Yes, big powers at play, here.
Consider Black Rock:
...and what they own.
The most-significant forms of opinion-expression in the world, currently -- the
de facto public square -- consist of curated content: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are the obvious examples. Couple that with curation of search-engine results by Google (owner of YouTube) et alia, and election outcomes have been affected, and close elections decided, by their influence. (Try being a candidate for public office in California without a good relationship with any of the above, and watch how fast you sink.)
Content worthy of debate, often expressing majority-or-large-minority opinion in the larger culture but disapproved-of by the prevailing corporate cultures within those firms, has a funny way of disappearing or losing rank within their "walled gardens." And let's not forget Amazon; it is the #1 seller of books, and not-infrequently responds to expressions of political outrage by Group X by delisting books or audio expressing the opinions of Group Y.
Yet these, are, as I mentioned, the
de facto public square.
The idea in a democracy -- yeah, I
know, it's a
Federal Constitutional Democratic Republic, and yeah, every part of that is
important, but even I am not wordy enough to say "Federal Constitutional Democratic Republic" every single time -- the idea in a "democracy" is that the people are, in-and-of-themselves, a "deliberative body," just like the House and Senate are. (Or, are
supposed to be.)
In a "deliberative body" people don't just lock themselves up in their own skulls and make decisions based on their limited personal experience. They participate in "the marketplace of ideas." They get out in the public square and interact with neighbors and talk to people and ask questions and try to figure out just what's going on in the world outside their own household. Thus informed (not only about what the issues are, but what ideas are proposed to deal with them, and which candidates favor which solutions), they're supposed to walk into the ballot-box and cast an
informed vote.
For the last two years, our ability to hang out at a diner and cordially exchange ideas with our neighbors has been, uh,
somewhat reduced.
Consequently everybody's doing their "deliberative body" chit-chat via these social media platforms, which, again, are
curated.
There is therefore a significant risk that the organizations doing the curating directly limit the conversation, thereby exerting yet more power over elections and policies than they did before. And...here's the thing: There is currently no way to prove that it happened, after-the-fact. It's a completely non-auditable system. They can curate to turn elections whichever way they like, and...who's going to go arrest
the algorithm for election fraud?
I ask you: In a large society of imperfect human beings, when there is strong incentive to cheat in a certain way, and potentially a large benefit if you succeed, and if the system is functionally so difficult to audit after-the-fact that nobody'll ever pin it on you in court...how often should we expect
at least a little of that cheating to occur?
The answer is...100% of the time, isn't it?
So, yes, there are big powers at play, and yes, I think it matters.
I haven't the foggiest idea what to do about it, really.
But
perhaps having Elon Musk control one of the
de facto public squares, putatively in the name of free speech, would help. I can't be sure. But here's what I see: They're all controlled; but mostly they're controlled by people who think a certain way. And Musk seems to not quite think the same way as they do, not about
everything. So I hope he won't even "curate" the platform, but, hey, even if he curates things
his way, and they carry on curating things
their way, we'll
still get more diversity-of-thought, in the aggregate.
The idea of all public discourse being predictably shepherded into one point-of-view? That's the scary thought, for me.
Donning tinfoil hat in 3...2...1...
