Yes. Ban Google, Meta, X and all the rest. Let's use a bit of EU funds to fund a privacy respecting social media that is NOT controlled by the US or China.
Not really. I think the whole internet should be accessible to everyone.
Do I think Americans are often obnoxious online? Yes.
Do I know for a fact their big tech corporations are equally as evil as the Chinese ones, no matter how much their propaganda tries to convince me China is worse? Definitely.
Is Xwitter a blight on society that only got worse since an out-and-out fascist bought it? Of course it is.
But closing ourselves off from the world is not the solution.
What I would support would be stricter regulations on data collection and algorithmic manipulation, because those things are bad no matter who is doing it.
I would support heavier tariffs on foreign big tech, because if they're going to use our people as a resource, they should at least pay up so we can put that money towards taking care of our own.
And I would support a government program to incentivise home-grown technological solutions, because digital sovereingty is a concern, and the only solution is having our own shit.
Considering they're being actively and without denial used to fuck us over, yes. I'm not going to play the censorship card. The US is now no better than Russia, there's no reason we should treat them better. US platforms are now literally an offensive weapon, Musk already started riots over fake news and is directly and openly meddling in our politics. This shit needs to stop. Just like we blocked RT news, this needs to go.
It's in the same vein like Trump threatening military action against Greenland. Trump is literally committing extortion under the treat of war. The US is an actively hostile nation that targets everyone including their own allies. Like what the actual fuck? How did we get here? We need to decouple from the US as soon as possible. I'd go as far as compare the US to a ravid animal on the international stage, I'm absolutely mortified by what's going on.
I didn't use to, and I am generally against limiting access to any sort of source of information. But the last few years have convinced me otherwise - the owners of these platforms are willing to destroy our way of life for their own personal benefit. Fuck Zuck. Fuck Musk. Fuck all of these charlatans and conmen.
Edit: oh, and the EU isn't a country (yet), it's a supranational organization which presents unique challenges in terms of policy. Def not a country
I’m an American and I think America social media should be banned.
That is, closed-source, centralized for-profit social media platforms that will inevitably devolve into ads and data collection machines should be banned.
The problem isn’t the country that hosts the platform. The problem is the incentive structure for social media to profit off its users.
Platforms that are either FOSS, run by non-profits, or pay-to-use don’t have an intrinsic incentive to exploit its users and can, in theory, be run ethically and sustainably.
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.
I'm definitely on board with ban of popular social media (from any country) that tracks me and collects my data even when I'm in toilet, let alone my search history on a day to day basis and sells it to others to generate it's revenue and shoves its own agenda as the result on my feed. I want something like 4chan but a little more mature in terms of audience and no modspreading like on Reddit.
Basically, Lemmy is good. Nice middle ground. Reddit like approach to content that I wanna view with other like-minded people whilst not being pushed off from the dinner table just because I wanna eat something else. Besides Reddit and fediverse, not many platforms allow that unless you completely start over with your algorithm.
I wanna be able to see and be part of whatever I chose to ignore after I feel like eating that said food tomorrow, or the week after or the next year. If any social platform provides that, to the entire world, then they should be supported no matter what. Sadly platforms like Lemmy are not that popular even though they offer almost exactly what I just asked for.
As a Canadian, yes please. Their culture infiltrates ours so much that there are some people who believe in the American superiority and don't understand that we're two different peoples, with very different approaches to how we should live and treat others. Obviously, we Canadians are not perfect, and we have more in common than not but it's disheartening to hear Canadians (including people in my own inner circle) view our country as nothing but the USA's little bitch.
I get the world is sliding right, and our political pendulum definitely swings. But I worry that in the efforts to acknowledge the harms that we've done (and currently do) to people in our own country, that the backlash to those policies and acknowledgments will cause us to lose things that I'm proud of and freedoms that I enjoy.
I agree, I worked a Canadian election years ago and a voter left the booth to ask me how to vote for a particular American political party because they couldn't find it on the ballot. I imagine things have only gotten worse since then.
