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  • i live in Brazil, and would be 100% down with X being banned, even Instagram or Facebook if necessary.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • It would achieve diversification of the social media landscape.

    • It would remove the possibility of feed shaping algorithm bias for mass manipulation, and back doors for spying and sabotage.

  • Well, EU is not a country, but yeah, they should either comply with our rules (which currently neither one of them does), or get fucked out of here.

    I hope some local, ActivityPub based service would appear in the vacuum.

  • 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 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.

  • 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 search engines and 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 trillions 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.

  • 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 know I'm not the target of this question, but as American I'd like to see the reverse. I wanna see more non American social media in the US.

  • 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.

  • 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?

    Fuck that, I'd start using VPNs.

    • They can join us on non-American social media.

      • Ah that's a fair compromise. In that case, assuming they were all going to join, I'd go for the non Elon / Zuck / Spez run platform for sure.

        That just makes me think, this is a strange question for the fediverse because I'm pretty sure a fair amount of instances aren't American run already.

  • There is a Paradox of Tolerance that essentially says that if you are tolerant of the intolerant, all tolerance will eventually be overrun.

    This is what's currently happening in the USA.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

    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.

  • I am American so I can't really answer but what would count as American social media?

    I feel like it would be most large social network sites and an unpredictable amount of smaller ones

  • As a Brazilian, yes. I doubt anything halfway decent would show up instead, which probably sounds better

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