Do you think an European Citizens’ Initiative to ban Twitter in the EU would be beneficial and have a possibility of being successful?
I’m sorry if this is not a good community for this question. If not please point me to one.
Do you think an European Citizens’ Initiative to ban Twitter in the EU would be beneficial and have a possibility of being successful?
I’m sorry if this is not a good community for this question. If not please point me to one.
I understand your concerns and effectivly if put it that way I’m advocating just that. I concur that this will put me in a bad spot.
Open communication is a very powerful tool especially in politics and academia. The thing is propaganda is also a powerful tool in politics. Propaganda and populism. With social media both of them became ubiquitous much to the detriment of the western democracies. The corona pandemic and all things about vaccination are a prime example of this trend.
While I still would very much like to have the ability to chat with someone from Australia or see pictures of people in Bali or share recipies with people of Norway, I see the downsides and am very worried of the trend that is emerging. The political discourse is rife with populism and the divided masses go into the fox holes for every matter be it as small as an atom and without any merit to argue about.
I have the feeling that compassion, understanding, and sympathy is going downhill and social media is giving a minority a voice to sound like a majority. I have the feeling that social media is exasperating all the negative emotions of the people. And to be honest that scares me.
So unless social media is heavily moderated - to battle e.g. hate speech and propaganda - I think a shutdown of every social media is needed.
But I have a question for you: Do you think of phpbb forums and blogs as open communication? If that’s the case, I’d say that I’m ambivalent of this issue since I wouldn’t mind blogs and forums since they are (typically) moderated.
P.S.: Reading all this again I see that it could be positive to give a minority a voice - like people with rare diseases so they could get better help, like repressed people and so on and so forth. But I still believe that sadly the cons outweigh the pros.
I think people are getting radicalised by more than social media. Podcast aren’t helping either in some cases. And if you live in a country that’s been flooded with drugs then I think people’s capacity to empathise and think critically is diminished.
Bulletin boards won’t solve this problem. They’re just another medium. They are just as much the target of the fire hose of falsehood that other social media platforms are. If mainstream social media is to be banned, and people rush to BBS, bulletin boards will no doubt have their bot activity ramped up and we would be back where we started. In other words, they will target people wherever they go.
If I thought scrapping social media would take us back to the simpler times we lived in before, I would be all for it. Put something about that idea doesn’t add up. It feels like there’s something missing. And if we do go into our individual, social-media free foxholes, how do we ever know when it’s safe to come out again?