Ask Lemmy

Danish person here.

Yes. Ban Google, Meta, X and all the rest. Let's use a bit of EU funds to fund a privacy respecting social media that is NOT controlled by the US or China.

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.

Considering they're being actively and without denial used to fuck us over, yes. I'm not going to play the censorship card. The US is now no better than Russia, there's no reason we should treat them better. US platforms are now literally an offensive weapon, Musk already started riots over fake news and is directly and openly meddling in our politics. This shit needs to stop. Just like we blocked RT news, this needs to go.

It's in the same vein like Trump threatening military action against Greenland. Trump is literally committing extortion under the treat of war. The US is an actively hostile nation that targets everyone including their own allies. Like what the actual fuck? How did we get here? We need to decouple from the US as soon as possible. I'd go as far as compare the US to a ravid animal on the international stage, I'm absolutely mortified by what's going on.

As an American please say yes. Because apparently they are all nazis now.

Dude I'm an American and I would support a ban on American socially media in my country.

I’m American, and I would support a ban of American social media in my country.

Chilean here, yes.

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.

I wouldn't support it because I don't like censorship.

I heard there is talk of a projects for the EU to increase its digital sovereignty. Now would be a great time for those projects to come to fruition.

As for me, if this means that there'll be an EU-wide reboot of Hyves, I'd be thrilled. Extra so if, on the back-end, it works on a Federated system.

Americans can't want social media banned too?

Twitter is not a social media anymore, it is a propaganda platform. There are regulations for media in civilized places. Twitter does not respect the law, thus it shall be banned.

If it were up to me it would be seized, because there is a public interest to this platform. Seizing it to make the algorithm transparent, fair and legal.

I didn't use to, and I am generally against limiting access to any sort of source of information. But the last few years have convinced me otherwise - the owners of these platforms are willing to destroy our way of life for their own personal benefit. Fuck Zuck. Fuck Musk. Fuck all of these charlatans and conmen.

Edit: oh, and the EU isn't a country (yet), it's a supranational organization which presents unique challenges in terms of policy. Def not a country

As a Canadian, yes please. Their culture infiltrates ours so much that there are some people who believe in the American superiority and don't understand that we're two different peoples, with very different approaches to how we should live and treat others. Obviously, we Canadians are not perfect, and we have more in common than not but it's disheartening to hear Canadians (including people in my own inner circle) view our country as nothing but the USA's little bitch.

I get the world is sliding right, and our political pendulum definitely swings. But I worry that in the efforts to acknowledge the harms that we've done (and currently do) to people in our own country, that the backlash to those policies and acknowledgments will cause us to lose things that I'm proud of and freedoms that I enjoy.

An MP I really admire in Ontario is pushing for Elections Canada to protect our electoral process from the Grand Twit's interference, so that's something. I'd prefer a ban.

Even though the Proud crowd are big operators in Canada, banning Yankee social media would maybe help lower the ragebait volume a bit. Whatever makes a dent.

I didn't need a ban. They enshitified and I moved on. All Meta apps (including WhatsApp) gone. X/Twitter gone. LinkedIn gone. Reddit gone.

Now I use Lemmy, Mastodon/BlueSky, and Signal.

For-profit social media, certainly. I don't trust it anymore. Astroturfing, data-harvesting, I feel like they're all made to fuck us over in some way.

absolutely. here's the petition for EU: https://www.ban-x-in.eu/

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.

I’m americana and would definitely support a ban of American Social media in my country.

I am a big proponent of free speech and the merits of free access to information.

Or at least I was. I've always known that bad actors with control over your information input can do an awful lot of damage. I used to think free and open access was the best choice. But seeing how a few companies captured the entire social media environment and have swollen to near-total monopolies and then how those same companies have shown themselves to be bad actors with malicious intent I have changed my opinion. Banning them would help slow down the flow of info sewage into the EU and encourage more competing companies to form. We need that since the EU can't break up American companies. So if new companies were ever to be competitive we need to remove the giants from the pool and commit to breaking up any that get too big.

Absolutely. It's basically just allowing American tech companies to decide who's leading the country. FrP (furthest right of the mainstream parties) is set to win the next election and it's not because they have good ideas. It's because of propaganda.

Also, the person you elected has threatened an EU member state with war, so there's that.

I'm definitely on board with ban of popular social media (from any country) that tracks me and collects my data even when I'm in toilet, let alone my search history on a day to day basis and sells it to others to generate it's revenue and shoves its own agenda as the result on my feed. I want something like 4chan but a little more mature in terms of audience and no modspreading like on Reddit.

Basically, Lemmy is good. Nice middle ground. Reddit like approach to content that I wanna view with other like-minded people whilst not being pushed off from the dinner table just because I wanna eat something else. Besides Reddit and fediverse, not many platforms allow that unless you completely start over with your algorithm.

I wanna be able to see and be part of whatever I chose to ignore after I feel like eating that said food tomorrow, or the week after or the next year. If any social platform provides that, to the entire world, then they should be supported no matter what. Sadly platforms like Lemmy are not that popular even though they offer almost exactly what I just asked for.

I'm all for free speech but when it's heavily skewed and unfairly moderated I support a ban. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Xitter should just be removed.

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have fucked up public discourse. They reward rage-bait content, they're addictive by design, encourage tribalism, and they use an opaque algorithm to promote/demote posts. They silently censor ideas and content. Meta censors news in Canada.

Zuckerberg and Musk appear to have political aims they are using their platforms to promote.

Why would I want that? I get the slippery slope argument, but they are a slippery slope already.

I am American and I would support a ban on American social media in my country.

In it's current form? Absolutely. Optimizing for anger is not doing us any favours

No. But a ban on algorithms would be nice.

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.

I am so tempted, so tempted to write yes. But no, at the end of the day, I don't think speech should be regulated like that. If we as a society don't learn to distinguish truth from bullshit, democracy can't survive.

EU absolutely is a country.

Also, fuck you.

Depends. Not all of them are bad. Take pinterest for instance, it's harmless. And youtube is too valuable to lose. But X? Yes, X should go.

At least anything that has anything to do with Trump or Muskyboi, yes.

Yeah. It would help usher in a new era of social media and communities. Fb, insta, tiktok, reddit have killed smaller communities and websites. And I miss them. Internet needs to die to be born again.

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

I would love that! Deleting my Facebook account would cripple my social life and ability to keep up with events in the community. It's the only thing keeping me in. Giving everyone a reason to find other places to organize would be amazing!

everything except skype and mabye YouTube

Yes, absolutely.

It isn't even for social media's general toxicity. It is because these Us companies are behaving so badly. Illegally. They are now openly provoking their own ban, but they think the EU is so toothless that they can get away with anything.