Non americans of lemmy, would you support a ban on american social media on your country?
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richardisaguy@lemmy.world
edited

EU absolutely is a country.
For-profit social media, certainly. I don't trust it anymore. Astroturfing, data-harvesting, I feel like they're all made to fuck us over in some way.
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Voice of Ron Howard cuts in: *"They were."*
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have fucked up public discourse. They reward rage-bait content, they're addictive by design, encourage tribalism, and they use an opaque algorithm to promote/demote posts. They silently censor ideas and content. Meta censors news in Canada.
Zuckerberg and Musk appear to have political aims they are using their platforms to promote.
Why would I want that? I get the slippery slope argument, but they *are* a slippery slope already.
I wouldn't lump in YT with those other two. YT definitely had problems but it has a lot of great content found no-where else
You could have said the exact same thing about any of the other socmed platforms before they enshittified.
Perhaps, but you could remove Twitter today and not lose anything of value. There are alternatives for the first two but not for YT
It's that advertising money... Ads should be heavily regulated and taxed
I am American and I would support a ban on American social media in my country.
Yeah. We hate our social media, and don't trust our government. Everyone else should absolutely ban our social media, yesterday, if not sooner.
Edit: And in response to lots of much more reasonable responses here, than mine: spot on!
The real wisdom is to ban our (United States) shitty social media's shitty behaviors, rather than playing platform bop-a-mole.
You shouldn't feel too bad or particularly exceptional, it's pretty common everywhere.
For example https://www.tv4.se/artikel/4A3ctxFCytb4R7kKQanI9H/sds-troll-factory-revealed-reporter-worked-undercover
There's hardly any big Swedish online communities where you don't run into their far-right talking points. r/Sweden is full of them and the largest Swedish forums is full of blatant racism and so is the Swedish community on Lemmy even. The pendulum is swinging hard right all across the "west"
Twitter is not a social media anymore, it is a propaganda platform. There are regulations for media in civilized places. Twitter does not respect the law, thus it shall be banned.
If it were up to me it would be seized, because there is a public interest to this platform. Seizing it to make the algorithm transparent, fair and legal.
I really hope the EU will ban it, but I'm afraid they will ask firmly for "some changes", and claim victory over whatever "small change" is in reality. Their investigation took too long and the lead was replaced already. Then they will declare that "recent events and information were not taken in account" and go on for another N years of investigations.
Sadly, the EU recently did exactly the opposite, by taking Twitter off the DMA VLOPs list for lack of a large business user base dependent on its services.
Practically Musk cratered it in order to snap off of what he sees as shackles.
i live in Brazil, and would be 100% down with X being banned, even Instagram or Facebook if necessary.
I am actively avoiding US social media accounts, blocking US politics channels and stepping away from a number of US-based services altogether.
If the government doesn't do it, I'll do as much of it as I can. Voting with your wallet is some US anarchocapitalist nonsense, but if my disgust removes incentives I'll take it as a side benefit.
I don't understand what you mean.
Man, such an exhausting tangent to go on.
Oversimplifying, "vote with your wallet" is a dereliction of duty of regulation, assuming that magical market forces will impose positive outcomes if we all just chip in on some sort of soft boycott.
In practice, at scale, people can't be expected to run a personal audit of all the money they spend or all the things they need. Money isn't support. Support is support. Preventing market forces from doing garbage stuff is what regulations are for, not consumer spending choices.
They mean it doesn't work. "Vote with your wallet" is pushed heavily by billionaires. Almost like they have the biggest wallets...
naah fuck that, I think the internet should go back to being as unregulated and wild as possible
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People have lost their minds because of a recommender algorithm and echo chambers. Ai agents are going to tear us to shreds.
That means no big platforms, but instead smaller niche sites.
If big US tech companies exist, we can't have a wild and free web.
No. That wouldn't solve anything. What is needed are very harsh punishments for companies abusing their power / position, instead of the slap on the wrist they currently are.
It would remove the possibility of feed shaping algorithm bias for mass manipulation, and back doors for spying and sabotage.
It would achieve diversification of the social media landscape.
I’m an American and I think America social media should be banned.
That is, closed-source, centralized for-profit social media platforms that will inevitably devolve into ads and data collection machines should be banned.
The problem isn’t the country that hosts the platform. The problem is the incentive structure for social media to profit off its users.
Platforms that are either FOSS, run by non-profits, or pay-to-use don’t have an intrinsic incentive to exploit its users and can, in theory, be run ethically and sustainably.
