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from the twitter-is-known-for-being-a-place-of-kindness-and-intelligence dept.
El Reg reports in a story that at least some people seem to think so.
Twitter trolls are undermining what political analysts had predicted would be a new form of responsive democracy.
Far from being an opportunity to engage directly with voters, researchers found that the more politicians tried to actively interact with their constituents, the more abuse they faced.
The eggheads, based in Europe and the US, analyzed just under 800,000 tweets from over 650 politicians based in Germany, Greece, Spain and the UK and found that the percentage of "impolite" tweets directed at them went from 8 per cent when they did nothing to an extraordinary 40 per cent when they actively tried to engage with voters.
If that wasn't depressing enough, the paper notes that the level of abuse increases almost exactly proportionally to how engaging people's messages are. The more they asked to hear people's views, the more those views were insulting.
"Most politicians who post anything quickly become subject to constant personal abuse," the paper, published in the Journal of Communication, notes.
Such is the level of unpleasantness and vehemence that most politicians simply give up and use their Twitter accounts to simply broadcast messages rather than seek input or discussion. Something that, ironically, has led to them being criticized for ignoring voters and not being sufficiently open or engaging.
My take: The egg heads may be right on this, however there is nothing inherently undemocratic in people publishing libelous and slanderous crap about politicians. It's been happening in American democracy for at least as long as the republic has been in existence. Some of the things said about Thomas Jefferson when he was running for president were worse than what we were subjected to during this election cycle.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 14 2016, @09:22AM
We have a total 435 representatives in congress, 100 senators. Our representatives represent an average of more than 730,000 people each! Our senators represent more than 3 million people a piece. These numbers are pretty silly.
I agree. Let's ban these numbers so that they are never used again.
Actually, what's silly about the numbers? 435 representatives is already a rather high number for any sort of organized decision making involving everyone present.
The reason we had representatives at first was because it'd be impossible to aggregate the views of everybody on every topic in anything like a timely fashion. At least it would have been 240 years ago when these things were being worked out. Now with the internet it'd be quite trivial.
Um, I would strongly disagree. We don't have discussion systems today that can scale past about a few thousand people. Things like Facebook or Twitter easily create echo chambers where like speak only to like. How could you even make a good decision when most viewpoints, particularly the ones actually in opposition, are filtered out?
And how much sense does it make that after an election is split 51/49 that the person with 51% ends up getting 100% of the power?
Did you plan to fix that or are you merely observing that it's kinda weird? Direct voting doesn't change the "all or nothing" nature of voting. It just creates more things to vote on.
People at least must take responsibility for their own actions. War is a perfect example. It's easy to support and vote for a war when you know it's not going to be you or your family going out their to fight, die, or come back psychologically destroyed.
All decision making systems have drawbacks. The drawback of any sort of voting is not that you have to take responsibility for your own actions, but that you have to take collective responsibility for the vote's outcome, even if it's all driven by clueless idiots who managed to find their way to the voting booth.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:53PM
And whether you buy it from Best Buy, build it from components off Newegg, or build it from individual logic gates, getting a PC is always all or nothing. Because no matter what you're just buying prebuilt packaged logic systems, it's just a matter of how many of them you have to buy and combine, right?
There are different levels of "all or nothing". Choosing a combined position for every bill passed over the next four years from one of two options is quite different from choosing a position on each one of those bills individually.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 15 2016, @05:00PM
Choosing a combined position for every bill passed over the next four years from one of two options is quite different from choosing a position on each one of those bills individually.
Who gets to decide what the bills are? The current direct voting methods, which depend on acquiring enough signatures for a referendum to appear on a ballot, have no room for negotiation and are quite onerous in their use of private citizen's time. In California, it was routine about ten years ago (when I was in the state) to see a gambling-related referendum on every ballot even though that was never an important priority for citizen or legislature and invariably it was an attempt at protecting existing casinos from competition rather than some serious attempt at reform of the situation.