But the people with control of mechanisms of power like social influence do only care about money, so the voices of people who have other values become irrelevant.

You write as though the selection of information by algorithmic feeds is a politically neutral act, which comes about by free actions of the people. But this is demonstrably not the case. Selecting hard for misinformation which enrages (because it increases engagement) means that social media are pushing populations further and further to the right. And this serves the interest of the literal handful of billionaires who control those sites. This is the unhealthy concentration of power the OP writes about, and it is a threat to democracy as we've known it.

By that logic, the New York Times also threatens democracy. Of course, it doesn't, and that's because no amount of opinion, injected in whatever manner and however biased, can override the role of free individuals in evaluating everything they've heard and voting their conscience.

You don't get to decide a priori certain electoral outcomes are bad and work backwards to banning information flows to preclude those outcomes.

No. The difference is that the New York Times has not been specifically engineered to be an addictive black hole for attention. Algorithmic social media is something new. Concentration of press power has always been a concern in democracy and many countries have sorted to regulate disability of individuals to wield that power. We get to choose as a society the rules on which we engaged with one another. Algorithmic social media is an abuse of basic human cognitive processing and we could if we wanted agreed that it’s not allowed in the public. It’s not a question of censoring particular information or viewpoints. – Here is that the mechanism of distribution itself is unhealthy.

It's really simple in the US: stop granting exemptions for the harm the content causes. Social media _is_ publishing. Expecting people to 'eat their vegetables' when only fast food is on offer is realistic, and flies in the face of all we know about the environmental drivers of public health.

Just because something is potentially harmful doesn't mean it should be illegal or otherwise prohibited.

That’s true. But it’s also often the case that we do choose to regulate harms so I’m not quite sure what the point you’re making is.

Normally that’s for software and it’s borne of irritation with enshittification and rent extraction from software that was previously free from that. SAAS is a risk if you invest time and energy in developing expertise in it. Lots of us have been burned many times in this way, and for me it’s one of the primary reasons I prefer open source software, beyond any purist gnu type arguments or anticapitlist sentiment.

Nobody is talking about banning ads on sports shirts.

We should be talking about that

But that doesn’t make the streams more or less addictive, or directly pay the platform which has control of that. So it’s basically irrelevant

So you really think ads during a video make them more addictive?

No. The point here is that Google is not paid for the ads, so are not incentivised to make the service more addictive. This seems obvious: it’s not the ads we have a problem with per se—- it’s the distortion of they attention economy they entail.

Clearly any scheme will not be perfect but these sort of objections either seem to misunderstand the core issue, or to be willfully confusing by raising irrelevant details.

This is a truism, but not that helpful. I have to be lucky every time I leave the house not to be murdered, but it doesn't substantially change my behaviour. Rather than freaking out or catastrophising we just need to focus on asserting and celebrating and educating citizens in our shared values (murdering is bad, privacy is important).

Nah, I think in this metaphor we need to lock up Mr.Stabby McStabFace instead of just allowing him to go without punishment for his repeated efforts to legalize face-stabbing.

The EU is built on rules that uphold liberal democratic principles, agreed to by national governments in a flush of post-WW2 clarity, and which tie successors to the same principles. There are exit mechanisms, but they impose large costs (i.e. Brexit).

You're saying nothing concrete in particular. What rules? How do they inhibit change? The only thing I can think of which is actually difficult to change is the echr and i see more than a dozen mostly liberal governments queueing up to change it (to little effect so far) over migration issues.

There are rules about election conduct and free operation of courts, to give two examples. Both of which Hungary skirts on occasion but the EU does apply some pressure.

The ECHR isn't actually an EU thing. (It's a Council of Europe thing, which is separate from and predates the ECSC/EEC/EU.)

I know and it's a requirement for being in the EU still.

US Supreme Court Judges are not elected. Although I hesitate to use this as an example currently, given how well the US separation of powers is (not) working, the point stands that all democratic systems need some kind of "damping" influence to survive. If successive national governments were hostile to EU bureaucrats there are options open to them to restore sovereignty — e.g. exit the EU, or force change in appointments by coordinating with other EU governments. The fact that senior positions in the EU are unelected does not in itself make the system un or anti democratic.

Yeah, except corporations don’t pay tax like they did in the 50s and 60s…

Isn’t that a feature?

A feature for devs, but I have often been told management is paid by the required field on tickets.