IMO, the Surgeon General's scaremongering over kids and social media is part of an anti-encryption push by world authorities.
If the powers that be convince the public that social media harms kids, they can establish a system where internet users must identify themselves under the guise of proving they're not children.
Over the course of my 7 years here on the fediverse, I’ve seen a lot of misinformation and misunderstandings about privacy, consent, and the onslaught of innovative new search and analytics tools. There’s a new one making the rounds and I wrote something up in response to a discussion on the topic.
Let me first say that yes, I think people should have the ability to consent to how their data is used. The reality is that doesn’t comport with, well, reality. We in the fediverse live behind a thin veneer of privacy, often relying on people doing unscrupulous things with fedi-data to be shamed into shutting down their service. But the reality is that doesn’t really protect our data. Not really. The fedivsere is an open ecosystem. It provides tools and abilities to better protect your information, tools and abilities that don’t make sense for other social media platforms to have because it hinders their ability to make money. But while those tools are available, they are not the default here.
This is something I just wrote for those that are concerned about their information being indexed, or analyzed, or otherwise used by one of the new analytics services. It’s Mastodon-centric and a few of the features are only available in the glitch-soc fork:
Enable “require follow requests”
Enable “hide your social graph”
Enable “opt out of search engine indexing”
Enable “hide your followers count”
Block and then unblock anyone that follows you whom you do not trust to not use a service like this so that they are no longer following you
Remove anything from your profile that you aren’t comfortable being collected and analyzed. For things you would like followers to see, create a followers only post with that info any pin it to the top of your timeline.
Going forward, ensure post visibility is set to “followers only” any time you post something that you don’t want to be analyzed
@jerryBreaking point theory, to put a name to it, emerges from the fact that it's often far easier to sever a link than to re-establish it. A block (individual, mutual, adminstrative / instance / server / network level) tends to remain in place once instituted. Which means that within any group, interactions occur up to some tolerance boundary after which they're disabled and are likely never reestablished.
I've seen this both personally (online and off), as well as in commercial and other contexts --- say, a business, vendor, or customer who crosses some annoyance threshold sufficiently often or egregiously that there is a decision by the counterparty to never do business again (or only under extreme duress / protest).
That of course is further confounded by issues such as monopoly / monopsony, other power imbalances, cultural and institutional biases or oppression, and All That Jazz. It's one thing to boycott your local sandwich shop for the transgression of putting sweet mustard on rye, another when Ye Global Information Monopoly Firme is the only option for reaching a large-scale audience, or participating meaningfully in public life, and yet it consistently violates not only deeply-held personal moral values but demonstrably supports / incites / enables mass atrocities.
I strongly suspect there's a sociology literature on this, though I'm not aware of it. I'd love to see it though.
Well now. It looks like Bluesky will have to deal with their Jack Dorsey issue sooner rather than later, after his recent history with promoting anti-vaccination crank RFK Jr. came to wider attention, because this isn’t just some harmless billionaire obsession, they’re literally killing people, bringing back diseases that were almost wiped out like measles.
Bluesky members are not happy and some are calling for Dorsey to be thrown off the Bluesky board.
Alas, the voters in the run-off #TurkeyElections2023 were partially disenfranchised by its #autocratic president exercising almost complete control over the state media and, thanks to right-wing pal #ElonMusk, over the still most important political #SocialMedia platform, #Twitter, as well as over the #Turkish organizations controlling....
All the #tech parents I know, and I’m one of them, run a very strict control regime on their own kids around #socialmedia and #screentime.
How are the parents who don’t understand how addictive tech runs circles around the #developing#brain of their kids supposed to be up to the task?
Conservative forces like to say it’s up to the parents, but isn’t that more like saying ”survival of the fittest”? I understand it’ll give the kids of already rich a leg up, so maybe it all makes sense.
Wenn wir den Menschen zeigen wollen, dass #SocialMedia auch "faktiv" sein kann und dich zB auf #Infos & #News etc. konzentrieren kann. Da soll da schon was konkretes vorgeführt werden.
Die Menschen müssen noch auf den #decentral Umgang "geschuhlt" werden und da ist für eine #Motivierung mit simplen Vortrag das effektiefste 🤷♂️
👆 Ich komme auf diesen Rückschluss weil für uns pro. Anwender:Innen das nutzen von anderen spezieller #ActivityPup als normal vorkommt.
In der breiten alg. Masse wird dies anders gesehen oder nicht verstanden. Deswegen benötigt dies meiner #Meinung nach simpleren Einstieg. Gelernt was das alles ist wird mit der Zeit 😉
Abgesehen davon, es gibt sicherlich cooleres für einige als dieses #Mastodon#SocialMedia und es ist oool zu sehen was es da noch wie zu nutzen mit welchen Funktionen gibt! 😊
I know I complain. Sorry. But this platform is useless. Pretty clearly my posts get no circulation. For my last one, I got 50 views within seconds of posting on LinkedIn. Zero nearly a day on Mastodon. If someone has a solution (yes, lots of #) please let me know.
@gjquartermaine@Gustodon agreed. The pace is slower here, but the engagement is deeper. And hashtags (and alt text) are key.
If it’s not for you, that’s okay too; there’s only so much #SocialMedia bandwidth to go around. But #mastodon has given me much more engagement — true engagement — than the bird site, for instance. #Mastodon for the win!
Can't wait till we're out of the social media fragmentation days, and I can hang a poster on my wall with the timeline akin to those children's storybook maps that showed you where all of the dragons were.
"The micropayments platform Post uses, which is powered by Stripe, allows users to buy a bundle of points in packets of 300 ($4.20) up to 10,000 ($126.70). As you get into the higher tiers — 1,500, 5,000 or 10,000 points, you’ll get a discount on your purchase
They can spread conspiracy theories that elect Trump and inspire school shooters, and hundreds of millions of people just keep using them (or billions? really?)
NefariousSocial wishes all of its current and future clients* a happy Pride Month full of lucrative advertising campaigns exploiting the struggles of marginalized peoples for profit.
I'm struggling with this. Not with "should I leave #Twitter" -- I did that last November. I'm struggling with how many people haven't, how many are using #SocialMedia that supports Trump etc.
Even with "should I go back to posting there to try to reach those people?"
I think I am just about done with #Mastodon. It was a (not) fun little experiment. I don't know why I thought that it would be safer for #Muslims, but the #fediverse has turned out to be exactly the same as every other corner of the Internet. #SocialMedia is like the USA. No #SafeSpace for Muslims, and if we complain, then we're part of the problem. #Allyships also run only one way here. Folks cry for us to support them, but refuse to support us in return. #MastodonSoWhite#MastodonSoBigoted
Andrew Tate, the controversial social media figure, weaves an image of non-conformity and opposition to the existing social system through his 'philosophy' of Tateism. However, rather than aid you to escape his idea of the 'matrix', he instead sells you back into it.