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.
Agreed
Astroturfing, data-harvesting, I feel like they’re all made to fuck us over in some way.
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’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.
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 achieve diversification of the social media landscape.
It would remove the possibility of feed shaping algorithm bias for mass manipulation, and back doors for spying and sabotage.
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.
naah fuck that, I think the internet should go back to being as unregulated and wild as possible
People have lost their minds because of a recommender algorithm and echo chambers. Ai agents are going to tear us to shreds.
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.
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 removed.
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, 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.
No. But a ban on algorithms would be nice.
Allow me to take some worry away: Pornhub is canadian.
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’.
most people understand
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.
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.
