Seriously, wtf is going on? All the big platforms are going ban happy on a lot of people as of late for no reason, no explanations, nothing, or for extremely vague bogus reasons if they even say anything at all, a lot of people are getting randomly screwed out of the blue on years long accounts, they literally didn’t do anything to warrant it at all, even I got randomly nuked and locked out of most of the internet without any warning, discord is the only one that hasn’t been going crazy lately.
When the heck did it get this bad? Why are they going after people doing literally nothing wrong but leaving porn/scam/AI bots and actual TOS violators be without an issue? How do they benefit from banning everyone with no reason? What’s the goal here? Because it sure isn’t for stopping bots or scammers, those are running rampant more then ever now, and I don’t see how they gain money by banning and discouraging people who create content for their platforms, isn’t that like, bad for them?
The techbros all support Fascism, and any kind of free expression is a roadblock for them to make it happen.
Manufacturing Consent:
[The book] argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”, by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase “the manufacture of consent” used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922).
The Wikipedia Entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_ConsentThe Film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
-Noam Chomsky
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Just part of americas facism happening, legel stuff to ban people and delete things the corporations don’t want us to know about. Like how saying anything about Lemmy on reddit will get that post removed.
I can’t avoid politics and shareholders completely, but it really boils down to cutting costs.
They are companies supported by venture capital, basically risk-taking investors wanting a high pay-off. The problem with receiving this money is that the investors end up owning the company, and you have to answer to them. And once they are making money, why wouldn’t the owner feel entitled to their share?
The problem being, of course, that they never really had a strategy for monetizing the platform. So how can you turn a profit? Some try to sell premium features, but for a dominant social media company it always boils down to three things:
- Operate the platform as cheap as possible
- Sell ads
- Avoid regulators
It used to be that point 3 required certain base levels of moderation, but with the current US government, this has changed. Point 3 has become unpredictable. Censorship of political content that can be deemed extremist, such as opposition to genocide in Gaza or sympathy for Luigi Mangione, might help social media companies that are eager to comply in advance.
So basically, platforms now need to maintain the cheapest possible moderation (1) that allows advertisers to stay on the platform (2) in order to maximise profits.
These platforms are huge enough that they do not need to care about individual users - especially sites where users tend to be anonymous. So you don’t really need to introduce expensive checks and balances; just ban users at any suspicion. There are plenty of fish in the sea.
Now, how do you get to a point of suspicion as cheap as possible? Machine learning models is probably your best bet. Reddit observing people’s voting history provides them with useful data to this end. Running some LLM on the user’s comments is good as well, which is how you end up being banned for quoting the Godfather, as I saw one newly recruited Lemmy user report. The more safeguards you introduce, the more expensive moderation becomes.
Advertisers don’t care much about over-moderation. Nobody has any incentive to care about individual users in a site that is as crowded as Reddit. What matters is that there are enough users left to generate content (until AI can take over that as well), and that passive (harmless) users are there to click on ads. This dynamic is the same across all mainstream social media - Instagram just wants to provide you with a sufficiently addictive and toothless feed to have you keep looking at ads.
Last, the question is what needs to be moderated. Is sympathy for Mangione the same as encouraging violence? The regulators/political elites would certainly think so. Is it extremist to support Palestine? Where is the line drawn between legitimate political opposition to a fascist coup d’etat and inciting political violence? These are sometimes hard decisions, but following the above logic of unmonitored over-moderation, you don’t even have to think about it. Just ban at first suspicion.
And then, suddenly, the social media platform is not only seeking profit, but it is also colluding with a fascist state takeover and suppressing the opposition. Which is why people give you political answers to this question even though the answer is really very simple: Bad moderation is cheaper.
I’m not much of a political person
You might not be interested in politics, but politics is very much interested in you.
Sure it might be fine to not be overly obsessed with politics but if you make a post about something that even remotely is indeed affected by politics, you should be prepared to receive political responses.
Damn why are all the Jews in concentration camps
Oh cmon guys I didn’t mean to get all political
As for a response to your question, I’m not exactly sure, but as soon as Reddit went public, I saw the enshitification happening. Once they closed APIs and third party apps, then try to push their shitty ui website redesign, that’s when I moved to Lemmy and never looked back.
I decided to make a new Reddit account yesterday after deleting mine back a bit after they shut down the mobile API.
I deleted it again this morning. I might have some minor issues with Lemmy, but my god Reddit is a toxic cesspit. People just suck there, and I’m not sure exactly why.
You know how Trump accused Biden of censoring social media? Well he’s actually doing it. And he’s doing it at scale. The social media platforms are being forced to bend the knee. And that includes mass banning based on partisan lines. Anything left of centrist dem risks being purged from corporate social media.
There are some documented communications from Dems doing this. Of course Trump is doing it ten times as hard. Precedents matter, and this has been going on on a smaller scale since way before Biden. Probably back to Reagan or much earlier. Before social media it was controlling the major news outlets, although back then there were still a few independent journalists. Now independents get deplatformed.
They just keep getting more and more emboldened. They’re determined to control the narrative, and by they, really I mean oligarchs.
There’s a difference between banning fascists and banning people who say we should be nice to each other. The paradox of intolerance.
The line must go up.
I had this feeling half a year ago, that’s when I moved to Lemmy. Still have accounts everywhere, just trying to keep them read-only.
My partner logged in to reddit today, and their 11 or 12 year old account has been perma-banned.
Never had any issues, never broke tos, never banned before. The reasons given also mentioned they have multiple accounts that are breaking the rules.
They only have one account, and have never broke any rules. Mind boggling decision.
My account is still fine, as of a couple hours ago.
You may be about to figure out that almost everything is controlled by the richest people on Earth, and that you are allowed to talk about that is bad for them.
Shareholders and politics.
Shareholders for Reddit, for sure, since they went public recently. What made the platform what it is will be censored until shareholders are happy. Users will be a second thought, or already are.
Politics because billionaires hate to pay taxes, so they’ll do anything to be in the good graces of politicians.
I’m glad we have alternatives now at least.
Maybe they’re trying to reign control of the narrative during a highly important transitional period for techno-fascism.
Dunno.
