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.
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.
It’s that advertising money… Ads should be heavily regulated and taxed
i live in Brazil, and would be 100% down with X being banned, even Instagram or Facebook if necessary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
naah fuck that, I think the internet should go back to being as unregulated and wild as possible
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.
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.
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.
EU absolutely is a country.
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 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.
