It’s really inconsequential why they want this. Their success means endgame.
The actions have consequences, and whether I’m breaking a window with a hammer to check how fragile it is or to go outside, it will have both those consequences.
We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.
You can have “disinformation and extremism” campaigns with only presenting truth or things posted by real people. Just like with political representation. Representatives are a subset of citizenry. The visible posts are a subset of all things posted. Except you can pick any subset you want, if you, say, classify posts by emotion and people by political alignment and what not.
One can have so much more believable bots today, that they won’t be distinguishable from people, but those are beneficial as pressure, making the situation clear for normies, - with transparent identities of people, signing and globally addressing posts, you wouldn’t fear bots and you wouldn’t need a digital ID to access a website. And additionally you would have a way to double check the “color” of recommendations you get.
Thus the solutions they are picking are stabilizing the “disinformation and extremism” environment. With today’s bots it will soon be utterly visibly useless to communicate over social media without what I’ve described. Which means, superficially paradoxically but really not, an end to such campaigns’ efficiency.
So the claim of this helping fight such campaigns I have disproved.
I understand the situation, but they’re trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.
There’s no “situation”. “Situations” develop much faster. Such a “situation” didn’t transpire in the early 00s Internet, despite plenty of people in it and no identities and regulation.
What “situation” would really look like, I have described - herds of LLM bots infesting social media, which would be beneficial for propaganda of a small amount of interested powerful parties, but will just make social media sour when everyone uses such. Which is fine, there is a technical solution, they just don’t like it. They want the “situation” they describe, but in their favor. It’s very convenient, a weapon evil useless jerks didn’t have for a long time.
OK, I’m in Russia and don’t affect anything. You protest, I’ll cheer.
jnod4@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
So they’re trying to censor any influence from adversarial nations to keep people from voting on politicians that would undermine the countries integrity?
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The problem of social manipulation via bots isn’t limited to intelligence operations, though I would argue that this is the most immediate danger.
We’re also seeing a huge spike in advertising bots pretending to be normal users just to push goods and services.
Because of these motives social media has become less about bringing people together and more about extracting information from people in order to more efficiently manipulate them.
It’s causing social media to become actively dangerous to society in general. Ensuring that everyone is a human is an essential first step for having ethical online social interactions.
Just look at the difference in conversations on Lemmy vs Reddit. Sure, there are some assholes here and there but it’s largely a calm place where you can have an actual conversation.
This is how online discourse used to be from the early BBS days right up until Facebook and algorithmically curated feeds discovered that fear, outrage and anger are the best drivers of engagement.
Now, in addition to the platform’s manipulation (which is largely commercially motivated) we have LLMs which let anybody with funding create massive armies of fake people who can dynamically insert themselves into conversations in order to push any messaging you can imagine.
It’s a bad situation that needs an immediate solution. I just don’t like that the solution has been decided on, in secret, by western democracies and is being forcefully implemented in a manner that also allows intelligence/law enforcement a backdoor into everything. (A digital ID also makes it very easy to view every users complete Internet history because that data is tagged with the users actual identity).
devolution@lemmy.world 2 days ago
So we must censor everything to protect us from misinformation which allows the censors to determine what is available and what is lot.
Sounds an awful lot like China.
Geez Brits. One shut decision after another. Just like your western children.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
offtopic: The house being Normandy? Then Brits still keep a piece of the fence, as a symbol. Channel Islands meaning.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah, I think this is a terrible way to address the problem and very likely a way for elites to re-assert their control over information sources using this emergency.
It’s certainly not about ‘protecting children’ in the way that they’re presenting it.