Just as the original Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need fundamental protections for our digital communities from corporate control and surveillance capitalism.

The rights are:

1. Privacy & Security
2. Ownership
3. Interoperability
4. Algorithmic Control
5. Self-Governance

It could identify when they were feeling worthless or helpless or like a failure, and [Meta] would take that information and share it with advertisers

the company was letting advertisers know when the teens were depressed so they could be served an ad at the best time. As an example, she suggested that if a teen girl deleted a selfie, advertisers might see that as a good time to sell her a beauty product as she may not be feeling great about her appearance. They also targeted teens with ads for weight loss when young girls had concerns around body confidence

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32280023

Three young children huddle in front of a camera, cross-legged and cupping their hands. “Please support me. We are very poor,” says a boy, staring down the lens.

They appear to be in a mud-brick hut in Afghanistan, living in extreme poverty. But their live stream is reaching viewers in the UK and worldwide – via TikTok Live.

For hours, they beg for virtual “gifts” that can later be exchanged for money. When they get one, they clap politely. On another live stream, a girl jumps up and shouts: “Thank you, we love you!” after receiving a digital rose from a woman in the US, who bought it from TikTok for about 1p. By the time it’s cashed out it could be worth less than a third of a penny.

TikTok says it bans child begging and other forms of begging it considers exploitative, and says it has strict policies on users who go live.

But an Observer **investigation has found the practice widesp

Yaaaass

Excellent article by @[email protected] highlighting how Musk draws on experiences from Twitter in his ongoing destruction of the US state aparatus.

Behind paywall, but the author shared an excellent thread on Mastodon containing large parts of the article as attached screenshots.

Edit: This seems to have been caused by some sort of algorithm censoring certain trending hashtags, not bootlicking admins. More info here: https://floss.social/@admin/114041922033317834

In a reminder that you don't have to be a billionaire to be a bootlicker, and that one needs to remain critical also while on the Fediverse, floss.social is blocking anti-fascist hashtags.

[I have chosen to redact this toot - the user deleted their post in response to admins clarifying what happened, so out of respect I remove this copy as well. The gist was that users could not post toots containing #antifa or #noAfD]

https://floss.social/@OddDev/114040886

I realize this might be slightly outside of the topic of this community ("Dedicated to antisocial behavior of social media corporations"), but I think it's important enough to nevertheless be of relevance.

With apologies for my bootlicker comment. Though we need to remain critical on the Fediverse, th

Most online debate is actively harmful to our thinking. Every hour spent arguing on Twitter is an hour we could have spent reading a book, writing an essay, or having a genuine discussion in a better environment.

The Internet promised us a marketplace of ideas. Instead, we built a gladiatorial arena where ideas go to die—time to find better places to think.

When was the last time you participated in an election for an online group chat or sat on a jury for a dispute about a controversial post? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences have spread far beyond online spaces themselves. Feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.

I found this to be a great write-up on how social media enables fascism by providing a sense of false agency: Posting online we feel like we are doing something, and we end up wasting our time shouting in a void rather than actually resisting.

Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like “fighting disinformation” and “accountability.” While these efforts are admirable, the past few years have changed my own internal calculus. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act. More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.

At a moment when Zuckerberg's focus is clearly on sucking up to the Trump administration, Instagram goes the extra mile to block hashtags like #democrat and #democrats from Instagram.

Officially it's a mistake, with some tool from the company giving the following statement:

We're aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it.

Despite their claim to affect "across the political spectrum", the "problem" seems to affect both #democrat and #democrats, but neither the hashtags #republican nor #republicans.

Here's a video of said behaviour documented by a PeerTube user (@[email protected]):

https://peertube.doesstuff.social/w/f8c84bb5-3dec-45a1-b833-3b3f0736c4e8

In an update to its hate speech policy on Tuesday, spotted first by The Independent, the apps' parent company Meta deleted numerous clauses banning specific derogatory statements about protected groups, while adding detailed exceptions for anti-trans speech.