Comment on NY Orders Apps To Lie About Social Media Addiction, Will Lose In Court
Telorand@reddthat.com 3 days agoI mean, it has enabled every goober and bad actor with an opinion to essentially have a megaphone and build platforms and movements. I’d argue that’s a net negative. Even the Fediverse isn’t immune to propaganda and conspiracy theories.
I think putting a warning on the tin is appropriate, especially for platforms run by billionaires whose explicit goal is to get people hooked and keep them feeding the machine by any means necessary.
It’s true that the bulk of the issue arises from the people in charge of the platforms, but nobody currently in power is going to do anything about the billionaire problem. This is at least a vague gesture acknowledging that a problem exists. Also, it’s just a sign. When have warning signs stopped people from doing things that are unhealthy?
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Good anecdote but this is just hegemonic propaganda. Social media has also revealed the reality behind the hegemonic narrative. That’s what they’re actually afraid of.
There is no tin. And then what? Once it’s unscientifically marked as “dangerous” then what’s next? I’m sure they’ll stop there. \s
It’s not true. What about the people in charge of this platform? The bulk of the issues arise from capitalism and this type of censorship is designed to abolish its criticism.
Telorand@reddthat.com 2 days ago
It’s not propaganda, it’s a fact. The rise of conspiracy theories becoming mainstream, the rise of fascist groups that are currently undermining global peace and stability, the ability for long-debunked pseudoscience to be treated as equal with science: all of that is facilitated by social media giving an equal platform to people that do not deserve one, particularly the platforms run by capitalists. Social media has indeed done some good, but my argument was never that social media is wholly bad, just that it’s a net negative.
I agree that “they” are afraid of The People organizing and seeing through all the bullshit, but that’s not something unique that social media is able to facilitate, and it’s not something social media has been particularly effective at doing. People of the past were able to see through the bullshit without social media, and if we all lost the internet tomorrow, people would still manage to communicate and share ideas. We did it for decades through books, newspapers, speaking events, zines, etc.
We don’t need social media to progress, and I would argue that recent history seems to indicate the contrary.
There are no people “in charge” of this platform. If you wanted to, you could spin up your own instance with the sole member being you. You could fork the code and start your own Lemmy v2.0. We are collectively responsible for the operation of this federation of services, and even here, you still find the tolerance of bad actors and the spread of rotten ideas.
Has the Fediverse been a net positive? Maybe. But we are small fish compared to the fat cats that are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Xitter, etc., and there’s no dispute that their influence has reached far and the ideas they’ve allowed to fester for profit have been destructive, to say the least.
Social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s within the context of a global society run by greed, and the fact that it sometimes does good doesn’t outweigh the capitalists who weaponize it against us.