Ask Lemmy

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

I am a big proponent of free speech and the merits of free access to information.

Or at least I was. I've always known that bad actors with control over your information input can do an awful lot of damage. I used to think free and open access was the best choice. But seeing how a few companies captured the entire social media environment and have swollen to near-total monopolies and then how those same companies have shown themselves to be bad actors with malicious intent I have changed my opinion. Banning them would help slow down the flow of info sewage into the EU and encourage more competing companies to form. We need that since the EU can't break up American companies. So if new companies were ever to be competitive we need to remove the giants from the pool and commit to breaking up any that get too big.

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.

I probably still wouldnt support banning any specific social media, or social media from a specific country. What needs to happen is some fucking regulation for algorithms, moderation, hate speech and misinformation. And then you can ban any social media that doesnt comply

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.

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

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.

everything except skype and mabye YouTube

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.

Not a blanket ban no, but if they constantly break our laws then yes. And I'm perfectly ok with laws that some would decry as censorship (anti-hate-speech, fact-checking) or claim makes business impossible (strict interpretations of GDPR).

UK. yes. as well as US news, import export.

Fuck no. The Americans provide 90% of our entertainment and they're actually fun people to interact with and chat with (the ones that aren't wearing MAGA hats that is). What am I gonna go without Americans on social media? Talk about fucking Table Mountain? Join the Europeans in looking down on the USA for everything and always acting like their own shit doesn't stink?

Fuck that, I'd start using VPNs.

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

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.

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

No I would not.

No, not if they follow our laws. That being said I don't use much social media.

Slight tangent but I have never until recent days considered social media companies to be American. I know on reflection they are but as a Scot I had used FB, Twitter and Insta for years without ever thinking they were American social media, just social media cos all my friends and family were there.

I’ve only retained Insta now, all else is Fedi. At the very least ban until age 16.

No

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