EU absolutely is a country.
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.
It’s that advertising money… Ads should be heavily regulated and taxed
I wouldn’t lump in YT with those other two. YT definitely had problems but it has a lot of great content found no-where else
You could have said the exact same thing about any of the other socmed platforms before they enshittified.
Perhaps, but you could remove Twitter today and not lose anything of value. There are alternatives for the first two but not for YT
All meta apps, they’re used for our government’s propaganda, yes.
As an American please say yes. Because apparently they are all nazis now.
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.
Absolutely not. I’ll rather choose for myself which content I consume than have the government choose it for me.
Not banning any content, just the giant social media platforms with their purposely biased feeds. The content will reach non-banned social media and have a less biased weighting in feeds here.
Based.
And freepilled
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).
Is “not constantly breaking our laws” enough? They are in our pockets, desktops, and server rooms. They know way too much about us, and have the opportunity to spy, manipulate, and sabotage.
Even if we had a way to make sure foreign social media is not doing subtle mass manipulation with their black-box feed shaping algorithms, tailored bias, and shadow-censorship, we can’t make sure closed-source code doesn’t have back doors for spying and sabotage. You have to ban it to be safe, which is what China does, mostly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only on Lemmy folks , people who complain about their freedoms being taken out, media censorship against their ideology and living in a LITERAL dictatorship since Trump took power, who claim to advocate for freedom of speech and information
That very same people actively demanding for information shared on social networks to be controlled, networks to be shutdown and people to be censored based on unknown and ambiguous criteria, without even understanding the implications of it.
Details at six
And for your question? No. People is free to choose what to think, listen, say or read. Fucking fascists
The US has shown itself to be a bad faith actor, and support misinformation and propaganda over reality.
Letting that run wild is not healthy for society.
Musk having a platform to spout lies and slander against the UK and the EU demands a response.
I think it has something to do with how freedom of speech is understood in Europe and USA. In Europe it’s more acceptable to think that one’s freedom of speech should not, in practice, mute someone else’s, by frightening them from speaking out, or by the majority drowning out their voice before it can be heard. And that protecting this is something worth taking action for.
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