media: Video games cause violence
media: Weird music causes violence.
media: Social media could never cause violence this is censorship (also we don’t want to pay moderators)
Fuck Reddit, can’t wait to see the IPO burn
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A New York state judge on Monday denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit against several social media companies alleging the platforms contributed to the radicalization of a gunman who killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York in 2022, court documents show.
In her decision, the judge said that the plaintiffs may proceed with their lawsuit, which claims social media companies — like Meta, Alphabet, Reddit and 4chan — ”profit from the racist, antisemitic, and violent material displayed on their platforms to maximize user engagement,” including the time then 18-year-old Payton Gendron spent on their platforms viewing that material.
“They allege they are sophisticated products designed to be addictive to young users and they specifically directed Gendron to further platforms or postings that indoctrinated him with ‘white replacement theory’,” the decision read.
“It is far too early to rule as a matter of law that the actions, or inaction, of the social media/internet defendants through their platforms require dismissal,” said the judge.
“While we disagree with today’s decision and will be appealing, we will continue to work with law enforcement, other platforms, and civil society to share intelligence and best practices,” the statement said.
We are constantly evaluating ways to improve our detection and removal of this content, including through enhanced image-hashing systems, and we will continue to review the communities on our platform to ensure they are upholding our rules.”
The original article contains 407 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 44%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I really don’t like cases like this, nor do I like how much the legal system seems to be pushing “guilty by proxy” rulings for a lot of school shooting cases.
It just feels very very very dangerous and ’going to be bad’ to set this precedent where when someone commits an atrocity, essentially every person and thing they interacted with can be held accountable with nearly the same weight as if they had committed the crime themselves.
Obviously some basic civil responsibility is needed. If someone says “I am going to blow up XYZ school here is how”, and you hear that, yeah, that’s on you to report it. But it feels like we’re quickly slipping into a point where you have to start reporting a vast amount of people to the police en masse if they say anything even vaguely questionable simply to avoid potential fallout of being associated with someone committing a crime.
It makes me really worried. I really think the internet has made it easy to be able to ‘justifiably’ accuse almost anyone or any business of a crime if a person with enough power / the state needs them put away for a time.
Do you not think if someone encouraged a murderer they should be held accountable? It’s not everyone they interacted with, there has to be reasonable suspicion they contributed.
Also I’m pretty sure this is nothing new
I didn’t say that at all, and I think you know I didn’t unless you really didn’t actually read my comment.
I am not talking about encouraging someone to murder. I specifically said that in overt cases there is some common sense civil responsibility. I am talking about the potential for the the police to break down your door because you Facebook messaged a guy you’re friends with what your favorite local gun store was, and that guy also happens to listen to death metal and take antidepressants and the state has deemed him a risk factor level 3.
I must have misunderstood you then, but this still seems like a pretty clear case where the platforms, not even people yet did encourage him. I don’t think there’s any new precedent being set here
Rulings often start at the corporation / large major entity level and work their way down to the individual. Think piracy laws. At first, only giant, clear bootlegging operations were really prosecuted for that, and then people torrenting content for profit, and then people torrenting large amounts of content for free - and now we currently exist in an environment where you can torrent a movie or whatever and probably be fine, but also if the criminal justice system wants to they can (and have) easily hit anyone who does with a charge for tens of thousands of dollars or years of jail time.
Will it happen to the vast majority of people who torrent media casually? No. But we currently exist in an environment where if you get unlucky enough or someone wants to punish you for it enough, you can essentially have this massive sentence handed down to you almost “at random”.
Depends on what you mean by “encouraged”. That is going to need a very precise definition in these cases.
And the point isn’t that people shouldn’t be held accountable, it’s that there are a lot of gray areas here, we need to be careful how we navigate them. Irresponsible rulings or poorly implemented laws can destabilize everything that makes the internet worthwhile.
Everyone on lemmy who makes guillotine jokes will enjoy their life sentence I’m sure
Is there currently a national crisis of Jacobins kidnapping oligarchs and beheading them in public I am unaware of?
No
Unfortunately
Literally no one suggested that end users should be arrested for jokes on the internet. Fuck off with your attempts at trying to distract from the real issue.
I dunno about social media companies but I quite agree that the party who got the gunman the gun should share the punishment for the crime.
Firearms should be titled and insured, and the owner should have an imposed duty to secure, and the owner ought to face criminal penalty if the firearm titled to them was used by someone else to commit a crime, either they handed a killer a loaded gun or they inadequately secured a firearm which was then stolen to be used in committing a crime, either way they failed their responsibility to society as a firearm owner and must face consequences for it.
This guy seems to have bought the gun legally at a gun store, after filling out the forms and passing the background check. You may be thinking of the guy in Maine whose parents bought him a gun when he was obviously dangerous. They were just convicted of involuntary manslaughter for that, iirc.
Yup, I was just addressing the point of tangential arrest, sometimes it is well justified.