I’m American, and I would support a ban of American social media in my country.
Seconded. And I live in a swing state so my opinion means more.
Yes, absolutely.
It isn't even for social media's general toxicity. It is because these Us companies are behaving so badly. Illegally. They are now openly provoking their own ban, but they think the EU is so toothless that they can get away with anything.
Danish person here.
Yes. Ban Google, Meta, X and all the rest. Let's use a bit of EU funds to fund a privacy respecting social media that is NOT controlled by the US or China.
Well, EU is not a country, but yeah, they should either comply with our rules (which currently neither one of them does), or get fucked out of here.
I hope some local, ActivityPub based service would appear in the vacuum.
no, i support an open internet. censorship is stupid and generally easily worked around. which usually leads to an escalation to make it more and more difficult, until you have chinese-style internet.
The aim of the ban is not censorship -- it's to free ourselves from the purposely biased feed shaping algorithms mass-manipulating our populace. The content would be allowed, but it would be promoted by human upvotes, not corporate and CIA interests.
So not easy to work around and by far most of the population will not do it, so are not exposed to whatever is blocked, so the blockage works...?
No. But a ban on algorithms would be nice.
Oh yes! Build Lemmy entirely from one line of lambda calculus.
While we're at it, the vegans can stop consuming inorganic chemicals.
;-)
I hate how in common parlance "algorithm" has become synonymous with "recommender system", when it's so much more basic of a concept. But whenever I used to gripe about it, or inform people of the more specific terminology back on reddit I was downvoted. So thanks to you for bringing it up first.
I suppose you got downvoted because it's such an 'Um actually it's GNU/Linux' thing to say. You are surely technically correct, but most people understand what's implicated and don't appreciate a know-it-all correcting them.
For myself, I don't care. I just learned a new name for social media algorithms with 'recommender system'.
I dunno, maybe? For me it still seems like a different shaping of the language, that some people now use and I haven't got used to yet. And there is value sometimes, I think, in reminding ourselves that such and such a concept has wider meaning or application than one particularly common one.
I bet you actually know what I am referring to ;-)
I do. Algorithms to target media to people according to individual data, typically for outcomes that benefit the company and advertisers rather than the consumer.
And I know that people against 'chemicals' in their food, are meaning industrially manufactured chemicals, typically for increasing appeal of the food with decreased cost, rather than fot the health of the consumer.
Still, the method to sort a list is an algorithm, and salt is a chemical, and salbutamol is a drug - and whilst I've gotten used to the latter two in "oh no I don't want this" parlance, using 'algorithm' to mean only that sort of algorithm still feels a bit absurdist to me.
Allow me to take some worry away: Pornhub is canadian.
Considering they're being actively and without denial used to fuck us over, yes. I'm not going to play the censorship card. The US is now no better than Russia, there's no reason we should treat them better. US platforms are now literally an offensive weapon, Musk already started riots over fake news and is directly and openly meddling in our politics. This shit needs to stop. Just like we blocked RT news, this needs to go.
It's in the same vein like Trump threatening military action against Greenland. Trump is literally committing extortion under the treat of war. The US is an actively hostile nation that targets everyone including their own allies. Like what the actual fuck? How did we get here? We need to decouple from the US as soon as possible. I'd go as far as compare the US to a ravid animal on the international stage, I'm absolutely mortified by what's going on.
As a Canadian, yes please. Their culture infiltrates ours so much that there are some people who believe in the American superiority and don't understand that we're two different peoples, with very different approaches to how we should live and treat others. Obviously, we Canadians are not perfect, and we have more in common than not but it's disheartening to hear Canadians (including people in my own inner circle) view our country as nothing but the USA's little bitch.
I get the world is sliding right, and our political pendulum definitely swings. But I worry that in the efforts to acknowledge the harms that we've done (and currently do) to people in our own country, that the backlash to those policies and acknowledgments will cause us to lose things that I'm proud of and freedoms that I enjoy.
I agree, I worked a Canadian election years ago and a voter left the booth to ask me how to vote for a particular American political party because they couldn't find it on the ballot. I imagine things have only gotten worse since then.
Yes. Current oligarch-owned USA considers Europe an enemy because of its liberal and leftist values. Look how they've already turned us, famously allergic to fascism, towards fascism once again.
