EU absolutely is a country.
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.
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?
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 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?
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:
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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.
100% yes. They have shown time and time again to do whatever the fuck they like with no regard to laws.
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 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.
Voting with your wallet is some US anarchocapitalist nonsense
I don’t understand what you mean.
They mean it doesn’t work. “Vote with your wallet” is pushed heavily by billionaires. Almost like they have the biggest wallets…
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.
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.
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”
As an American please say yes. Because apparently they are all nazis now.
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’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.
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.