Well you were talking about charging the gun owner if someone else commits a crime with their gun. That’s unrelated to this case where the shooter was the gun owner.
The lawsuit here is about radicalization but if we’re pursuing companies who do that, I’d start with Fox News.
If you lend your brother, who you know is on antidepressants, a long extension cord he tells you is for his back patio - and he hangs himself with it, are you ready to be accused of being culpable for your brothers death?
Did he also use it as improvised ammunition to shoot up the local elementary school with the chord to warrant it being considered a firearm?
I’m more confused where I got such a lengthy extension chord from! Am I an event manager? Do I have generators I’m running cable from? Do I get to meet famous people on the job? Do I specialize in fairground festivals?
…. Aside from everything else, are you under the impression that a 10-15 ft extension cord is an odd thing to own…?
Oh, it turns out an extension cord has a side use that isn’t related to its primary purpose. What’s the analogous innocuous use of a semiautomatic handgun?
Self defense? You don’t have to be a 2A diehard to understand that it’s still a legal object. What’s the “innocuous use” of a VPN? Or a torrenting client? Should we imprison everyone who ever sends a link about one of these to someone who seems interested in their use?
You’re deliberately ignoring the point that the primary use of a semiautomatic pistol is killing people, whether self-defense or mass murder.
Should you be culpable for giving your brother an extension cord if he lies that it is for the porch? Not really.
Should you be culpable for giving your brother a gun if he lies that he needs it for self defense? IDK the answer, but it’s absolutely not equivalent.
It is a higher level of responsibility, you know lives are in danger if you give them a tool for killing. I don’t think it’s unreasonable if there is a higher standard for loaning it out or leaving it unsecured.
“Sorry bro. I’d love to go target shooting with you, but you started taking Vynase 6 months ago and I’m worried if you blow your brains out the state will throw me in prison for 15 years”.
Besides, youre ignoring the point. This article isn’t about a gun, it’s about basically “this person saw content we didn’t make on our website”. You think that wont be extended to general content sent from a person to another? That if you send some pro-Palestine articles to your buddy and then a year or two later your buddy gets busted at an anti-Zionist rally and now you’re a felon because you enabled that? Boy, that would be an easy way for some hypothetical future administrations to control speech!!
You might live in a very nice bubble, but not everyone will.
So you need a strawman argument transitioning from loaning a weapon unsupervised to someone we know is depressed. Now it is just target shooting with them, so distancing the loan aspect and adding a presumption of using the item together.
This is a side discussion. You are the one who decided to write strawman arguments relating guns to extension cords, so I thought it was reasonable to respond to that. It seems like you’re upset that your argument doesn’t make sense under closer inspection and you want to pull the ejection lever to escape. Okay, it’s done.
The article is about a civil lawsuit, nobody is going to jail. Nobody is going to be able to take a precedent and sue me, an individual, over sharing articles to friends and family, because the algorithm is a key part of the argument.
Knowingly manipulating people into suicide is a crime and people have already been found guilty of doing it.
So the answer is obvious. If you knowingly encourage a vulnerable person to commit suicide, and your intent can be proved, you can and should be held accountable for manslaughter.
That’s what social media companies are doing. They aren’t loaning you extremist ideas to help you. That’s a terrible analogy. They’re intentionally serving extreme content to drive you into more and more upsetting spaces, while pretending that there aren’t any consequences for doing so.
Yeah, but algorithmic delivery of radicalizing content seems kinda evil though.
This wasn’t just a content issue. Reddit actively banned people for reporting violent content too much. They literally engaged with and protected these communities, even as people yelled that they were going to get someone hurt.
This appears to be more the angle of the person being fed an endless stream of hate on social media and thus becoming radicalised.
What causes them to be fed an endless stream of hate? Algorithms. Who provides those algorithms? Social media companies. Why do they do this? To maintain engagement with their sites so they can make money via advertising.
And so here we are, with sites that see you viewed 65 percent of a stream showing an angry mob, therefore you would like to see more angry mobs in your feed. Is it any wonder that shit like this happens?
It’s also known to intentionally show you content that’s likely to provoke you into fights online
Which just makes all the sanctimonious screed about avoiding echo chambers a bunch of horse shit, because that’s not how outside digital social behavior works, outside the net if you go out of your way to keep arguing with people who wildly disagree with you, your not avoiding echo chambers, you’re building a class action restraining order case against yourself.
I’ve long held this hunch that when people’s beliefs are challenged, they tend to ‘dig in’ and wind up more resolute. (I think it’s actual science and I learned that in a sociology class many years ago but it’s been so long I can’t say with confidence if that’s the case.)
Assuming my hunch is right (or at least right enough), I think that side of social media - driving up engagement by increasing discord also winds up radicalizing people as a side effect of chasing profits.
It’s one of the things I appreciate about Lemmy. Not everyone here seems to just be looking for a fight all the time.
You may have gotten this very belief from this comic
Nah. I picked that up about 20 years ago, but the comic is a great one.
