EU absolutely is a country.
I’d support one in America lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
Texas GOP Platform:
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
I wouldn’t support it because I don’t like censorship.
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. 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.
’
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 banned that shit, and China has been successful partly for its detachment from US far-right propaganda.
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.
Fuck no. The Americans provide 90% of our entertainment and they’re actually fun people to interact with and chat with (the ones that aren’t wearing MAGA hats that is). What am I gonna go without Americans on social media? Talk about fucking Table Mountain? Join the Europeans in looking down on the USA for everything and always acting like their own shit doesn’t stink?
Fuck that, I’d start using VPNs.
They can join us on non-American social media.
Ah that’s a fair compromise. In that case, assuming they were all going to join, I’d go for the non Elon / Zuck / Spez run platform for sure.
That just makes me think, this is a strange question for the fediverse because I’m pretty sure a fair amount of instances aren’t American run already.
Yes
Yep
No. But I would like them to be forced to use activitypub to operate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
empty-er
Surely squeezing people out of social media giants would bring many more people to Lemmy?
100% yes. They have shown time and time again to do whatever the fuck they like with no regard to laws.
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.
