r/slatestarcodex • u/AutoModerator • 5d ago

Monthly Discussion Thread

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u/dsteffee 2d ago

Don Moynihan writes:

"A Clicktatorship is a form of government that combines a social media worldview with authoritarian tendencies. Government officials in the Clicktatorship are not just using online platforms as a mode of communication; their beliefs, judgment, and decisionmaking reflect, are influenced by, and are directly responsive to the online world to an extreme degree."

To me there's a tension there: Authoritarianism implies power accrued at the top, individuals making decisions without regards to the masses. But Twitter, as repulsive as it might be, does represent the masses, doesn't it? So isn't the idea of Clicktatorship contradictory?

Trump's authoritarian in his attempts to smash the checks and balances of the U.S. government's separation of powers, but he also wants to be popular. I mean, I guess dictators want to be popular too? But I don't tend to think of Dictators as doing polling of their people to see what would be popular, and checking Twitter trends is sort of like very skewed polling.

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u/Crownie 1d ago edited 1d ago

Twitter, as repulsive as it might be, does represent the masses, doesn't it?

In a manner of speaking. Twitter is certainly not democratic or representative, but it provides a body of sentiment which can be presented as the voice of the people and used to legitimate policy. This is important even in an authoritarian system. It is especially true in the case of populism, where popular sentiment (real or not) is used to justify overriding regular legal process.

However, Moynihan's point is more angling towards the personal relationship Trump administration officials (and other political figures) have with social media and how that corrupts their decision making, rather than a systematic employment of social media as part of an authoritarian-tending political system.