Europe is changing social media for the better – the US can do it, too
thehill.com
thehill.com
In other forms of media (books, newspapers, radio, tv, phones/sms, chat, email) if you try to broadcast your important thoughts to everyone on the planet you get a giant bill.
Speech was free. But Broadcast capability was not.
The unintented main feature of social media is broadcast being free. And the main unanswered question is why should it be free?
If all the neurons in your brain were broadcasting simultaneously to every other neuron the only outcome is seizures.
The EU has not answered this.
It has instead told the platforms they will be held responsible for seizures.
Someone has to come up with better answers about how we all coordinate broadcasting. Otherwise we will keep seeing scary and shocking seizures.
Humility from the US? Surely you jest.
On the other hand, the US is highly resistant to government regulation, because our politicans are bought and sold by those who would be regulated.
In practice they will outsource this to some "best practices" "private" (government approved) censor to avoid liability.
Seriously though, even if there exist risks, the goal is improvement, not perfection. There are people who specialize in things like this, moral philosophers for instance. It's actually possible to know things in this space.
But which one of your friends or relatives would you appoint as the person who gets to determine what you say on any topic?
Do masks work? How about the vaccine, did it stop you from getting it? Did it stop you from spreading it? Did the lock down last 2 weeks. Was 2 months long enough. Would people leave their bluetooth on, so the tracking app could work? Were the tracking apps secure? Did the tracking apps that cost Australia 100mil actually work?
The experts all said yes and they also all said no.
What is hate speech? Is saying Picnic hate speech?
I think it's a bit defeatist and therefore wrong to say that because some people who claim to be experts are giving lousy advice we should stop using experts. I think the way forward is to teach better and more impartial experts, not stop using experts altogether.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/10/15/64-of-ame...
https://socialmediavictims.org/mental-health/self-esteem/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7905185/
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/social-media-profound-risk...
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/teachers-union-issue...
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-social-m...
Sure let’s debate what version we have to live with, but not whether we should continue the experiment in the first place. Social media isn’t inevitable. We could just say no thanks and move on. It’s not too late (yet) imo for society to choose to say no thank you. There will come a day when it becomes completely inconceivable to have a society without it, but even the fact that you could consider it not being there proves we aren’t at that point yet.
(Posted on social media).
The difference between less harmful and more harmful cancer could be the difference between life and death.
I think any steps towards a more human friendly platforms are welcome. Kind of like the "boil a frog" thing, but in the opposite direction.
This is a strange analogy. Of course some forms of cancer are more treatable than others, especially when detected early, but the best "treatment" for cancer is to avoid it in the first place.
There's no realistic, sensical way to move people from getting getting more harmful forms of cancer to to less harmful forms of cancer. In fact, it would be absolutely absurd to try somehow to encourage people to get less harmful forms of cancer. All of the encouragement should be directed at avoiding behaviors that lead to cancer.
And the metaphor is apt to my original point.