I’m seeing one too many people blaming social media for this and social media for that because it’s just simply - social media. I think about this because I believe that you shouldn’t blame the tool because it is a tool, but blame the person who uses the tool for their intent.
Which means I’m on the side of the camp that actually knows lots of people abuse social media and has it demonized. It’s absolutely silly to just blame a concept or an idea for just being as is. So everyone else is going around blaming and blaming social media for their problems. Not too much the individuals that have contaminated it with their empty-brained existences.
And we all know that some of the more popular social media platforms are controlled by devoid-of-reality sychophants in Zuck, Spez, Musk that sways and stirs the volume of people on their platform with their equally as devoid ideas in how to manage.
Social Media, whether you like it or not, has a use. It’s a useful tool to engage with eachother as close as possible. Might be a bit saturated with many platforms to choose from.
But I just think social media being blamed for just being as is, is such a backwards way of thinking.
Yes, social media is the problem. But there are two social media spheres. The one where we are, with Lemmy and Mastodon, is not the problem. The problem is the social media that exists in the capitalist world. What happened with the internet is that we invented a lot of services that should be a human right but they are controlled by corporations. Everyone should have access to a zero knowledge email, everyone should have access to a social media platform that is not controlled by anyone (it’s a public space).
Everyone should have access
They have, and choose not to.
This. Don’t rob the public of agency, they actively choose algorithms that will dictate them what to say, think, do and feel.
I don’t disagree with that but what about the people that are not connected to information like we are? What about the average Joe that is asked for an Instagram account so that he can get the contact of a person promising a job? (Just a random example).
Social media is probably the most powerful propaganda tool of all times.
In the 1960s you would say the same thing about TV, and you’d be right. Before that it was the cinema. It’s not because the mediums as such are inherently evil, but they carry an inherent power that can be used for evil.
Currently, social media is very much being used for evil.
There is, however, another element to it, and one that is completely new for social media. That’s the illusion that we can actually contribute in a meaningful way by participating.
Nobody believes they are actively fighting fascism by watching TV all day. Yet, on social media, well-meaning people are wasting their time shouting at clouds rather than going out in the real world and and actually achieve anything. They collectively tread in water as democracy dies, all the while they feel like they are “doing their part”. In other words, social media is pacifying as fuck.
I participate in the Fediverse because I have hope that we are building something different here; something that can derail the platforms that are currently used for evil, and something where the organization of actual opposition can be possible. I think it might be. But I am also afraid I am just wasting my time.
Yes. Social media is literally just a fairly accurate reflection of us as a species and our civilization. If people wanted, things would be very different. People simply do not want equality or progress, they want to hate thy neighbour.
Social media is literally just a fairly accurate reflection of us as a species and our civilization.
Strong disagree. Capitalists sell it to us as a mirror, but it’s a distorted mirror that shows us exactly what they want us to see for whatever reason.
If they want to sell us diet pills, they will turn it into one of those amusement park mirrors that makes you look fat. If they want to overthrow democracy, they’ll turn it into a mirror where everyone standing around you suddenly look suspicious and cruel. And if the Russians want to pay them to get control of what people will see in the mirror, hell - that’s just freedom of expression.
Add on top that pretty much everyone on earth is staring mindlessly into the mirror for hours every day, and you got yourself what I would consider to be a problem.
Algorithms will show you something you already to some degree want to see see or nobody would visit social media. People like capitalism. They like authoritarian dictators. People like Trump, Musk etc. they do not act alone. Leftists and other assorted humanists and progressives are wildly unpopular because most of the public simply can’t imagine not having the sheer bloodlust they have for thy neighbor.
If people didn’t like any of this, they’d be here, not on Xitter. They know and they will make any reason up not to be here from the somewhat reasonable to the truly bizarre like pretending not to comprehend instances/servers while using discord, and that’s only if they even bother to virtue signal that lack of corporate control is something they want to appear to want, like how average joe will say in a survey he isn’t racist because he knows that’s socially desirable, even when he of course is and similarly in reality the public love every inch of the boot.
There’s no educating them, there’s no misinformation that can be debunked, it’s all excuses and these people reason backwards from what they want to believe and because of this and the bloodlust - the natural state of humanity is a fascist one and that’s why getting someone to agree you shouldn’t throw babies in the woodchipper is like pulling teeth and whenever a guy comes around saying he’ll double the baby crushing machine capacity nationwide at the expense of healthcare for everyone, endless unwashed hordes of barbarians come out of the woodwork voting for him.
Leftists and other assorted humanists and progressives are wildly unpopular because most of the public simply can’t imagine not having the sheer bloodlust they have for thy neighbor.
