Do you think an European Citizens’ Initiative to ban Twitter in the EU would be beneficial and have a possibility of being successful?
I’m sorry if this is not a good community for this question. If not please point me to one.
Twitter actively pushes some content and hides others.
So it’s controlling what people see with an editorial decision.
The fact that this decision is made by an algorithm is entirely irrelevant.
Therefore Twitter should be fully responsible for any harm caused by what it publishes, and any illegal content.
They can’t claim to be just a platform as long as their algorithm controls what people get to see.If the EU enforced this, there would be no need to ban Twitter.
Twitter isnt a social media plattform anymore. Its like truth social a plattform for propaganda. And as we do boycott, bann and so on russian and chinese propaganda, we should ban us propaganda too. I think ith that easy. (:
I don’t like the idea of banning social media, newspapers, books, or news websites. Even if they go downhill like twitter. Just opting out and ignoring them, will do. If many do it, it will collapse by itself. But there must be a good alternative and that is difficult.
@nuko147 @SchwertImStein Me neither, but politicians should not be using commercial and closed platforms for communication owned by people like Zuck and Musk that earn money with this… That is something I DO take issue with. And i don’t really see how Bluesky is better than X.
Yeah, all politicians in Europe should abandon twitter. And surely all official offices. Many replacing it with bluesky, witch is a wrong move.
Instead of leading the people to an open source and maybe not profit focused platform, they just follow the mass.
Not a fan of banning sites. This establishes infrastructure, which a future fascist regime could use for their purposes. Better to strengthen local alternatives and let it happen by itself.
what about restricting use by governments?
people should make choices, governments should be sovereign in as many ways as possible imo… twitter has proven that it’s not an unbiased utility
or perhaps the “primary source of truth” must be elsewhere and may be shared to twitter, but governments must do whatever they can to ensure that citizens primary method of interaction is through sovereign sources - which may mean limited posting to twitter/meta etc, or it may mean marketing
Exactly, govt representatives, journalists and newspapers should at the very least start using alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky. Let Twitter wither away by itself after that.
X does not and will not comply with EU rules, and thus needs to be banned until they change (i.e. indefinitely).
The main issue with Twitter is that we will never be able to prove that the algorithms are not manipulating users by shaping a certain narrative. Combine this with the unsettling events of recent months and I feel like we have no other choice than banning this platform in the free world.
Yes, Let’s censor the news we disagree with!
This is not about disagreement but the total lack of transparency and control over potentially hostile and destructive narratives. Right now, what Elon pushes on twitter is borderline hate speech, corruption and fake news. And hate speech is illegal in many countries. It‘s exactly the same situation as with TikTok and USA, who are still likely to ban TikTok. Also, I don’t think Twitter should be banned on the internet level like what China is doing. But as a European I should be able to disable all algorithms and other content manipulation methods when using the service.
I think companies etc should be banned from sharing news and updates there. Eg. A lot of public transport news is shared there, sometimes exclusively. It would be ideal if people could get access but nothing official or important was facilitated. Imagine if we were having to access truth social to find out if public transport was cancelled due to a snowstorm - well, now xitter is truth social.
This was the moment where banning twitter turned from a good idea into a non negotiable measure we need to take asap.
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To be honest, I wouldn’t mind. I also wouldn’t mind banning any and all of social media.
The experiment was fun while it lasted but as is often the case some people poison the well. And that happened to every social media. In my eyes every social media is very much a propaganda tool and destabilizes the democracies around the world. The corporations behind these are not moderating enough because they don’t want to or it is to costly for them or just - what I can understand - too much to do feasibly.
So every social media should be banned. I understand that this is not what everyone thinks or wants to hear, but in my eyes the car already hit the wall and we have to live with the consequences.
(I do fully understand that this means reddit, feddit, youtube and others. I would really miss feddit and youtube but well… I like to live in a progressive society and not in a dystopian, propaganda riddled shadow of its former self.)It sounds like your advocating banning open communication
I understand your concerns and effectivly if put it that way I’m advocating just that. I concur that this will put me in a bad spot.
Open communication is a very powerful tool especially in politics and academia. The thing is propaganda is also a powerful tool in politics. Propaganda and populism. With social media both of them became ubiquitous much to the detriment of the western democracies. The corona pandemic and all things about vaccination are a prime example of this trend.
While I still would very much like to have the ability to chat with someone from Australia or see pictures of people in Bali or share recipies with people of Norway, I see the downsides and am very worried of the trend that is emerging. The political discourse is rife with populism and the divided masses go into the fox holes for every matter be it as small as an atom and without any merit to argue about.
I have the feeling that compassion, understanding, and sympathy is going downhill and social media is giving a minority a voice to sound like a majority. I have the feeling that social media is exasperating all the negative emotions of the people. And to be honest that scares me.So unless social media is heavily moderated - to battle e.g. hate speech and propaganda - I think a shutdown of every social media is needed.
But I have a question for you: Do you think of phpbb forums and blogs as open communication? If that’s the case, I’d say that I’m ambivalent of this issue since I wouldn’t mind blogs and forums since they are (typically) moderated.
P.S.: Reading all this again I see that it could be positive to give a minority a voice - like people with rare diseases so they could get better help, like repressed people and so on and so forth. But I still believe that sadly the cons outweigh the pros.
I think people are getting radicalised by more than social media. Podcast aren’t helping either in some cases. And if you live in a country that’s been flooded with drugs then I think people’s capacity to empathise and think critically is diminished.
Bulletin boards won’t solve this problem. They’re just another medium. They are just as much the target of the fire hose of falsehood that other social media platforms are. If mainstream social media is to be banned, and people rush to BBS, bulletin boards will no doubt have their bot activity ramped up and we would be back where we started. In other words, they will target people wherever they go.
If I thought scrapping social media would take us back to the simpler times we lived in before, I would be all for it. Put something about that idea doesn’t add up. It feels like there’s something missing. And if we do go into our individual, social-media free foxholes, how do we ever know when it’s safe to come out again?
Fuck Twitter but not sure a ban would be a good thing
Banning fascists instead of accomodating them is absolutely the right thing to do. It’s accommodating them that got us into this mess.
@starlinguk @turtl If we do what the bad people do, are we the bad people? (censorship)
Nope. Paradox of tolerance.
Not a fully formed opinion yet; but since X is ran in a way that encourages populism, misinformation and extremism, yeah. Maybe it could make it harder for extremists to connect and recruit new people. But if that is the goal, banning X is not enough. Platforms like Telegram are also popular for harboring extremists. So it would probably need a widespread effort across public platforms to be regulated and better moderated.
the difference is that telegram is a chat application rather than a public space. i’ve been on telegram for 10 years at this point and i’ve never gotten so much as an invite from people i don’t know. the owner is iffy so my friend group is trying to migrate away but none of us have ever seen the things telegram is famous for. i’m not even sure i know how to get shit like that to show up. on twitter it’s in your face as soon on you log in.
Don’t ban it. I like watching Musk on X making a fool out of himself every more. Tesla shares crashed as a result of it.
Yes. Freedom of speech? There is no true freedom of speech there so limiting X is not a violation of it
