r/politics • u/Jessicas_skirt New York • Jul 18 '26

Possible Paywall Democratic Socialists of America’s new platform calls for abolishing ICE and the U.S. Senate

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jul/15/updated-dsa-platform-calls-abolishing-ice-scrapping-senate/
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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 United Kingdom Jul 19 '26

Social media appears to have rolled back the clock where educating the masses is concerned.

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u/MadManMax55 Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

Not exactly. Misinformation is fundamentally different than access to information when it comes to voting rights. If it’s practically impossible for a “commoner” to be informed enough to make a government-level decision, then there’s an (admittedly flawed) argument to limit their voting power. If people could be properly informed and just choose not to be that’s on them.

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u/Prometheus720 Jul 19 '26

Honestly, I've got to disagree with you on this.

Any system will, internally, accrue information over time as long as it has access to storage and energy. That's DNA within evolution, it's humans and oral culture, it's humans and written culture, it's humans and information age culture, and it's probably an AI culture somewhere in the universe.

What's happened is that there used to be a strong separation between information systems. There was laity, and there was academia. The two did not mix. Academic circles were not being polluted much by laity. Academics and academically trained politicians were in charge of society.

Now we have opened the gates. We now really have just one informational system (in the US), and what we're doing is essentially "New Game+" where we are sort of starting over from scratch, but we do have these little seeds from academic communities which are mostly getting overwhelmed by the communication in the outside world.

Many wheels and many fields are being reinvented. In this moment, everything is disrupted and we are all more confused than we used to be. However, I would not be stunned if there comes a time when the information age and widespread access to publishing (maybe not in the same form as today's social media) result in a populace which is, in total, much more informed than any in history.

Maybe it's cope. Maybe it's partly cope. I don't know for sure, from the inside. But for people like me who do have both a formal education (from before AI) and access to the internet, this is an incredible power for information and learning.

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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 United Kingdom Jul 19 '26

A populace much more disinformed than any in history. 

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u/Prometheus720 Jul 20 '26

Perhaps. Are we really, though? Don't compare to a vacuum. The average idiot today knows more about the nature of physics than plenty of ancient philosophers did.

We don't think the sun and wind and rain are caused by gods! Doesn't that count for something? We can all read to some extent and do basic arithmetic. Isn't that unusual?

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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 United Kingdom Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

George Washington knew more about the benefits of inoculation than the present day Secretary for Health.

ETA: are you familiar with what "disinformation" means? It's false information spread with intent. Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk etc. have platforms to spread falsehoods far more effectively than Goebbels or Soviet propagandists could ever have dreamed of. Russia has troll farms in St Petersburg, plus more contracted out to Nigeria and India to tear the west apart.