I haven’t read The Oatmeal in a while. I guess I know what I’ll be doing later tonight!
It depends on how their beliefs are challenged. Calling them morons won’t work. You have to gently question them about their ideas and not seem to be judging them.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Another commenter on this post suggested my belief on it was from an Oatmeal comic. That prompted me to search it out, and seeing it spelled out again sort of opened up the memory for me.
The class was a sociology class about 20 years ago, and the professor was talking about cognitive dissonance as it relates to folks choosing whether or not they wanted to adopt the beliefs of another group. I don’t think he got into how to actually challenge beliefs in a constructive way, since he was discussing how seemingly small rifts can turn into big disagreements between social groups, but subsequent life experience and a lot of good articles about folks working with radicals to reform their beliefs confirm exactly what you commented.
People have been fighting online long before algorithmic content suggestions. They may amplify it, but you can’t blame that on them entirely.
The truth is many people would argue and fight like that in real life if they could be anonymous.
Absolutely. Huge difference between hate speech existing. And funneling a firehose of it at someone to keep them engaged. It’s not clear how this will shake out. But I doubt it will be the end of free speech. If it exists and you actively seek it out that’s something else.
Also worth remembering, this opens up avenues for lawsuits on other types of “harm”.
We have states that have outlawed abortion. What do those sites do when those states argue social media should be “held accountable” for all the women who are provided information on abortion access through YouTube, Facebook, reddit, etc?
And ironically the gun manufacturers or politicians who support lax gun laws are not included in these “nets”. A radicalized individual with a butcher knife can’t possibly do as much damage as one with a gun.
I think the distinction here is between people and businesses. Is it the fault of people on social media for the acts of others? No. Is it the fault of social media for cultivating an environment that radicalizes people into committing mass shootings? Yes. The blame here is on the social medias for not doing more to stop the spread of this kind of content. Because yes even though that won’t stop this kind of content from existing making it harder to access and find will at least reduce the number of people who will go down this path.
Is it the fault of social media for cultivating an environment that radicalizes people into committing mass shootings? Yes.
Really? Then add videogames and heavy metal to the list. And why not most organized religions? Same argument, zero sense. There’s way more at play than Person watches X content = person is now radicalized, unless we’re talking about someone with severe cognitive deficit.
And since this is the US… perhaps add easy access to guns? Nah, that’s totally unrelated.
“Person watches X creative and clearly fictional content” is not analogous in any way to “person watches X video essay crafted to look like a documentary, but actually just full of lies and propaganda”
Don’t be ridiculous
So it’s the severe cognitive deficit. Ok. Watching anything inherently bad and thinking it’s ok to do so becauses it seems legit… that’s ridiculous.
I mean, yes. People are stupid. That’s why we have safety regulations. This court case is about a lack of safety regulations.
I agree, but I want to clarify. It’s not about making this material harder to access. It’s about not deliberately serving that material to people who weren’t looking it up in the first place in order to get more clicks.
There’s a huge difference between a user looking up extreme content on purpose and social media serving extreme content to unsuspecting people because the company knows it will upset them.
I think the design of media products around maximally addictive individually targeted algorithms in combination with content the platform does not control and isn’t responsible for is dangerous. Such an algorithm will find the people most susceptible to everything from racist conspiracy theories to eating disorder content and show them more of that. Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don’t technically violate the rules.
With that said, laws made and legal precedents set in response to tragedies are often ill-considered, and I don’t like this case. I especially don’t like that it includes Reddit, which was not using that type of individualized algorithm to my knowledge.
Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don’t technically violate the rules.
The problem then becomes if the clearly defined rules aren’t enough, then the people that run these sites need to start making individual judgment calls based on…well, their gut, really. And that creates a lot of issues if the site in question could be held accountable for making a poor call or overlooking something.
The threat of legal repercussions hanging over them is going to make them default to the most strict actions, and that’s kind of a problem if there isn’t a clear definition of what things need to be actioned against.
It’s the chilling effect they use in China, don’t make it clear what will get you in trouble and then people are too scared to say anything
Just another group looking to control expression by the back door
There’s nothing ambiguous about this. Give me a break. We’re demanding that social media companies stop deliberately driving negativity and extremism to get clicks. This has fuck all to do with free speech. What they’re doing isn’t “free speech”, it’s mass manipulation, and it’s very deliberate. And it isn’t disclosed to users at any point, which also makes it fraudulent.
It’s incredibly ironic that you’re accusing people of an effort to control expression when that’s literally what social media has been doing since the beginning. They’re the ones trying to turn the world into a dystopia, not the other way around.
Bullshit. There’s no slippery slope here. You act like these social media companies just stumbled onto algorithms. They didn’t, they designed these intentionally to drive engagement up.
