Social media has the power to do so much good: connecting people across the globe, enabling the sharing of information across language barriers and in circumvention of government censorship, and more. But because the world is run by greedy power-hungry pigs, we can’t have social media without it being exploited to the furthest extent possible in the name of profit. The mental health of the public is not even a secondary concern - it is completely disregarded in favor of squeezing further growth out of a saturated market for a service that should be both simple and free.
Before all that - and you are right on your take - there is a more basic flaw that affects social media: people do not know how to act properly.
The anonimity emboldens the small minds that use it to mistreat, slander and ridicule others and spread lies and rumours.
Unless we can force people to act with civility - which implies people being fairly conscious of the consequences of their words and actions - social media will remain what it is: a cesspool where the worst of our species destils into a refined poison.
people do not know how to act properly
They do, in communities where rules exist and are enforced. Anonymity may lead some people to feel more emboldened to act out, but when handled properly I believe the vast majority of them will just settle down and either learn how to participate in good faith or find somewhere else to be. The bad behavior patterns we see in some places are, in my opinion, the result of insufficient social norms and enforcement thereof. This is also a situation capitalists will foster, because it drives engagement and inflates content.
Unless we can force people to act with civility - which implies people being fairly conscious of the consequences of their words and actions
So you already understand that this is a problem that only exists in places where bad actors are given license to continue acting out.
If I didn’t understood there is already a problem of bad actors, I wouldn’t have approached your reply. And deny it in any way would be bad faith from me.
What I feel the need to underscore is that individuals make and influence groups and even the most progressively thought out environment is open to being corrupted if any individual present there lacks, in any way, the self awareness that their attitude is damaging.
It’s not the group that needs to regulate the individual; the regulation needs to arise from the individual themselves, in the first place. And most individuals lack that hard individual sense of responsability.
When television started it had all the same potentials you mention in your first sentence, but by far its main use has been to convince people to buy crap they don’t need with money they don’t have. And that’s how it is now with the internet.
That may be true, but TV also brought me Star Trek TNG, Captain Planet, Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and many others that instilled values in me that are core to who I am today. Let’s not let perfection be the enemy of progress, and keep working to put our tools to better use.
I get that - I had my favorite shows too that were important in me becoming who I am. But before TV people had been developing good values for thousands of years, without degrading their attention spans or other mental functions, and in the 75 or so years of its history I really don’t see any evidence that the industry is working toward putting it to any better use.
people had been developing good values for thousands of years, without degrading their attention spans or other mental functions
Okay, so? That doesn’t prove TV doesn’t help with that. We got along wiping our asses with sticks just fine before toilet paper, I’m sure.
in the 75 or so years of its history I really don’t see any evidence that the industry is working toward putting it to any better use.
I literally just explained how, and you agreed with it. Are you sure you’re having the conversation you think you are?
Everyone has TV shows they like - this doesn’t in any way imply that the television industry is working toward making better use of it. It just means television has never been “all bad”. Whatever fight you’re looking for, I’m not interested.
The industry is not a monolith. It’s up to individuals and individual organizations to use TV for whatever purpose they choose. People like Mr. Rogers chose to turn television into an instrument to teach children about life and how to live it, about themselves and others, how we’re different and alike. To look at that and still be mad because every other individual or organization that ever went on air didn’t do the same thing is just mind-blowingly out of touch with reality.
Whatever fight you’re looking for, I’m not interested.
Shit, I’m still waiting for you to make a valid point. Get blocked then, I guess.
Yet no one wants to leave social media.
I left it last year and feel so much better. No FB no Whatsapp, no Insta, no Tictok, no nothing.
You’re on a sm rn….
This comment is not the slam dunk you think it is… Lemmy isn’t owned by corp interests, it’s not algorithm driven and it isn’t 92% bots from fascists, oligarchs and foreign influence agencies. You can as much control as you want here. You can talk to actual people here.
Everyone has an agenda. Lemmy wasn’t created for shits and giggles. You don’t really know what’s under the hood, what posts and comments are encouraged, which ones have votes that are inflated. It’s an illusion to think otherwise.
I feel like I’m missing something here, but isn’t knowing what’s under the hood exactly the point of projects like Lemmy? The source is available on github, and they explain the algorithms or talk about their political bias pretty openly in most communities.
Were you thinking more from the angle of the way our social biases work as a group, or like the risk of maintainers tampering with the sauce pre-release?
I hope this didn’t come across shitty - genuinely curious.
I’m sorry to see comments like this mindlessly downvoted. While I don’t agree that Lemmy was built with any ill intentions, this thread results in good discourse.
For example, the platform itself lends itself to be used or abused to promote commercial interests or push one side of a story. The manner in which pro-Russian content has flooded Lemmy shows how the platform itself can be used to manipulate narratives, and there are no doubt many more subtle ways in which the community sentiment is being skewed in ways we might not realize.
Does lemmy do the whole algorithm thing? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong.
Algorithmic social media is pretty much what we’re talking about, I’m sure.
Of course it has an algorithm, but I think you’re referring to an algorithm that includes personalized or demographic parameters.
Regardless of whether the algorithm includes that (or rather, to which degree), let’s not forget that bad actors can use the knowledge of the open source algorithm to identify the optimal way to manipulate the platform to bring their content on top.
Fair. Have you seen an example of this?
In my limited imagination, bots that flood a topic has a tendency to do that. The the “ask reddit” bots I see in “All”.
Yes, browse https://lemmy.ml/c/memes.
