Authoritarians use social networks to undermine democratic principles so not exposing kids to that takes power away from them. Or did I misunderstand something?
My take for a while has been that authoritarian ideas (both hard right and hard left) dominate on social media because of the short form short attention span format. Authoritarianism tends to run on simple slogans, grievances, and identity politics. That stuff is very well suited to 140 characters, memes, and short videos.
Liberal ideas require more explaining and historical context, and they don’t play well when everyone has been triggered and trolled into limbic system mode by rage bait.
Liberal politics speaks to the neocortex. Authoritarianism speaks to the brain stem.
I’m using the word liberal to mean things like liberty, individual rights, democracy, and the rule of law. That’s why I also mentioned hard left authoritarianism.
Also there’s a world of difference between people registering dislike on an online forum and the use of state power. It seems like a lot of people these days draw no distinction between removal from a private space or even people just showing disapproval and actual state force.
This doesn't surprise me much; social networks have worked in tandem with governments, allowing them to call the shots to remove any content that opposed their political agendas, narratives, and opinions, to the extent that facts were flat-out censored to paint certain political opponents in a bad light, or worse, create potential legal issues.
It created a world where: when disapproval inside an echo-chamber fails to a critical mass of people telling the truth, just pretend the content doesn't exist and then gaslight people using official media outlets, including Congress and the White House.
So it gave people the impression there's no difference between the two. Not only were disapproval and state force in agreement, they colluded.
So you are alleging that Reddit manipulates vote totals to affirm their biases? There's plenty wrong with Reddit, but I haven't seen any credible evidence that this is the case.
The Arab Spring, the Mahsa Amini protests, the recent resurgence of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, have all been conducted primarily using social media.
This is a very narrow scale when taking the bigger picture, as these are just prominent events in Middle Eastern history since the growth of social media usage, say after 2011.
You are not even considering the travesties avoided due to social media, what regulatory action has been avoided (or taken) to avoid social media backlashes.
You are being extremely disingenuous, and you are directly attacking some peoples' only hope of minimizing repression. I urge you to reconsider your beliefs. This directly and critically affects me.
I’m sorry for you and by all means, keep social media where you live. Maybe the next Arab spring will work out better than the first one and TikTok will enable that.
Where I live, we’re already free from repression and social media threatens to reintroduce it.
I guess the question is, how should citizens communicate with each other? Who should apply the restrictions? If the authoritarian state is applying the restrictions, then it's probably for their own goals.
An authoritarian state might have more legitimacy in applying the restrictions than a for profit company. Think about it.
But really, people should communicate with each other by means not including algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement. Preferably including as little emotion as possible when it comes to discussing policy.
It seems to me that this is much bigger problem for vulnerable or stupid adults. You can be naive when you are young but you can change.
I would say that much bigger problem is possibly the influence of these sites on development of young people.
We know it's addictive, we know it's harmful. Cigarettes and alcohol are banned for the same reason so I'm kinda glad for this Australian experiment. We'll see.
