Ask Lemmy

No, not if they follow our laws. That being said I don't use much social media.

I sure hope everyone who wants to ban these things actually has plans to create their own content or Lemmy's gonna become quite empty.

UK, and no, censorship is bad, especially if it's controlled by a capitalist government.

Slight tangent but I have never until recent days considered social media companies to be American. I know on reflection they are but as a Scot I had used FB, Twitter and Insta for years without ever thinking they were American social media, just social media cos all my friends and family were there.

I’ve only retained Insta now, all else is Fedi. At the very least ban until age 16.

No I would not.

No

That’s a double edged sword right there. If you don’t allow external influences, you block both good and bad types of conversations. What you’re left with is only the local conversation, which might be balanced or biased depending on where you live.

If you live under a dictatorship, you might really want some of that external influence. If you can trust that the local conversation is good and balanced, banning Twitter and Meta won’t have any serious drawbacks.

No. And I would continue helping people evade whatever censorship a government tries to impose on them.

As an American, I would support such a ban. the rest of the world shouldn't be subjected to American social media.

Nope

There is a Paradox of Tolerance that essentially says that if you are tolerant of the intolerant, all tolerance will eventually be overrun.

This is what's currently happening in the USA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

I don't think that banning them is going to fix anything, but sanctions for not controlling the platform and prosecuting and punishing perpetrators is going to make an impact felt way beyond simply banning a platform.

Being in a civil society requires effort. So far the effort in curtailing the extremism embodied by USA social media has been incidental at best.

You might be interested in this piece from a government funded Australian think tank about escaping the current social media environment

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/social-media-as-it-should-be/

No. How much shit do we need to ban before you dumb fucks understand prohibition never fucking works and only fuels more crime.

Disclaimer: I am American, but just want to point out the problem with any proposed censorship:

So y'all know VPNs exist right?

Like, look at the red states here in the US, they just bypass the "Age Verification" with VPNs.

So what's the point?

Are y'all banning VPNs too?

Doesn't that feel similar to umm...

People's Republic of China and the "Great Firewall"?

Are y'all sure that's the future y'all wanna have?

I don't know, but I really would like to see country specific social media.

All meta apps, they're used for our government's propaganda, yes.

Yep

I would not. Why? It won't fix anything. People would just switch to TikTok or Telegram or something, which is not that much better

I am American so I can't really answer but what would count as American social media?

I feel like it would be most large social network sites and an unpredictable amount of smaller ones

No. But I would like them to be forced to use activitypub to operate.

Twitter: yes 1000 percent. Meta: businesses, landlords and social workers communicate via whatsapp here so I'd prefer bigger fines and more pressure on meta.

Yes, I use signal messenger, but I also quite literally need WhatsApp unfortunately.