So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

Have you been to 4chan? It's an open sewer. Everything requires some degree of regulation or it turns into that.

Regulation is no good without teeth. So yeah if platforms don't comply with even the most basic common sense EU norms then absolutely they should be hit with repercussions.

We've had our experiment with the internet and it's failed. A far right billionaire agitator specifically bought a social media as a platform for his toxic far right **** under the guise of performative "free speech". And guess what? It's turned into an open sewer of hateful content, rammed with bots.

So yeah, the agenda is to enforce actual regulation that does something.

The Guardian did a very good experiment where they set up a load of accounts and tracked how the algorithm aggressively pushed far right content.

I don't miss X at all. It's truly a hateful cesspit now.

Edit: It was Sky News:

https://news.sky.com/story/how-sky-news-investigated-xs-algorithm-for-political-bias-13463916

Also worth remembering within the last 6 months, grok was in the wild and capable of generating CSA material, they were actively avoiding guard rails. The availability of the platform should be questioned when Musk is happy to outright flout the law.

I see the internet as being a nation of sorts. In the morning, if I try to travel to any country, I will need a passport. This will allow Customs to know who I am and where I come from. I think that it should be very clear where users come from and each nation should be responsible for administering a digital passport. While they can still preserve the principles of pseudo anonymisation, it is still important that we can independently verify that first each poster is a real and verifiable person and secondly, we should know what country they come from, so that we can detect bad-faith arguments and potentially foreign meddling in domestic politics. It should be an international collective effort to audit and verify regularly that the people are abiding by these rules and that the passport type ID corresponds to a real person in that place. Techno-libertarianism just doesn’t work. We are seeing the consequences in the destruction of democracy and societies. Would you like to live in a society where everybody wore a balaclava and nobody knew who other people were…

Again, there is this feeling of impunity, because people can access any sort of service on the web, including the abhorrent generation of CSAM, so long as they have an internet connection, that is not even always traceable. The real issue is that you can go about your business online in a completely unverified manner. People would think twice about generating CSAM if they thought that their identity could be derived. The original techno-liberalism has shown its extremely harmful limitations to a society

You are misunderstanding terms and they have specific meanings. If you read about the history of the internet, the tech titans founded it on the principles of neo-libertarianism. This is essentially a free-for-all, do what you want model.

why do we need passports? They could be deemed Orwellian? Moreover, when issuing passports why, even in America is this not privatised? It is done at state level by governments. This probably should serve as a model for the internet.

I can go to O’Connell St and start shouting my head off about whatever. It is the fact that I am identifiable that stops me from doing this. Equally, people are generating CSAM because they know that there is no consequence because it cannot be traced back to them. Finally, we have lots of social medias of Irish citizens flooded with context designed to destabilise our very democracy by nefarious foreign actors and we do not even realise that it is happening.

Freedom should always be sought, but we must accept its limitation. If everybody was completely free in society, then I could kill another person, ending their freedom. Freedom only works if it does not impinge on the freedom of others. For the fairest distribution of freedom in society, it has to come with certain restrictions.

attack the point, not the person. What is your rationale for saying it is stupid?

Not going to happen. While I don't want an Orwellian-style surveillance system, lamenting sites like this is no reason to encourage one.

The solution is to update the law to treat these godless abominations as publishers, not the neutral platforms they purport to be. That means holding them to account for the content they choose to host. I'd also be all for a tax on each individual user. That'd sort out the bots if nothing else.

The problem is that they will always keep spouting up new sites to get around the regulation. And there has to be genuinely significant consequences for breaching these laws. And it has to be enforceable

The technocrats wield way too much power and nothing will rein them in. They now operate as free-agents, immune from the safeguards of the free-market. Any attempts to curtail will be met by a vicious campaign on the platforms and media outlets, denouncing overreach. They control the message. And any politician will be reluctant to full on attack them, because they can start an effective campaign against the campaign and find support from another politician

The EU would be absolutely vilified if they tried to introduce that law and lobby groups will prevent it.

We cannot even get legislation passed to prevent minors from accessing social-media, despite the rapidly accumulating evidence of its impact on their health and wellbeing.

I wish that your model would work and that we could force them into submission. But they hold the power

I hope that you are right and I am wrong. I am an eternal pessimist and current affairs over the past decade seems to justify that stance