You mean it’s a millennial like Zuckerberg who’s causing all this damage to the world? I thought it was evil boomers?
I really do think we could neuter social media’s harm by requiring them to positively identify users as actual people or own the consequences of what gets posted - like how a newspaper has the legal accountability for what it says. This “neutral platform” is not healthy for our democracy.
I’m all for freedom of speech - but I don’t think those freedom of speech laws had anticipated how wide the damage of speech can flow and how stealthily things can be spoken.
And it’s not hard to set up. The EU’s new identity network requires zero-knowledge-proofs - ie “this is a real person” is all that social media platforms would be able to verify. I’d obviously be deeply against the social media companies being able to positively identify users.
But I usually get downvoted to oblivion for making this point.
How is this news? Breaking news, warm water is wet !
Pssst 🤫, you are harming democracy by spreading rumors via this social media platform.
The biggest perpetrators of misinformation are the MSM. Without social media a lot of what is going on in the world will never see the light of day.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/13/social-media-misinformation-doxxing-privacy-laws/
https://jacobin.nl/hoe-de-nederlandse-media-een-illegale-oorlog-verkopen/
And the biggest lie they spread is that social media is good for democracy.
That’s a bad headline, Reuters. Surveys don’t show how things work; they show what people think. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if it was true that social media was bad for democracy, but this isn’t enough to say that’s the case.
You don’t say. Who would have thunk?
It spreads blatant lies. Not all rumors are lies, though.
Oh, it “harms democracy”, doesn’t it? How about this headline: social media fuels a genocide by spreading rumors, Myanmar finds. But alas, that was 2017 and only brown people getting harmed in some far-away place, so it’s old news and nothing to hold Facebook accountable for, eh?
What about anything you said refutes the point?
they’re being facetious lol
The greatest tragedy of the internet is when we accepted that lies are worth more than the truth.
Rumors? That’s a funny way of spelling propaganda.
It also includes trolling and people that are just plain wrong, but people tend to believe what they want to believe.
Greta Hopkins ruined my small village by spreading rumours. There was no survey, if you knew Greta, you knew it was her.
I love the quiet irony you employed here. I know nothing about Greta Hopkins other than she’s a village-ruining whore who should suffer for ask the pain she’s caused!
I don’t know her, I don’t know the village, and I don’t know you, but that bitch needs to go down. Thanks, social media!
Nice! I like the cut of your jib!
Not more than lobbies and billionaires
Oh yes they do, as a multiplicator of everything that lobbies and billionaires say and do.
And by extension the bastardization and gutting of basic education. People who aren’t taught how to think won’t understand things.
Don’t worry, I’m sure AI is going to make that all better, right? Right?
They also spread the truth as well even when government and media have conspired to obscure it. Social media has led to people beating companies, governments and politicians simply by providing an avenue to share reality. Social media defends democracy and protects democracy. There has always been an enormous power balance issues between the elites and the peasants and social media for the first time is allowing the peasants to speak to each other rather than the only voice being the elites through their media platforms.
They did. That’s why they spent so much effort to ruin the internet these past few years.
My guy… Social media ARE the elites media platforms you Dingus.
They aren’t letting people do shit, they are all censored and monitored to ensure we stay fractured and disengaged
He seems stuck at what social media was in 2012 and hasn’t realized how they are now.
Yet in principle the social benefit described (amplifying voices of the unheard) isn’t entirely out of reach for social media as a category, especially if we can escape the era of closed platforms. Open alternatives are still relatively new. There is a plausible future in which closed platforms are left behind and we become much more capable of keeping mass public manipulation in check.
Exactly but I think for most people social media = the ones used by the masses, the “social normiedia”, like Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter = Arab Spring because it lets them use cheap SMS flipphones!
