The opposite of social media today (election manipulation, divided societies, ethnic cleansing) is the state of affairs before social media, which wasn't bad at all. I'm struggling to think of large-scale benefits social media has brought us, because the individual ones like talking more to grandma and getting more dates are clear enough. But come on, people should just pick up that phone and go out more.
It's obvious that the Internet and social media wouldn't solve these issues with people, or hide these flaws in humanity. I am baffled why people think it would. It's just another form of something governments or institutions cannot handle/control, which has been occurring since written history began. The only difference is the sheer quantity and ease of having a voice these days.
(For reference regarding my use of these "platforms": I use YouTube periodically to mainly watch the C++ conference videos to further highlight how out of touch I am with the modern iterations of the language, but have nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter since I found it to be a stream of people talking about themselves; by definition that is not a conversation, so is not social and should be renamed "Selfish Media" IMHO).
I disagree. I would lose the ability to contact many good friends.
a surprising number of people don't realize that a) carriers are obligated to port their number and b) it is possible to transfer contacts when they buy a new phone. instead of fixing the original problem, they post "hey new number (xxx)-xxx-xxxx, add me!" or "new phone, send your numbers!" to facebook or instagram. I can't explain how this is supposed to work to every single person I want to stay in contact with, and I don't check social media much so I tend to miss these posts.
if I lost my facebook account, it wouldn't be a huge issue. I'd be able to track everyone down on other platforms. if all social media were shut down, there are at least a couple people I'd never be able to contact again.
And go out.. where, exactly?
"But I didn't mean those!"
OK, fine, now we need to define social media. Clearly everybody wants to count Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But some of the major incidents come from memetic circulation of fake news and racial hatred propaganda etc on Whatsapp. The Christchurch shooter (and others) were radicalised by 4/8chan. Both he and Anders Breivik also cited racial hatred material produced by "traditional", "legitimate" sources such as major newspapers.
(I wonder if anyone's ever done an "impact factor of evil" analysis on the citation graphs of mass shooter manifestoes? Going all the way back to Kaczynski, T and beyond)
> people should just pick up that phone and go out more
You've missed all the "millenials NEVER answer the phone" memes, then?
> The opposite of social media today (election manipulation, divided societies, ethnic cleansing) is the state of affairs before social media, which wasn't bad at all
My point is that none of those are new, it's just that people struggle to recognise the warning patterns. Countries that were badly hit by SARS-COV were more attuned to the risks of SARS-COV-2. Countries that were badly hit by 20th century fascism are more attuned to the risks of 21st century fascism. Hence all the endless (somewhat fruitless) discussion about who counts as a Nazi and when it might be OK to punch them.
It's not just the medium, we have to look at the messages. Can we ban certain messages without throwing out the medium?
Here's my definition of the elements of "toxic social media":
1) the automated surfacing of messages from random people because they are "popular" (i.e. highly engaged) mixed in with personal messages. This is the amplifying effect that makes things hot.
2) the immediacy - a message can be spread insanely rapidly, faster than any individual humans can understand or respond to it. This is the fuel.
It's the fact that it happens at an inhuman scale that I think is the biggest part. Email at a human-to-human level is like letter writing. Information can travel through it, but it can't amplify by bypassing the human connections in the way that Twitter trending topics can. Likewise 1:1 or limited-sized groups on Whatsapp.
I'd even put Facebook groups into that bucket, so long as they're full of humans who know each other. It's once you get to groups with millions of people who don't know each other directly that things get out of hand.
Seen in that perspective, social media could be considered a part of the problem simply for being a way for people to voice their opinions, but as you wrote, a "fediverse" would not be more resistant to disruptive opinions. It will be a problem as long a people have a variety of ways to communicate with lots of people.
I think it's naive to assume that a fediverse wouldn't eventually include somebody developing such an algorithm that becomes popular among the average user base.
Blaming algorithims is the "big lie" essentially of repeating something enough that people eventually believe it is true. I noticed it before and dismissed it as the bullshit it was but even computer literate people are falling for the hysteria.
In fact, casualties of war, as a percentage of population, have been more or less constant for hundreds of years.
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-yea...
Perhaps the rules have changed now, due to mutually assured destruction.
It's increasingly difficult to have rational conversations with Americans these days, and this idea is certainly a big part of it.
It just astonishes me that Americans see little difference between a private company forbidding liars from using their free service, and people being rounded up at gunpoint and being killed.
(I seem to have been misunderstood quite badly, a sibling comment to yours makes exactly the opposite allegation! Also, I'm a Brit)
The risk of any ban system is that true-but-inconvenient stuff ends up getting banned as well. The very real risk that video evidence of murders by police might be banned for "promoting violence", for example. There's already the controversy over removing evidence of war crimes in Syria - kind of understandable, given that those must be pretty traumatic videos.
(yes, this is a pre-crime argument, but crimes against humanity committed by and on behalf of states or warring ethnic factions are qualitively different from ordinary crime.)
I think you’re inflating the views of the few outspoken fools too be that of the majority.
... have we? Much of the 20th century was spent at war, with a death total somewhere in the region of a hundred million. As were most of the previous centuries. There have been isolated pockets where one might have a lifetime of stability over a wide area, but few of those were also "free".
> The problem we have is that social media should not exist
The challenge is to thread the needle between freedom degenerating into chaos and murder (Rohingya, etc) and total clampdown that also escalates into disappearances and murder.