Demanding that they change their algorithms to stop intentionally driving negativity and extremism isn’t dystopian at all, and it’s very frustrating that you think it is. If you choose to do nothing about this issue I promise you we’ll be living in a fascist nation within 10 years, and it won’t be an accident.
this is exactly why section 230 exists. sites aren’t responsible for what other people post and they are allowed to moderate however they want.
Reddit is the same thing. They intentionally enable and cultivate hostility and bullying there to drive up engagement.
But not algorithmically catered to the individual.
Which is even worse because more people see the bullying and hatred, especially when it shows up on a default sub.
This is the real shit right here. The problem is that social media companies’ data show that negativity and hate keep people on their website for longer, which means that they view more advertisement compared to positivity.
It is human nature to engage with disagreeable topics moreso than agreeable topics, and social media companies are exploiting that for profit.
We need to regulate algorithms and force them to be open source, so that anybody can audit them. They will try to hide behind “AI” and “trade secret” excuses, but lawmakers have to see above that bullshit.
Unfortunately, US lawmakers are both stupid and corrupt, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see proper change, and more likely that we’ll see shit like “banning all social media from foreign adversaries” when the US-based social media companies are largely the cause of all these problems. I’m sure the US intelligence agencies don’t want them to change either, since those companies provide large swaths of personal data to them.
While this is true for Facebook and YouTube - last time I checked, reddit doesn’t personalise feeds in that way. It was my impression that if two people subscribe to the same subreddits, they will see the exact same posts, based on time and upvotes.
Then again, I only ever used third party apps and old.reddit.com, so that might have changed since then.
Mate, I never got the same homepage twice on my old reddit account. I dunno how you can claim that two people with identical subs would see the same page. That’s just patently not true and hasn’t been for years.
Quite simple, aniki. The feeds were ordered by hot, new, or top.
New was ORDER BY date DESC. Top was ORDER BY upvotes DESC. And hot was a slightly more complicated order that used a mixture of upvotes and time.
You can easily verify this by opening 2 different browsers in incognito mode and go to the old reddit frontpage - I get the same results in either. Again - I can’t account for the new reddit site because I never used it for more than a few minutes, but that’s definitely how they old one worked and still seems to.
It’s probably not true anymore, but at the time this guy was being radicalized, you’re right, it wasn’t algorithmically catered to them. At least not in the sense that it was intentionally exposing them to a specific type of content.
I suppose you can think of the way reddit works (or used to work) as being content agnostic. The algorithm is not aware of the sorts of things it’s suggesting to you, it’s just showing you things based on subreddit popularity and user voting, regardless of what it is.
In the case of YouTube and Facebook, their algorithms are taking into account the actual content and funneling you towards similar content algorithmically, in a way that is unique to you. Which means at some point their algorithm is acknowledging “this content has problematic elements, let’s suggest more problematic content”
(Again, modern reddit, at least on the app, is likely engaging in this now to some degree)
That’s a lot of baseless suppositions you have there. Stuff you cannot possibly know - like how reddit content algos work.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
Sure, and I get that for like, healthcare. But ‘systemic solutions’ as they pertain to “what constitutes a crime” lead to police states really quickly imo
The article is about lawsuits. Where are you getting this idea that anyone suggested criminalizing people? Stop putting words in other people’s mouths. The most that’s been suggested in this thread is regulating social media algorithms, not locking people up.
Drop the melodrama and paranoia. It’s getting difficult to take you seriously when you keep making shit up about other people’s positions.
I don’t believe you’ve had a lot of experience with the US legal system
I don’t think you understand the issue. I’m very disappointed to see that this is the top comment. This wasn’t an accident. These social media companies deliberately feed people the most upsetting and extreme material they can. They’re intentionally radicalizing people to make money from engagement.
They’re absolutely responsible for what they’ve done, and it isn’t “by proxy”, it’s extremely direct and deliberate. It’s long past time that courts held them liable. What they’re doing is criminal.
Proving this “intent to radicalize” in court is impossible. What evidence exists to back up your claim beyond a reasonable doubt?
The algorithms themselves. This decision opens the algorithms up to discovery and now we get to see exactly how various topics are weighted. These companies will sink or swim by their algorithms.
I do. I just very much understand the extent that the justice system will take decisions like this and utilize them to accuse any person or business (including you!) of a crime that they can then “prove” they were at fault for.
Nah. This isn’t guilt by association
In her decision, the judge said that the plaintiffs may proceed with their lawsuit, which claims social media companies — like Meta, Alphabet, Reddit and 4chan — ”profit from the racist, antisemitic, and violent material displayed on their platforms to maximize user engagement,”
Which despite their denials the actually know: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-knew-radicalized-users-rcna3581
Excuse me what in the Kentucky fried fuck?
As much as everyone says fuck these big guys all day this hurts everyone.