Even though the Proud crowd are big operators in Canada, banning Yankee social media would maybe help lower the ragebait volume a bit. Whatever makes a dent.
Twitter is not a social media anymore, it is a propaganda platform. There are regulations for media in civilized places. Twitter does not respect the law, thus it shall be banned.
If it were up to me it would be seized, because there is a public interest to this platform. Seizing it to make the algorithm transparent, fair and legal.
I really hope the EU will ban it, but I'm afraid they will ask firmly for "some changes", and claim victory over whatever "small change" is in reality. Their investigation took too long and the lead was replaced already.
Then they will declare that "recent events and information were not taken in account" and go on for another N years of investigations.
Sadly, the EU recently did exactly the opposite, by taking Twitter off the DMA VLOPs list for lack of a large business user base dependent on its services.
Practically Musk cratered it in order to snap off of what he sees as shackles.
I'm all for free speech but when it's heavily skewed and unfairly moderated I support a ban. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Xitter should just be removed.
Absolutely. It's basically just allowing American tech companies to decide who's leading the country. FrP (furthest right of the mainstream parties) is set to win the next election and it's not because they have good ideas. It's because of propaganda.
Also, the person you elected has threatened an EU member state with war, so there's that.
I am so tempted, so tempted to write yes. But no, at the end of the day, I don't think speech should be regulated like that. If we as a society don't learn to distinguish truth from bullshit, democracy can't survive.
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
I hate how in common parlance "algorithm" has become synonymous with "recommender system", when it's so much more basic of a concept. But whenever I used to gripe about it, or inform people of the more specific terminology back on reddit I was downvoted. So thanks to you for bringing it up first.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have fucked up public discourse. They reward rage-bait content, they're addictive by design, encourage tribalism, and they use an opaque algorithm to promote/demote posts. They silently censor ideas and content. Meta censors news in Canada.
Zuckerberg and Musk appear to have political aims they are using their platforms to promote.
Why would I want that? I get the slippery slope argument, but they are a slippery slope already.
You shouldn't feel too bad or particularly exceptional, it's pretty common everywhere.
For example https://www.tv4.se/artikel/4A3ctxFCytb4R7kKQanI9H/sds-troll-factory-revealed-reporter-worked-undercover
There's hardly any big Swedish online communities where you don't run into their far-right talking points. r/Sweden is full of them and the largest Swedish forums is full of blatant racism and so is the Swedish community on Lemmy even. The pendulum is swinging hard right all across the "west"
I would love that! Deleting my Facebook account would cripple my social life and ability to keep up with events in the community. It's the only thing keeping me in.
Giving everyone a reason to find other places to organize would be amazing!
I wouldn't welcome a ban in general but yeah, if everyone was off Facebook here it would make things so much better. It's the only way to connect and follow social organizations and small businesses. Hate it.
Yeah. It would help usher in a new era of social media and communities. Fb, insta, tiktok, reddit have killed smaller communities and websites. And I miss them.
Internet needs to die to be born again.
It isn't even for social media's general toxicity. It is because these Us companies are behaving so badly. Illegally. They are now openly provoking their own ban, but they think the EU is so toothless that they can get away with anything.
Then you wouldn't mind if your neighbor put your picture and address all over these social media sites telling everybody the (I hope) lie that you're a pedophile, right?
Or do you think that maybe there is some nuance here?
No. That wouldn't solve anything. What is needed are very harsh punishments for companies abusing their power / position, instead of the slap on the wrist they currently are.
I am actively avoiding US social media accounts, blocking US politics channels and stepping away from a number of US-based services altogether.
If the government doesn't do it, I'll do as much of it as I can. Voting with your wallet is some US anarchocapitalist nonsense, but if my disgust removes incentives I'll take it as a side benefit.
