this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
239 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
68723 readers
3793 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm glad this is finally being looked at because I've been saying this for years and I feel like the vast majority doesn't realize how bad this is.
If you look at social media use and the rise of the far right over the last 15 years, they pretty much go hand in hand. Sure, that isn't proof for anything, but it's alarming and needs to be studied further.
In Germany, we have safeguards that prevent a single media outlet to gain too much power over controlling the public opinion. We have this for TV stations, news papers etc. Just not social media. Because social media wasn't even on the horizon when this law was put in place.
I think it's insane that we just let foreign profit driven companies steer the public opinion and discourse in our society and we finally have to start to heavily regulate them.
Correlation is not causation. This is Statistics 101... I can point to other things that are correlated with the rise in the far right. For example, centralization, the increase in monopolies, the number of years since World War II, the average temperature of the earth, the number of years into the new millennium.
Anyway, when I read your comment on the whole what I actually see is that your concerned that social media is too centralized and therefore ripe for abuse. That's vastly different from saying that social media itself is inherently going to be abused.
Corellation is not causation but in this case it is very suspicious and studies like these show that there might be causation That's why I said it's not proof but needs to be studied further.
And yes, of course I mean centralized, profit driven social media. But that is the overwhelming majority of social media.