We can't rely on enemy services in a cold war. We can't review closed-source code to be free from back doors for spying and sabotage, or black-box feed shaping algorithms to not have bias and shadow-censorship for mass manipulation.
EU must ban all US-made smart products for its own safety. All closed-source software and electronics that can be used for strategic manipulation and sabotage – Google, Apple, Amazon, all of it.
They are in every European citizen's pockets, desktops, and server rooms. They know way too much about us, and have every opportunity to manipulate us: - Make the most intelligent people never stumble upon important information on search engines and social media. - Make the most compatible people never meet each other on dating sites. - Make the most valuable people never find career-making jobs on work-centered social media.
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Black box recommendation algorithms in the control of one country enables the slow, strategic destruction of Europe by trillions of unnoticeable manipulations. CIA has done this shit before, and now it's being given more power than ever to do so.
China banned that shit, and China has been successful partly for its detachment from US far-right propaganda. They have also made subtle mass-manipulation difficult by making their own services.
We have functional, clunky open-source software that could easily be fitted for any purpose with the money we waste propping up foreign monopolies sabotaging us. Europe has taken a huge risk. I suspect bribery.
I agree with everything you said except this bit:
China loves US far right propaganda, the amount of Chinese people reeeeing about DEI or wokeism or the LGBTs, and fellating the South African Nazi who inherited wealth from an apartheid labour emerald mine and (for some reason, still) J. Lopsterson is kind boggling.
The common view in China is that the US is too progressive and needs to clamp down on minority rights and immigration... The mind boggles.
But yes, also fully fuck US social media and tech monopolies.
But the EU had taken risks so far as we think when push comes to shove we'll be on the same side as the US, ignoring that the US still seems to think realpolitik is an appropriate course of action. Never trust a realpoliker to have your back.
Yes. I've already started replacing everything I can with Europe- or Japan- or Korea-made stuff. We have to learn to be self-sufficient and vigilant. Latest was my decision to ditch stability.ai, which is anyway the most horrendous collection of dark patterns I've ever seen, with dezgo.com , which is French and as transparent as can be.
No. And I would continue helping people evade whatever censorship a government tries to impose on them.
Not censoring content, just banning the giant-corp black-box feed shaping algorithms pushing fascist propaganda.
I'm way too familiar with liberals labeling everything they don't like as "fascist propaganda" :)\
So, still no.
Based
Not really. I think the whole internet should be accessible to everyone.
Do I think Americans are often obnoxious online? Yes.
Do I know for a fact their big tech corporations are equally as evil as the Chinese ones, no matter how much their propaganda tries to convince me China is worse? Definitely.
Is Xwitter a blight on society that only got worse since an out-and-out fascist bought it? Of course it is.
But closing ourselves off from the world is not the solution.
What I would support would be stricter regulations on data collection and algorithmic manipulation, because those things are bad no matter who is doing it.
I would support heavier tariffs on foreign big tech, because if they're going to use our people as a resource, they should at least pay up so we can put that money towards taking care of our own.
And I would support a government program to incentivise home-grown technological solutions, because digital sovereingty is a concern, and the only solution is having our own shit.
No, but that's not to say I wouldn't be delighted to see Xitter and Meta burn. Ultimately, though, we need laws that require transparency and impartiality on the part of the owners, similar to the rules we have for television news outlets, and those rules need enforcing in no uncertain terms. It doesn't matter, then, if the service is native or foreign.
I don't believe censorship is the solution there. It can be used for good, but more often than not it's the kind of system that can be massively misused to silence inconvenient information.
The best solution is teaching people to think critically early on so they learn to question information and seek both sides of the story before drawing conclusions and avoid confirmation bias. Don't silence misinformation, teach the tools to render misinformation worthless.
Texas GOP Platform:
But such a ban would not come because of censorship. It is not these social media users and their opinions, but these companies that need to get banned.
Yeah. It would help usher in a new era of social media and communities. Fb, insta, tiktok, reddit have killed smaller communities and websites. And I miss them. Internet needs to die to be born again.
I sure hope everyone who wants to ban these things actually has plans to create their own content or Lemmy's gonna become quite empty.
Surely squeezing people out of social media giants would bring many more people to Lemmy?
empty-*er*
I didn't need a ban. They enshitified and I moved on. All Meta apps (including WhatsApp) gone. X/Twitter gone. LinkedIn gone. Reddit gone.
Now I use Lemmy, Mastodon/BlueSky, and Signal.
the questions wasn't regarding you, it was regarding everyone else
I'm not American.
