The problem of participatory democracy is that the people need to be informed and participate and vote for the issues, if no one cares about the surveillance then nothing is going to be done about it, and this is a major problem of the society; nothing is going to be done with facebook policy internally because there is no democratic process inside corporations.
The other issue is -- as I come to grips with it myself, is yes NSA has sweeping and unjust powers, which invade privacy of many, but so far this power has been largely benign, whereas facebook was either complicit or actively participated with the subversion of several western democracies.
> The problem of participatory democracy is that the people need to be informed and participate and vote for the issues, if no one cares about the surveillance then nothing is going to be done about it
Incidentally this is also true of people patronizing large companies and exchanging their personal data for those companies' services. And I don't know why a constituency which accepts NSA surveillance from its government would be expected to pressure that same government to sanely regulate edge providers like Facebook. In reality, this pressure is all coming from elites who are upset by the prospect that they've lost some of their exclusive control over social media to the Bad Side. When it was the Obama campaign applying largely the same tactics in 2012, they were feted in the press as tech geniuses.
> yes NSA has sweeping and unjust powers, which invade privacy of many, but so far this power has been largely benign
"So far" being the operative term here, and I'm amazed that the same people who think Trump is a huge threat to civil liberties are somehow still not up-in-arms about this. It's probably also not true that its use has been benign, there are strong hints that NSA surveillance has already been deployed in an unconstitutional manner against U.S. citizens who find themselves in the government's crosshairs, e.g. in the hunt for Ross Ulbricht.
> facebook was either complicit or actively participated with the subversion of several western democracies.
Again, the only reason people are talking about "subversion of Western democracies" is because Trump/Brexit/Orban/AfD are winning, and that's not "supposed" to happen according to their own preconceptions. It's far easier to chalk these election results up to nefarious foreign meddling than it is to confront the genuine, pressing systemic problems causing voters to want to upend the system in this way. Had the Russians run a similar number of hilariously bad ads in favor of Clinton, occupying an equally infinitesimal sliver of Facebook ad traffic, it correctly would be dismissed as largely inconsequential to the electoral result.
I don't like Facebook, and even as a fairly hardcore libertarian, I'm open to the idea that FB and its ilk need to be reined back from some forms of data sharing and overly broad applications of their terms of service. But it's hilarious that what finally got people up in arms about this issue was Russia putting up a handful of vaguely pro-Trump Jesus arm wrestling memes on Facebook.
> In reality, this pressure is all coming from elites who are upset by the prospect that they've lost some of their exclusive control over social media to the Bad Side. When it was the Obama campaign applying largely the same tactics in 2012, they were feted in the press as tech geniuses.
That's just false equivalency.
> "So far" being the operative term here, and I'm amazed that the same people who think Trump is a huge threat to civil liberties are somehow still not up-in-arms about this. It's probably also not true that its use has been benign, there are strong hints that NSA surveillance has already been deployed in an unconstitutional manner against U.S. citizens who find themselves in the government's crosshairs, e.g. in the hunt for Ross Ulbricht.
So far we can only operate with the evidence we have. Ross Ulbricht was caught because he was trying to order a 'hit' on one of his accomplices who turned to authorities. It's strange that you used this example because he was arrested and charged by using good old police work, everything that he did to run his organization, besides tech skills, was really amateurish.
> Again, the only reason people are talking about "subversion of Western democracies" is because Trump/Brexit/Orban/AfD are winning, and that's not "supposed" to happen according to their own preconceptions. It's far easier to chalk these election results up to nefarious foreign meddling than it is to confront the genuine, pressing systemic problems causing voters to want to upend the system in this way.
There's consistent, irrefutable evidence that it is in fact the nefarious foreign power manipulating people to achieve destabilization of what it perceives to be the enemy states.
> I don't like Facebook, and even as a fairly hardcore libertarian,
Try throwing Atlas Shrugged at Zuck and see if that does anything.
> There's consistent, irrefutable evidence that it is in fact the nefarious foreign power manipulating people to achieve destabilization of what it perceives to be the enemy states.
It takes far more credulity to believe that Russian social media activity is swinging these elections than it does to be duped by the ads themselves.
The other issue is -- as I come to grips with it myself, is yes NSA has sweeping and unjust powers, which invade privacy of many, but so far this power has been largely benign, whereas facebook was either complicit or actively participated with the subversion of several western democracies.