Oversimplifying, "vote with your wallet" is a dereliction of duty of regulation, assuming that magical market forces will impose positive outcomes if we all just chip in on some sort of soft boycott.
In practice, at scale, people can't be expected to run a personal audit of all the money they spend or all the things they need. Money isn't support. Support is support. Preventing market forces from doing garbage stuff is what regulations are for, not consumer spending choices.
I think regulation would be the proper course of action, here. I mean neither do we ban American cars in Europe. We just say they have to play by our rules or they can't do business here. So I wouldn't support a ban based on country of origin. But regulation what they can and can not do.
How do you regulate closed-source code to be free from back doors for spying and sabotage, and black-box feed shaping algorithms to not have bias and censorship for mass manipulation?
Don't rely on enemy services in a cold war, no matter how much they seem to follow your regulations.
I think that works like all other regulations. Like for example food, chicken, cars and machinery. You take samples and check them. Or have a court decide to have a look at the paperwork... If anything looks fishy or people get harmed... Investigate. And we have investigators and experts in domains available. It's fairly easy to do. And decisions regularly rely on expert opinion...
And I don't view myself as the enemy in a cold war. I'm opposed to the current administration of the USA. But that's pretty much it. I'm not necessarily in active combat against the economy... Well... I am against privacy invading platforms. But because they invade privacy, and not because they are from a certain country.
How do you regulate closed-source code to be free from back doors for spying and sabotage, and black-box feed shaping algorithms to not have bias and shadow-censorship for mass manipulation?
Don't rely on enemy services in a cold war, no matter how much they seem to follow your regulations.
Recent EU legislation already requires insight into feed algorithms. They're not allowed to be black-box on huge platforms.
Back-doors is another issue, but depending on the kind of personal data, EU legislation already requires separation and different levels of protection.
If data being sent to the US can not be considered safe, it can not be transferred without explicit and informed consent. US firms create EU firms to have regional legal entities. They can store private data locally, within the EU.
I can't really get away from a 'benevolent dictator' mindset on this, I support good things and don't support bad things. Good and bad being defined be me alone. X and Meta feel like bad things to me so away they go. So the following feels like post hoc justification of the above, right?
I oppose oligarchy, X and Meta are products of oligarchs and as such wouldn't oppose their ban.
A more objective, or at least utilitarian justification is that oligarchy reduces total welfare by overconsuming limited resources for the benefit of the few. Propaganda for such inequity is unethical and should be banned.
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 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.
China banned that shit, and China has been successful partly for its detachment from US far-right propaganda.
China loves US far right propaganda, the amount of Chinese people reeeeing about DEI or wokeism or the LGBTs, and fellating the South African Nazi who inherited wealth from an apartheid labour emerald mine and (for some reason, still) J. Lopsterson is kind boggling.
The common view in China is that the US is too progressive and needs to clamp down on minority rights and immigration... The mind boggles.
But yes, also fully fuck US social media and tech monopolies.
But the EU had taken risks so far as we think when push comes to shove we'll be on the same side as the US, ignoring that the US still seems to think realpolitik is an appropriate course of action. Never trust a realpoliker to have your back.
Yes. I've already started replacing everything I can with Europe- or Japan- or Korea-made stuff. We have to learn to be self-sufficient and vigilant. Latest was my decision to ditch stability.ai, which is anyway the most horrendous collection of dark patterns I've ever seen, with dezgo.com , which is French and as transparent as can be.
No, but that's not to say I wouldn't be delighted to see Xitter and Meta burn. Ultimately, though, we need laws that require transparency and impartiality on the part of the owners, similar to the rules we have for television news outlets, and those rules need enforcing in no uncertain terms. It doesn't matter, then, if the service is native or foreign.
Not banning any content, just the giant social media platforms with their purposely biased feeds. The content will reach non-banned social media and have a less biased weighting in feeds here.
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.
The aim of the ban is not censorship -- it's to free ourselves from the purposely biased feed shaping algorithms mass-manipulating our populace. The content would be allowed, but it would be promoted by human upvotes, not corporate and CIA interests.