A ban would fix a lot of problems. But only because the platforms moderate things to match the platform owners opinions.
Platforms enabling free speech are beneficial.
I think a ban would cause a lot of problems too. it's not cut and dry and banning a social media platform is the "nuclear" option
Oh absolutely it would cause problems. And no the answer isn't that simple. It rarely is.
No, because regulation works; or can work. We can require them to follow our laws because they're invested in our market too.
There are regular fines for GDPR violations for example; it just feels like our checks and fines need to happen faster and harder.
China regulates their platforms like TikTok differently in their own country than outside. We can require the same.
How do you regulate closed-source code to be free from back doors for spying and sabotage, and black-box feed shaping algorithms to not have bias and shadow-censorship for mass manipulation?
Don't rely on enemy services in a cold war, no matter how much they seem to follow your regulations.
Recent EU legislation already requires insight into feed algorithms. They're not allowed to be black-box on huge platforms.
Back-doors is another issue, but depending on the kind of personal data, EU legislation already requires separation and different levels of protection.
If data being sent to the US can not be considered safe, it can not be transferred without explicit and informed consent. US firms create EU firms to have regional legal entities. They can store private data locally, within the EU.
1.Provide a code that's not the one running
2.Then commit to use the code you provided
3.Change the code back again right after the investigation stops.
With all delays you can legally add to the process, by the time, you've helped electing enough neo-fascists around, who all rely on you, to shut down the whole case.
That would still leave social media in the hands of foreign corporations. I'd prefer stuff like Lemmy and Mastodon.
Tons of bots here would have the same impact
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Absolutely. It's basically just allowing American tech companies to decide who's leading the country. FrP (furthest right of the mainstream parties) is set to win the next election and it's not because they have good ideas. It's because of propaganda.
Also, the person you elected has threatened an EU member state with war, so there's that.
Absolutely not. I'll rather choose for myself which content I consume than have the government choose it for me.
Not banning any content, just the giant social media platforms with their purposely biased feeds. The content will reach non-banned social media and have a less biased weighting in feeds here.
Based.
And freepilled
That’s a double edged sword right there. If you don’t allow external influences, you block both good and bad types of conversations. What you’re left with is only the local conversation, which might be balanced or biased depending on where you live.
If you live under a dictatorship, you might really want some of that external influence. If you can trust that the local conversation is good and balanced, banning Twitter and Meta won’t have any serious drawbacks.
Commercial social media platforms already mark certain conversations as bad and censor them. Both Zuckerberg and Musk seem to have political goals and have changed how their platforms work to promote them.
If they were a free marketplace of ideas, I'd agree. But while Facebook is hiding news in Canada, YouTube is promoting rage-bait, and Twitter is making weird tweaks for Musk's self confidence, they seem like they're trying to promote a US worldview.
It'd be interesting to see what would replace them if they weren't available.
I've also noticed that every LLM I've used has a political agenda of some sort. If you try to make it write material of controversial or questionable nature, you'll run into some issues. You'll also notice, that many LLMs prefer to give everything a rather wholesome twist whenever possible. Not really a bad thing IMO, but I must say that these tools are not completely neutral when it comes to sensitive matters. Personally, I don't really have a problem with these moral preferences, but I also know some people who most certainly do.
When companies have a vast multinational audience, they need to consider these kinds of matters. It applies to social media companies too, and they already have experience with this, while various LLM companies are still learning this game. We've already seen how social media platforms have been used to promote the agenda of the company behind them, and I believe we'll see the same with LLMs. Once LLMs become an inseparable part of everyday life, there will be more political pressure to push a specific narrative to the users, just like there currently is with social media platforms.
Unshockingly I have found that it's very hard to make an LLM be critical of LLM and AI in general.
The question is not about banning *foreigners* from our social media, it's about banning foreign-controlled social media. The Americans can join us here on Lemmy.
I guess I should have use a more specific term. "External influence" is just such a short an convenient concept, but it's clearly way too broad. What I meant to say is pretty much what you seem to be getting at. The idea is, that banning websites and services will limit the extent of influence one government can intentionally have on another nation. Individual citizens are going to be doing their own thing anyway, and that's a separate matter.
Here's a clarification that didn't fit into the previous post. You can view these things form the perspective of the local government that aims to maintain status quo. If some foreign social media platform is having a negative impact on your country, banning the platform should be a net positive. However, who defines these values? Is it good for the freedom of the people, good for the people in power, or something entirely different. All of that depends on the circumstances and the country you're in. If the EU blocks Xitter, it's not quite the same when China is doing the that.