I agree with you, but … I was on reddit since the Digg exodus. It always had it’s bad side (violentacrez, jailbait, etc), but it got so much worse after GamerGate/Ellen Pao - the misogyny became weaponized. And then the alt-right moved in, deliberately trying to radicalize people, and we worked so. fucking. hard to keep their voices out of our subreddits. And we kept reporting users and other subreddits that were breaking rules, promoting violence and hatred, and all fucking spez would do is shrug and say, “hey it’s a free speech issue”, which was somewhere between “hey, I agree with those guys” and “nah, I can’t be bothered”.
So it’s not like this was something reddit wasn’t aware of (I’m not on Facebook or YouTube). They were warned, repeatedly, vehemently, starting all the way back in 2014, that something was going wrong with their platform and they need to do something. And they deliberately and repeatedly choose to ignore it, all the way up to the summer of 2021. Seven fucking years of warnings they ignored, from a massive range of users and moderators, including some of the top moderators on the site. And all reddit would do is shrug it’s shoulders and say, “hey, free speech!” like it was a magic wand, and very occasionally try to defend itself by quoting it’s ‘hate speech policy’, which they invoke with the same regular repetitiveness and ‘thoughts and prayers’ inaction as a school shooting brings. In fact, they did it in this very article:
In a statement to CNN, Reddit said, “Hate and violence have no place on Reddit. Our sitewide policies explicitly prohibit content that promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability, as well as content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people. We are constantly evaluating ways to improve our detection and removal of this content, including through enhanced image-hashing systems, and we will continue to review the communities on our platform to ensure they are upholding our rules.”
As someone who modded for a number of years, that’s just bullshit.
Edit: fuck spez.
Yep that’s how the Nazis work on every site. The question is who lets them on these sites so easily to do this work on society. And why do sites fight for them to stay? Are Nazis high up in government? Is it the wealthy? Probably something like that.
Part of the reason they get so high up on nerd sites (And Reddit at least started as a nerd site) is that they hunger for power, and the right people are too shy to seek power themselves.
This would all be greatly relieved if communities asked for communities to nominate other members, and asked for the type of folks who are the types who would mostly only consider the position of asked/ or if they were write-ins.
People with the capacity but are looked over because they maybe lack the ego or self confidence to take such power.
This works especially well in smaller communities under 4K users or so, which kinda falls apart in our Big Internet world, sadly…
hate and violence are bad unless we make money, then its ok.
The first thing that came to mind when I saw Reddit was The_Donald.
What an excellent presedent to set cant possibly see how this is going to become authoritarian. Ohh u didnt report someone ur also guilty cant see any problems with this.
deleted by creator
You could make a good point with better spelling, grammar, and word choice.
Yes i could. I could spend the extra 30seconds fixing it or i could not bother and still have my point comprehendable.
unpossible
Ohh u didnt report someone ur also guilty cant see any problems with this.
That’s… not what this is about, though?
“However, plaintiffs contend the defendants’ platforms are more than just message boards,” the court document says. “They allege they are sophisticated products designed to be addictive to young users and they specifically directed Gendron to further platforms or postings that indoctrinated him with ‘white replacement theory’,” the decision read.
This isn’t about mandated reporting, it’s about funneling impressionable people towards extremist content.
U can make any common practice and pillar of capitalism sound bad by using the words impressionable and extremist.
If we remove that it become: funnelling a market towards the further consumption of your product. I.e. marketing
And yes of cause the platforms are designed to be addictive and are effective at indoctranation but why is that only a problem for certain ideologies shouldnt we be stopping all ideologies from practicing indoctranation of impressionable people should we not be guiding people to as many viewpoints as possible to teach them to think not to swallow someone elses ideas and spew them back out.
I blame Henry Ford for this whole clusterfuck he lobbied the education system to manufacture an obedient consumer market and working class that doesnt think for itself but simply swallows what its told. The education system is the problem anything else is treating the symptoms not the disease.
If we remove that it become: funnelling a market towards the further consumption of your product. I.e. marketing
And if a company’s marketing campaign is found to be indirectly responsible for a kid shooting up a grocery store, I’m sure we’ll be seeing a repeat of this with that company being the one with a court case being brought against them, what even is this argument?
Isnt the entire gun market indirectly responsible, what about the food the shooters ate? Cant we use the same logic to prssecute anyone of any religion cos most of the religiouse texts support the killing of some group of people.
Its convenient to ask what the argument is when u ignore 60% of it
Did you even read the article we’re discussing, or are you just reading the comments and getting mad?
- No decision has been made. This is simply a judge denying the companies’ motion to have this thrown out before going to trial.
- This is very much different than “the gun market” being indirectly responsible. This is the equivalent of “the gun market” constantly sending a person pamphlets, calling them, emailing them, whatever else, with propaganda until they ultimately decided to act on it. If that was happening, I think we’d be having the same conversation about that, and whether they should be held accountable.
- Whether they’re actually responsible or not (or whether any group is) can be determined in court following all the usual methods. A company getting to say “That’s ridiculous, we’re above scrutiny” is dangerous, and that’s effectively what they were trying to do (which was denied by this judge.)
