The talk follows the same general pattern as commentaries on the 2016 US presidential elections.
People, as may be concluded from her example of interviewing residents of a primarily working-class town in Wales, are stupid (ok, technically speaking, they are average, but that just means that average is stupid). They are easily duped. Or perhaps they are vile and predisposed to nationalistic and xenophobic messages. In behavioral economist’s words, they are irrational.
She doesn’t make this conclusion. Perhaps it doesn’t occur to her; perhaps it’s unspeakable; but instead she points her accusing finger at Facebook and says how it’s on the wrong side of history for enabling evil lying politicians.
She talks about democracy. Democracy, she says, is threatened by the likes of Facebook, because it delivers to people messages that they want to hear and while doing so it is not accountable to any supervisory bodies that will have control over these messages. But if democracy is the will of the people, and if people, as she herself demonstrates in the opening part of her talk, are so ignorant and irrational, then why is democracy such a treasure anyway? Doesn’t it simply mean that whoever is the best influencer, wins?
