ProPublica has obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.
Which is why our governments are trying to kill US Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that platforms cannot be held responsible for their content. (Although, if you want advertisers, it needs to be brand safe, and its this that does most of the censorship) – there are still some limits. You have to take down CSAM when someone posts it, and it’s generally a good idea to moderate spam and hate speech. And when dealing with billions of posts or comments per hour, it’s really hard to moderate at that scale.
Social media allows us to see the truth of what’s going on, e.g. what it’s really like on the Gaza Strip and what’s really being done by the IDF. Police shootings and unnecessary SWAT and DEA raids were a problem before the internet got going, but now when someone dies, BLM and ACLU get videos of the incident, and that fuels discontent and unrest, and to our elites, that’s a problem.
This is the very point of the Freedom of the Press in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to let people know when institutions aren’t serving the public, rather are serving something else, usually plutocratic interests.
All the disinformation, the enshittification of big social media platforms, and heck, Musk’s direct purchase of X are about neutering the power of the internet, which is how I ended up on Lemmy.
We can do something about this. But there needs to be tens or hundreds of millions of us on the same page. Doubtful.
We cannot organize at that scale without media, and its difficult to do even with media.
And our billionaires control the media.
We don’t need the media, we have the internet.
Exactly! I get all of my news from Facebook. /s
Touché! 😅
Which is why our governments are trying to kill US Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that platforms cannot be held responsible for their content. (Although, if you want advertisers, it needs to be brand safe, and its this that does most of the censorship) – there are still some limits. You have to take down CSAM when someone posts it, and it’s generally a good idea to moderate spam and hate speech. And when dealing with billions of posts or comments per hour, it’s really hard to moderate at that scale.
Social media allows us to see the truth of what’s going on, e.g. what it’s really like on the Gaza Strip and what’s really being done by the IDF. Police shootings and unnecessary SWAT and DEA raids were a problem before the internet got going, but now when someone dies, BLM and ACLU get videos of the incident, and that fuels discontent and unrest, and to our elites, that’s a problem.
This is the very point of the Freedom of the Press in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to let people know when institutions aren’t serving the public, rather are serving something else, usually plutocratic interests.
All the disinformation, the enshittification of big social media platforms, and heck, Musk’s direct purchase of X are about neutering the power of the internet, which is how I ended up on Lemmy.
It’s due for an update (I’ve gotten some grief about the block chain part and also that I used an LLM for some formatting initially) but…
I believe the solution is to transition to a new system, which they cannot tamper with and can’t control.
https://sturlabragason.github.io/blog/2023/07/04/Decentralized-Autonomous-Communities.html