You do realize that the billionaires are already surveilling and censoring everyone?
For more than a century. Beginning with hired private detectives and crooked cops.
Comment on For Spain’s Sánchez, the fight against tech billionaires is personal
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 days agoYou do realize that the billionaires are already surveilling and censoring everyone? Google sharing info with ICE, Bezos killing Washington Post, Musk modifying algorithms to promote his messages and banning inconvenient accounts, Thiel promoting his crazy agenda through Palantir and so on and so on.
When you say “government should not surveil and censor” you’re really saying “only billionaires should surveil and censor”.
The proper way forward is to censor the shit out of Russian bot ridden, billionaire controlled propaganda machines that is social media and move discussion back to civilized places. People who think that places like Twitter are net benefit for society are delusional. They gave us nothing but bunch of right wing populists and disinformation while real media is still doing all the actual oversight. The sooner all those places are banned the better.
lechekaflan@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
And the solution to that is to give the billionaires your government ID?
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Why are you implying that we would need to do that? The proposed solution in the article is an app that social media apps would need to interact with to get approval. Something like an external verification tool. All the billionaires would get is an “ok, go on” or “stop”.
Is it so hard to read the article before criticizing your own hallucinations?
john_t@piefed.ee 2 days ago
Or the alternative… quit doom-scrolling all day long to an addictive algorithm. No one is forced to use social media.
Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Its not just about social media, the scope keeps changing and these laws are being used as a framework for mass censorship and surveillance of the entire internet. First it was just porn, now it’s social media and next will probably be VPNs. And social media is a loose definition that can be expanded to include whatever you want, I’m sure at one point Australia were going to include github in their age verification law although I don’t know if they followed through with that.
And sure for now we can escape to platforms like Lemmy which are free from both age verification and the general shittiness of the big platforms, but guarantee it won’t stay that way for long.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 days ago
Yes. The solution for bots and foreign actors filling social media with propaganda is to identify it’s users. What’s the downside, in EU specifically, to giving social media companies your ID? What are they going to do with it they don’t do already?
Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Get hacked and leak it for starters, as has already happened with Discord. And social media is a loose definition that can be expanded to include whatever you want. Currently Lemmy and Mastodon are not included but it could be. And Lemmy currently has none of my personal information so uploading my ID would be infinitely worse than what we have now. And before you say it’s not feasible to force all instances to comply or be blocked that won’t stop them trying.
aka_@piefed.social 2 days ago
It doesn’t work like that… it’s an open source government platform the one doing the id check.
Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
That really doesn’t ease my concern that it’s just more government surveillance
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
An app that gets requests to verify access and returns ok/no is minimal surveillance. We are so past that in terms of surveillance that complaining about it seems silly.
aka_@piefed.social 2 days ago
I don’t know what country you’re from but in mine one has to produce one’s id to vote, access adult only establishments, go through customs or board a plane. I understand this as the procedures of a civilized society.
I don’t understand how verifying one’s identity and age when accessing a regulated site is any different. It fascinates me how rules that are business as usual in the physical world seem not to apply in the digital world for (??) reasons.