Social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
That’s a lot of words to just say “Allowing bad actors to lie about elections makes us money, while hiring the staff to combat election lies costs us money, and we’re too sociopathic to spend money for the good of the country.”
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I have had a sociological theory for a while now:
There has been two dominate breeds of homo sapiens: the people and the dragons.
The dragons, through out history, have been driven by greed, whether it’s capturing more land, hoarding gold, or accumulating power.
The people have been driven by cooperation and community, whether it’s sharing a cup of sugar, or giving money to those in need, or building a barn as a community.
The problem we’ve faced with Capitalist Realism is the argument that deep down we are all dragons whether we want to admit it or not, when actually dragons are a tiny, tiny tiny percent of the population determined to benefit at the expense of everyone else.
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“Even if we want to do the right thing, our board of directors will fire us. If the board members don’t, the institutional investors will elect new board members that will allow or even encourage the spread of misinformation because it makes them more money.”
This is a shitty opinion article that links speculation, anecdotal evidence, and “experts” with no actual studies at all. Whether or not they’re doing a good job at it, all of these companies invest heavily in moderation on their platforms, and that investment hasn’t been reduced substantially.
Everyone hates social media through elections, it’s an easy thing to blame because the loud get louder. This article is punching down early for clicks.
I made a comment the other day saying Lemmy users are just as biased as average people.
Someone said, “how is this article biased.”
I am convinced half the user base that was here before Reddit doesn’t know they are stuck in a loop of reading and posting articles here that justify their mindset the same as anyone else.
Idk they might be just as biased but they seem more vocal about it.
Lemmy caters particularly well to the doomer crowd, since it presents an alternative to corporate-owned social media. Doomers have a lot of overlap with leftists(or liberals or whatever), and this causes a feedback loop of depression and anxiety. Consider two people; the leftist and the doomer:
-The leftist gets mad about something and posts a few articles
-The doomer sees this and reposts it with a more fatalistic title
-The leftist sees the new post and becomes more outraged, posting massive walls of enraged text in the comments
-The doomer reads the first paragraph and begins wailing about how the world is ending
-This anger spills over into other posts and generally sours the mood for everyone involved
Because the doomer is incapable of viewing anything in a positive light and the leftist lives in a state of perpetual butthurt, they feed into one another and fill everybody’s feed with outrage and despair.
Swap the leftist with alt-right and you have 4chan circa 2017. Let it fester for a few years and you have a machine for churning out political extremists.
Just like Musk and the other billionaires wanted.
Delete Facebook, Twitter (x 🙄), insta, and Reddit.
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Yes, and stay on Lemmy, the totally unmoderated version of those filled with Russian and CCP propaganda.
It’s not unmoderated lmao
Yeah there were systematic issues at play there
If you’re going to compare it to corporations like Meta who spend billions per year on platform moderation then yes, it’s absolutely unmoderated. Even compared to the shitty volunteer moderation of Reddit, which at least has mod tools. If Lemmy was big enough to be noticed by the media it’d be right up there on that list of misinformation spreaders, because that’s just what social media is.
I like Lemmy better than those platforms, I’m here after all, but saying get off those other platforms from a platform that has the same problems is the pot calling the kettle black
I think it’s also worth bearing in mind there that the average fedi user currently is well aware of the lack of platform level moderation, both the good and the bad that come with that.
Maybe a hot take, but allowing capitalist corporations to decide what is “the truth” was always a terrible idea.
why? you don’t consider short term profit gain the most important aspect of our society?
Why do we want social media companies to be the arbiters of truth anyway…
Because like it or not that is where a lot of people get information these days. If it keeps pushing bulshit, people believe bulshit. For an example, anti-vaxxers didn’t use to be so common, until their bulshit was spread all over social media.
I would love for people to be wise enough to verify information in reliable sources and not just believe everything they see, but sadly that’s not the world where we live in.
Antivax sentiment has been around for hundreds of years, long before the Internet, mostly through political party rhetoric and/or religion, not saying the spread likely hasn’t increased, but people believe wrong information all the time.
There is always a nutball, but my point is that, yes, it has increased significantly. Vaccines were a settled matter already, people far and wide trusted them. Now vaccination rates have gone down and diseases that we had nearly eliminated are having a comeback. This has happened because now any stupid grifter can have a worldwide platform and a following who actively spreads their nonsense.
They shouldn’t be the arbiters of truth anyway.
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Nothing recent, but they’ve controlled these for a long time.
I know what you mean by capitalists, but respectfully, I think you dilute your argument to phrase it that way. Many people start their own small businesses and find success, personal freedom, fulfillment (I mean they also find challenges, anxiety, and struggles, sure.) Isn’t it capitalism that allows them to decide what they want to do, start something from scratch, determine their own prices?
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe you or someone else can tell me, how does starting a business in a capitalistic society differ from starting one in a more socialistic society? I’m wondering what freedoms and restrictions there are. I started out going one way with this comment but realized there’s probably a lot I could learn to broaden my perspective. I really only know what it feels like to start my own business in a capitalistic society.
I always wonder what form people imagine this regulation taking. One of my least favorite ideas is YouTube recommendations.
Only allow certain algorithms in feeds. Ban recommendations of any kind altogether across all platforms.
So I have to know what I am looking for before I can watch it?
I am glad this idea will never happen
He’s a cancer on the human race as a whole.
Social Media is morons telling each other made up bullshit.
Well, musk showed he can just shirk duty and take home more money… so why not follow his lead.
Facebook was the start (though Yahoo and YouTube weren’t far behind). All conservatives and the rich have is money, so what’s it to them to buy out the company or their CEO? This may end up being a worse propaganda machine than FOX, but time will tell…Haven’t been on Reddit but not sure how their algorithm has been doing but their ads were very conservative before I left…
Facebook Hired Joel fucking Kaplan right after he left the Bush White House. Kaplan personally exempted rightwing conspiracy news sites from Facebook’s truth standards, while also deprioritizing more overtly left leaning sites.
He personally nixed any change to the Facebook algorithm that would reduce the radicalization pipeline.
Oh, and he also stuffed Facebook management with right-wing yes men.
Thank you. At least someone remembers that Facebook/Meta has been a right winger echo chamber earlier than Musk’s version
Best we can do is migrate…I always had this thought (stick with it): a lot of police are conservative, because how many progressive people do you know who want to have that difficult job? It seems true for management to: progressives don’t enjoy bossing people around and often enjoy the process of producing/making something. So who is left to fill the void? Conservatives. Worse, it doesn’t seem rare that “progressives,” turn hyper capitalist or all together conservative - they simply joins the rich club and most of their ideology. Even most politically left politicians only pander to progressive social issues but tend to bend to special interests. It’s going to take a major shift to change our power structure and who knows how that will come about…
Moral of the story: it only took one social media site to start being more lax on cersorship for the other ones to follow suit. Maybe this is indicative that spending a lot of money on censorship measures is useless.
Edit: sorry I’m not sure what happened , it worked when I posted. Working link posted below (thanks @chunkMcHorkle)
~~Got paywall on main link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230825070213/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/25/political-conspiracies-facebook-youtube-elon-musk/~~
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This one works for me.
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They know our government effectively has schizophrenia. Trouble is they’re fucked in the long run whether it’s Jekyll or Hyde.
Depressing content. Not on my Friday. Closed after the third paragraph.
