Ask Lemmy

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!

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.

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.

UK. yes. as well as US news, import export.

I believe censorship is harmful to civilization.

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.

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

I think regulation would be the proper course of action, here. I mean neither do we ban American cars in Europe. We just say they have to play by our rules or they can't do business here. So I wouldn't support a ban based on country of origin. But regulation what they can and can not do.

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.

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.

No, because regulation works; or can work. We can require them to follow our laws because they're invested in our market too.

There are regular fines for GDPR violations for example; it just feels like our checks and fines need to happen faster and harder.

China regulates their platforms like TikTok differently in their own country than outside. We can require the same.

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.

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 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 billions 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.

I am actively avoiding US social media accounts, blocking US politics channels and stepping away from a number of US-based services altogether.

If the government doesn't do it, I'll do as much of it as I can. Voting with your wallet is some US anarchocapitalist nonsense, but if my disgust removes incentives I'll take it as a side benefit.

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.

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

Absolutely not. I'll rather choose for myself which content I consume than have the government choose it for me.

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.

Not a blanket ban no, but if they constantly break our laws then yes. And I'm perfectly ok with laws that some would decry as censorship (anti-hate-speech, fact-checking) or claim makes business impossible (strict interpretations of GDPR).