Believe it or not, this is not a necessity of human nature. It’s just your society that’s fucked up. And it’s probably not even that bad if you go out and talk to people rather than judge society by the distorted reflection given on social media.
I talk to people every day. Statistically, they’d vote to take my rights away so I keep my wits about me though and thank god each day we don’t live in an actual democracy lest minority blood will run in the streets.
If there’s anything I can agree with rightoids on, it’s that the average person should have absolutely no say in anything that happens to them and god forbid anyone else, all I want is a woke dictatorship at this point where the masses are very openly and directly brainwashed unto humanist ideals by elites who know what’s good for them, except these elites should be ethical scientists, “woke moralists”, other experts and humanists and not a handful of ultra-wealthy morons.
Social media is just a canvas for the average joe to show his true colours. I for one don’t like what I see, but I don’t blame the canvas for the paint our species chose.
Yeah, I’m not going to make the argument that people are fundamentally good either, and they are shaped by the media landscape they consume.
I live in a country where trans rights are not really questioned, and where I am feeling confident that they won’t be. Of course it still has ways to go and there are bad people, but trans rights have not become effectively politicized and it’s just not a point of contention.
It’s no fundamental rule of society that we have to go around hating each other. It’s a construct. That doesn’t mean it’s not the case where you live, but it’s something that can be changed.
Believe it or not, this is not a necessity of human nature. It’s just your society that’s fucked up.
Do you look at the prisoner’s dilemma and conclude that cooperation is the obvious answer?
The prisoner’s dilemma depends on the fact that the two prisoners cannot cooperate. If you allow information to flow between them it’s literally not a dilemma any more.
So yes.
If you mean cooperation with the police, how the hell did you derive that from my text?
I should also add that the prisoner’s dilemma is only a dilemma when it is played in only one round. Once it becomes a game of several rounds cooperation arises as the dominant strategy.
Then again, I’m not sure how the prisoner’s dilemma is relevant here in the first place, I just thought it was a funny point to make.
only a dilemma when it is played in only one round.
There is no fixed solution for the repeated case:
in such a simulation, tit-for-tat will almost always come to dominate, though nasty strategies will drift in and out of the population because a tit-for-tat population is penetrable by non-retaliating nice strategies, which in turn are easy prey for the nasty strategies. Dawkins showed that here, no static mix of strategies forms a stable equilibrium, and the system will always oscillate between bounds
The issue is not necessarily social media as a concept its how social media interacts with the profit motive to encourage addiction and hate. It is silly to blame the tool which why I blame the capitalists who have nearly monopolized ownership of the tool and use it to divide us.
Political motive too. If society was less divided, and had less authoritarian inclinations, the hate would be less prevalent. It would just be addictive to see nice things on the net
The actions of capitalist are always inherently political when they affect the working class but I know what you mean
It’s not social media, it’s the algorithms that drives engagement for … profit. “Number must go up.” “The more users the more we can sell ourselves to VCs for.”
That’s why Fediverse is so important. We keep the social, but leave the negative effects behind. Feel free to click on a ragebait title here without your whole feed suddenly being steered in that direction.
It’s just a catalyst. Or rather a mirror
Social media as a concept is not evil or whatever, but a platform with millions and millions of users under corporate control puts a lot of power and influence in the hands of a very small elite. This is the problem. Not the technology itself. With regulation or decentralisation the problem can be fixed. Imo.
Social media is not just a tool; every single major social network has an algorithm with an agenda
Tools for connecting people cannot make editorial decisions. Tools for connecting people don’t try to manipulate those people into thinking certain ways.
If social networks were purely tools for connecting people who want to communicate, then we’d be having a different conversation.
If you ask me, we should recategorize Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc from “Social Networks” to “Content Distributors” because that’s what they are. They take content from the users and advertisers and prioritize what they want to promote in front of the users.
Signal, Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc don’t have algorithms with agendas so their purpose is purely social networking. They are the actual social networks.
Social media, like most things in life, has its good and bad sides. Places like twitter and Facebook have definitely been moved to the “bad” side of things through the use of an algorithm to curate the user’s experience and steer them towards socially harmful content. It’s much more difficult to do this on federated SM because anti social messaging doesn’t get amplified.
It’s not a panacea, and there will be attempts to corrupt it, but federated SM does give me hope that we can escape the rabbit hole of billionaire bro psychopaths.
It’s equally easy to do on federated social media, it’s just that no one found the incentive (yet?).
Why is it fairly easy?
It’s just an algorithm, all it takes is someone deciding they want to do it.
Huh? What algorithm? Where?
