• WatDabney@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    A government that can ban social media sites is going to base their choices of which ones to ban on their preferences - not yours.

    • nialv7@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      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.

      • WatDabney@fedia.io
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        7 hours ago

        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.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      The EU seems to be handling it fine, the point is not targeting specific sites but targeting user hostile behaviors against citizens

      • Arkouda@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        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.

        • dnick@sh.itjust.works
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          22 hours ago

          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.

      • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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        19 hours ago

        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.