Petition calls to ban Elon Musk's X in Europe
This petition introduces the campaign for the ban of Elon Musk's social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) in the European Union.
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4853884
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4853256
To whom it may concern.
Ah change.org the platform best known for not changing anything ever.
Yeah, but they're great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-"moderate" political parties.
This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won't do anything further about it.
Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would've been it if, it wasn't that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).
Everyone who signed the petition should close their Twitter accounts. And write their newspapers that they would cancel their subscriptions if the articles quoted or embedded tweets. I didn't sign any petition, and I'm already doing it. Well, sort of. I didn't have any Twitter account ro close.
Maybe not quote, but embed. They should still quote noteworthy things on there, but don't force us to interact with the site
I hate the amount of lazy journalism that embedded tweets have spawned, I will find articles that say "people are saying" something and the proof is three random tweets with about 6 likes between them.
You can always quote without giving the source. "Politician XY said that ...", instead of "Politician XY tweeted that ..."
Closed it. Viva la France!
Agree with the first part, but news ought to still quote tweets while it exists, otherwise they cannot denounce many of the wrong things going on in there. I quote the Guardian's email I received this week (even if I prefer quoting to embedding, as tweets get deleted, and embeds brings traffic to the site):
Dear reader, Yesterday we announced that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our content elsewhere. This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse. X users will still be able to share our articles, and the nature of live news reporting means we will still occasionally embed content from X within our article pages. Our reporters will also be able to carry on using the site for newsgathering purposes, just as they use other social networks in which we don’t officially engage. Social media can be an important tool for news organisations and help us to reach new audiences but, at this point, X now plays a diminished role in promoting our work. Our journalism is available and open to all on our website and we would prefer people to come to theguardian.com and support our work there. You can also enjoy our journalism on the Guardian app and discover new pieces via our brilliant set of regular newsletters. Thankfully, we can do this because our business model doesn’t rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giants’ algorithms – instead we’re funded directly by our readers.
My twitter account is just a link to my mastodon profile, with a script that posts a link to it every week or so to stop it getting banned for inactivity.
I actually can't remember the last time I saw someone under 60 buy a newspaper. I think the cross over in the venn diagram is going to be pretty small.
write their newspapers that they would cancel their subscriptions if the articles quoted ... tweets.
Given the former and future president of the USA's habit of announcing policies there, that seems unworkable.
I'm not American, but even I heard about Trump tweeting like a maniac. Here in Europe, though, the media understand that politicians use social media to communicate with their supporters, and nothing else. So, traditional media usually ignores them (unless they say something clickbaity), and focuses what was said outside the social media. Perhaps the same could be applied in the US. Especially if Trump is indeed as narcissistic as he's portrayed. When he realizes people don't listen to him, he may change his methods of communication.
Ah, a change.org petition . I eagerly await the sweeping improvements to life abroad.
Has any petition here ever actually lead to any change?
Not going to sign it, too. Change.org is part of the problem, and not of the solution.
Just a casual bystander with no clue what's going on... why's change.org a problem?
Edit: ok, read more posts, understand now
Op, if you want to submit a petition to the EU, you should use their portal https://www.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/en/home not change.org
Exactly. This is the only correct answer. Change.org petitions are as worthless as a 7 euros banknote.
As much as I dislike Musk, expansion of the great firewall of Europe seems like a bad idea.
+1
They should discourage institutions from using it (and use government Mastadon instances of course). This is honestly long overdue.
Yep they should keep fining him exponentially till he leaves (he obviously will never fall in line with EU rules)
They only need to expand it a little bit. Add a rule against Nazi websites, and enforce it. That's not restrictive very much at all. Drag has gone drag's entire life without relying on Nazi sites
Does the article say anything about censorship? Usually bans like this are financial. So X offices would close in the EU and bank accounts seized and they wouldn't be allowed to conduct business (eg with advertisers) in the EEA
Let's at least block the government agencies from using it in favor of open platforms and protocols to communicate with its citizens.
At least give me some good ole RSS in the backend, and they could host their own Mastodon instances that people can subscribe to from other public instances.