And they profit from it. That’s mentioned there too, and it makes it that much more infuriating. They know exactly what they’re doing, and they do it on purpose, for money.
And at the end of the day, they’ll settle (who are the plaintiffs? Article doesn’t say) or pay some relatively inconsequential amount, and they’ll still have gained a net benefit from it. Another case of cost-of-doing-business.
Would’ve been free without the lawsuit even. Lives lost certainly aren’t factored in otherwise.
That means that the government is injecting itself on deciding what “extremist” is. I do not trust them to do that wisely. And even if I did trust them, it is immoral for the state to start categorizing and policing ideologies.
Do you understand you’re arguing for violent groups instigating a race war?
Like, even if you’re ok with white people doing it, you’re also saying ISIS, MS13, any fucking group can’t be labeled violent extremists…
Some “ideologies” need to be fucking policed
Ur missing the point violence should absolutly be policed. Words ideas ideology hell no let isis, ms13, the communists, the nazis, the vegans etc etc etc say what they want. They are all extremists by some definition let them discuss let them argue and the second someone does something violent lock em for the rest of their lives simple.
What you are suggesting is the policing of ideology to prevent future crime their is an entire book about where that leads to said book simply calls this concept thought crime.
anarchists have had to deal with this for over a century. the state can go fuck itself.
Some “ideologies” need to be fucking policed
Someone wants to start with yours, and they have more support than you know. Be careful what you wish for.
Guess we shouldn’t ever do anything about anything, ever.
Big difference between policing actions and policing thoughts. Declaring some thoughts as verboten and subject to punishment or liability is bad.
It’s insane you’re being downvoted by people who would be the first ones silenced.
You really think they’re going to use this for himophobes and racists instead of anyone calling for positive socia6 change?
Did you not see any of history?
That is generally what Governments do. They write laws that say … you can do this but not that. If you do this thats illegal and you will be convicted. Otherwise you wouldnt be able to police things like Mafia and drug cartels. Even in the US their freedom of speech to conspire to committe crimes is criminalised. There is no difference between that and politically motivated ‘extremists’ who conspire to commit crimes. The idealogy is not criminalised the acts that groups plan or conduct are. You are totally fine saying . I dont like x group.
What its not ok to say is . Lets go out and kill people from x.group.
The problem is that social media sites use automated processes to decide which messages to put in front of users in the fundamentally same way that a newspaper publisher decides which letters to the editor they decide to put in their newspaper.
Somehow though Tech companies have argued that because their is no limit on how many posts they can communicate amd hence theoretically they arent deciding what they put in and what they done, that their act of putting some at the top of people’s lists so they are seen is somehow different to the act of the newspaper publisher including a particular letter or not …but the outcome is the same The letter or post is seen by people or not.
Tech companies argue they are just a commutation network but I never saw a telephone, postal or other network that decided which order you got your phone calls, letters or sms messages. They just deliver what is sent in the order it was sen.
commercial social media networks are publishers with editorial control - editorial control is not only inclusion/exclusion but also prominence
There is a fundamental difference in Lemmy or Mastodon in that those decisions (except for any moderation by individual server admins) dont promote or demote any post so therefore dont have any role in whether a user sees a post or not.
The government is already the one who makes that decision. The only thing new here is a line being drawn with regards to social media’s push towards addiction and echo-chamberism.
umm… isnt the government or rather the judikative already deciding what extremist is?
How would specifically this be different?I can understand the problems thos causes for the platforms, but the government injecting decisions is something you focus on?
Not to forget the many other places they inject themselves… one could say your daily lifes because… careful now… you live in the country with a government, whaaat?
Youtube Shorts is the absolute worst for this. Just recently it’s massively trying to push transphobic BS at me, and I cannot figure out why. I dislike, report and “do not recommend this channel” every time, and it just keeps shoving more at me. I got a fucking racist church sermon this morning. it’s broken!
Imagine watchibg let alone even having the option for shorts. Get newpipe there is a sponsorblock version on fdroid no shorts no google tracking no nonsence u dont get comments tho but whatever. It also supports peertube which is nice.
Report for what? Sure disagree with them about their bullshit but i dont see why u need to report someone just cos u disagree with their opinions.
Imagine watchibg let alone even having the option for shorts.
I like shorts for the most part
Report for what?
Misinformation and hatespeech mostly. They have some crazy, false pseudoscience to back their “opinions” and they express them violently. Like it or not, these videos “promote hatred against a protected group” and are expressly against youtube TOS. Reporting them is 100% appropriate.
I can strongly reccommwnd stop watching ahort form content it has been proven to caise all sorts of mental issues.
Fair. Also what is a “protected group” what makes it any different from any other grouping?
I am not discounting anyone’s experience. I am not saying this isn’t happening. But I don’t see it.
LiberalGunNut™ here! You would think watching gun related videos would lead me down a far-right rabbit hole. Here’s my feed ATM.
