• @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      No one with power gives a shit and congress is just showboating. Maayyyybe they’ll fine him .001% of his worth.

      Is a single child’s life worth a billion dollars? What about 10 children? 100?

      Not to them. Until business leaders are held accountable for the crimes that are allowed to happen, nothing is going to change. And I doubt that will ever happen. People are far too easy to bribe.

      How many deaths would you all be willing to leave unpunished for a million? What about a billion? One, at least. Don’t lie. Think of all the lives you could save with that money. Exactly. Now we’re all accomplices.

      • @CleoTheWizard
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        011 months ago

        I don’t think I’d be willing to overlook the deaths of young people for an amount of money. The reason your comment seems reasonable is because a lot of us need money to survive in this hellscape. People in power don’t need the bribes. Yet they take them anyways.

        Make no mistake of how deplorable these people are. They don’t overlook deaths to help people or pay off their car or eat this month. They do it so they can buy stocks that they unfairly trade and then make millions for a third home and sports car. Would the average person do this? No because the average person isn’t insane and doesn’t want to be a politician.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 months ago

          Greed is greed regardless if you have money already or not. And also you’re a lair. You have a price.

          • @CleoTheWizard
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            111 months ago

            Weird assertion to make. I don’t feel that my life would be improved by having unimaginable amounts of money. Would I like enough to comfortably retire? Yep. Would I trade someone’s life to retire right now? No. Other than that I wouldn’t really care to have more money.

            This is why rich people are psychopaths. It isn’t normal to put greed over peoples lives. But it’s also what the US mentality encourages which is why you think I’m wrong.

            • @[email protected]
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              111 months ago

              Anyone’s life? What about a billionaire. You get all their money, to do whatever with. And they drop dead.

              • @CleoTheWizard
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                011 months ago

                You’re asking a different question. If I were to want them to die, it wouldn’t be because I want their money. It would be because I view their lives as a moral negative which causes incalculable harm.

                If obtaining their money was a side benefit of their death, I would spend almost all of it promoting and enacting humanism. I really don’t need what they have.

    • Flying Squid
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      1011 months ago

      Does it matter? Do you think this will have any effect? This is the yearly ‘drag the social media CEOs in front of congress and berate them’ showboat. Literally yearly. And nothing changes.

  • @[email protected]
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    2711 months ago

    A day later, Biden announced, “If you harm an American, we will respond”, and dropped missiles on more than 80 targets across Syria and Iraq. Sure bro, just so long as the Americans aren’t teenagers with smart phones.

    Who wrote this??? Sure bro, that sounds like some social media comment. And why use a retaliation bombing as a positive example??? That’s just absurd. Bombings are never good and can always wound or kill innocent people. I get the message social media has negative effects on teenagers but by god the writing style is just braindead.

  • @_sideffect
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    1311 months ago

    No one with money cares, and no one who wants to be the guy with money cares either

    It’s us. The ones without the money, that care. And we CAN make a change but we don’t know how.

    Not yet.

    • @[email protected]
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      1311 months ago

      And we CAN make a change but we don’t know how.

      Start with “stop using their software.” If they have no data to sell, their company is worthless, but the people you claim care so much won’t stop. I have heard so many excuses as to why people “need” social media its maddening, and yet somehow I manage to survive without sites like facebook, etc. I am only on lemmy as an anonymous contributor, and if I feel like things are headed towards where they are with other social media I will drop it like a hot potato. Delete your accounts, and stop giving them data.

      • jherazob
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        811 months ago

        The problem of course is that the vast mass of consumers won’t do this, it’s only us weirdos

      • @[email protected]
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        511 months ago

        Reducing the supply increases the value. Create data, just make it worthless. You’ll be doing your part. If enough people piss in the pool, it will eventually reach a concentration that nobody wants to touch.

        • @[email protected]
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          211 months ago

          That would work if you had control over what data they collected. At this point they are collecting data that you don’t get to see, and you have no say in what they do with it. I realize people signed up for this, but I think they have also been duped or at least denied the ability to even understand what gets collected. You can’t pee into a pool you aren’t allowed to even get near.

  • @RealFknNito
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    811 months ago

    “I’m not responsible for the wellbeing of my children, big tech is!” This kind of shit is how we get forced into having to use government IDs to use the internet. Some states already do it for porn. The danger isn’t big tech, it’s harassment that should be taken care of offline.

    You want to regulate them go for it but what if they go for the internet as a whole and not just social media? Then what?

    • @theangryseal
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      011 months ago

      OH, SO, stalker calls me and tells me to end myself you mean I can’t get paid by Verizon? Bullshit! I should be protected. The KIIIIIDDDS should be protected!