Let's at least block the government agencies from using it in favor of open platforms and protocols to communicate with its citizens.
Yeah. When public services solely use Xitter or Facebook pisses me off. We can and should make that shit illegal.
Germany did this years ago. Their government hosts a mastodon instance for various agencies
Watch the next government go back on all of that.
Corporate nationalist social media like "X" (American oligarchy) and TikTok (Chinese oligarchy) are a danger to the sovereignty and stability of the Western world.
and the reddit Russian psy-op? certainly not helping
Ew, that sounds bad. I would prefer "promote open twitter-like social media" instead of "ban X" (you can replace X with any other website/software, even FOSS one). No banning should be allowed in EU.
Yeah, keep X on and pile up the multi-million fines if they don't comply with laws. That's the only thing companies care about - something eating up their profits.
And if they keep not complying - then ban it altogether, like Brazil did. I prefer to recognize and ban it for the illegal activities it does, not because some folks don't like it and banded together against it.
They should pass a resolution that all EU member nations shall create official Mastodon and Lemmy instances. Moderators and admins would be actual jobs constrained by the relevant national or EU law.
(Or replace Mastodon and Lemmy with whatever open platforms you deem appropriate)
I like this idea.
Twitter was supposed to be the "online town hall". And online public spaces are not publicly owned, they're run by private companies that can ban you at their own whims.
With each country having their own federated platforms, they can truly act as online public spaces where the usual laws apply as they would do offline.
You'd need to employ thousands of moderators though if everyone was online but honestly I think it's worth it.
But don't be handing out prison sentences for posting stupid shit. Online harassment and calls for violence can still be legally handled the same way they are offline, but jailing people for offensive jokes and stupid hot takes is just idiotic.
Best way is temporary bans increasing exponentially in length, then small percentage of income fines again increasing exponentially.
Also, and I'd argue we already need this, a court system for online crimes. This means the regular court system doesn't get more workload added on to it and specialist judges and lawyers can be appointed.
I don't like the idea of governments banning access to a website, unless its like CSAM.
Yeah, I don't think that banning social platforms is a good idea, unless its hosting illegal content. As bad as ""X"" is, banning it could be a slippery slope.
Although, I don't think this change.org petition will get far.
That's cool for the EU (probably) but there's still the other 90% of the world.
It's short sighted indeed.
Block? No.
Ask public law institutions to not use it. Maybe.
This is all they have to do
I'm glad they at least name mastodon and not bluesky as an alternative.
Whats wrong with bluesky? Ive been using it fornthe past week and its definitely more intuitive and accessible for the average joe than Mastodon.
Blue sky has an owner and investors, right?
Publicly funded organizations should be required to use open solutions.
If they want to also replicate what they post somewhere open to BlueSky and Xitter, and Facebook, so be it.
That said, I could see carving out an exception for BlueSky if it provides the full open stack (public unauthenticated HTML, RSS, federation, etc ), and only while it does so.
I can't run my own bluesky instance. Its literaly the same problem as X
Petition calls to ban world hunger
Eh, BlueSky seems to be actually gaining some traction now, enough so that celebs and brands are jumping ship, so maybe just give it a few months and let it rot.
Don't let the garbage sit until it rots. It will attract flies and possible more garbage.
Bsky has 20 million users, which is great, basically doubled in a month, but twitter has hundreds of millions of users. We talking a different order of magnitude.
While I definitely agree, enough momentum going both ways, alongside perhaps people choosing to leave Mastodon and Threads to go to the "winner of the alternatives" could sway this to a point where BlueSky is no longer the minnow here. Given that we're only weeks detached from Trump's win, I can only see it getting worse for Twitter, to the point where I can see Elon just selling it and moving on - perhaps even to BlueSky if Jack wanted a cut price deal.
Curves being what they are, these numbers don’t mean much. Yes twitter has more users but if bsky crosses some threshold, their user count can begin to catch up quickly.
How many bots and duplicate accounts on Twitter though?
Petition calls to ban war
Why stop there, why not ban Elon all together?
How about "if you don't like Musk, don't use X or buy a Tesla?"
