censorship and content moderation is a difficult problem. i don’t think its solution involves a bunch of american corporations being in charge of and thought policing large chunks of our online communication.
leaving moderation to centralized entities clearly isn’t working, but decentralization also prevents effective censorship. so maybe these are not the tools we should be using.
it affects more than just criminal use, and our problems are growing beyond the political, affecting our collective mental health. social media is very hard to moderate without raising ethical questions, and impossible to moderate without introducing subjective bias.
we need to better understand how ideas—or weaponized memes—spread throughout the system, and come up with countermeasures to mitigate its amplifying and accelerating effects, regardless of message content.
it’s not even a new problem. we’ve failed to mitigate the dangers of mass media from the start.
i certaintly don’t expect any solutions coming from the likes of facebook or google because their very business model is part of the problem
what social media platforms do right now is sort of segregate people into these ideological bubbles, causing the well-known echo chamber effect which leads to radicalization, atomization and people losing touch with reality. i think this is the wrong way to go about it.
maybe the way to limit the spread of information should be based more on geographical closeness than closeness of interests.
@mia I really like that idea of bringing back geographical closeness into the digital mix. Not the way annoying geoblocked videos or creepy “find people around you” app features do it, but instead somehow creating a buffer or at least letting people give more importance to spatially local interactions... I guess it’s part of the general idea of bringing more meatspace-like interaction into the digital space, to make us more human on the web?
@vivit @mia I definitely agree about concerns around privacy, this needs to be taken into account and sharing location should only be an opt-in thing, with the possibility of providing a very imprecise location like a whole city.
I also agree with your second point: I never said it should be a hard restriction. It should be an option we can turn on or off. I love that we can find communities around the world nowadays. It’s even a lifesaver for some of us!
There are multiple problems with that, I think. Geographical location is sensitive personal information. Limiting online communications based on that would be an overt attack on anonymity, which is now more important than ever in the age of witch-hunts and doxing. Second of all... isn't being able to interact with people all the way across the world one of the greatest things about the global Internet? Online interaction is abstracted and disembodied, and that is its glory.