Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls
theatlantic.comIt also dies behind dark patterns that prevent you from canceling the subscription. I've subscribed to a few publications over the years but not any more.
After getting burned a few times from an easy to sign up but impossible to cancel user experience I have sworn them all off.
I refuse to support subscriptions that require talking to a person. And waiting on hold and having to navigate the operator trying to prevent you from canceling. In my experience all media and news subscriptions do this.
Once signed up for the WSJ. Took 10 minutes just put in my credit card and address, got a sign up discount, and boom was done.
3 months later I needed to cancel. It turns out you can only cancel by a phone call, during their business hours on the east coast. Of course that wasn't the end because then it was probably twenty minutes on hold and fighting with. "No I want to cancel. No I don't care if you offer me a discount, I am pissed you made me call in to cancel. No I don't want to suspend I want to quit."
Swore I would never purchase them again if they are going to do something like that.
Just checked. They will now let me cancel online. It has suspend and cancel options next to each other and bills itself as "1 click cancel." Maybe they listened to you.
What state are you looking at it from?
California. It is just following along their support page directions.
https://customercenter.wsj.com/help/article?topic=Policies&t...
Why not just use a virtual credit card?
They can still send you to a debt collector if you don't "properly" cancel by sending them a smoke signal at 3:42pm on a sunny day with easterly winds.
They did it to me, luckily I was able to get it removed.
Not if you never give them any real information about you. At least one virtual card operator lets you use whatever name and address you want per card.
Why not just read something else that doesn't require such hoops.
An interesting dilemma for media owners - the subscription model is the future of news, yet the self suppression of reach that this necessarily entails means that media owners now have far less influence over politics than they did during the ad-funded era, hence this unsatisfactory half-way house of 'its free when we want to influence your voting behaviour'
Also: democracy isn't dying just because media stops have the reach it once did. People will still vote, that is not being suppressed
> People will still vote, that is not being suppressed
Some would vehemently disagree with the second part of that sentence. Voter suppression is practically a plank of one of the two U.S. major parties.
And is voting still meaningful if most people are ignorant of what's happening in the shadows?
how is voter suppression operating (genuine question!) - what are the key techniques?
>And is voting still meaningful if most people are ignorant of what's happening in the shadows?<
Democracy is simply people voting for representatives, we have never measured ignorance of the population, hence no qualitative difference today than any time in the history of this system of governance
> how is voter suppression operating
Well, one egregious example would be sending a SWAT team to arrest someone in the early morning because they were erroneously allowed to register but not to vote.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/florida-voter-fr...
Or aggressively purging voter rolls in minority districts.
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lawsuit-alleges-ohio-illegally-p...
Or closing voting sites in minority areas.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/poll-closures-rural-...
Or outlawing handing out water to people waiting in line to vote.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/29/josh-holme...
And early/absentee voting has been on the firing line.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/vot...
thanks. This is outrageous. How is it possible for these actions to occur, especially closing voting sites? Surely there should be federal mandate that there should be X number of voting sites per Y number of residents
Like much else in the U.S. system of government, responsibility for managing elections is distributed between the federal and local governments, and most of the laws are local, not federal.
For decades much of the south was under federal oversight because the suppression of black voting rights was so flagrant that Congress passed a law to impose some sanity, but the law was significantly hamstrung by the Supreme Court in 2013.
the most obvious is by closing poling places in regions where your opponents live. Lots of Republican states have dramatically reduced the number of poling places in cities leading, predictably to hour long lines to vote. in addition, some have made giving food or water to people in line illegal.
this is terrible. How are they able to get away with this?
The irony here is insane
It's already called out in the article, "(Yes, you may face this very dilemma reading this story in The Atlantic.)"
The author doesn't have control over the paywall policy, and he probably isn't a full-time journalist. So I don't think this is as much of a "gotcha" as other comments make it out to be.
But, interestingly enough, another author wrote a very similar, non-paywalled article at https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2022/all-news-election-ar... a few years ago! I wonder if Stengel was aware of it.
I think a more-specific example of guarded democracy would be politicians whom only communicate with the public via gardened walls (e.g. Facebook, Twitter).
How ironic that this article is behind a paywall
Is this supposed to be ironic? This article is literally behind a paywall…
Yes, it's behind a paywall. mitchbob posted the archive link, and as I have noted, when factual information is paywalled, only lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories will be free to many.
A raft of subscriptions is ridiculous and dangerous. Every one increases your odds of identity theft.
And the idea is not new. "Someone" created a cool graphic a long time ago.
