I just assume they’re under contract to surveill everyone.

Bummer that the voters never held anyone accountable for the ‘Patriot’ Act.

Hola Kitty.

Normally I wouldn’t pimp out my YT channel on Lemmy, but I made a video on this topic a few weeks ago: https://youtu.be/kklfzIxWJ7I

I hope some of these are new to you.

Not me, but it’s important to remember that Lemmy doesn’t just feed you an algo. You have to actually post things.

Yeah, when you’re on the global feed, posts fly by at a dizzying rate. Turning on slow mode makes it so that they stop auto-scrolling and only scroll when you click that you want to see more posts.

No doubt there are bad actors polluting communities on the Fediverse

Yeah, but there’s a huge difference: human moderation coupled with better curation tools. You can block a user or a whole instance, which quiets the Nazis pretty fast.

And the people doing the moderation are volunteers who actually give a shit.

Yup.

Though I thought of it as the Internet from 2010. No ads. No algo. All chronological. Once you figure out where the slow mode setting is and turn it off, Mastodon is the fucking best. I even pay a voluntary sub every month to help my instance host itself.

And it requires just enough setup (5-10 minutes tops) that the vast majority of the Internet is too lazy to use it, which keeps the quality high.

deleted by creator

Nice.

In his shoes I’d have done the same.

Correct.

It’s a cycle, and one that’s repeated many, many times.

Any camera/audio device with a wireless connection in your home is recording and storing your intimate moments.

And it will falsely identify people at even greater scale, because it is an imprecise and buggy tool.

Plus walking a dog in your neighborhood probably results in increased social interaction and less isolation, probably a plus for long-term health too.

The Electoral College

If we want to say we’re a democracy then we need to be a democracy.,

If you want to call yourself an artist, do the work yourself, Stephen.

You limpdick, no talent ass clown.

Came here to say something similar.

I’m a little tired of free speech absolutists looking at terrorist ideologies and concluding “No, man. That’s just an opinion.” as if we’re deciding which condiment we like most at a burger stand. Speech is regulated in some ways, and should be. (Look at Stolen Valor laws for an example.)

There is no ‘we’ in your hypothetical, unless you’re sitting on a billionaire fortune or a member of the Epstein class.

The only power you or I have is local, and this is a national problem.

When I was in art school our TA’s were making 20k a year but stilling on 50k - 100k in student debt. They’d all been to bigger, more prestigious art schools, and they were barely getting by. And each of these schools was churning out hundreds or thousands of students every year.

That convinced me to take a different direction in life. Glad I did. I’m still a working artist and make a good living with it as a side hustle, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with the uncertainty.

I support Age Verification

(Not to be confused with: I like Age Verification.)

For a few reasons.

• 1. The government already has all of your info and is spying on you from any device with a camera or microphone and wireless connection and without a warrant or meaningful accountability. We know this objectively because the FBI, desperate to look competent, inadvertently publicized footage obtained illegally in the Guthrie case that shouldn’t have existed.
• 2. It’s not 2014. We have enough information now to know definitively that social media (and increasingly, use of LLM’s) is harmful to children’s mental health, and that its negative effects are more pronounced on developing brains. (Though they affect adults as well.) These systems harm a person’s mental health and cognitive abilities, and while this bit is anecdotal, I know several teachers who struggle to teach kids because they’re no longer able to focus on anything for more than sixty seconds. (And the question: “Why do I have to know this if an AI can do it for me?” is becoming a common refrain.)
• 3. Private entities also already have your data. Go look yourself up on spokeo.com or some other background check site if you don’t think so. (And be sure to put in a request there to have your info deleted while you’re at it.) Or sub to a deletion service that will remove it for you.
• 4. People say that to cut kids off from social media will isolate them, but I grew up in a world where we only had email, chat rooms, snail mail, and land lines, and somehow we magically made friendly connections anyway. It’s a nonsense argument, and ignores that social media itself is isolating people to a much greater extent.

Essentially, I think Age Verification is the lesser of two huge evils, and I don’t expect the government in my country to force social media companies to disclose and change their algorithms to eliminate the harm being done to kids, so Age Verification becomes a necessary evil. (Hopefully a short-term one, but we’ll see.) The social media companies have too much money for any civil suit to meaningfully impact them financially.

I just use ‘Hide Post’ liberally.

Most people do.

Usually it’s Taylor Swift.