Here's a little info on it. link

My basic stance is that it's a form of censorship and it shouldn't be done. People are going to get misinformation elsewhere because the media is teeming with it. Regardless, a person has a right to ignorance should they elect not to question things that they see on the net.

Social media as a whole needs to fucking chill. You are not a news source. You are a place for people to post memes and pictures of food and be nerds together. You are greatly overestimating your own importance. Fuck. Ing. Chill.

Conflicted tbh

Social media platformers have become publishers, and like traditional publishers, they should have some basic social responsibility. There's no ignoring the fact that many people now get their news exclusively from social media. So I do agree with eg. Twitter putting "disclaimers" on tweets from ppl in positions of authority that are blatantly false / could incite violence / could undermine an election. And on the flipside, it's irresponsible that youtube's algorithms lead people further and further down the path to political extremism by recommending ever more "extremist" videos.

But idk about the instagram thing. Neither for or against it tbh. And does it even do much to combat misinformation?

@DS Dude exactly! Social media is social media you talk to people. It's in the name. Sometimes the people you talk to are misinformed or flat out wrong. And that's fine, not everyone has to be right all of the time. Social media sites need to leave news to new media and stick to letting people converse. Also insta of all place it's like 'calm down, people post pictures of their cats and food' it isn't as political as Facebook or Twitter. I go on insta to look at fandom shit and stalk Within Temptation. I used to post concert pics. I haven't even seen politics (not much anyways) in the hashtags there.
I am literally using a tor browser to see the Azula hashtag. Like the browser I use to fuck around on the darkweb when I'm feeling degenerate.

@PT I don't know, I feel like it's not their job? Maybe it's the 'Merican, yee haw FREEDOM!!!! in me, but I don't think that social media sites have any responsibilities as far as blocking content goes. Okay, well I do think that they should be responsible for not leaking your public info, for making sure people don't get harassed, and for making sure that gore/crime/child porn and the like don't get uploaded. But censoring what kind of info is put out is boarderline an infringement on rights. I think that it should be commonsense that a place like insta isn't a reliable source for news and info and that info found on there should be fact checked. Like tumblr, if tumblr did this it would be ridiculous. There is SO much more misinformation over on there than on insta.

I think that the disclaimers are perfectly fair, but nixing hashtags altogether? I read an article about how it impacted a small business that relied on hashtags to advertise and provide satisfactory service.

The issue is that social media is no longer just a place to chat and share memes (I wish it were so). It's become a news source for link of Australian adults. It's link print newspapers as a news source in the US. And link of people say that they hear about the latest news via social media before ever hearing about it on a news station.

"Sometimes the people you talk to are misinformed or flat out wrong" This is fine when it's just your Uncle Bobby going off by himself lol. The issue with social media is that fake stories become amplified: a dodgy website posts something misleading with an attention-grabbing headline, it's shared thousands or millions of times, and then it's reached an incredible amount of people within a short time. In the good ol days, the town crackpot would have a rant in the pub to whoever would be in speaking distance. Nowadays the crackpot can reach millions of people within a few hours.

This is exacerbated by the fact that falsehood actually spreads faster and further than truth, because it's more sensational and attention-grabbing. link on this found that "false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people".

The whole thing is made even more shitty due to the "bullshit asymmetry principle": the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

I would love if it were just cat pics, but unfortunately social media is incredibly important in our modern political landscape imo.

"Maybe it's the 'Merican, yee haw FREEDOM!!!! in me" lmao

"I don't think that social media sites have any responsibilities as far as blocking content goes... But censoring what kind of info is put out is boarderline an infringement on rights"
The issue is that mere "words" can actually drive people to actual violence (I talked about this in the Australian context link). In the American context, the BS about "election fraud" has led people to plan bombings of voting stations and vote counting centres (and undermined trust in the election process / democracy in general, which could have link long-term effects)

Also, social media platforms are NOT passive or laissez-faire in terms of what people see on their newsfeed. It's hard to overstate just how important their algorithms are in the whole process. The algorithms are actually more important than the blocking. Tinkering with them could literally make people's newsfeeds more right- or left-wing or whatever. This is sorta straying away from the point, but social media companies already control what content reaches whom - and how far it goes - through algorithms that are never released publicly.

Facebook overlords are real. Zuckerberg is coming.

In all serious, I'm researching tech law stuff for my job atm and the shit I've seen... y'all should all be scared of algorithms lmao

"I think that it should be commonsense that a place like insta isn't a reliable source for news" Yes but think of a person of average intelligence, and then appreciate that half the population are dumber than that 🙃

EDIT I think I somewhat strayed from the poll question, which I'm still conflicted on. Was more just talking about the importance of social media in politics + whether companies have any sort of social responsibility for the content they show their users.