As an American, I would support such a ban. the rest of the world shouldn't be subjected to American social media.
An MP I really admire in Ontario is pushing for Elections Canada to protect our electoral process from the Grand Twit's interference, so that's something. I'd prefer a ban.\
Even though the Proud crowd are big operators in Canada, banning Yankee social media would maybe help lower the ragebait volume a bit. Whatever makes a dent.
I think regulation would be the proper course of action, here. I mean neither do we ban American cars in Europe. We just say they have to play by our rules or they can't do business here. So I wouldn't support a ban based on country of origin. But regulation what they can and can not do.
How do you regulate closed-source code to be free from back doors for spying and sabotage, and black-box feed shaping algorithms to not have bias and censorship for mass manipulation?
Don't rely on enemy services in a cold war, no matter how much they seem to follow your regulations.
I think that works like all other regulations. Like for example food, chicken, cars and machinery. You take samples and check them. Or have a court decide to have a look at the paperwork... If anything looks fishy or people get harmed... Investigate. And we have investigators and experts in domains available. It's fairly easy to do. And decisions regularly rely on expert opinion...\
And I don't view myself as the enemy in a cold war. I'm opposed to the current administration of the USA. But that's pretty much it. I'm not necessarily in active combat against the economy... Well... I am against privacy invading platforms. But because they invade privacy, and not because they are from a certain country.
UK, and no, censorship is bad, especially if it's controlled by a capitalist government.
But... the foreign black-box feed shaping algorithms *are* controlled by oligarch capitalists, and they *are* doing shadow-censorship. Ever thought about why Brexit won?
If you banned the giant social media platforms, people would come to Lemmy, freeing themselves from what you say is bad.
Only if it's a capitalist government? So you're okay with censorship by fascist, socialist, communist and totalitarian governments?
Fascism is a form of capitalism.
As @[email protected] pointed out, I said "especially", and that is because capitalist governments are incentivised to use censorship in a uniquely negative way against workers.\
In *theory* socialist and communist governments should only employ censorship to protect workers, but history has shown that in practice that isn't always the case and, as Maxim Gorky pointed out, even when it is, it often creates more problems than it solves.
They said "especially", not "only". your question is still partly valid why he would be "more ok" with other types of governmental structures.
Dude I'm an American and I would support a ban on American socially media in my country.
In it's current form? Absolutely. Optimizing for anger is not doing us any favours
There is a Paradox of Tolerance that essentially says that if you are tolerant of the intolerant, all tolerance will eventually be overrun.
This is what's currently happening in the USA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I don't think that banning them is going to fix anything, but sanctions for not controlling the platform and prosecuting and punishing perpetrators is going to make an impact felt way beyond simply banning a platform.
Being in a civil society requires effort. So far the effort in curtailing the extremism embodied by USA social media has been incidental at best.
I believe censorship is harmful to civilization.
Then you wouldn't mind if your neighbor put your picture and address all over these social media sites telling everybody the (I hope) lie that you're a pedophile, right?
Or do you think that maybe there is some nuance here?
So you support the ban
No?
Then you support censorship. Do you think those social media companies didn't already have mechanisms in place for censoring content in other countries? All they had to do was flip the switch on inauguration. There's a reason why Zuckerberg was at the inauguration.
Oh I see your point. it's a natural consequence of any platform that's capitalism first. A big part of why I'm on this platform. But I feel it's not helpful to block another platform for their policies.
It's more important to educate people to practice critical thinking.
Do you believe the government should intervene if a popular fast food chain started adding lead paint to their special sauce? Or would that be overstepping?
Libertarians have no concept of how the real world works. But more amusingly, they seem to be unaware that the vast, vast, vast majority of the world doesn't want what they're selling. And with all of their talk of not wanting to force things on people, they sure seem happy to force their own ideals on them. See the town they took over in New Hampshire by moving there en masse to force libertarianism, The town where they decided to end trash pickup and then the bears took over.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
I know I'm not the target of this question, but as American I'd like to see the reverse. I wanna see more non American social media in the US.
I’m americana and would definitely support a ban of American Social media in my country.
No. How much shit do we need to ban before you dumb fucks understand prohibition never fucking works and only fuels more crime.
