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.

  • aasatru@kbin.earth
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      30 days ago

      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.

      • aasatru@kbin.earth
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        30 days ago

        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.

        • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          30 days ago

          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.

          • aasatru@kbin.earth
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            30 days ago

            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.

        • iii@mander.xyz
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          30 days ago

          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?

          • aasatru@kbin.earth
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            30 days ago

            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?

            • aasatru@kbin.earth
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              30 days ago

              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.

              • iii@mander.xyz
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                30 days ago

                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

                (1)

                • aasatru@kbin.earth
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                  30 days ago

                  For cooperation to emerge between rational players, the number of rounds must be unknown or infinite. In that case, “always defect” may no longer be a dominant strategy. As shown by Robert Aumann in a 1959 paper, rational players repeatedly interacting for indefinitely long games can sustain cooperation.