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Showing posts from February, 2017

Why a crackdown on fake news is a bad idea

One of the promises of the internet has been that it will bring about better democracy ( here and here , for example). Even before the web was invented, Vannevar Bush, the creator of the hypertext concept and the Memex machine expected science and information will lead to a better society ( source ). Since 1990s, when those ideas started to materialize, everybody saw that the internet is vastly increasing the access to information and the ease of connecting people. The conventional wisdom has been that better informed citizens would be making better political decisions and that the more connected people will also be forging a more tightly connected society. This would both lead to e- (for electronic) or i- (for internet) democracy. Peak eDemocracy In retrospect, it would appear that the peak eDemocracy optimism was reached in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama as the president of the United States. His was one of the first campaigns where the internet played a major, some wo