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).
Is "not constantly breaking our laws" enough? They are in our pockets, desktops, and server rooms. They know way too much about us, and have the opportunity to spy, manipulate, and sabotage.
Even if we had a way to make sure foreign social media is not doing subtle mass manipulation with their black-box feed shaping algorithms, tailored bias, and shadow-censorship, we can’t make sure closed-source code doesn't have back doors for spying and sabotage. You have to ban it to be safe, which is what China does, mostly.
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?
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.
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
But such a ban would not come because of censorship. It is not these social media users and their opinions, but these companies that need to get banned.
How could you make sure that closed-source code follows our laws? That it has no back doors for spying and sabotage, and that social media feed shaping algorithms have no bias and shadow-censorship for mass manipulation? You can't, you need to ban it.
You're still living in the 1990s? Using your argument: How do you make sure my server running all open source is not breaking the law? You can't, therefore you must ban that too.
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.
As @[email protected] pointed out, I said "especially", and that is because capitalist governments are incentivised to use censorship in a uniquely negative way against workers.
In theory socialist and communist governments should only employ censorship to protect workers, but history has shown that in practice that isn't always the case and, as Maxim Gorky pointed out, even when it is, it often creates more problems than it solves.
But... the foreign black-box feed shaping algorithms are controlled by oligarch capitalists, and they are doing shadow-censorship. Ever thought about why Brexit won?
If you banned the giant social media platforms, people would come to Lemmy, freeing themselves from what you say is bad.
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.
Commercial social media platforms already mark certain conversations as bad and censor them. Both Zuckerberg and Musk seem to have political goals and have changed how their platforms work to promote them.
If they were a free marketplace of ideas, I'd agree. But while Facebook is hiding news in Canada, YouTube is promoting rage-bait, and Twitter is making weird tweaks for Musk's self confidence, they seem like they're trying to promote a US worldview.
It'd be interesting to see what would replace them if they weren't available.
I've also noticed that every LLM I've used has a political agenda of some sort. If you try to make it write material of controversial or questionable nature, you'll run into some issues. You'll also notice, that many LLMs prefer to give everything a rather wholesome twist whenever possible. Not really a bad thing IMO, but I must say that these tools are not completely neutral when it comes to sensitive matters. Personally, I don't really have a problem with these moral preferences, but I also know some people who most certainly do.
When companies have a vast multinational audience, they need to consider these kinds of matters. It applies to social media companies too, and they already have experience with this, while various LLM companies are still learning this game. We've already seen how social media platforms have been used to promote the agenda of the company behind them, and I believe we'll see the same with LLMs. Once LLMs become an inseparable part of everyday life, there will be more political pressure to push a specific narrative to the users, just like there currently is with social media platforms.
The question is not about banning foreigners from our social media, it's about banning foreign-controlled social media. The Americans can join us here on Lemmy.
I guess I should have use a more specific term. "External influence" is just such a short an convenient concept, but it's clearly way too broad. What I meant to say is pretty much what you seem to be getting at. The idea is, that banning websites and services will limit the extent of influence one government can intentionally have on another nation. Individual citizens are going to be doing their own thing anyway, and that's a separate matter.
Here's a clarification that didn't fit into the previous post. You can view these things form the perspective of the local government that aims to maintain status quo. If some foreign social media platform is having a negative impact on your country, banning the platform should be a net positive. However, who defines these values? Is it good for the freedom of the people, good for the people in power, or something entirely different. All of that depends on the circumstances and the country you're in. If the EU blocks Xitter, it's not quite the same when China is doing the that.
I don't think that banning them is going to fix anything, but sanctions for not controlling the platform and prosecuting and punishing perpetrators is going to make an impact felt way beyond simply banning a platform.
Being in a civil society requires effort. So far the effort in curtailing the extremism embodied by USA social media has been incidental at best.
