this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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I think it's important for groups of people to be able to choose to ban propaganda and misinformation, because propaganda is not simply information being imparted, it's an entire ecosystem of deceptive methods to disseminate information and to alter your perception without you realizing.
If it were calling for the EU banning X solely because they don't like Musk's shitty personal opinions, I'd agree with you, but they cite the disinformation, misinformation, and outright propaganda that the platform is being used to spread, and I think that's perfectly valid.
Take 2 scenarios:
5 million actual people telling you that 'x' political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.
500 thousand actual people, plus 4.5 million bot accounts telling you that 'x' political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.
In reality, you don't even need the bot accounts to outnumber the real users if you control the algorithms that determine what people see, which is exactly the situation that X is in right now.
tl;dr This isn't about banning the viewpoints themselves, it's about banning a platform that deceptively alters visibility of viewpoints to manipulate people.
Tell that to Musk; X bans TONS of people over their viewpoints.
This isn't misinformation. Lemmy gives you skewed image of what political views are popular. Truth social does the exact same thing but from the opposite perspective. These are just groups of people self selecting onto platforms they most feel comfortable at. Having different political views to that of yours is not misinformation and platforms shouldn't be banned because of it.
Again, not in any way exclusive to twitter. Go take a look at lemmy.ml/modlog for example. These are both privately owned and the people running them are free to moderate however they desire. If you don't agree with it, then don't go there. That's what I do with .ml instances too.
Right, the other example is. The whole point is the difference between propaganda (the bots) and legitimate political sentiment (all real people). Given that Musk is actively choosing not to combat misinformation bots on his platform, it's fair to step in.
The other is the same thing said differently. Not misinformation either.
No, bots are not real people, so them masquerading as real people holding an opinion is, by definition, misinformation.
Name a social media platform without bots pretending to be real people.
Probably none. Now I'll name one that is large and influential, and isn't trying to combat the problem: X
To claim they're not trying to combat the problem is a lie. I used to get several bot followers a day around a year ago. Now I got none and I've lost a ton of subscribers because the bot accounts are getting deleted. The amount of bots was also the reason Elon wanted to turn down the deal to begin with because twitter lied about it.
Also, misinformation can be combated with community notes. An open source feature I'm not aware of any other social media platform having.