Non americans of lemmy, would you support a ban on american social media on your country?

Danish person here.

Yes. Ban Google, Meta, X and all the rest. Let's use a bit of EU funds to fund a privacy respecting social media that is NOT controlled by the US or China.

Considering they're being actively and without denial used to fuck us over, yes. I'm not going to play the censorship card. The US is now no better than Russia, there's no reason we should treat them better. US platforms are now literally an offensive weapon, Musk already started riots over fake news and is directly and openly meddling in our politics. This shit needs to stop. Just like we blocked RT news, this needs to go.

It's in the same vein like Trump threatening military action against Greenland. Trump is literally committing extortion under the treat of war. The US is an actively hostile nation that targets everyone including their own allies. Like what the actual fuck? How did we get here? We need to decouple from the US as soon as possible. I'd go as far as compare the US to a ravid animal on the international stage, I'm absolutely mortified by what's going on.

Not really. I think the whole internet should be accessible to everyone.

Do I think Americans are often obnoxious online? Yes.

Do I know for a fact their big tech corporations are equally as evil as the Chinese ones, no matter how much their propaganda tries to convince me China is worse? Definitely.

Is Xwitter a blight on society that only got worse since an out-and-out fascist bought it? Of course it is.

But closing ourselves off from the world is not the solution.

What I would support would be stricter regulations on data collection and algorithmic manipulation, because those things are bad no matter who is doing it.

I would support heavier tariffs on foreign big tech, because if they're going to use our people as a resource, they should at least pay up so we can put that money towards taking care of our own.

And I would support a government program to incentivise home-grown technological solutions, because digital sovereingty is a concern, and the only solution is having our own shit.

I’m American, and I would support a ban of American social media in my country.

I’m an American and I think America social media should be banned.

That is, closed-source, centralized for-profit social media platforms that will inevitably devolve into ads and data collection machines should be banned.

The problem isn’t the country that hosts the platform. The problem is the incentive structure for social media to profit off its users.

Platforms that are either FOSS, run by non-profits, or pay-to-use don’t have an intrinsic incentive to exploit its users and can, in theory, be run ethically and sustainably.

For-profit social media, certainly. I don't trust it anymore. Astroturfing, data-harvesting, I feel like they're all made to fuck us over in some way.

Dude I'm an American and I would support a ban on American socially media in my country.

Twitter is not a social media anymore, it is a propaganda platform. There are regulations for media in civilized places. Twitter does not respect the law, thus it shall be banned.

If it were up to me it would be seized, because there is a public interest to this platform. Seizing it to make the algorithm transparent, fair and legal.

As an American please say yes. Because apparently they are all nazis now.

As a Canadian, yes please. Their culture infiltrates ours so much that there are some people who believe in the American superiority and don't understand that we're two different peoples, with very different approaches to how we should live and treat others. Obviously, we Canadians are not perfect, and we have more in common than not but it's disheartening to hear Canadians (including people in my own inner circle) view our country as nothing but the USA's little bitch.

I get the world is sliding right, and our political pendulum definitely swings. But I worry that in the efforts to acknowledge the harms that we've done (and currently do) to people in our own country, that the backlash to those policies and acknowledgments will cause us to lose things that I'm proud of and freedoms that I enjoy.

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have fucked up public discourse. They reward rage-bait content, they're addictive by design, encourage tribalism, and they use an opaque algorithm to promote/demote posts. They silently censor ideas and content. Meta censors news in Canada.

Zuckerberg and Musk appear to have political aims they are using their platforms to promote.

Why would I want that? I get the slippery slope argument, but they are a slippery slope already.

I am American and I would support a ban on American social media in my country.

I didn't need a ban. They enshitified and I moved on. All Meta apps (including WhatsApp) gone. X/Twitter gone. LinkedIn gone. Reddit gone.

Now I use Lemmy, Mastodon/BlueSky, and Signal.

An MP I really admire in Ontario is pushing for Elections Canada to protect our electoral process from the Grand Twit's interference, so that's something. I'd prefer a ban.

Even though the Proud crowd are big operators in Canada, banning Yankee social media would maybe help lower the ragebait volume a bit. Whatever makes a dent.

I wouldn't support it because I don't like censorship.

