Australian Senate, last sitting of the year. No idea when the Social Media Ban debate is kicking off.

If anyone’s keen, feel free to give a live run-down of anything interesting in this thread.

(sorry about all the edits, just trying to get a decent thumbnail: elevated photo of the Australian Senate)

    • Zagorath
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      3 days ago

      In Labor’s defense (as loath as I am to defend them for this), many parents seem to be concerned less with the content of the messages than with the amount of time their children are spending obsessing over it. Which is much harder for them to control on a phone app than in-game console chat.

      Still a parenting issue IMO and not a matter for the legislature.

      • NaevaTheRat [she/her]@vegantheoryclub.org
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        3 days ago

        It’s a moral panic. When I was a kid sitting close to the TV would make you blind.

        I hate this dodgy piece of legislation. I want socmed regulated to hell, like no non-curated recommendations that aren’t transparent filters like ‘new’ or ‘top votes’, full responsibility as a publisher for the content of messages etc. I just don’t see how a slapshod reactionary ban is going to do much useful for society broadly.

        I feel like the platforms will remain just as addictive and cruel, kids will just start using them later, kids will get around bans to use unregulated shithole sites, and people will wash their hands of understanding the actually nuanced problem of kids and screen time.

        Meanwhile the police state expands. Cool and good.

        • Zagorath
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          2 days ago

          full responsibility as a publisher for the content of messages

          We really don’t want this. America’s Section 230 is a really good legal framework, and it’s very important. Because if you didn’t have that sort of protection, it would become almost impossible for smaller competitors to enter the market. The likes of Facebook and Twitter should be made more liable than they are for misinformation that survives even after being reported—and for continuing to host individuals who have repeatedly been seen sharing disinformation. But as a default assumption, platforms should not be liable for content users shared. Unless your goal is to kill off all platforms that aren’t already big enough to easily comply.

          • NaevaTheRat [she/her]@vegantheoryclub.org
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            2 days ago

            Why do you want more social media companies? Ideally the industry is regulated out of existence, at least in its current form.

            What social good is served should not be in the hands of companies mining data and advertising. Forums, self hosted federated systems, and chat rooms were/are all vastly superior in terms of social good:harm ratio.

            Making it completely unprofitable and impossible to comply with under current mass signup sell ads models would be the point.

            • Zagorath
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              2 days ago

              We’re on social media right now. It’s not the big for-profit guys who lose out with that sort of legislation. It’s smaller guys, including those run for the fun of it.

              • NaevaTheRat [she/her]@vegantheoryclub.org
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                2 days ago

                Yeah, and federates socmed can easily assume responsibility for messages by not having mass sign up and moving to a trusted users, largely self hosted base. Lemmy is designed around replacing reddit with all the massive flaws of that.

                I mean tell me you think lemmy.world is contributing to the world haha.

                you could easily assume legal responsibility for what you published under a slightly different model where you only hosted your own content/the content of trusted users.

                • Zagorath
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                  2 days ago

                  I mean tell me you think lemmy.world is contributing to the world haha.

                  I literally don’t know, because federation issues over the last 12 months or so have meant I never see their content in my feed. But before that? Yes, it definitely was. Certainly more than ML and hexbear. Or Reddit.

                  • NaevaTheRat [she/her]@vegantheoryclub.org
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                    2 days ago

                    Really? you think that it’s on the whole good and wouldn’t be better if replaced by a system of smaller, more topic focused networks where administrators have less access to user data and less ability to control conversation? Where infrastructure was less vulnerable to single point failure?

                    Do you remember what irc, xmpp, and bbs’s were like? Or were they before your time. One angry admin on lemmy.world could compromise ~170k users and they’re large enough that they could also distribute malicious files to like half a million computers. That is so obviously not good I feel completely baffled that you don’t see the problem.