Ask Lemmy

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.

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 am American and I would support a ban on American social media in my country.

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 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.

I’m American, and I would support a ban of American social media in my country.

naah fuck that, I think the internet should go back to being as unregulated and wild as possible

Well, EU is not a country, but yeah, they should either comply with our rules (which currently neither one of them does), or get fucked out of here.

I hope some local, ActivityPub based service would appear in the vacuum.

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 bitch.

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.

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.

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.

No, but that's not to say I wouldn't be delighted to see Xitter and Meta burn. Ultimately, though, we need laws that require transparency and impartiality on the part of the owners, similar to the rules we have for television news outlets, and those rules need enforcing in no uncertain terms. It doesn't matter, then, if the service is native or foreign.

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.

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.

Yeah. It would help usher in a new era of social media and communities. Fb, insta, tiktok, reddit have killed smaller communities and websites. And I miss them. Internet needs to die to be born again.

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.

No, because regulation works; or can work. We can require them to follow our laws because they're invested in our market too.

There are regular fines for GDPR violations for example; it just feels like our checks and fines need to happen faster and harder.

China regulates their platforms like TikTok differently in their own country than outside. We can require the same.

In it's current form? Absolutely. Optimizing for anger is not doing us any favours

I think regulation would be the proper course of action, here. I mean neither do we ban American cars in Europe. We just say they have to play by our rules or they can't do business here. So I wouldn't support a ban based on country of origin. But regulation what they can and can not do.

No. And I would continue helping people evade whatever censorship a government tries to impose on them.

Yes. Current oligarch-owned USA considers Europe an enemy because of its liberal and leftist values. Look how they've already turned us, famously allergic to fascism, towards fascism once again.

We can't rely on enemy services in a cold war. We can't review closed-source code to be free from back doors for spying and sabotage, or black-box feed shaping algorithms to not have bias and shadow-censorship for mass manipulation.

EU must ban all US-made smart products for its own safety. All closed-source software and electronics that can be used for strategic manipulation and sabotage – Google, Apple, Amazon, all of it.

They are in every European citizen's pockets, desktops, and server rooms. They know way too much about us, and have every opportunity to manipulate us:

• Make the most intelligent people never stumble upon important information on search engines and social media.
• Make the most compatible people never meet each other on dating sites.
• Make the most valuable people never find career-making jobs on work-centered social media.
  '

Black box recommendation algorithms in the control of one country enables the slow, strategic destruction of Europe by billions of unnoticeable manipulations. CIA has done this shit before, and now it's being given more power than ever to do so.

China banned that shit, and China has been successful partly for its detachment from US far-right propaganda. They have also made subtle mass-manipulation difficult by making their own services.

We have functional, clunky open-source software that could easily be fitted for any purpose with the money we waste propping up foreign monopolies sabotaging us. Europe has taken a huge risk. I suspect bribery.

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.

Absolutely not. I'll rather choose for myself which content I consume than have the government choose it for me.

UK, and no, censorship is bad, especially if it's controlled by a capitalist government.

I would love that! Deleting my Facebook account would cripple my social life and ability to keep up with events in the community. It's the only thing keeping me in. Giving everyone a reason to find other places to organize would be amazing!

I believe censorship is harmful to civilization.

As an American, I would support such a ban. the rest of the world shouldn't be subjected to American social media.