Absolutely. It's basically just allowing American tech companies to decide who's leading the country. FrP (furthest right of the mainstream parties) is set to win the next election and it's not because they have good ideas. It's because of propaganda.

Also, the person you elected has threatened an EU member state with war, so there's that.

I heard there is talk of a projects for the EU to increase its digital sovereignty. Now would be a great time for those projects to come to fruition.

As for me, if this means that there'll be an EU-wide reboot of Hyves, I'd be thrilled. Extra so if, on the back-end, it works on a Federated system.

Chilean here, yes.

Well, EU is not a country, but yeah, they should either comply with our rules (which currently neither one of them does), or get fucked out of here.

I hope some local, ActivityPub based service would appear in the vacuum.

I didn't use to, and I am generally against limiting access to any sort of source of information. But the last few years have convinced me otherwise - the owners of these platforms are willing to destroy our way of life for their own personal benefit. Fuck Zuck. Fuck Musk. Fuck all of these charlatans and conmen.

Edit: oh, and the EU isn't a country (yet), it's a supranational organization which presents unique challenges in terms of policy. Def not a country

I know I'm not the target of this question, but as American I'd like to see the reverse. I wanna see more non American social media in the US.

No. But a ban on algorithms would be nice.

I’m americana and would definitely support a ban of American Social media in my country.

In it's current form? Absolutely. Optimizing for anger is not doing us any favours

absolutely. here's the petition for EU: https://www.ban-x-in.eu/

i live in Brazil, and would be 100% down with X being banned, even Instagram or Facebook if necessary.

I am actively avoiding US social media accounts, blocking US politics channels and stepping away from a number of US-based services altogether.

If the government doesn't do it, I'll do as much of it as I can. Voting with your wallet is some US anarchocapitalist nonsense, but if my disgust removes incentives I'll take it as a side benefit.

Yeah. It would help usher in a new era of social media and communities. Fb, insta, tiktok, reddit have killed smaller communities and websites. And I miss them. Internet needs to die to be born again.

I am so tempted, so tempted to write yes. But no, at the end of the day, I don't think speech should be regulated like that. If we as a society don't learn to distinguish truth from bullshit, democracy can't survive.

EU absolutely is a country.

Also, fuck you.

Yes, absolutely.

It isn't even for social media's general toxicity. It is because these Us companies are behaving so badly. Illegally. They are now openly provoking their own ban, but they think the EU is so toothless that they can get away with anything.

No. That wouldn't solve anything. What is needed are very harsh punishments for companies abusing their power / position, instead of the slap on the wrist they currently are.

I'm all for free speech but when it's heavily skewed and unfairly moderated I support a ban. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Xitter should just be removed.

I would love that! Deleting my Facebook account would cripple my social life and ability to keep up with events in the community. It's the only thing keeping me in. Giving everyone a reason to find other places to organize would be amazing!

I am a big proponent of free speech and the merits of free access to information.

Or at least I was. I've always known that bad actors with control over your information input can do an awful lot of damage. I used to think free and open access was the best choice. But seeing how a few companies captured the entire social media environment and have swollen to near-total monopolies and then how those same companies have shown themselves to be bad actors with malicious intent I have changed my opinion. Banning them would help slow down the flow of info sewage into the EU and encourage more competing companies to form. We need that since the EU can't break up American companies. So if new companies were ever to be competitive we need to remove the giants from the pool and commit to breaking up any that get too big.

I'm definitely on board with ban of popular social media (from any country) that tracks me and collects my data even when I'm in toilet, let alone my search history on a day to day basis and sells it to others to generate it's revenue and shoves its own agenda as the result on my feed. I want something like 4chan but a little more mature in terms of audience and no modspreading like on Reddit.

Basically, Lemmy is good. Nice middle ground. Reddit like approach to content that I wanna view with other like-minded people whilst not being pushed off from the dinner table just because I wanna eat something else. Besides Reddit and fediverse, not many platforms allow that unless you completely start over with your algorithm.

I wanna be able to see and be part of whatever I chose to ignore after I feel like eating that said food tomorrow, or the week after or the next year. If any social platform provides that, to the entire world, then they should be supported no matter what. Sadly platforms like Lemmy are not that popular even though they offer almost exactly what I just asked for.