China banned many foreign services and made their own substitutes. What crime is being fueled? Bypassing the great firewall using VPNs is insignificant because most people are on the recommended domestic social media. This way China shut out most of enemy manipulation and propaganda, which is why I support the ban in the EU.
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Yeah banning handguns didn't work at all for us fucksake, even the ducks are packing now
Two points: * Can you unban abortion and harder drugs then please? * Gun/ammunition banning/control has been shown to drastically reduce mass murders and shootings. Similar to how needing a license to drive a car has dramatically increased road safety.
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You're right as far as road fatalities weren't systematically collected by the Yank government until 1960, 7 years after the last state made driving licences mandatory. But, we have material such as this 1930s Reader's Digest on road accidents and safety, and if I thought you were much more than a troll I might see if anyone's done an obituary analysis for the 1920s - 1950s on road deaths... But:
😘
Still a dumb fucking argument. Thanks for wasting your time to prove that. 👏👏
I would love that! Deleting my Facebook account would cripple my social life and ability to keep up with events in the community. It's the only thing keeping me in. Giving everyone a reason to find other places to organize would be amazing!
I wouldn't welcome a ban in general but yeah, if everyone was off Facebook here it would make things so much better. It's the only way to connect and follow social organizations and small businesses. Hate it.
No I would not.
Slight tangent but I have never until recent days considered social media companies to be American. I know on reflection they are but as a Scot I had used FB, Twitter and Insta for years without ever thinking they were American social media, just social media cos all my friends and family were there.
I’ve only retained Insta now, all else is Fedi. At the very least ban until age 16.
Nope
No
As an American please say yes. Because apparently they are all nazis now.
I am so tempted, so tempted to write yes. But no, at the end of the day, I don't think speech should be regulated like that. If we as a society don't learn to distinguish truth from bullshit, democracy can't survive.
Also, fuck you.
Was that a gif animation? As such, it's hard to understand.
i didn't meant for it to be understood
I wouldn't support it because I don't like censorship.
Not a blanket ban no, but if they constantly break our laws then yes. And I'm perfectly ok with laws that some would decry as censorship (anti-hate-speech, fact-checking) or claim makes business impossible (strict interpretations of GDPR).
Is "not constantly breaking our laws" enough? They are in our pockets, desktops, and server rooms. They know way too much about us, and have the opportunity to spy, manipulate, and sabotage.
Even if we had a way to make sure foreign social media is not doing subtle mass manipulation with their black-box feed shaping algorithms, tailored bias, and shadow-censorship, we can’t make sure closed-source code doesn't have back doors for spying and sabotage. You have to ban it to be safe, which is what China does, mostly.
No. But I would like them to be forced to use activitypub to operate.
Twitter: yes 1000 percent. Meta: businesses, landlords and social workers communicate via whatsapp here so I'd prefer bigger fines and more pressure on meta.
Yes, I use signal messenger, but I also quite literally need WhatsApp unfortunately.
I mean... if whatsapp get banned, people would just use something else, or just use sms.
Yes.
Please tell me what I'd lose if you turned off X, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.
"I've got mine, fuck off"
I don't follow? Social media adds very little value to our lives. It has displaced genuine interactions and filled our lives with vapid time wasters.
Some people use it to maintain contact with long distance friends and family. Especially in scenarios where other methods are prohibited by time zone and expense. It's also been used by whistleblowers to expose government corruption and illegal corporate machinations.
Just because it's primary use case has been altered to favor brainrot and slop doesn't mean it totally lacks value or usability for other uses.
It is my belief that the optimization of all the current platforms towards advertising revenue has destroyed the value of these platforms for those other uses. Meta is so concerned with appeasing advertisers that it will happily suppress important free speech and, at the moment, Instagram is suffering a scandal because they introduced an antifeature that does nothing but kowtow to Trump.
I don't disagree that networks are needed - I don't think that any of the networks I mentioned can serve that purpose however. They are nothing more than slop shovelers that perpetuate outrage and disinformation.
100% yes. They have shown time and time again to do whatever the fuck they like with no regard to laws.
No, not if they follow our laws. That being said I don't use much social media.
How could you make sure that closed-source code follows our laws? That it has no back doors for spying and sabotage, and that social media feed shaping algorithms have no bias and shadow-censorship for mass manipulation? You can't, you need to ban it.
You're still living in the 1990s? Using your argument: How do you make sure my server running all open source is not breaking the law? You can't, therefore you must ban that too.
