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Neat, how about actually making some sweeping regulations tackling corporate EULA-washed malware?
Why do companies get to keep injecting spyware and even rootkits into their OS/software without ever explaining the consequences in a way a lay person can understand?
Used to be when companies did that they got punished. Anyone remember that Sony BMG case with rootkit enabled DRM, or BonziBuddy who’s EULA allowed developers to sell your information to advertisers?
Remember the fucking stink people threw over them? Remember the fucking lawsuits? This shit is just a normal Tuesday for MFAANG. Shit even fucking video games are pushing rootkits down your throat these days. They need to be spanked BAD.
This is just going to end one of two ways:
- companies storing and selling even more personally identifiable information
- kids lying
Probably both.
So I’m going with no. I’m a responsible parent and I’m preventing my kids from accessing social media and teaching them how to find reliable information. As they earn my trust with other services, I’ll slowly remove restrictions. If I think my kids are ready for SM, I’ll let them have access, using a VPN to avoid state restrictions as needed.
What’s SM?
Social media.
This shit applies directly to lemmy. Y’all seem to be blinded by your hate of TikTok.
The problem is algorithmically driven content feeds and the lack of transparency around them. These algorithms drive engagement which prioritizes content that makes people angry, not content that make people happy. These feeds are full of misinformation, conspiratorial thinking, rage bait, and other negativity with very little user control to protect themselves, curate the feed or to have neutral access to news and politics.
Lemmy sorts content very simply based on user upvotes. If you want to know why you’re seeing a post you can see exactly who upvoted it and what instances that traffic came from. It’s not immune to being manipulated but it can’t be done secretly or in a centralized way.
Yet based on their actions we already know that Facebook has levers they can pull to directly affect the amount of news people see about a specific topic, let alone the source of information on that topic. These big social media companies guard these proprietary algorithms that are directly determining what news people see on a massive scale. Sure they claim to be a neutral arbiter of content that just gives people what they want but why would anyone believe them?
Lemmy is not the same thing, though it’s not without its own problems.
Lemmy has hot and top. All of these fall into addicting algorithms.
It raises the question what does or doesn’t count as an addictive feed. I bet this doesn’t specify any particular dark pattern or monetization model.
If we gave half a fuck about mental wellnes regarding mobile use, we would have addressed all this when it was particular to mobile games.
No, this is about our kids learning early how fucked society is, and how their own generation is being fed a pro-ownership-class indoctrination regimen before being appointed a string of dead-end toxic jobs.
Social media is how we learn about the genocide in Gaza, police officer-involved homicide rates, and unionization efforts. and that is why we want kids off social media.
Don’t make me put up the koala cartoon again.
I agree with the first two paragraphs, but the rest really feels like you projecting your political and social outlook on the situation.
Social media provides and strengthens biased worldviews and confirmation bias. If you stick to social media, you’ll think violent crime is rapidly increasing (in the US), but it’s actually down. It’s still a problem, but it’s being used to push political agendas that don’t actually solve the problem. For example, banning bump stocks, which are almost never used in mass shootings (most of those are handguns), and make guns way less accurate. Only enthusiasts get them, and pretty much only for range use. And you also have to pull the trigger each time, it just makes that easier (can get the same effect with a rubber band…). It’s also how we got the anti-vax movement and various other conspiracies.
Social media is one way to get less censored news, but it’s unreliable and tends to lead to echo chambers. We should instead be pushing to get government and political bias out of news reporting (or at least make bias explicit), not protect the less trustworthy, biased social media based news sources. There are countless examples of large social media sources providing incorrect information, and never correcting it, and the false information gets more views than the correct information. Social media drives people toward radicalization, and it’s largely how we got Trump.
Social media is a liability. Mobile games are too. Parents should be restricting their children’s access to both (we do), and instead teaching children to recognize bias and find good information (we’re working on that, but they’re still young).
