EU absolutely is a country.
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.
Not really. I think the whole internet should be accessible to everyone.
Do I think Americans are often obnoxious online? Yes.
Do I know for a fact their big tech corporations are equally as evil as the Chinese ones, no matter how much their propaganda tries to convince me China is worse? Definitely.
Is Xwitter a blight on society that only got worse since an out-and-out fascist bought it? Of course it is.
But closing ourselves off from the world is not the solution.
What I would support would be stricter regulations on data collection and algorithmic manipulation, because those things are bad no matter who is doing it.
I would support heavier tariffs on foreign big tech, because if they’re going to use our people as a resource, they should at least pay up so we can put that money towards taking care of our own.
And I would support a government program to incentivise home-grown technological solutions, because digital sovereingty is a concern, and the only solution is having our own shit.
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.
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.”
Agreed
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.
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.
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.
As an American please say yes. Because apparently they are all nazis now.
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 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
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”
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 removed.
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.
Dude I’m an American and I would support a ban on American socially media in my country.
I didn’t need a ban. They enshitified and I moved on. All Meta apps (including WhatsApp) gone. X/Twitter gone. LinkedIn gone. Reddit gone.
Now I use Lemmy, Mastodon/BlueSky, and Signal.
the questions wasn’t regarding you, it was regarding everyone else
I’m not American.
A ban would fix a lot of problems. But only because the platforms moderate things to match the platform owners opinions.
Platforms enabling free speech are beneficial.
A ban would fix a lot of problems.
I think a ban would cause a lot of problems too. it’s not cut and dry and banning a social media platform is the “nuclear” option
Oh absolutely it would cause problems. And no the answer isn’t that simple. It rarely is.
No. But a ban on algorithms would be nice.
Oh yes! Build Lemmy entirely from one line of lambda calculus.
While we’re at it, the vegans can stop consuming inorganic chemicals.
;-)
I hate how in common parlance “algorithm” has become synonymous with “recommender system”, when it’s so much more basic of a concept. But whenever I used to gripe about it, or inform people of the more specific terminology back on reddit I was downvoted. So thanks to you for bringing it up first.
I suppose you got downvoted because it’s such an ‘Um actually it’s GNU/Linux’ thing to say. You are surely technically correct, but most people understand what’s implicated and don’t appreciate a know-it-all correcting them.
For myself, I don’t care. I just learned a new name for social media algorithms with ‘recommender system’.
most people understand
I dunno, maybe? For me it still seems like a different shaping of the language, that some people now use and I haven’t got used to yet. And there is value sometimes, I think, in reminding ourselves that such and such a concept has wider meaning or application than one particularly common one.
I bet you actually know what I am referring to ;-)
I do. Algorithms to target media to people according to individual data, typically for outcomes that benefit the company and advertisers rather than the consumer.
And I know that people against ‘chemicals’ in their food, are meaning industrially manufactured chemicals, typically for increasing appeal of the food with decreased cost, rather than fot the health of the consumer.
Still, the method to sort a list is an algorithm, and salt is a chemical, and salbutamol is a drug - and whilst I’ve gotten used to the latter two in “oh no I don’t want this” parlance, using ‘algorithm’ to mean only that sort of algorithm still feels a bit absurdist to me.
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.