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Surely the banning government would recommend Loops, Pixelfed, Lemmy, Mastodon, and Signal.
All meta apps, they're used for our government's propaganda, yes.
Disclaimer: I am American, but just want to point out the problem with any proposed censorship:
So y'all know VPNs exist right?
Like, look at the red states here in the US, they just bypass the "Age Verification" with VPNs.
So what's the point?
Are y'all banning VPNs too?
Doesn't that feel similar to umm...
People's Republic of China and the "Great Firewall"?
Are y'all sure that's the future y'all wanna have?
The vast majority of people don't have a clue what a VPN is. Even people that use them at work mostly see VPNs as IT voodoo they have to click on to get their job done.
You know you can just educate people, right? lts a lot more constructive than being an arrogant dick who expects everyone to arrive at all scenarios with perfect knowledge.
absolutely. here's the petition for EU: https://www.ban-x-in.eu/
As a Brazilian, yes. I doubt anything halfway decent would show up instead, which probably sounds better
I heard there is talk of a projects for the EU to increase its digital sovereignty. Now would be a great time for those projects to come to fruition.
As for me, if this means that there'll be an EU-wide reboot of Hyves, I'd be thrilled. Extra so if, on the back-end, it works on a Federated system.
I'm all for free speech but when it's heavily skewed and unfairly moderated I support a ban. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Xitter should just be removed.
From the US as well, as I'm sure you meant. But just for extra emphasis.
Nah, I'm from Iceland maaang
No no, I mean that you would support removing those things from the US as well as non-US locations. Sorry unclear.
Oh, gotcha, yeah, shourd be removed globally if possible and replaced with a fediverse alternative that doesn't promote fear mongering shitposts
Yes. (EU)
I didn't use to, and I am generally against limiting access to any sort of source of information. But the last few years have convinced me otherwise - the owners of these platforms are willing to destroy our way of life for their own personal benefit. Fuck Zuck. Fuck Musk. Fuck all of these charlatans and conmen.
Edit: oh, and the EU isn't a country (yet), it's a supranational organization which presents unique challenges in terms of policy. Def not a country
I am American so I can't really answer but what would count as American social media?
I feel like it would be most large social network sites and an unpredictable amount of smaller ones
monopolistic social media owned by big tech american companies, like X, Instagram and Facebook.
...can you help ban them in the US, too, please?
Oh lord yes!
Absolutely.
I don't know, but I really would like to see country specific social media.
Do you want nationalism? Because that seems like a good way to get it.
It gets better when the nationalism gets to the socialist part
No I just mean having more local flavour in a platform might be fun.
ON or IN ? It changes the meaning significantly.
Illegal above the surface.
Time to spend the day in the basement where it's legal to doomscroll on nazitter and kremlin-book
UK. yes. as well as US news, import export.
EUian here. I tend to say no, with a big "but" (insert Sir Mix-a-Lot joke here): I would expect legislation to govern effective content moderation by the platforms. No cutting corners to save money.
I've heard some great ideas around making algorithms open, splitting platforms apart (Meta world have to divest one of Instagram or Facebook), and splitting businesses apart (Google search would need separate ownership from YouTube), etc.
I'd support one *in America* lol
Only on Lemmy folks , people who complain about their freedoms being taken out, media censorship against their ideology and living in a LITERAL dictatorship since Trump took power, who claim to advocate for freedom of speech and information
That very same people actively demanding for information shared on social networks to be controlled, networks to be shutdown and people to be censored based on unknown and ambiguous criteria, without even understanding the implications of it.
Details at six
And for your question? No. People is free to choose what to think, listen, say or read. Fucking fascists
The US has shown itself to be a bad faith actor, and support misinformation and propaganda over reality.
Letting that run wild is not healthy for society.
Musk having a platform to spout lies and slander against the UK and the EU demands a response.
I think it has something to do with how freedom of speech is understood in Europe and USA. In Europe it's more acceptable to think that one's freedom of speech should not, in practice, mute someone else's, by frightening them from speaking out, or by the majority drowning out their voice before it can be heard. And that protecting this is something worth taking action for.
No - just like I don't want to ban people having a conversation in a pub about a topic I don't like even if they just tell lies to each other.
If it was up to the EU we'd still believe there was no chance in the world the Corona Covid virus could have ever come from a Chinese lab and even suggesting it should have you banned from social media. Free float of ideas and let the best argument win.
