Change My View (CMV)

Our current system of democracy relies on every individual having a voice in who (directly) and how (indirectly) gets to govern us.

This worked well because typically the majority voice had a mitigating effect on extremes that were in the minority - people with extreme views could not influence governance.

However, with the rise of social media, media companies have been handed a tool which they now use to drive profits up - by serving the public the most juicy, most controversial, most engaging content. And because nothing prevents them from choosing content which is political, or even directly related to elections, they have taken advantage of this and have increasingly shifted the spotlight to the most disgust/anger/reaction-inducing topic with even the remotest of political ties ... because it turned out this is what drives in the most traffic, or attracts the best sponsorships. Money.

In the past 10 or so years, due to the above mentioned mechanic, political public discourse has significantly changed into something, in my opinion, ugly and toxic ... and it has divided citizens into two opposing groups, which are increasingly aggressive and antagonistic to one another. We now live in a world where extreme views are the loudest, and because more and more people can't hear anything other than the loudest voices every day at every news show, more and more people forget that there even were/are normal and rational non-extreme views they can hold or support. More and more people decide to stand behind one of the opposing extremes. The majority voice no longer has a mitigating effect on extremes, it started to back them.

Societal stability and harmony is important for a healthy society, and so unless something changes, we will continue to see a deterioration of the quality of public discourse, increases in politically motivated violence, loss of respect in authority ... as well as increased lack of cooperation between political parties, and this will result in basically less and less things being done efficiently in government.

It creates a vicious circle that will need to be somehow broken. In my mind, this will be done by, in some fashion, shutting down voices - either that of the free and unchecked media (or social media), or that of the, whichever happens to be at the time, the losing party and their supporters, resulting in loss of true democracy and creating something more authoritarian in its place.

There is no way out of this without sacrificing something.