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No, I want the opposite! Everyone else should automatically block politicians. No POTUS Twitter account, no Senators chasing TikTok trends. Think of how much cringe we could avoid.
Holding office should constrain you to official channels, which should be both boring and delayed. If the leader of the free world needs to address the population, he can damn well set up a press conference.
If Congressmen weren’t allowed to broadcast their reelection propaganda like this, nothing of value would be lost.
The problem with this is that it allows politicians to be held hostage by the official communications apparatus. Have you ever watched Yes Minister? Politicians become actors whose only job is to say the lines they're given in the right order, and to take the blame when the Civil Service wishes to assign it to them.
Like it or not, Congressmen need to get reelected and are therefore dependent on comms. The only question IMO is whether you want the propaganda to at least be written (sometimes) and signed off on by the politicians themselves, or whether you want your representatives to be unable to speak except when the bureaucrats arrange and opportunity for them to do so.
To be perfectly honest, I do not think that truly boring politics is compatible with democracy. Japan tends to have boring politics but a) there's a certain amount of grassroots turmoil these days and b) Japan somewhat resembles China in that almost all important debate takes place within a single ruling party.
Presumably they could do that by going on television, releasing statements to the press, writing books, and all the other things that serious people did before social media. If you're concerned about the asymmetry with what bureaucrats get to release on the politicians-deserted social media, we can simply ban bureaucrats from using social media either - make social media a completely government-official-free zone - forbid the dissemination of official information of any kind through such platforms. An end to Bluechecks once and for all.
In theory yes, in practice I think most people do agree that there was a phase change where social media enabled populists and more fringe movements to gain the spotlight and communicate better.
I don't know the mechanism for this. Plausibly, filming a statement that won't go down well with the bureaucrats in front of all your advisors has a chilling effect compared to writing a social media post where thousands of your followers jump in to defend and support you. Also plausibly, gatekeeping is much harder to do on social media compared to official channels.
Broadly I think that both the following are consistent positions:
But I don't think it's true that going back to 90s era communications will still allow 2020s political populism. And I am broadly skeptical of people arguing that it will, because as far as I can tell most of them are arguing for switching back to the old system precisely because they don't like modern populist politics!
The question, I think, is whether social media merely removed bureaucratic gatekeepers so that a preexisting silent majority of extremists (as it were) was suddenly allowed to speak out; or whether the presence of politicians on social media contributed to a self-sustaining feedback cycle that made everyone's positions genuinely more extreme than they were before.
Under the latter theory, the outcome would indeed be "politics becomes more centrist and less populist/fringe", but that would not be because nefarious advisors are preventing the politicians from giving the base what it wants; it would be because, in the absence of the toxic social media clout-chasing incentives, the politicians and to an extent the people will genuinely come to hold more measured views because they aren't getting into stupid dick-measuring contests everyday.
Putting it into practical terms: in a world where he is forbidden to communicate in any way on Twitter or Truth Social or any similar platform, Trump is going to rant a lot less about CROOKED Democrats who are TRAITORS who should be SHOT to DEATH for TREASON. Is this because his advisors would stop him from saying what he wants to say? I don't think so. I think it simply wouldn't occur to him to tell the world half the shit he types, if he wasn't invested in chasing the algorithm like a common vlogger. Would he be betraying the wishes of the voters who put him in the White House? Again, I don't think so - at least, not in a counterfactual world where he was never the Poster President at all. I think his base would not want him to say this stuff if he hadn't gotten them hooked on their daily Two Minutes of Hate in the first place. It's a hyperstimulus like any other, and you've got to cut off the vicious cycle.
Okay, that's a consistent viewpoint. I half-agree with it, too. E.g. my opinions of Scotland became sharply more negative after being exposed to the writings of Cybernats (Scottish Nationalists online).
The flipside is that at least in the UK I think we have been building up serious problems that, prior to social media, it was simply impossible to discuss or publicise. I remember Covid, when social media was maximally locked down - the effect of that freezing wasn't that people or politicians became less extremist, it was that it was impossible to publicise any facts or opinions that ran contrary to what was convenient to the administration. That's a big blow in my mind for the 'more controlled communication leads to better and saner politics' hypothesis.
I would say I started getting worried/upset about immigration in 2013-2016 which did coincide with rhetoric ticking up but also with various life changes and pretty high levels of immigration. Likewise my opinions of feminism were worsened by extremely negative feminist rhetoric online (White Male Tears) but also by the behaviour of my actual acquintances. And so on and so on. I think it's both tbh.
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Hm. Maybe we shouldn’t try to drift towards the UK.
And Japan has had its fair share of unhinged opposition.
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