this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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TikTok being banned is good. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter should be banned as well. Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms should be banned and these apps all use dark patterns in their design.
The fediverse and open social networks where the algorithms are open source and well understood and the user is allowed to choose their own algorithms is the only safe way to use social media.
A government that can ban social media sites is going to base their choices of which ones to ban on their preferences - not yours.
The EU seems to be handling it fine, the point is not targeting specific sites but targeting user hostile behaviors against citizens
That is the thing that fear mongering against the Government always fails to address.
Yes, banning one thing out of ten that all do the same thing is wrong. Yes, we do not want to give the Government the ability to ban specific sites because history.
But banning or regulating algorithms, which are the actual problem, does not stop social media sites from existing. It just stops them from being able to manipulate massive groups of people by hiding/pushing the information the company wants one to see.
Unfortunately, the majority doesn't see algorithmic social media as a bad thing because they really do like echo chambers, and politicians don't ever seem to understand what a "root issue" is.
I still consider us in something like the teenage years as a society, just discovery something big like the Internet and social media and we're going to handle it poorly until we learn to handle it responsibly.
Heads or tails whether we make it to adulthood before the powers that be manage to wrangle things in their favor first. Signs point in a bad direction, but there's no saying that the tools that worked on society before won't break when the next thing comes along. Maybe ai will take a form that liberates, or hits the powerful far more negatively than it hits the masses.
I don't consider society in such ways because what we are seeing now is not a natural state of being. The global population is under educated, and that is by design. No one is taught how to think critically when it matters and then they are thrown into a world of non sense. Made worse by modern communication tools because people don't know how to process information and communicate.
It is not about learning to handle new tech responsibly. If we focused on educating our population social media wouldn't be so damaging.
AI already exists and is being used as a tool to further extract what is left by the people claiming it will be a good thing for the masses. It is not being made in a way to benefit everyone, and it is being built by people who want money and power. No average person will have a better life because AI is running more things, but a select few will be ever richer.
Exactly like what happened when mass production became a thing.
Governments can place qualifiers based on hostile behaviours but then still selectively enforce said restrictions on the platforms they want to target.
Such as with tiktok they specially worded the laws so that it only affected tiktok and not the others.
The problem is not the government got to choose - in a functioning democracy, the government would represent the will of the people.
The problem is this democracy is fucked.
Citizens United was a death sentence for the ideal of the government representing the will of the people.
Trump's election is the final nail in its coffin. He hasn't even taken office yet and he's already brazenly selling influence
And if he and the oligarchs have their way about it, it won't he long before we won't even be able to say things like that. Not because the oligarchy will do something so doomed to failure as trying to censor it themselves, but because sites that don't "choose" to censor whatever they want censored will be banned.
Honestly I think it's a terrible precedent to set. Now the government can just say they don't like XYZ website and are banning it. That wasn't really something they did 10 years ago. Unless of course it was illegal activity. But I don't think this is a net win for the internet. Regardless of what decision has been made, freedoms were removed and citizens' rights were sidestepped for political means. I think it shouldn't be the government's job to protect us from ourselves.
I was totally onboard with banning tiktok on government computers and I was completely on board with the government publicly expressing concerns over the motives of tiktok as a business. That's where I personally believe this should have stopped. Inform the people of the danger and then let them decide what to do with that information.
The problem with that idea though, is that nation-wide, citizens' trust in the government is at an all-time low. So even if the government said tiktok is bad and you shouldn't use it, people already don't trust the government. Maybe they should work on regaining the trust their people had for them 65 years ago before it tries to get people to behave how they think we should.
I disagree, I think this ban sets a bad precedent. What governments should do is pass stricter data protection laws, as well as banning the many addictive design patterns that manipulate people into scrolling for hours and hours. For example infinite scroll. Imagine how much less people would doom scroll if they had to manually click "yes, I want to continue to page 7 of my twitter feed"
Well it's a good thing they banned TikTok because it has "Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms" and not for some other reason
Inb4 Lemmy ban
If we left it up to our government, that’d probably be what happens
Trump may even welcome that, considering that Truth Social is just Mastodon.
isn't it a mastodon fork?
and considering it's probably blocked by like 98% of the fediverse, i don't think he likes it very much
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone is it still a fork? It thought it started that way to get something done quickly, but thay they moved to a proprietary platform. I could be wrong, but do have any info on instances blocking Truth Social? Are the instances that don't block Truth Social?
@return2ozma@lemmy.world @TORFdot0@lemmy.world @woelkchen@lemmy.world
Almost nobody blocks Truth Social. Everyone seems more preoccupied with blocking Threads over actual far right content.
No no no my friend. You misunderstand USAing. You sweet sweet summer child.