This honestly just reads like paranoia. Social media isn’t sowing anything. It’s the people on the platform and the recommendation algorithms behind the platform.
edit: sew/sow
edit: sew/sow
For example, I consider myself a centrist and yet whenever I log into YouTube account all I see are far right recommendations. I don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, but I remember they behaved the same with their content discovery.
Read this study which goes further into the debate.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-020-00950-y
I consider myself a centrist because I find that there is a very pernicious and unacceptable part of the left fermenting in the last decade or so.
You know nothing of my policy preferences or whom I voted for, yet because I said I consider myself a centrist you catalogue me as right leaning.
Even if we were to agree in policy, and I bet we most likely do, I just can’t say I belong to any of these extremes that see everything in absolutes.
Do you not see the irony of what your accusing me of doing with what your saying? I'm not a self described leftist (though that is a right wing internet troll thing to say) I just have my opinions
American politics have gotten pulled so far to the right, center is pretty right wing. Idk how you can deny that? That's all I'm saying. Even if you don't, other wise sure prove me wrong explain how your actually center.
80+ million of us Americans voted in record numbers for the left leaning candidate, our biggest media platforms promote left leaning message, right wing individuals have been censored, etc.
Maybe not everybody in the United States is left leaning, but I wouldn’t call this a politically right leaning country.
Also, the only irony I see is that this thread continues. You already alluded I reply like a ring wing troll. Perhaps it’s better we both disengage as this is going nowhere.
left: |---|---| right
left: |-------|-------|right
edit: i cant get the lines to line up, the beggining of the first line is supposed to be like two dashes over
the right has gotten more extreme than the left has gotten extreme. if you think your in the middle, your really just right wing becasue the right has gotten insane. thats my point. your free to prove me wrong when ever by explaining your thoughts on policy though
We have people advocating for extreme capitalism and people advocating for a socialist regime. Opposed citizen militias such as Proud Boys and Antifa. Individuals who want a wall around the country and people who believe in open borders. The examples don’t end there.
We have extremes with plenty of support on both ends and unless you can bring data that indicates there is a concentration of individuals in one side, you cannot infer America is becoming far right, or assume that the center is skewed to the right.
Antifa isn't real, that is right wing media fear mongering
The extremes of the left wing in America isn't winning races. But the extreme fringe of the right wing is. Look at who won and lost primaries.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunda...
That first image shows what I'm talking about. America's left is center, the Republicans are all the way on the extreme right. If you think your an American center, your on the right
You better tell that to the lefties that label themselves antifa. What isn't real is a group called Antifa, but the anti-fascist (and anti-capitalist) movement, otherwise known as antifa, is real.
I wonder who these guys are then:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/look-whos-still-rioting-1161127...
(Sewing is what you do with a needle and thread.)
Blaming the platform is scapegoating the real problem.
And to be clear, I am blaming corporations for creating these platforms, not blaming the platforms themselves.
The documentary was successful in underplaying the challenges of moderating/recommending at scale and, in my opinion, scapegoating social media companies as the source of the problem when they're really a symptom.
The main focal point of The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris, as creator of the Centre for Humane Technology has an obvious agenda (not saying he's wrong). Take the documentary for what it is but to throw the baby out with the bathwater is wrong when there are obvious benefits to social media.
Regulating social media is a fool's errand imo, it's a lose-lose. Either you let ideas flow which includes bad actors/ideas to propagate or you now create gatekeepers and censors with ever moving goalposts. I'm not against more regulation but do you really think the United States Congress is capable of passing legislation to effectively tow that line? Doubtful.
> Regulating social media is a fool's errand imo, it's a lose-lose. Either you let ideas flow which includes bad actors/ideas to propagate or you now create gatekeepers and censors with ever moving goalposts. I'm not against more regulation but do you really think the United States Congress is capable of passing legislation to effectively tow that line? Doubtful.
This is just a generic argument against free speech. The obvious problem is that there's no way to ensure that our censors are going to be good actors, and in particular we know with some degree of certainty that Twitter, Facebook, etc are not. Congress (or whomever) doesn't have to toe that line at all--regulating these businesses out of existence is strictly a better option than allowing them to continue poisoning our society. No doubt they deliver some value, but (1) much of that value could be realized through other means (people can still organize on web fora like they did in the brief years prior to social media proper) and (2) they certainly don't deliver enough value to justify the rapid erosion of our social and political fabric. So the worst thing we can do is continue on with the status quo.
That said, I think it's entirely reasonable that we could be more surgical about regulation. There's no reason we can't keep some of the benefits of social media while doing away with the immense costs. For one, we can require social media companies to speak an open protocol such that anyone can compete--not just ad-based businesses with established large networks. We could require their curation algorithms to be made transparent. We could require that they behave as dumb pipes, but they may afford their users mechanisms to curate their own feeds. I'm sure there are many other solutions as well, but again, we oughtn't defer action until we find the best option because we know the status quo is strictly the worst option.
I get your point is to have some more regulation, however the argument is much more nuanced than "Ban All Social Media" which is what I'm trying to portray.
We need high regulation of recommended content, probably by moving recommendations out of the scope of section 230. Pointing to a not banned but extremely highly regulated decriminalized sector kind of speaks for itself. It's not like I could go on a San Francisco street corner tomorrow and start selling pot like a paperboy.
No. Blame isn't indivisible. It's not even a zero-sum allocation.