Comment by yojo
3 hours ago
I’m taking it as a given that any sufficiently large social network is a gigantic propaganda machine of interest to domestic and foreign nation-state actors.
Entertaining the thought experiment where all the normies join the fediverse: now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
When it’s Lazarus Group vs Randall, the over-worked sys admin who stood up a node in his spare time, who do you think wins?
Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on.
You are worrying about domestic nation state actors, and you are calling social media to be banned by whom? Some mysterious administrative entity that is surely not a part of the domestic nation state doing the very propaganda you are railing against?
Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where foreign agents spread dangerous ideas and keep the good ones where only upright citizens of their own country can talk about how great everything is.
Shhh if you say too much you’re gonna rattle their “the government will save us if we vote hard enough” worldview
They should be rattled. The US didn’t vote its way to independence from the England. Freedom never comes without a cost paid in blood, but people don’t want to admit that anymore.
>Just ban the lot of them and move on.
How do you define social network, though? Is Facebook a social network, even though it includes a marketplace? Is HN a social network? Is Newgrounds a social network....? Seems difficult to stomp out effectively
We can come up with a definition and refine it. Maybe something like: algorithmic content suggestions trying to maximize engagement and time on app (leave out chronological + explicit follow).
Banning is not the way to go about things. India is always ban happy -> a competitive exam in a state? Take down internet in the whole state to curb cheating. Outright banning hard to deal with stuff sets a bad precedent.
You don't ban the users or the internet, you make it illegal to do shitty psyops on the public. They were making plenty of money on chronological friend feeds.
9 replies →
Seems difficult to stomp out effectively
So just give up because something is hard? Sounds like the tech industry and its never-ending quest for low-hanging fruit.
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas."
I'm sorry if my comment came off dismissive, I was just remarking the idea of banning social media seems like we're going down the wrong alley. I like other commenter's ideas of outlawing the underlying tech. I'm more-so just asking how to make a distinction between a post on Reddit (commonly called social media) and a post on Stack-Overflow (not commonly referred to as social media). Discord vs Teams...etc.
I think user 0x5FC3 correctly identifies the root of the issue, and any (if implemented) regulation should be based on the algorithmic serving, but I hold a firm belief that you cannot and should not try to outlaw math. From my first glance at this issue, it seems tricky
3 replies →
> So just give up because something is hard?
No, but a good first step would be to widely acknowledge that the problem is hard. And thus is not solvable by a quick fix of a type "let's ban <something>". Otherwise we will keep trying quick fixes and local optimizations that will be just as quickly subverted by the deep pocketed incumbents.
[dead]
We could start by stomping out the Linux kernel mailing lists; that cancer is at the root of so many other social networks' software.
> now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
You'd have a much larger number of targets which makes things somewhat more difficult for those looking to exploit them since they'd have to track down the various platforms and navigate a variety of systems each with their own rules and culture. Fewer of them would allow ads at all and none of them would match facebook in terms of being as easy to weaponize. "Pay us to attack this platform's userbase" is a core part of facebook's business model.
You'd also be much better off when the people maintaining the system are hobbyists because they actually care about the platform and moderation. That's a massive improvement over facebook which does as little as they possibly can, only enough to be able to claim that they do "something" at the next congressional hearing, while still making sure that they can actively censor what they want. Moderation on major social media platforms seem to frustrate the efforts of legitimate users more than spammers and scammers.
I'd put my money on "Randall, the over-worked sys admin" over the half-assed AI moderator bots employed by Musk and Zuckerberg
What exactly would you like banned and how would you define what should be banned and what shouldn’t?
I assume you want FB and Insta banned. What about Reddit? YouTube? Hacker news? Discord? X? Dating apps? Snapchat? WhatsApp? iMessage? Gmail? Just curious where exactly you draw the line, and how you’d implement the ban.
Randall’s eagle eye friend and fellow US-based sysadmin notices attacks on his own server, reports it to his congressperson, and the fed stands up protection for the whole fediverse in short order.
The government in the US will prevent others from immediately physically infringing on your rights, say to brew beer. So they’d help us online too even at the expense of corporate platforms right?
> Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on
I've been pushing for the under-14 ban, which is popular in almost every country with polling, and holy shit is it a pigpen to wade through.
Just find a good technical solution that doesn't require handing over your id, yeah?
> find a good technical solution that doesn't require handing over your id, yeah?
In a perfect world, sure. In the real world, the political demand for a solution to this problem means we'll get a lot of crummy solutions.
The idea that they would ban their propaganda networks, but not their alternatives, is really baffling...