As a Brazilian, yes. I doubt anything halfway decent would show up instead, which probably sounds better

I think regulation would be the proper course of action, here. I mean neither do we ban American cars in Europe. We just say they have to play by our rules or they can't do business here. So I wouldn't support a ban based on country of origin. But regulation what they can and can not do.

I believe censorship is harmful to civilization.

Depends. Not all of them are bad. Take pinterest for instance, it's harmless. And youtube is too valuable to lose. But X? Yes, X should go.

Americans can't want social media banned too?

No, but that's not to say I wouldn't be delighted to see Xitter and Meta burn. Ultimately, though, we need laws that require transparency and impartiality on the part of the owners, similar to the rules we have for television news outlets, and those rules need enforcing in no uncertain terms. It doesn't matter, then, if the service is native or foreign.

No, because regulation works; or can work. We can require them to follow our laws because they're invested in our market too.

There are regular fines for GDPR violations for example; it just feels like our checks and fines need to happen faster and harder.

China regulates their platforms like TikTok differently in their own country than outside. We can require the same.

At least anything that has anything to do with Trump or Muskyboi, yes.

naah fuck that, I think the internet should go back to being as unregulated and wild as possible

Yes. Current oligarch-owned USA considers Europe an enemy because of its liberal and leftist values. Look how they've already turned us, famously allergic to fascism, towards fascism once again.

We can't rely on enemy services in a cold war. We can't review closed-source code to be free from back doors for spying and sabotage, or black-box feed shaping algorithms to not have bias and shadow-censorship for mass manipulation.

EU must ban all US-made smart products for its own safety. All closed-source software and electronics that can be used for strategic manipulation and sabotage – Google, Apple, Amazon, all of it.

They are in every European citizen's pockets, desktops, and server rooms. They know way too much about us, and have every opportunity to manipulate us:

• Make the most intelligent people never stumble upon important information on social media.
• Make the most compatible people never meet each other on dating sites.
• Make the most valuable people never find career-making jobs on work-centered social media.
  '

Black box recommendation algorithms in the control of one country enables the slow, strategic destruction of Europe by billions of unnoticeable manipulations. CIA has done this shit before, and now it's being given more power than ever to do so.

China banned that shit, and China has been successful partly for its detachment from US far-right propaganda. They have also made subtle mass-manipulation difficult by making their own services.

We have functional, clunky open-source software that could easily be fitted for any purpose with the money we waste propping up foreign monopolies sabotaging us. Europe has taken a huge risk. I suspect bribery.

Absolutely not. I'll rather choose for myself which content I consume than have the government choose it for me.

no, i support an open internet. censorship is stupid and generally easily worked around. which usually leads to an escalation to make it more and more difficult, until you have chinese-style internet.

I probably still wouldnt support banning any specific social media, or social media from a specific country. What needs to happen is some fucking regulation for algorithms, moderation, hate speech and misinformation. And then you can ban any social media that doesnt comply

I don't believe censorship is the solution there. It can be used for good, but more often than not it's the kind of system that can be massively misused to silence inconvenient information.

The best solution is teaching people to think critically early on so they learn to question information and seek both sides of the story before drawing conclusions and avoid confirmation bias. Don't silence misinformation, teach the tools to render misinformation worthless.

everything except skype and mabye YouTube

I sure hope everyone who wants to ban these things actually has plans to create their own content or Lemmy's gonna become quite empty.

Not a blanket ban no, but if they constantly break our laws then yes. And I'm perfectly ok with laws that some would decry as censorship (anti-hate-speech, fact-checking) or claim makes business impossible (strict interpretations of GDPR).

UK. yes. as well as US news, import export.

Fuck no. The Americans provide 90% of our entertainment and they're actually fun people to interact with and chat with (the ones that aren't wearing MAGA hats that is). What am I gonna go without Americans on social media? Talk about fucking Table Mountain? Join the Europeans in looking down on the USA for everything and always acting like their own shit doesn't stink?

Fuck that, I'd start using VPNs.

Slight tangent but I have never until recent days considered social media companies to be American. I know on reflection they are but as a Scot I had used FB, Twitter and Insta for years without ever thinking they were American social media, just social media cos all my friends and family were there.

I’ve only retained Insta now, all else is Fedi. At the very least ban until age 16.