      Someone uses a bulletin board at a post office to post a picture of my kid with captions on it that cause my kid to feel depressed, I WANT LAWS! The person who is in charge of the post office? Straight to jail! Manufacturer of the bulletin board? YUP, prison! Company who made the paper? Everyone who works there should be locked up!

      Now, back to reality.

      Wherever humans can be social, there will be bad humans using that to hurt other humans. You’re right. It should start with the parents. We didn’t ban kids from using telephones and television. Some parents did. That’s their business.

      Facebook should do the best they can to enforce their policies about minors being on the platform, but billions of people use Facebook. Billions. They can’t possibly be responsible for all of it.

      I don’t like Facebook as a company, at all. Still though, we should do better to handle our homes and stop counting on outsiders to do it all for us.

      • @RealFknNito
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        611 months ago

        I don’t like Facebook, Twitter, any of those sites either nor do I use them but what I can’t get over is that people demand action and I haven’t seen any suggestions. Just a demand for change. The only thing that comes to mind in censoring messages/tweets but wow that would be a great way to kill the site.

        Adults want a free, open experience for themselves but also want a safe, enclosed space for kids. In the same spot. So how do you differentiate between an adult and a kid reliably without an ID?

        You can’t. And it’s why there will never be a solution. Kids will lie to get the adult freedom and then suffer the consequences be it mental or otherwise.

        • @[email protected]
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          311 months ago

          Letting your kid on the Internet without supervision is akin to giving them unlimited blank plane tickets. Yes they could experience some very enriching event but could and most likely will be left hurt and traumatized in an unfamiliar place.

          • @RealFknNito
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            211 months ago

            But that kind of argument can go back to every generation for every sufficient advancement of media. “Without supervision your kids could watch something traumatizing on TV” i.e. horror movies, and I’m sure the same extends to the radio and even books. The world can be traumatizing but it isn’t the world’s responsibility to have kid-safe barriers on everything just in case.

            • @[email protected]
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              311 months ago

              That’s my point. It’s your kids not mine. Not my job to care for them irl and not my job to care for them on the Internet.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    211 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Last week’s grilling of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley Übermenschen was a classic of the genre: front pages, headlines, and a genuinely stand-out moment of awkwardness in which he was forced to face victims for the first time ever and apologise: stricken parents holding the photographs of their dead children lost to cyberbullying and sexual exploitation on his platform.

    A coroner in Britain found that 14-year-old Molly Jane Russell, “died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content” – which included Instagram videos depicting suicide.

    Yet Silicon Valley’s latest extremely disruptive technology, generative AI, was released into the wild last year without even the most basic federally mandated product testing.

    Last week, deep fake porn images of the most famous female star on the planet, Taylor Swift, flooded social media platforms, which had no legal obligation to take them down – and hence many of them didn’t.

    Could there be any possible downside to releasing this untested new technology – one that enables the creation of mass disinformation at scale for no cost – at the exact moment in which more people will go to the polls than at any time in history?

    To understand America’s end-of-empire waning dominance in the world, its broken legislature and its capture by corporate interests, the symbolism of a senator forcing Zuckerberg to apologise to bereaved parents while Congress – that big white building stormed by insurrectionists who found each other on social media platforms – does absolutely nothing to curb his company’s singular power is as good as any place to start.


    The original article contains 1,183 words, the summary contains 264 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @[email protected]
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    011 months ago

    This is silly. It’s not any one company’s job to parent your children.

    It wouldn’t hurt for Facebook to provide the tools to better handle the situation but it’s not like Zuck or anyone at Facebook directly participated in any of this.

    • @[email protected]
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      611 months ago

      The Facebook whistleblower said that there was indication that the algorithm was promoting eating disorders to teenage girls. When it was reported to the execs, the reaction of the execs was like “yeah but what kind of ad numbers are we getting on that content?” and decided not to change anything.

      Sure I agree people shouldn’t let social media algorithms raise their children. But that doesn’t mean social media companies should be given carte blanche to behave like psychopaths. They can and should adjust their algorithms when harmful content is being promoted even while parents should be doing more to monitor their children’s activity online. We can do both!

      But I think they should probably change the CDA so social media companies are liable for the content their algorithms promote. It’s actually a removal of some regulation, that’s what the silicon valley tech bros want, right? Less regulation?

    • Jackie's Fridge
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      611 months ago

      It’s not their job, but they can do it with very little effort and they don’t. Like it or not, children are on Facebook, and if Meta can slap you within 3 seconds of posting a nipple, they can remove content that actually IS harmful.

  • snownyte
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    011 months ago

    This whole article is just golden with contradictions.

  • Flying Squid
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    -611 months ago

    I said this in another thread- Zuckerberg doesn’t care about dead children because he doesn’t have any children and the only things he cares about are things that affect him personally.