I personally don't really like any billionaires at all, but I'm not going to get in to a hissy fit because someone uses Microsoft Windows or bought something from Amazon.
That’s all well and good, and that’s currently my policy.
But that’s an entirely different discussion than whether banning a certain propaganda platform is worth doing and would cause the intended results.
The first thought that comes to my mind is that the people in Twitter are just going to migrate to another social network. It won't be problem solved, it'll be problem moved.
The second thought I have is the amount of hate and comments full of misinformation on sites like Facebook. Should we ban Facebook too? And if so, where does it stop and who is it that gets to decide that a site is getting banned for "wrong think".
Personally, I believe this isn't so much a petition against X, but a petition against Musk, who I think wouldn't be absolutely gutted even if X went out of business. I think he bought it with the aim of derailing anyway.
I'm not going to get in to a hissy fit because someone uses Microsoft Windows or bought something from Amazon
You're more mature than some people here.
I also don't think banning anything is the way to go. Who don't want to use X doesn't have to - there is Reddit, Mastadon, BlueSky and others.
Petition to ban all people who think differently from me
Here quite a few of the popular social media are banned. They're still popular but now every schoolkid, housewife and grandpa knows what a VPN is. Every time I hear such news, I am afraid of crackdowns on censorship evasion in those places too...
Does the article say anything about censorship? Usually bans like this are financial. So X offices would close in the EU and bank accounts seized and they wouldn't be allowed to conduct business (eg with advertisers) in the EEA
Why there are always petitions to ban something, not to create something, like eu based social network everyone can join and use for free ?
Found the market liberal.
You ban stuff not because it is bad and you want something better. You ban stuff that is so bad that is actually harmful.
As with hate speech, the harm needs to be quantifiable. "I don't like that people are sharing ideas and opinions that I personally disagree with" doesn't cut it.
The price of freedom of speech is needing to hear things that make you uncomfortable every now and again. Deciding what people can and can't write on the internet is a slippery slope.
The German government already has their own mastodon instance on social.bund.de
Much better alternative to a EU funded social network, as this would automatically drive critics to the assumption, that politicians are controlling the narrative and deleting critical content. Also supports the development of open source and self hosted alternatives this way.
Fascism
If someone told me "I don't like Musk, I'm going to stop using Twitter", I'd say "good for you". I think it's great when people stand up for their beliefs and put their money where their mouth is.
If someone told me "I don't like Musk, so you're not allowed to use Twitter", I'd tell them to go fuck themselves. It's none of their business whether they personally like what it is that I want to do as long as I'm not hurting anyone.
Inb4: I'm not a Twitter user and probably never will be, but I believe very strongly in the freedom of expression, even when that means I have to hear things that I don't like.
It kind of invalidates what the EU Committee is all about. This is just stupid, and calling for a ban in a free world is more concerning than X.
Site doesn't load. I trust they're talking about banning it financially, not with a firewall, right?
I think they should just force him to disclose his shitty algorithm
Edit: Third party, local moderators for social media should also be a standard requirement. No outsourcing of moderation.
Obviously not what they have in use anymore, but for a golden few seconds the algorithm was open source: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm
European politicians use X and its an assets for their governments. I doubt they are going to do much about it.
Petition calls to ban hurt feelings
There's absolutely no sensible reason to even consider doing this.
There's absolutely no sensible reason to even consider not doing this.
In few years we have moved from nonsensical Musk worshipping to nonsensical Musk hating.
Correction, we went from fanatical Elon worship to a sudden realization, that he's the greatest scam artist of all time (quite literally, nobody EVER burned more tax payer and inverter money) and went into sudden shock and disbelief.
we have moved to musk hating but i fail to see how all of it could be characterised as nonsensical; there are elements for sure
I never liked Musk, even when he was "In." Even the Mars colonization meme rubbed me the wrong way, as the science does not line up with that.
It felt like a cult of personality to me. He was always a fickle jerk, a mixed bag.
You have a point though, people's opinions were largely political, I think. Or just based on pure hope/cultism
It's like JK Rowling all over again.
There is a certain, disturbingly large, segment of the population which doesn't even appear to attempt to think for themselves.