How about when one of the people in the pub conversing is an enemy agent in a cold war, always telling lies?
That would be the equivalent of what we do now: we let foreign social media govern who of us converses with whom about what, by shaping our feeds with black-box recommendation algorithms.
I still don't understand how it ever was a controversial thought. Like, there was a virus studying lab nearby, even if you don't have any proof, it should never be labelled as a conspiracy, given it's pretty viable theory.
It was my personal theory since the beginning - a designer virus accidentally released before it was finished.
China was frothing at the mouth any time someone mentioned it.
Australian politician said "there should be an investigation into wuhan" and China slapped a 100% tarrif on Australian wine IIRC.
You might be interested in this piece from a government funded Australian think tank about escaping the current social media environment
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/social-media-as-it-should-be/
Why would I do that?
election fraud
I'm from the US and live in Japan and I'd still support it. I don't think it's the solution, but putting all the big ones in time out would at least allow competition and allow finding means to address the real issues (paradox of intolerance, balancing free speech with some way to handle disinformation and the like, and probably more I'm not thinking of).
Chilean here, yes.
I'd rather see their methods of profit be made illegal. Not all at once. Let them try to find loopholes and other unethical ways of making obscene amounts of money, and make those illegal too.
Maybe they can switch to a paid model out of necessity, and then they wouldn't be quite as omnipresent.
I am a big proponent of free speech and the merits of free access to information.
Or at least I was. I've always known that bad actors with control over your information input can do an awful lot of damage. I used to think free and open access was the best choice. But seeing how a few companies captured the entire social media environment and have swollen to near-total monopolies and then how those same companies have shown themselves to be bad actors with malicious intent I have changed my opinion. Banning them would help slow down the flow of info sewage into the EU and encourage more competing companies to form. We need that since the EU can't break up American companies. So if new companies were ever to be competitive we need to remove the giants from the pool and commit to breaking up any that get too big.
I'm definitely on board with ban of popular social media (from any country) that tracks me and collects my data even when I'm in toilet, let alone my search history on a day to day basis and sells it to others to generate it's revenue and shoves its own agenda as the result on my feed. I want something like 4chan but a little more mature in terms of audience and no modspreading like on Reddit.
Basically, Lemmy is good. Nice middle ground. Reddit like approach to content that I wanna view with other like-minded people whilst not being pushed off from the dinner table just because I wanna eat something else. Besides Reddit and fediverse, not many platforms allow that unless you completely start over with your algorithm.
I wanna be able to see and be part of whatever I chose to ignore after I feel like eating that said food tomorrow, or the week after or the next year. If any social platform provides that, to the entire world, then they should be supported no matter what. Sadly platforms like Lemmy are not that popular even though they offer almost exactly what I just asked for.
No, it's how the various clubs I'm in plan and coordinate things.
Depends. Not all of them are bad. Take pinterest for instance, it's harmless. And youtube is too valuable to lose. But X? Yes, X should go.
Yep
No. I have friends who are American and it's much more feasible to communicate with them through social media since they live so far away from me. It'd also mean one of my favourite sites ever (Tumblr) would be inaccessible to me.
They can join us on non-American social media.
Instant yes.
At least anything that has anything to do with Trump or Muskyboi, yes.
I'd tolerate it, but not support it. Forcefully taking them away gains these platforms even more support and demand. Only when people seek for alternatives or a change on their own, we can solve the problems.
One way to promote alternatives is to make those platforms harder to use.
I don't consider that promotion. Think from the perspective of the people who happily use US big corpo social media. When you're forced to consume B, because A is banned, you're likely not giving B a fair chance, even if it would have otherwise convinced you.
(Obviously you must still enforce rules and ban the platforms that don't abide.)
I probably still wouldnt support banning any specific social media, or social media from a specific country. What needs to happen is some fucking regulation for algorithms, moderation, hate speech and misinformation. And then you can ban any social media that doesnt comply
I can't really get away from a 'benevolent dictator' mindset on this, I support good things and don't support bad things. Good and bad being defined be me alone. X and Meta feel like bad things to me so away they go. So the following feels like post hoc justification of the above, right?
I oppose oligarchy, X and Meta are products of oligarchs and as such wouldn't oppose their ban.
A more objective, or at least utilitarian justification is that oligarchy reduces total welfare by overconsuming limited resources for the benefit of the few. Propaganda for such inequity is unethical and should be banned.
Americans can't want social media banned too?
Yes