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.
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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.
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 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.
Edit: And in response to lots of much more reasonable responses here, than mine: spot on!
The real wisdom is to ban our (United States) shitty social media’s shitty behaviors, rather than playing platform bop-a-mole.
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”
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.
naah fuck that, I think the internet should go back to being as unregulated and wild as possible
Removed by mod
People have lost their minds because of a recommender algorithm and echo chambers. Ai agents are going to tear us to shreds.
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.
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.
It would achieve diversification of the social media landscape.
It would remove the possibility of feed shaping algorithm bias for mass manipulation, and back doors for spying and sabotage.
I’m American, and I would support a ban of American social media in my country.
Seconded. And I live in a swing state so my opinion means more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree, I worked a Canadian election years ago and a voter left the booth to ask me how to vote for a particular American political party because they couldn’t find it on the ballot. I imagine things have only gotten worse since then.
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.
So not easy to work around and by far most of the population will not do it, so are not exposed to whatever is blocked, so the blockage works…?
The aim of the ban is not censorship – it’s to free ourselves from the purposely biased feed shaping algorithms mass-manipulating our populace. The content would be allowed, but it would be promoted by human upvotes, not corporate and CIA interests.
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.
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 trillions 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.
I agree with everything you said except this bit:
China banned that shit, and China has been successful partly for its detachment from US far-right propaganda.
China loves US far right propaganda, the amount of Chinese people reeeeing about DEI or wokeism or the LGBTs, and fellating the South African Nazi who inherited wealth from an apartheid labour emerald mine and (for some reason, still) J. Lopsterson is kind boggling.
The common view in China is that the US is too progressive and needs to clamp down on minority rights and immigration… The mind boggles.
But yes, also fully fuck US social media and tech monopolies.
But the EU had taken risks so far as we think when push comes to shove we’ll be on the same side as the US, ignoring that the US still seems to think realpolitik is an appropriate course of action. Never trust a realpoliker to have your back.
Yes. I’ve already started replacing everything I can with Europe- or Japan- or Korea-made stuff. We have to learn to be self-sufficient and vigilant. Latest was my decision to ditch stability.ai, which is anyway the most horrendous collection of dark patterns I’ve ever seen, with dezgo.com , which is French and as transparent as can be.
