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I literally clicked on a Twitter link accidentally after months of not visiting it, immediately got far-right propaganda. Obviously.

Legalation banning algorithmic feeds and replacing them with chronological posts from users you subscribe to is imperative to fixing our politics and improving the mental health of young people.

I think it's time we start to acknowledge social media as a threat. They are using our freedom and liberties against us. I really dont know what the answer is here. Shuting down all social media? Doxxing every user so we know we are not dealing with bots? Restricting who gets to publish news? Every move here will take us closer to another dystopia.

I kind of prefer at least to have a saying on what kind of dystopia I want to live in, before the Chinese, Putin or israel choose it for us.

This is just sad. I miss the days in which we thought that internet was a weapon of the masses and not another tool to control us.

All feeds on all platforms are skewed right if not even extreme right since years.

You have to block (far) right channels on YouTube to not get their crap videos suggested again and again.

Add to that the brain frying effect of short clip after short clip on IG, YT and TikTok you get those right wing zombies.

We should really ban all of these platforms in the EU - including Xitter, FB. Allow only fully open space products hosted in Europe.

We need to constaly audit algorithmic timelines. There cannot be "trade secrets" here.

It's not like code auditing is some magic were not capable of - its a multi billion industry perfectly capable of managing this task and we have all of the existing tools and frameworks for it.

There's a German game called Wolf. Where two people are the wolf and the rest are the villagers. Each turn the two wolves open their eyes and pick a villager to kill, while the villagers keep their eyes shut. Then everyone guesses who the wolves are. If both wolves are caught, the game is over. Almost always, the wolves win.

Moral of the story, an informed minority will almost always defeat an uninformed majority.

I hope it doesn't come to this in Germany..

reddit is doing this too, at first it leaned left but recently they allowed more astroturfing from right wingers to swamp the subs, so now they are banning any remotely things that can be critical of right wing views. the reason it leans more right is, because they are allowing so much trump based news like with MSM.

Even all the way back in 2021, an internal study by Twitter — as X used to be called before Elon Musk bought and rebranded the platform — found that its algorithms promote more right-leaning content than left.

(Except from article cited in above paragraph):

Twitter’s research said that Germany was the only country that didn’t experience the right-leaning algorithm bias. It could be related to Germany’s agreement with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to remove hate speech within 24 hours.

Huh. Sounds like things got really bad quickly for German Twits. Did the hate speech policy get rescinded when Musk took over? Also, I wonder if TikTok got worse after whatever deal they made to keep operating in the US - anecdotally I've heard US feeds have been pushing more alt-right content since then.

Só musk is getting ready to buy germany

It's time to get rid of US social media in europe. I don't care if I won't be able to engage on social media, we'll have european social media at some point getting users. But we can't let the US have such a large impact into our own society, how we vote, etc.

Fuck Elon. Hope he'll burn in hell.

Yeah well TikTok was "saved" by Trump and a right winger has a 14% share. I've definitely seen more questionable comments and videos since it got "saved".

Add YouTube to that. You go there without cookies and login, and after you watched some random (not even German) vids to get a home feed, you can be sure to find the AfD in there, just because your language is set to German.

What about IG? Every single sponsored post is some kind of grift: zionism, religion, prosperity gospel, scientology. It's nonstop right-wing garbage.

This sounds a lot like the concerns that were brought against TikTok after the Romanian elections were annulled in December.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-opens-investigation-into-tiktok-over-romanian-election/

X doing it is probably not going to surprise anyone.

Coincidentally, I just read a mastodon post where someone did a basic experiment to see what kind of content TikTok is pushing.

I was curious what a TikTok user might see if they made a fresh account. I provided no preferred content categories, and did not interact with any video in any way except the skip them.

In my first fifteen minutes, I received:

9 manosphere “inspiration” videos The official accounts of Tucker Carlson and Vivek 2 clips from each Fox News, and tabloids New York Post and Metro 1 “America first” rando 1 Copaganda vid of “cool” new police robots Elon’s nazi salute without context or commentary

(they go on to list other things they saw after this.)

I'm getting stuff on Facebook, too. I've stopped engaging with political content on Facebook years ago, and every time I see something, I either block the account or click "Stop showing me posts from X".

It doesn't even look like ads. It's just stuff that Facebook seems to happen to be recommending to me.

Pepperidge Farms remembers when Conservatives complained about tech have a left leaning bias.

Was that a confession like all accusations?

techcrunch . . . I know you're not new, and I know it's difficult being any sort of news platform whatsoever but. Honestly.

Does anyone need this gently presented as if it's any sort of revelation? You know what's going on here. We know what's going on here. Why present this this way?

This is like "Survey of local residents indicates many Jews may not have been seen for weeks"