Can you unban abortion and harder drugs then please?
Gun/ammunition banning/control has been shown to drastically reduce mass murders and shootings. Similar to how needing a license to drive a car has dramatically increased road safety.
China banned many foreign services and made their own substitutes. What crime is being fueled? Bypassing the great firewall using VPNs is insignificant because most people are on the recommended domestic social media. This way China shut out most of enemy manipulation and propaganda, which is why I support the ban in the EU.
The vast majority of people don't have a clue what a VPN is. Even people that use them at work mostly see VPNs as IT voodoo they have to click on to get their job done.
You know you can just educate people, right? lts a lot more constructive than being an arrogant dick who expects everyone to arrive at all scenarios with perfect knowledge.
Twitter: yes 1000 percent.
Meta: businesses, landlords and social workers communicate via whatsapp here so I'd prefer bigger fines and more pressure on meta.
Yes, I use signal messenger, but I also quite literally need WhatsApp unfortunately.
EUian here. I tend to say no, with a big "but" (insert Sir Mix-a-Lot joke here): I would expect legislation to govern effective content moderation by the platforms. No cutting corners to save money.
I've heard some great ideas around making algorithms open, splitting platforms apart (Meta world have to divest one of Instagram or Facebook), and splitting businesses apart (Google search would need separate ownership from YouTube), etc.
I'd rather see their methods of profit be made illegal. Not all at once. Let them try to find loopholes and other unethical ways of making obscene amounts of money, and make those illegal too.
Maybe they can switch to a paid model out of necessity, and then they wouldn't be quite as omnipresent.
I'd tolerate it, but not support it. Forcefully taking them away gains these platforms even more support and demand. Only when people seek for alternatives or a change on their own, we can solve the problems.
I don't consider that promotion. Think from the perspective of the people who happily use US big corpo social media. When you're forced to consume B, because A is banned, you're likely not giving B a fair chance, even if it would have otherwise convinced you.
(Obviously you must still enforce rules and ban the platforms that don't abide.)
No. I have friends who are American and it's much more feasible to communicate with them through social media since they live so far away from me. It'd also mean one of my favourite sites ever (Tumblr) would be inaccessible to me.
I'm from the US and live in Japan and I'd still support it. I don't think it's the solution, but putting all the big ones in time out would at least allow competition and allow finding means to address the real issues (paradox of intolerance, balancing free speech with some way to handle disinformation and the like, and probably more I'm not thinking of).
No - just like I don't want to ban people having a conversation in a pub about a topic I don't like even if they just tell lies to each other.
If it was up to the EU we'd still believe there was no chance in the world the Corona Covid virus could have ever come from a Chinese lab and even suggesting it should have you banned from social media. Free float of ideas and let the best argument win.
I still don't understand how it ever was a controversial thought. Like, there was a virus studying lab nearby, even if you don't have any proof, it should never be labelled as a conspiracy, given it's pretty viable theory.
It was my personal theory since the beginning - a designer virus accidentally released before it was finished.
How about when one of the people in the pub conversing is an enemy agent in a cold war, always telling lies?
That would be the equivalent of what we do now: we let foreign social media govern who of us converses with whom about what, by shaping our feeds with black-box recommendation algorithms.
Only on Lemmy folks , people who complain about their freedoms being taken out, media censorship against their ideology and living in a LITERAL dictatorship since Trump took power, who claim to advocate for freedom of speech and information
That very same people actively demanding for information shared on social networks to be controlled, networks to be shutdown and people to be censored based on unknown and ambiguous criteria, without even understanding the implications of it.
Details at six
And for your question? No. People is free to choose what to think, listen, say or read. Fucking fascists
I think it has something to do with how freedom of speech is understood in Europe and USA. In Europe it's more acceptable to think that one's freedom of speech should not, in practice, mute someone else's, by frightening them from speaking out, or by the majority drowning out their voice before it can be heard. And that protecting this is something worth taking action for.