I doubt Brexit would've been much different. The constituency nature of UK general elections means that a substantial majority of MPs knew they had to support it even though it was only a 48-52 split in a supposedly advisory referendum.
But to the extent that it might have been different, the many incompatible visions for it that gridlocked UK politics might have coalesced into a single vision, and while that would still have been worse than not having done Brexit as all, it might have been less bad than five mutually incompatible visions that got brushed under the carpet long enough to make it happen only by Boris Johnson promising all things to all people.
OTOH, things can be much much worse than Brexit. Musk's tweets about civil war in the UK, his willingness to support people too far right to even be in the most far-right of the top 8 polling parties, what Grok calls itself…
This is why I disagree with the free speech absolutist crowd.
A lot of "speech" online isn't real humans voicing their opinions and having civilized discourse.
It's nation states and moneyed interests weaponizing our naïveté, using what are meant to be public squares as means of disseminating propaganda and dividing our societies.
People arguing for unrestricted free speech online are either complicit (e.g. Musk) or naive and being taken advantage of.
We live in crazy times. I shudder what Brexit would have been like today with all these AI fakes, truly scary times.
I doubt Brexit would've been much different. The constituency nature of UK general elections means that a substantial majority of MPs knew they had to support it even though it was only a 48-52 split in a supposedly advisory referendum.
But to the extent that it might have been different, the many incompatible visions for it that gridlocked UK politics might have coalesced into a single vision, and while that would still have been worse than not having done Brexit as all, it might have been less bad than five mutually incompatible visions that got brushed under the carpet long enough to make it happen only by Boris Johnson promising all things to all people.
OTOH, things can be much much worse than Brexit. Musk's tweets about civil war in the UK, his willingness to support people too far right to even be in the most far-right of the top 8 polling parties, what Grok calls itself…
On that kind of theme, there's a psych study, Robbers Cave, worth reading about. Also note some summaries fail to mention that both groups resented being manipulated by the researchers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb...
This is why I disagree with the free speech absolutist crowd.
A lot of "speech" online isn't real humans voicing their opinions and having civilized discourse.
It's nation states and moneyed interests weaponizing our naïveté, using what are meant to be public squares as means of disseminating propaganda and dividing our societies.
People arguing for unrestricted free speech online are either complicit (e.g. Musk) or naive and being taken advantage of.