Technology

I think its too late. An entire generation had their brains fried. But yeah, better late than never.

Also the brain can actually recover. But it takes a lot of work.

For me, just reading a book is difficult now. The mind is not used to that kind of focus. My eyes go down the page, and then I realize ive been thinking of something else, and have to start over. This happens over and over again. But with practice, it gets easier.

Add "YouTube Shorts" to the list, and fine them, too. They are doing the same, for the same reason.

Bravo EU!!!

Anything owned by that pos Zionist Larry Ellison should be illegal

great, do facebook products now.

Let me hold my breath waiting for something actually meaningful to be done about it, more than a "cost of doing business" protection payment.

Tech companies shouldn’t have these sorts of algorithmic profiles of people. It’s manipulation.

Cool! No one's surprised. Anyway. Nothing is gonna be done.

Lemmy has infinite scrolling too so if lemmy get big it will have the same legal issue

And what about all their copycats? Like Instagram and YouTube that are trying to do the same thing?

The big danger here, which these steps mitigate but do not solve are:

#1 Algorithmically curated content

On the various social media, there are systems of automated content moderation that are in place that remove or suppress content. Ostensibly for protecting users from viewing illegal or disturbing content. In addition, there are systems for recommending content to a user by using metrics for the content, metrics for the users combined with machine learning algorithm and other controls which create a system of controls to both restrict and promote content based on criteria set by the owner. We commonly call this, abstractly, 'The Algorithm' Meta has theirs, X has theirs, TikTok has theirs. Originally these were used to recommend ads and products but now they've discovered that selling political opinions for cash is a far more lucrative business. This change from advertiser to for-hire propagandist

The personal metrics that these systems use are made up of every bit of information that the company can extract out of you via your smartphone, linked identity, ad network data and other data brokers. The amount of data that is available on the average consumer is pretty comprehensive right down to knowing the user's rough/exact location in real-time.

The Algorithm used by social media companies are a black box, so we don't know how they are designed. Nor do we know how they are being used at any given moment. There are things that they are required to do (like block illegal content) but there are very little, if any, restrictions on what they can block or promote otherwise nor are there any reporting requirements for changes to these systems or restrictions on selling the use of The Algorithm for any reason whatsoever.

There have been many public examples of the owners of that box to restricting speech by de-prioritizing videos or restricting content containing specific terms in a way that imposes a specific viewpoint through manufactured consensus. We have no idea if this was done by accident (as claimed by the companies, when they operate too brazenly and are discovered), if it was done because the owner had a specific viewpoint or if the owner was paid to impose that viewpoint.

This means that our entire online public discourse is controllable. That means of control is essentially unregulated and is increasingly being used and sold for, what cannot be called anything but, propaganda.

#2 - There is no #2, the Algorithms are dangerous cyberweapons, their usage should be heavily regulated and incredible restrictions put on their use against people.