Meh. History, gun comparisons, chemistry, movies, whatever. Nothing crazy. (Don’t watch Brandon any longer, got leaning too right, too political. Video’s about his bid for a Congressional seat in Texas. Not an election conspiracy thing. Don’t care.)
If anyone can help me understand, I’m listening. Maybe I shy away from the nutcase shit so hard that YouTube “gets” me? Honestly don’t get it.
So that looks like main long form content. I’m specifically talking about youtube shorts which is Google’s version of TikTok
Don’t dislike it just hit do not recommend, also don’t open comments - honestly the best way is just to skip past as fast as you can when you set one, the lower time with it on your screen YNt less the algo thinks you want it.
I never really see that on YouTube unless I’ve been on related topics recently and it goes pretty quick when you don’t interact. Yes it’s shifty but they’re working on a much better system using natural language with an llm but it’s a complex problem
Here comes more censorship from Big Tech. 🤦♂️
Tonight we investigate the hacker known as 4chan. More at 9.
Who is this “Four Chan”?
So, I can see a lot of problems with this. Specifically the same problems that the public and regulating bodies face when deciding to keep or overturn section 230. Free speech isn’t necessarily what I’m worried about here. Mostly because it is already agreed that free speech is a construct that only the government is actually beholden to. Message boards have and will continue to censor content as they see fit.
Section 230 basically stipulates that companies that provide online forums (Meta, Alphabet, 4Chan etc) are not liable for the content that their users post. And part of the reason it works is because these companies adhere to strict guidelines in regards to content and most importantly moderation.
Section 230©(2) further provides “Good Samaritan” protection from civil liability for operators of interactive computer services in the good faith removal or moderation of third-party material they deem “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”
Reddit, Facebook, 4Chan et all do have rules and regulations they require their users to follow in order to post. And for the most part the communities on these platforms are self policing. There just aren’t enough paid moderators to make it work otherwise.
That being said, the real problem is that this really kind of indirectly challenges section 230. Mostly because it very barely skirts around whether the relevant platforms can themselves be considered publishers, or at all responsible for the content the users post and very much attacks how users are presented with content to keep them engaged via algorithms (which is directly how they make their money).
Even if the lawsuits fail, this will still be problematic. It could lead to draconian moderation of what can be posted and by whom. So now all race related topics regardless of whether they include hate speech could be censored for example. Politics? Censored. The discussion of potential new laws? Censored.
But I think it will be worse than that. The algorithm is what makes the ad space these companies sell so valuable. And this is a direct attack on that. We lack the consumer privacy protections to protect the public from this eventuality. If the ad space isn’t valuable the data will be. And there’s nothing stopping these companies from selling user data. Some of them already do. What these apps do in the background is already pretty invasive. This could lead to a furthering of that invasive scraping of data. I don’t like that.
That being said there is a point I agree with. These companies literally do make their algorithm addictive and it absolutely will push content at users. If that content is of an objectionable nature, so long as it isn’t outright illegal, these companies do not care. Because they do gain from it monetarily.
What we actually need is data privacy protections. Holding these companies accountable for their algorithms is a good idea. But I don’t agree that this is the way to do that constructively. It would be better to flesh out 230 as a living document that can change with the times. Because when it was written the Internet landscape was just different.
What I would like to see is for platforms to moderate content posted and representing itself as fact. We don’t see that nearly enough on places like reddit. Users can post anything as fact and the echo chambers will rally around it if they believe it. It’s not really incredibly difficult to radicalise a person. But the platforms aren’t doing that on purpose. The other users are, and the algorithms are helping them.
Moderation is already draconian, interact with any gen Z and you gonna know what goon, corn, unalive, (crime) in Minecraft, actually mean.
These aren’t slangs, this is like a second language developed to evade censorship from those platforms, things will only get worse.
It’s always been that way though. Back in the day on Myspace or MSN chatrooms there were whole lists of words that were auto censored and could result in a ban (temp or permanent). We literally had whole lists of alternates to use. You couldn’t say sex, or kill back then either. The difference is the algorithm. I acknowledge in my comment that these platforms already censor things they find objectionable. Part of that is to keep Section 230 as it is. A perhaps more relevant part of it is to keep advertisers happy so they continue to buy ad space. A small portion of it may even be to keep the majority of the user base happy because users who don’t agree with the supposed ideologies on a platform will leave it and that’s less eyeballs on ads.
“Noooo it’s our algorithm we can’t be held liable for the program we made specifically to discover what people find a little interesting and keep feeding it to them!”
I find it very weird to be living in a country legalizing drugs and assisted suicide (even for depression) but simultaneously trying to severely curtail free speech, media freedom and passing legislation to jail people at risk of breaking the law who don’t meet the “conspiracy to commit” threshold".
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Been on the canadian news the last few days, federal Liberals are trying to bring in pre-crime legislation.
