I suggest watching the video, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo but the article has an OK summary.
Also a Mastodon shout-out in the video.
I suggest watching the video, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo but the article has an OK summary.
Also a Mastodon shout-out in the video.
I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.
On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.
I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.
Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.
As much as anyone may dislike it, it’s a form of private journalism, private opinion, and private art, and almost all the content itself is free speech. You have to regulate the medium as harmful, very specifically described functionality. What is not protected is stuff like infinite scrolling, but something like comments and voting are likely also protected as speech.
I think Mozilla’s controversial “Deplatforming is not enough” lays out a better strategy for “the algorithm” problem to me.
Having big tech be able to work in secret to pick anf choose what content isnt allowed and then being super charged by the state to do it for them as well just doesnt sit well with me
While I don’t disagree with the transparency Mozilla is advocates, I think it fails to address the underlying problem then tries to compensate by picking and choosing winners (which arguably is the same as the underlying problem). The underlying problem is the ad-incentivized watchtime algorithm, which isn’t a technical issue but a financing one.
I’ve been an advocate of endowments for a long time, but this is just another area where they’d be ideal. They supply a small steady income to support a relatively cheap product. As the website grows you can either do temporary ads to grow the endowment or ask for donations. Either way, it’s not that hard to fund operations this small. Add in federated systems like lemmy and each individual operation is even smaller and cheaper.
Heck, universities who are already accustom to dealing with endowments would be ideal places to host lemmy instances. I can definitely imagine offering to donate 10k to an endowment dedicated to hosting a lemmy and mastadon instance with open to registration to students, staff, and alumni. Maybe coordinate with the computer science and IT folks. Allow some percentage of the endowment income to go to “salary overhead” while the rest just funds the server. Point out that the university would essentially be creating the perfect route to solicit donations and they might do it themselves… Honestly, I’m probably gonna flesh this idea out and email the people at my university because it’s just too perfect of a solution.
I don’t think so. She said she wants to make them unable to continue with their business like they did before, with regulations. Just not outright censorship, but instead go fight their data harvesting, decapitating their business strategy.
yeah, the root issue is on their business strategy, the brainrot is just the conclusion of several years spent on optimizing engagement