[trcarney]

hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation? Where would that end? could i be jailed if i post a review for a restaurant if you feel it manipulated you? or anyone stating an opinion could be construed as manipulation. that is beyond a slippery slope, that is an authoritarian nightmare.

[gf000]

So you think writing a review is somehow on the same magnitude as social media platforms with 300 million-3 billion users?

And how is that different from TV channels/media en large having laws to abide by? Slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery slopes..

[trcarney]

The TV station thing, talking about the US here, only applies to broadcast TV and it is a condition of getting their a frequency allotment from the government.

No, i am not saying that it is the same. I am saying that it would start as "We are just going after the tech companies" but if you give the government an inch they will take a mile. They would take that and expand upon the hate speech stuff you are already see around the world as an excuse to arrest whoever they wanted.

I am a free market person, so i think these sites are providing something to the market that people like or they wouldn't be there. If you wanted to rein them in, fine but you have to be careful how you word stuff or it gets pretty scary pretty quickly.

[gf000]

Hate speech laws exist in most of Europe and they are not abused at all. And it's not like media wouldn't already have a bunch of laws applied to it, even in the US - e.g. libel and the like. Surely you can slippery slope with that as well, right?

And the free market only works if there is a well-defined market with proper laws that are upheld. Otherwise it's a running competition where Meta/X just shoot every other competitor at the start and drive to the goal with a car. This has been known by Adam Smith already - you can't be a "free market person" while being happy with these giga-corporations trampling on laws left and right.

[direwolf20]

> they are not abused at all

In Germany, support for Palestine is considered hate speech since it's antisemitic.

[Bender]

I believe the context I was proposing would be at the scale of world-wide manipulation. Rigging elections and such. There is a Netflix documentary called "The Great Hack" that gets into what I am discussing though from the perspective of social media algorithm. This only gets more effective when people are chatting with an AI bot that mimics a human and they think is their significant other that laughs at all their jokes and strokes their ego.

I think your interpretation would be more along the line of making 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid's Tale a reality.

[trcarney]

Yeah i get that. I just hesitate to give any government even more power than they do now to silence people, which they would definitely use any law like that to do.

I will have to check that out, it sounds interesting. It was also pretty obvious how all the social media companies pushed the same narrative through COVID.

I don't like how these social networks and the media try to manipulate things but I don't think giving the government even more power will fix anything. It will probably make it worse. I think even if you had those laws on the books, you would still get manipulation through selective enforcement.

I think the only solution is education and individuals saying no to these platforms' and their algorithmic feeds. I think we are already seeing a growing movement towards people either not using social media or using it way less than they did previously. I know for me personally, I use X but only follow tech people i like and only look at the "following" tab. It is a much better experience than the "for you" tab

[direwolf20]

Few laws have bright lines. Can I be jailed for murder if I crash a car into someone? It depends greatly upon the specific circumstances.

[josteink]

> hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation?

Its the usual deal from the that crowd:

- when the left does it, it’s just them using their civil liberties

- when the right does it, its illegal manipulation, election interference, fascism and/or Russian disinformation.

It’s the same crowd which keeps using the phrase “our democracy”.

Behaviour like this really makes me wonder who they are, and who they deem not worthy to be included in “their” democracy.