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I wonder if you built a social media site where the main feature was that the algorithm just showed you things in sequential order like in the old days, would it be popular
No, there is too much content for that nowadays. YouTube has over 3 million new videos each day. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram also has ridiculous amounts of new posts every day. Browsing Reddit on New was a terrible experience on r/all or even many of the bigger subs. Even on the fediverse sorting by new is not enjoyable. You are swarmed with reposts, and content that’s entirely uninteresting to you.
It works in smaller communities but there it isn’t really necessary. You usually have an overview of all the content anyhow and it doesn’t matter how it’s ordered.
Any social media that plans on scaling up needs a more advanced system.
Fuck scale.
I enjoy using Lemmy mostly that way, just sorting the feed by new / hot / whatever and looking at new posts of random shit. Much more entertaining than video-spamming bullshit.
People complain about mastodons lack of algorithms a lot. Its part of how misskey, ice shrimp, and catodon came to be
So a paper encyclopedia set? How is Britannica doing?
YouTube feeds me so much right wing bullshit I’m constantly marking it as not interested. It’s a definite problem.
YouTube started feeding me that stuff too. Weirdly once I started reporting all of them as misinformation they stop showing up for some reason…
Is fucking insane how much that happens I stopped using Instagram for that reason at least yt listened to my “not interested” choices. I also have revnaced so IDK what ads it would shoot at me.
I can’t prove that they were related but I used to report all conservative ads (Hillsdale Epoch times etc) to Google with all caps messages how I was going to start calling the advertisers directly and yell at them for the ads, about 2-3 days after I started doing that the ads stopped.
I would love for other people to start doing this to confirm that it works and to be free of the ads.
That worked for me also. I like a lot of sports docs on YouTube. That triggered non stop Joe Rogan suggestions and ads for all kinds of right wing news trash.
I quit drinking years ago and I reported every (e alcohol) ad explaining that I am no longer their target market and the ads are literally dangerous to me. They were gone within a few weeks - haven’t seen a booze ad in 5+ years.
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Can you try my method and see if it works? I am really curious
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It’s amazing how often I get a video from some right wing source suggested to me companting about censorship and being buried by youtube. I ended up installing a third party channel blocker to deal with it.
I gave up reporting on major sites where I saw abuse. Stuff that if you said that in public, also witnessed by others, you’ve be investigated. Twitter was also bad for responding to reports with “this doesnt break our rules” when a) it clearly did and b) probably a few laws.
I gave up after I was told that people DMing me photographs of people committing suicide was not harassment but me referencing Yo La Tengo’s album “I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass” was worthy of a 30 day ban
On youtube I had a persistent one who only stopped threatening to track me down and kill me (for a road safety video) when I posted the address of a local police station and said “pop in, any time!”
I remember one time somebody tweeted asking what the third track off Whole Lotta Red and I watched at least 50 people get perma’d before my eyes.
The third track is named Stop Breathing.
I TAKE MY SHIRT OFF AND ALL THE HOES STOP
BREATHIN’accessing their Twitter accounts WHEH? 🧛♂️🦇🩸sLatt! +*
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That’s true, but a lotnof things are illegal eeverywhere. Sexual Harassment or death treads will get you a lawsuit in probably every single country of the world.
Lawsuits are for civil cases. If someone breaks a law, they’re charged by authorities at their discretion.
Laws against threats to kill, rape and assault tend to be pretty constant across the world… 🤷♂️
Americans online regularly tell me that that’s protected free speech down there! Haha
Platforms should be held responsible for the content their users publish on them, full stop.
So if some random hacker takes over your network connection and publishes illegal content which then leads back to you, you should be held responsible. It’s your platform after all.
If it’s your server, then yes you should have responsibility with how you deal with said content.
How much of a responsibility? Is a token effort enough or should you be charged with a crime for not trying hard enough?
Then user generated content completely disappears.
Without the basic protection of section 230, it’s not possible to allow users to exist or interact with anything. I’m not sure you could even pay for web hosting without it.
Content creators should be held responsible for their content. Platforms are mere distributors, in general terms, otherwise you’re blaming the messenger.
Specific to social media (and television) yes, they bank on hate, it’s known - so don’t use them or do so with that ever dwindling human quality called critical thinking. Wanting to hold them accountable for murder is just dismissing the real underlying issues, like unsupervised impressionable people watching content, easy access to guns, human nature itself, societal issues…
Maybe this will lead to a future where Stochastic Terrorism isn’t a protected activity?
So now anyone who says things is going to be held accountable for crazy people being crazy?
What a lovely world we live in. That’s worse than what CNN kept saying about the joker after that one mass shooting at the theater that happened to be showing “The Dark Knight” at the same time.
So now anyone who says things is going to be held accountable for crazy people being crazy
Nope, that’s just you being melodramatic. The judge has acknowledged there is grounds for the case to be argued so it won’t he dismissed. That’s all. They haven’t been found guilty of anything. They’re not being lined up and shot.
What would you prefer we did to determine if a company is culpable? Just ask you because you read a headline?
