this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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I don't like Twitter, but I am also not for banning a service or application nationwide. This should be the choice of the user. Do not take away freedom of choice, regardless of your feelings, believes or what you like. Do not be like China or Russia.
Instead fight against the actual problem, like disinformation or whatever it is. I'm absolutely against such a ban.
Good thing you're not going to be affected by such a ban, seen as no European would have made the mistake of saying 'nationwide' in reference to the EU as a whole. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't really think it's funny, at all.
Should people also have the freedom of choice to buy snake oil that claims to cure cancer, etc? The opposite of freedom is not regulation. That's a bunch of propaganda used by people when they want to change an inconvenient topic. It's used, for example, when talking about the ACA and claiming that nationalized health insurance would rob the people of choosing their blood sucking middle man for health insurance.
Are you defending snake oil? The pseudoscience con so uniquituously used to deprive the desperate from their money that it became the term used to describe "harmful bullshit sold for profit?"
Freedom of choice or not, I suppose you should be able to spend your money however you want.
But if someone is selling people lies under the promise of medical miracles, we need to throw the book at them.
No.
Big fan of the Citizens United decision and money in politics, I take it?
Ah, I'm still waking up, so I must have misunderstood.
I hadn't considered political spending, but I didn't get the impression we were talking about super PACs. Those are abhorrent, and undemocratic.
My stance was that if a person wants to buy something that's stupid, ineffective, but gives them some small degree of hope and doesn't harm others, then they should be able to. However, I'm also of the opinion that regulators need to remove those products from the market because they're lying to people about their efficacy.
Ideally we'd be teaching people that snake oil doesn't work. But the current political climate suggests that Big Snake Oil has captured the regulation, so I don't see that happening either.
How is that even remotely equivalent comparison?
Isn't blocking a disinfo place a way of fighting disinformation? I don't get it
Blocking an entire community, service or application blocks access to non disinformation and normal communication too. Instead fight against the specific issues. Or with your logic we need to ban every platform such as Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Discord and even Wikipedia. Because misinformation is everywhere.
I don't want anyone decide for myself what to use. If I want to use Twitter, that should be MY decision, not yours, not the one with the campaign here and certainly not any government.
Now you're talking.
And Lemmy, Mastodon, Bluesky etc.
Posting on the fediverse I sort of want to exempt those, but Bluesky can get in the sea too, yeah.
So you want to ban the platforms you dont like/use but leave the ones you do?
No, I use only the platforms I wouldn't want to see get lost eventually. But I see your attempt at a rhetorical gotcha, and I want to recognise that, too.
Every service may be abused to spread misinformation. Here, the complaint isn't that people abuse a service against the owner's will, but that the service is operated to spread misinformation.
One way to address this could be to look at moderation. Is there meaningful moderation to limit misinformation? A service operated to spread misinformation wouldn't moderate it.
I imagine that Twitter being blocked in Europe might actually lead to some of those sources moving elsewhere to continue to reach their audience. I'm not a big fan of blocking websites either in a general sense, but a I can see why countries would want to avoid having what's happening to the US be repeated within their own borders, and that seems to be a distinct danger with Twitter. There's a pretty good argument to be made that that's literally its purpose at this point.
Dismantling legitimate governments with disinformation seems like a pretty viable power grab strategy for billionaires trying to create a megacorp hellscape where they get to do whatever they want until the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans some time after their own deaths.
There needs to be due process. We can't ban a website because 10k people said it has disinformation. The DSA is the process for combatting disinformation on major platforms, and we should follow it. Twitter is already being sued under the DSA, and they will be banned in the next few months if they do not fulfill their obligations to fight disinformation.
Sure, that's fine - except I guess a petition is a petition. It's not binding, it's a way of expressing political will. So if a lot of people go sign it I don't see what the problem is? It's a nice way of shitting on musks neck, rubbing some in his mouth and nose. I guess we should all sign
Is there no disinformation on other social media platforms?
I don't know. That isn't the point though, is it?
It had long since hit critical mass in Europe before it was bait and switched to serve as a US fascist tool of propaganda. Banning it is the correct response.
except it's literally state sponsored propaganda.