OneMeaningManyNames

Imagine responding like that to any Lemmy post:

*Proton endorses Trump

*K

*Gaza ceasefire

*I’m baby

Ecofascists. That is the term.

Fancier algorithms are not bad per se. They can be ultra-productive for many purposes. In fact, we take no issue with fancy algorithms when published as software libraries. But then only specially trained folks can seize their fruit, which it happens it is people working for Big Tech. Now, if we had user interfaces that could let the user control several free parameters of the algorithms and experience different feeds, then it would be kinda nice. The problem boils down to these areas:

• near-universal social graphs (they have all the people enlisted)
• exert total control on the algorithm parameters
• infer personal and sensitive data points (user-modeling)
• not ensuring informed consent on the part of the user
• total behavioral surveillance (they collect every click)
• manipulate the feed and observe all behavioral response (essentially human subject research for ads)
• profiteering from the above while harming the user’s well being (unethical)

Political interference and proliferation of fascist “ideas” is just a function that is possible if and only if all of the above are in play. If you take all this destructive shit away, a software that would let you explore vast amounts of data with cool algorithms through a user-friendly interface would not be bad in itself.

But you see, that is why we say “the medium is the message” and that “television is not a neutral technology”. As a media system, television is so constructed so that few corporations can address the masses, not the other way round, nor people interact with their neighbor. For a brief point in time, the internet promised to subvert that, when centralized social media brought back the exertion of control over the messaging by few corporations. The current alternative is the Fediverse and P2P networks. This is my analysis.

If you model and infer some aspect of the user that is considered personal (eg de-anonymize) or sensitive (eg infer sexuality) by means of an inference system, then you are in the area of GDPR. Further use of these inferred data down the pipeline can be construed as unethical. If they want to be transparent about it they have to open-source their user-modeling and decision making system.

a reality warping engine.

Now you’re talking.

You think the Meta algorithm just sorts the feed for you? It is way more complex and it basically puts you on some very fine-grained clusters, then decides what to show to you, then collects your clicks and reactions and adjusts itself. For scale, no academic “research with human subjects” would be approved with mechanics like that under the hood. It is deeply unethical and invasive, outright dangerous for the individuals (eg teen self esteem issues, anorexias, etc, etc). So “algorithm-like features” is apples to oranges here.

Non-consensual user-modeling systems should be heavily regulated.

At this point the ones preaching against trans liberation are the same ones that will take away your union protections. This is the long and short of it.

The premise of this meme is overly simplistic. Effectively equating a social media platform with a website hosting specific beliefs.

Here are, from the top of my head, some ways Big Social is different, regardless of country.

• Hosting a platform with millions or billions of users.
• Exploiting algorithms that mine sensitive data to an invasive degree.
• Control the flow of information, to a very granular degree of precision.
• Experimentally collecting behavioral data in response to said control of information.
• Modeling user’s life expectancy, sexual orientation, political beliefs, consumer patterns, terminal illnesses.
• Selling said data and model outputs to private insurance companies as well as police states.
• Addicting users to withdraw from real life, and get hooked to their screen where they can happily serve the company for data mining.

I hardly think that any of the above should be gauged by the standards of individual rights to free speech. Even corporate entities viewed as individuals with a right to free speech.

This is something else entirely, and whoever owns it, out of whichever country must have their ass regulated off.

Even harder than the EU did.

Operations of this type and size should be eventually dismantled. They are inherently antisocial, corporatist, and totalitarian in their conception and daily function.

Sometime ago I started a discussion about the “Role of Attrition” in the effort to dismantle Big Social enterprises Here it is

Words also have connotations.

Human rights violations aside The EFF and Techdirt have already said that it is hate speech and effectively suppresses the free speech of gay and trans. Do you know better than these sources? The latter is like the very person who states that anti-hate speech laws are First Amendment violations. He said it loud and clear: this is actual censorship of LGBT voices.

Meta’s anti-LGBT rules are closely knit to their ending the fact-checking: It is science denialism and linked to racism and vaccine skepticism.

Homosexuality and gender identity are not considered mental illnesses, Sex is not a binary, and Race is not connected to intelligence.

Bigots never liked science on these three, and now they use political power to impose their narrative.

Meta never moderated such discourse. Nor reddit nor twitter nor youtube. There was no censorship to end here. What this is, it is a free pass to punch down trans and gay people. It is incitement to violence, and Zuckerberg and Musk must go to the gallows for it.

Don’t get me started on the toxic harassment these platforms have allowed against African and Carribean reparation activists, how they have destroyed the lives of feminists, and how they have named all Palestinians terrorists.

At this point race realists and gender essentialists have ensured political and technological control of the narrative.

There is no room for debating sealioning trolls on this one. If they don’t understand the social dynamics against gender/sex/minorities at this moment, they are no better than brownshirts.

It is permabans and hooks and jabs all the way, for every single weird freak that backs this deranged hateful shit.