Lemmy has no algorithm in the way that you mean it.
Which is to say: there are a number of sort options like “top”, “hot” or “scaled” which work purely on the basis of upvotes or downvotes and don’t involve the actual content within the posts whatsoever.
It also has no “suggested” or “for you” and no personalization or data harvesting, the sort being based purely on upvotes or downvotes also doesn’t artificially skew the content politically in any which way.
It’s also completely open source so if that changed, not only would people find out immediately, but they’d be able to fork it and undo the change and maintain their own version.
Any instance then using an unfair sort feature would be defederated from.
So I don’t understand what you mean at all to be honest.
As someone who became an adult before social media was a thing, it has absolutely been a detriment to society.
There’s great aspects to it and I utilize them. But as a whole, it has FUUUUCKED us up in a very significant way.
There is a direct correlation between the rise of social media and the absolute nosedive our political discourse has taken. Misinformation is SO much more prevalent now. And that rise in misinformation is definitely having real world effects.
Are social media the root of all problems? No. Do they have a significant influence? Yes.
You mentioned spineless billionaires who eff around. There are instances of real harm. There is bullying (everywhere), there are schemes to make groups depressed (teenage girls on Insta), there is a lack of moderators that lead to genocide (Myanmar). These things deserve to be looked at by legislators when the sycophants don’t do it by themselves.
Social media addiction is a thing as well. Addictions in young people are bad. Parents should be on the front line of this. But that does not absolve social media companies from taking measures to curb certain excesses. Tobacco companies are not allowed to advertize to toddlers either.
So saying they’re just a tool, like, say, a hammer is insincere. You can use a hammer to cause real harm. You can deploy social media to cause real harm.
One of the greatest issues of social media is scale. People on the fringes of society who would be largely outcast in their communities can group and organize with much more ease. In the past, this was limited to the pub in three sheets to the wind discussions. Now you get sh!t like Q Anon, flatearthers, vax nuts, etc. - stuff that common sense in smaller communities would have moderated or stamped out now gets mass appeal. They seem much bigger as an online presence than they often are. But they get dedicated believers to start shooting.
The introduction of the internet has been compared to the introduction of the printing press in Europe. Both events caused a quantum leap in the dissemination of information with profound influences on society. After the printing press we got a century and a half of conflicts and wars. We’ll be well off if all we get here is a century of people typing in caps lock at each other.
We limit things in society. The availability of nicotine products, alcohol, the ability to drive, the availability of weaponry, antitrust laws, environmental protections, etc. I think we will not get past regulating social media somehow. By which I mean I don’t know how either.
One thing that is certain will benefit society is investing in education, teaching media savvy-ness to young children and all adults if possible, giving them the tools to sort the relevant from the distorted. We are largely unprepared for this and I include myself here having grown up with papers and landlines. But education is the saddest item in any budget, as the costs are high and the results take a generation to bear fruit.
Trump wants to dismantle the DOE…
Social Media can be a valuable tool. I find that certain platforms attract different groups of people. I stay away from twitter because, well, we know how to find the nazis. Facebook is for people who like to argue and scam people. And instagram is for the utterly shallow and vapid people who think they are famous. Big ego central. There are nice people on any platform, but you do have to put up with a ton of shit depending on the platform. Watching TV does not rot your brain. Playing video games does not make you violent. Smoking pot does not make you a junkie. Kissing does not lead to sex & pregnancy.
Any activity/tool can do harm, but it’s the individual who is responsible for the action.
I like your sentiment but I have to admit I’m wary of perpetuating the narrative of personal responsibility, since it’s been used so often to excuse discrimination against people for perceived ‘deviant choices’. I would argue that the manifestations of individual behavioral dysfunction are a function of the corrosion of traditional social bonds combined with the unrealized societal effects of new communication technologies. Like a feedback loop of compromised people consuming media that validates their harmful or extreme worldviews.
I read a book once - i know, crazy right? - looking at Facebook’s policies, strategies, and actions and reactions in relation to driving engagement and its algorithms. They know well what they are doing in regards to hate groups and driving opinions that veer into human rights abuses. If the profit motive is removed, as is the need for ‘hours on platform’ and engagement and feeding people the worst aspects of themselves back to themselves, then much of the malignancy is dampened if not removed. Even so, if we had nothing but benign platforms, I think that a) being always in contact with people is not necessarily a good thing as is claimed, and b) being in contact is not (necessarily) being connected, and fudging or confusing that is a problem in itself.
You’ll find this in many places that people would rather blame the world en lieu of looking inward. It’s a sad thing, as the latter is where one has most effect.