The issue is that social media is no longer just a place to chat and share memes. People say that they hear about the latest news via social media before ever hearing about it on a news station. This is a good point but I also feel as though this is where personal responsibility comes in. It is constantly preached that you shouldn't believe everything you see on the internet. I think that people should have some responsibility. Tumblr is where I first hear about a lot of things too, but I pretty much follow it up by researching it on news websites and such. I think that the internet should be used as a first step sort of thing. And that it shouldn't be the job of the websites to make sure people have common sense. I think that there should be a warning on the home page about misinformation is being spread but the fact that I can't check the Azula hashtag is ridiculous. Like they blanket censored everything.

This is exacerbated by the fact that falsehood actually spreads faster and further than truth, because it's more sensational and attention-grabbing. This is also a fair point though. Clickbait needs to die. But I think that instead of blanket censoring everything, the sites should use their tech to detect clickbait and delete that and only that.

What I fear though is the slippery slope. You give them the power to censor misinformation. But what else are they going to try to censor? I can see governments using this kind of thing to censor information they don't want the public to see. For example; a government bombs a foreign country and genuine and true information starts to spared. The government comes in, declares that it is misinformation, and censors it. You give them an inch, they take a mile.

The issue is that mere "words" can actually drive people to actual violence (I talked about this in the Australian context here). I feel like this might be getting into a bit of a different topic a little. Tbh I think that people are just constantly looking for a reason to punch each other in the face. If not over a twitter post they saw then it'd be something else. However I can see where you're coming from because of all of the anti-mask conspiracies' going around and how it has led people to get verbally abusive with customer service workers. But then again, that was always a thing. They simply found a newer and dumber reason to be dicks.

In all serious, I'm researching tech law stuff for my job atm and the shit I've seen... y'all should all be scared of algorithms lmao I'm gonna start a whole new poll to talk about this because I think that algorithms are horrifying and evil. And also WT made their whole 2019 album centered around this theme lol.

Yes but think of a person of average intelligence, and then appreciate that half the population are dumber than that 🙃 *Nervous chuckle* ya got me there.

I think I somewhat strayed from the poll question, which I'm still conflicted on. It's all good. I feel like these things go hand in hand. But with Insta specifically I think that they went overboard. I just want to fangirl over Azula and this blanket ban is infringing on my ability to do so. Granted my old ipod touch is so gotdamn old and the software (I never install any of the updates lmao) is so dated that I can actually view uncensored Insta on it.
In other words new tech = bad. Old tech = good. 5G = bad and unnecessary.

"I think that there should be a warning on the home page about misinformation is being spread" yeah this is the better option IMO, and it's also why I don't mind that twitter has been putting disclaimers on tweets from public figures that are blatantly false/misleading. It's not censoring or limiting its reach, it's just a warning to exercise caution about the info contained therein.

"What I fear though is the slippery slope. You give them the power to censor misinformation. But what else are they going to try to censor? I can see governments using this kind of thing to censor information they don't want the public to see. For example; a government bombs a foreign country and genuine and true information starts to spared. The government comes in, declares that it is misinformation, and censors it" Ooof this is true and this actually happened just last week. A lefttuber called Second Thought released a link criticising the CIA and it got full-on shadowbanned: he wrote a link with the details. This is on top of the fact that a few months ago, shortly after uploading a video on police brutality, he got a visit from the Department of Homeland Security who asked him about "Anti-American sentiment" in his videos.

So yeah I don't doubt that governments will try and censor - lol they already are. Or at least, youtube has a contract with them that requires them to suppress criticism of intelligence agencies... which is effectively the same thing.

I'd write more but I gotta get off fanpop lol, that twitter thread covers a few other points I was gonna raise about freedom of speech (or rather, how it ain't as free as we think it is)

EDIT oh dude did a whole link on it a few days ago

it's also why I don't mind that twitter has been putting disclaimers on tweets from public figures Yeah this doesn't bother me much. Like that's fair, they can do that because people still have the freedom to ignore it if they want. Even if I personally don't think that they should.

Ooof this is true and this actually happened just last week. A lefttuber called Second Thought released a video criticising the CIA and it got full-on shadowbanned Sounds horrifying, I'll have to watch it if I get some free time. I think that that's crazy though. Like that's kind of the danger of giving them even an inch of power which is why I'm so hesitant to say that even a temporary banning of hashtags is okay. It just opens the door and they start testing the boundaries of how much bullshit people are willing to put up with.

Isn't Youtube with Google and Google is notorious for that kind of stuff. To me that has the same vibes as book burnings but make it digital.