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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was the plan all along. Musk spends his handler’s money to buy Twitter, and he makes it unpalatable to the liberal users by fucking it up. Then he removes the ability to block users, reinstates Donald Trump, and then Trump and his followers use it as a platform to build momentum for his reelection. This is important enough to Trump’s handlers to be worth 44 billion dollars.
Musk went along because they have dirt on him. Life-ruining dirt. The entire GOP is kept in line by the people in the shadows collecting and manufacturing dirt on everyone. It’s like having an entire oligarchy of Kingpins, except it’s totally real.
They suck in and trap pedophiles, rapists, embezzlers, hackers, deeply closeted homosexuals, and anyone they can lure into commiting a crime while their cameras roll. (Or what their constituents see as abhorrent behavior).
Some of the GOP relish in it, and some hate it but are trapped. It’s a mixed bag, but they all serve the people in the shadows trying to take control of the US.
If anyone gets caught doing one of these crimes, it gets swept under the rug or they simply get thrown to the wolves while publicly disavowing the person.
It’s exactly as evil as what Putin does except a lot less obvious to the public who is doing it. However, everyone with any tenure in the GOP knows exactly what’s up and who’s in charge. It’s half cult and half trapped losers.
While I don’t necessarily disagree, who do you think is in the shadows? I’ve always said that Reagan being an actor with Alzheimer was a pro, not a con, to the GOP, but I’ve never subscribed to shadow order conspiracies. Do we have proof that there are puppet master and whom they might be?
I think we need to pursue a strategy that attempts to discourage the spread of disinformation while avoiding making them the arbiters of truth.
I think social media platforms are like a giant food court. If you do nothing to discourage the spread of germs, your salad bar and buffets are all going to be petri dishes of human pathogens. That doesn’t mean that the food court needs to put in hospital-level sterilization measures. It just means that the FDA requires restaurants to use dishwashers that get up to 71 C, and employees are required to wash their hands.
In this case, I think we should experiment. What if platforms were required to let users flag something as disinformation, and share a credible source if they like? Maybe users could see all the flags and upvote or downvote them. The information would still be there, but you’d go to the InfoWars page and it would say, “Hey: You should know that 95% of people say this page posts mostly bullshit.”
Something like that. I don’t like the role the companies play currently, but disinformation does carry the potential to cause serious harm.
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.
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.
Capitalism in its end state would prevent the creation of small businesses. In present-day United States capitalism, if a dozen PhDs who’ve been working for decades in their own time and with their own money to discover something magical like cheap insulin or a cure for cancer, it is not possible for them to start an independent business selling such a product.
tbh if you aren’t in highschool or a content creator why the fuck have an insta or Facebook or any of this at this point. nobody cares about your vacation bro
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.
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