this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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TikTok being banned is good. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter should be banned as well. Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms should be banned and these apps all use dark patterns in their design.
The fediverse and open social networks where the algorithms are open source and well understood and the user is allowed to choose their own algorithms is the only safe way to use social media.
Trump may even welcome that, considering that Truth Social is just Mastodon.
Honestly I think it's a terrible precedent to set. Now the government can just say they don't like XYZ website and are banning it. That wasn't really something they did 10 years ago. Unless of course it was illegal activity. But I don't think this is a net win for the internet. Regardless of what decision has been made, freedoms were removed and citizens' rights were sidestepped for political means. I think it shouldn't be the government's job to protect us from ourselves.
I was totally onboard with banning tiktok on government computers and I was completely on board with the government publicly expressing concerns over the motives of tiktok as a business. That's where I personally believe this should have stopped. Inform the people of the danger and then let them decide what to do with that information.
The problem with that idea though, is that nation-wide, citizens' trust in the government is at an all-time low. So even if the government said tiktok is bad and you shouldn't use it, people already don't trust the government. Maybe they should work on regaining the trust their people had for them 65 years ago before it tries to get people to behave how they think we should.
A government that can ban social media sites is going to base their choices of which ones to ban on their preferences - not yours.
The problem is not the government got to choose - in a functioning democracy, the government would represent the will of the people.
The problem is this democracy is fucked.
The EU seems to be handling it fine, the point is not targeting specific sites but targeting user hostile behaviors against citizens
Governments can place qualifiers based on hostile behaviours but then still selectively enforce said restrictions on the platforms they want to target.
Such as with tiktok they specially worded the laws so that it only affected tiktok and not the others.
That is the thing that fear mongering against the Government always fails to address.
Yes, banning one thing out of ten that all do the same thing is wrong. Yes, we do not want to give the Government the ability to ban specific sites because history.
But banning or regulating algorithms, which are the actual problem, does not stop social media sites from existing. It just stops them from being able to manipulate massive groups of people by hiding/pushing the information the company wants one to see.
Unfortunately, the majority doesn't see algorithmic social media as a bad thing because they really do like echo chambers, and politicians don't ever seem to understand what a "root issue" is.
I still consider us in something like the teenage years as a society, just discovery something big like the Internet and social media and we're going to handle it poorly until we learn to handle it responsibly.
Heads or tails whether we make it to adulthood before the powers that be manage to wrangle things in their favor first. Signs point in a bad direction, but there's no saying that the tools that worked on society before won't break when the next thing comes along. Maybe ai will take a form that liberates, or hits the powerful far more negatively than it hits the masses.
Well it's a good thing they banned TikTok because it has "Closed, source, manipulative and harmful algorithms" and not for some other reason
Inb4 Lemmy ban
If we left it up to our government, that’d probably be what happens
No no no my friend. You misunderstand USAing. You sweet sweet summer child.