I think liberal values like free speech, secularism, and tolerance might actually require defending from forces that abuse those values to destroy them. If this is the way to do it, then I think it’s becoming increasingly necessary. The fact of the matter is a lot of people are impressionable according to what they read and see. Society simply cannot function when there are malicious actors intentionally trying to spread divisive hate and misinformation. Make Facebook liable for hosting the kind of shit that led to January 6th.
I’m not sure this is a good thing. How will small Brazilian websites and forums be able to comply with these regulations? Sure, Meta and Google can afford to spend millions on content moderation. I don’t know if all sites can. I wonder how it will affect Brazilian lemmy instances, for example.
They won’t be able to. Tech laws in Brazil are incredibly archaic and non-sensical so this isn’t even registering with people cause Brazil is so far behind.
On the one hand, I’m against censorship. But on the other, every bit of content on Facebook and X should be removed and all their hardware run through industrial shredders. It’s quite the conundrum.
Censorship is bad, but Facebook and X’s entire business models revolve around spreading content that is at once false and inflammatory, either just to create engagement or for more malicious purposes, and they reach a huge portion of the population directly, including children, teenagers, the mentally ill and other vulnerable populations. This requires a new understanding of accountability for spreading information.
I wouldn’t agree that it makes sense to hold a Mastodon instance responsible for what its users post, because they don’t have a financial incentive or the ability to promote misinformation at a massive scale. Twitter does. As Aristotle said, we must treat equals equally, and treat the unequal unequally according to the form and extent of their inequality.
The algorithms optimized for engagement with no ethics was the point the world starts going downhill.
It’s not censorship to hold people accountable for making editorial decisions on media platforms, and as long as FB, Twitter, and others are weighting different kinds of content in their algorithms (which they are), they should be held accountable financially and legally for the consequences.
The main problem is that the platforms have a money incentive to keep spam and scam posts online. They pay meta and TikTok for boosts, the scam gets boosted, all done.
Frankly, it seems like the problem could be solved by forcing the platforms to get a Know Your Customer level of information and putting that info on every boosted post, so people know who’s paying for that.
Buuuut, it’s Brazil. Justice and fairness only ever happen as side effects from judges’ decisions
Its so easy to implement a half-decent KYC these days. Thers a bit of KYC already but it’s so basic any scammedr can get around it all easily.
Meta in particular is so bad. I’ve been reporting straight up scam ads on threads for months now and they’re still there!
