Government by Facebook?

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Published on December 21, 2011 with 1 Comment

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  1. Brandon

    December 29, 2011 at 12:05 pm

    I don’t think technology is up to par to allow something like this to be successful. There are still a lot of people without internet access or on dial-up, so social media doesn’t seem like a good option if you want to include everyone. I would think that one of the requirements would be to first create a free internet source that is available to all US citizens. Another thing that would probably need to happen is to make a completely open source network so you wouldn’t have a company like Facebook or Twitter in charge of all the content.

    Plus, there are a lot of potential concerns that would need to be addressed. Who would host the network? What happens if it goes down? Or, more importantly, what might happen if hackers gained access to the site or viruses were written that force people to vote a certain way on a single issue?

    Anyways, if you look at many open source software projects, the successful ones generally have strong leadership giving the project direction and deciding which code is good enough to make it into the project. This seems to be closer in concept to our elected officials than “Government by the People”. I don’t feel that many of the current open source concepts would transfer over well to government so I think it is very doubtful that something like this would be very successful.