The entire community is run by Russian trolls who take the following approach:
- Engage with anybody even remotely critical of the extremely pro-Russian posts, under the guise of being “modern-day communists”
- Parrot and inflate anything that resembles far-right movements in Ukraine
- Repeat all the Russian propaganda, such as describing the Ukrainian government as fascist
- Misconstrue comments and incorrectly extract quotes
- As mods, selectively delete comments to create a one-sided, pro-Russian narrative
- Gang up with all their troll accounts onto a comment they deleted, chiming in with “wow, fascist” to make the casual observer believe that message must have been awful and they are the good guys
What is that?
sm = social media
You are not wrong. It is a social media and TBF the term has been poisoned by many platforms. I think just like drinks there are healthier options. Healthier online community spaces and I’d like to think this place is one of them.
It is an addiction that takes steps of lesser. The place you visit. How long you stay there are steps of management.
Is this social?
Lacks self-awareness, along with everyone upvoting them lol.
Self awareness is very challenging, you will always have blind spots.
Yes, and… it’s a skill that needs to be practiced. We don’t call it out as a skill, we don’t recognize it as a skill, and we don’t tell others that they need to practice it. So we get stupid shit like people saying they don’t do social media, on social media.
The world would be a much better place if we prioritized self-awareness as a universal skill.
There are lots of us that wanted to leave and did. There are lots that want to and can’t find the will power to do so. It’s definitely addictive. It was hard for me to quit, I have an addictive personality, but I’ve also given up drinking and smoking entirely without councilors or pharma aids. I think it’s time we regulate it like a dangerous addiction until there’s a change to how the algorithms function, which may be never.
In today’s episode of “fucking obviously, duh,”… fine-tuned digital brainwashing algorithms do in fact have generally ‘bad’ effects on the human mind.
Some say they may even be addictive and habit forming!
More at 11!
Attention Everyone.
Grass is green.
Fork found in kitchen.
Water is wet.
Sky is blue.
Thank you for your time.
Y’all, this is one of those articles worth reading right quick. The title is… well, bad. They were looking more at the “quality” rather than quantity of social media usage. The findings were more about the reinforcement of the user’s state rather than social media itself being bad. Sure, the algorithm will push things, but your algorithm is primarily gonna push what it needs to keep you engaged with itself, and what you engage with will be influenced by your state of mind/mood. If you’re already depressed, you’re probably gonna reinforce that via the algorithm. Same deal with positive outlooks. Neuroplasticity and all that.
The researchers also bring up a good point about calling into question the recommendation to limit the amount of time on social media with the idea of mitigating the negative effects. Much like [alcohol] prohibition in the US, a ban on social media usage does nothing to teach us a more wise and healthy approach, nor is it something realistic for the general population.
In fact, if we practice abstention in such a way, those that would use it for malignant purposes would make it worse. I think a good example of that is cryptocurrency. Crypto isn’t inherently bad, but boy did it get super maligned by any left-leaning space. There are plenty of useful things we could do with crypto, especially now with the hostile behavior of many currency-issuing states, but since crypto was mostly abandoned by leftist spaces, scams, commodification, speculation, and other hyper-capitalist bullshit abounds in the crypto space.
Do we really want to cede the further development of social media to malignant dickheads via unwitting abstention? Or will we take the time to actually learn how to wisely approach the tools we have right in front of us?
Howabout this:
All social media algorithms that direct content flow to users are required to be open source, in perpetuity, at least for viewing, so that actual unbiased folks can audit them. Maybe make a new liscense class for this, if need be, so companies can still own the code, but it just has to be publically reviewable.
Would you install blackbox code on your pc?
Well, would you let a blackbox determine what information is fed into your own brain?
Mandate systemic transparency.
That’s what Pirate parties advocate for, actually. They do seem to gain back in popularity with the chat control proposal. Problem of the mainstream left parties is that they heavily underrate importance of free software. Underrate to the level of buying iphones, macbooks, subscriptions and so forth. Pirate parties are actually nice step to secure privacy of left-activists in the neoliberal future.
I did not know that, but that entirely makes sense.
I’m American; if we had a ‘pirate party’ type party, it would be considered a terrorist organization by our pedophile president and his cult of closeted christian racist theocrat morons.
But uh yeah… world economy and society broadly is hugely run by tech and tech companies, you’d think a more nuanced and informed discussion about tech law and policy would accompany that… but nope!
There are Pirate Parties in U.S and Canada. Yet U.S politics are bad asf.
water is wet, fork found in kitchen
cat found on keyboard
Social media itself is bad for your mental health. It encourages forming snap judgements using low quality information. Training yourself to use this kind of superficial thought process makes you easier to fool and manipulate.
What’s your approach to news? Do you follow certain journalists or newspapers or something else?
Right now I enjoy Tangle - but I don’t obsess on the news as much as most people I know. Focusing more on other interests keeps me saner. In general I think it’s healthier to have a couple news sources you peruse, rather than a “feed”. You look at items that interest you and then you’re done - like in the days of newspapers, when people would read what they wanted and they’d be finished with the paper. I think that sense of completion is important to mental health. You don’t get that from a feed because a feed is never empty.
Lemmy has been ok for me. I get on it whenever I feel like it and leave whenever I can’t deal with the politics anymore
Edit: grammar
It’s much better here without an algorithm, but on the other hand the user base feels pretty ruthless where the blandest opinions net you down votes and angry replies. I only feel safe with jokes and factoids. I think I’m slowly reaching the point where I’ll either stop using any online platforms altogether or just 100% lurk.
Again!
IDK how many times I’ve seen similar headlines. But it’s a lot.A simple google search shows me more than 5 studies already on the first page.
I’m shocked! SHOCKED! Well…
No shit!
It took them time…
You mean making it seem like a person’s world is all a giant terrible feedback loop of things that cause them outrage is a bad thing? Whodathunkit?
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