credibility to that original message.

Meanwhile those stranded on the tops of the towers would be livestreaming their final moments.

Mr Wu, the author of “The Attention Merchants”, wants Facebook to become a “public benefit corporation”, obliged by law to aid the public.

Some point to China, where it is reported that more than 2m moderators, most employed by social-media firms, scour the networks, erring on the side of caution when they see something that may displease official censors.

Increased friction is one suggestion, offering users pop-ups with warnings along the lines of: “Do you really want to share this? This news item has been found to be false.”

Both firms have also lobbied to avoid disclosure rules for political ads that conventional media have to comply with, arguing that digital ads lack the space to make clear who paid for a campaign.

As Rasmus Nielsen of Oxford and Roskilde universities argues, not enough is known about the inner workings of social media to come up with effective regulations.

In 2015 enterprising enemies set up a Twitter bot dedicated to sending him tweets with unattributed quotes from Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator. Last year Mr Trump finally retweeted one: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” Cue Trump-is-a-fascist outrage.

Efforts to debunk fake news often don’t spread as far, or through the same networks: indeed, they may well be ignored because they come from mainstream media, which many no longer trust.

Ms Clinton saw herself compelled to deny the rumours—only to see them gain strength when she indeed developed pneumonia.

“It’s like you start as a vegetarian and end up as a vegan,” says Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describing her experience following the recommendations on YouTube.

They need mechanisms which can amplify messages developed online, provide the illusion of objectivity, and validate people’s beliefs.

On and around 4chan, groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media, from white nationalists to men’s rights activists, developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas. Gamergate was their coming-out party.

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Because of the data they collect, social-media companies have a good idea of what sort of things go viral, and how to tweak a message until it does. They are willing to share such insights with clients—including with political campaigns versed in the necessary skills, or willing to buy them.

They share information because they want attention for themselves, and for what the things they share say about them.

The more people use their addictive-by-design social media, the more attention social-media companies can sell to advertisers—and the more data about the users’ behaviour they can collect for themselves. It is an increasingly lucrative business to be in.

The new opportunity to share things with the world has made people much more active solicitors of attention, and this has fundamentally shifted the economy’s dynamics.

The population of America farts about 3m times a minute. It likes things on Facebook about 4m times a minute.

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Regardless of specific agendas, though, it seems to many that the more information people consume through these media, the harder it will become to create a shared, open space for political discussion—or even to imagine that such a place might exist.

Facebook has estimated that Russian content on its network, including posts and paid ads, reached 126m Americans, around 40% of the nation’s population.

They often perform better than content from real people and media companies. Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year.

At outfits like the Internet Research Agency professional trolls work 12-hour shifts. Russian hackers set up bots by the thousand to keep Twitter well fed with on-message tweets (they have recently started to tweet assiduously in support of Catalan independence).

Governments simply do not know how to deal with this—except, that is, for those that embrace it. In the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte relies on a “keyboard army” to disseminate false narratives.

Looking at the role that social media have played in politics in the past couple of years, it is the fake-news squalor of Gamergate, not the activist idealism of the Euromaidan, which seems to have set the tone.

Most people not directly involved were able to ignore it; crucially, the mainstream media, when they noticed it, misinterpreted it. They took Gamergate to be a serious debate, in which both sides deserved to be heard, rather than a right-wing bullying campaign

“COME on guys, let’s be serious. If you really want to do something, don’t just ‘like’ this post. Write that you are ready, and we can try to start something.” Mustafa Nayem, a Ukrainian journalist, typed those words into his Facebook account on the morning of November 21st 2013. Within an hour his post had garnered 600 comments.

To him it was clear: Training was hopeless for all kinds of judgments. But we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems.

Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can.

In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug

The reading brain circuit reflects the affordances of what it reads,” she notes: affordances being the built-in opportunities for interaction.

Based on the fMRI data, Yarkoni, Speer, and Zacks concluded that the scrambled sentences forced the readers to keep remaking their “situation models,” their mental representations of what was happening in the story.

Naumann gave a group of high-school students the job of tracking down certain pieces of information on websites; he found that the students who regularly did research online—in other words, the ones who expected Web pages to yield up useful facts—were better at this task (and at ignoring irrelevant information) than students who used the Internet mostly to send email, chat, and blog.

The Internet’s flood of information, together with the distractions of social media, threaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, stranding us in what the journalist Nicholas Carr has called “the shallows,” a frenzied flitting from one fact to the next.

Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud.

a businessman who sells a cheeseburger to J. Edgar Hoover is committing civic evil.

a businessman who sells food and clothing to Martin Luther King, Jr., is making a genuine contribution to civic virtue, even though he makes it indirectly.

Caplan notes that a politician clever enough to worry about his constituents’ future happiness as well as their present gratification might be motivated to give them better policies than they know to ask for.

Voters may also rely on the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents who have made them unhappy, a technique that in political science goes by the polite name of “retrospective voting.”

The political scientist Scott Althaus has calculated that a voter with more knowledge of politics will, on balance, be less eager to go to war, less punitive about crime, more tolerant on social issues, less accepting of government control of the economy, and more willing to accept taxes in order to reduce the federal deficit. And Caplan calculates that a voter ignorant of economics will tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration.

Bear in mind that, during the current Presidential race, it looks as though the votes of blacks and women will serve as a bulwark against the most reckless demagogue in living memory, whom white men with a college degree have been favoring by a margin of forty-seven per cent to thirty-five per cent.

Knowledge about politics, Brennan reports, is higher in people who have more education and higher income, live in the West, belong to the Republican Party, and are middle-aged; it’s lower among blacks and women.

If I can’t really say how we’ll identify the pixies or harness their sagacity, and if I also disclose evidence that pixies may be just as error-prone as hobbits and hooligans, you’d be justified in having doubts

but he doesn’t present compelling evidence that they really exist.

If I do not vote, your vote counts more,” Brennan wrote

If historically disadvantaged groups, such as African-Americans or women, turned out to be underrepresented in an epistocratic system, those who made the grade could be given additional votes, in compensation.

The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, “You might be right, but who made you boss?”

Truth “peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate

democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do.

But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians.

About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government.

The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”