just grow a pair and ban twitter, spacex, starlink, and tesla from operating in europe already.
there’s no good reason to let them operate.
Tesla is getting a buttload of cash from the EU soon in climate compensation (also Volvo but not so much).
They’re mostly all national security threats, especially with Elon and Putin having a special relationship.
don’t ban starlink pls
Shutting Off X’s Algorithm
Hey EU, that’s not how any of this works. First of all, you do not have any control over that – even if you demand it be done, there’s no way to verify compliance. Second, there’s always an “algorithm.” There can’t not be an “algorithm;” that would mean it would display nothing at all. Even the choice to just display tweets chronologically is still a choice, and implemented in the form of an “algorithm.”
What you do have the power to do – and what you should do – is simply just straight-up block X entirely.
Oh they can turn off musk’s algorithm quite easily: just ban the whole fucking site.
He’s folded like origami on this already, and he’ll do it again.
he folded to brazilian courts last year. but now, with trump in power, he may have more means to pressure back.
If WWIII broke out over the EU blocking Twitter and the US lost would Musk take a cyanide pill?
who knows… but the us has softer means to pressure europe
Worked brilliantly for the Brazilian government. Lulu pulled the plug for… a week? BlueSky suddenly got incredibly popular. Musk panicked and folded on every demand. And the amount of pro-Bolsonaro/coup-posting on Twitter sank like a brick.
Realistically I think that is why banning him even as a brief show of force will be very effective. He understands pain, it’s the universal language.
I wouldn’t call reverse chronological order with blocks accounted for an algorithm.
Twitter didn’t always have an algorithm.
Mastodon does not have an algorithm. Or am I not being inclusive enough in my definition?
to not piss off computer scientists and mathematicians with their dear word “algorithm”, you may want to narrow it down with the expression recommendation algorithms.
An important thing to consider: Mastodon doesn’t have an “algorithm” for presenting posts in your subscription feed.
That doesn’t mean it “does not have an algorithm” entirely, though. There’s a couple of non-trivial ones being used to recommend friends and calculate the trending posts and tags that show up on the front page, and they do actually consider likes/shares as part of scoring.
Yeah an algorithm is a series of mathematic instructions so from my armchair I’d say sort by date is not an algorithm. But to complicate things further there seems to be a sticking point with some that social media uses heuristics and not algorithms. I don’t really understand the difference nor do I really care as this is all too much about semantics - /u/grue’s final point is still spot on IMO. Why mess with letting a billionaire toy with the minds of your citizens? Let the USA have twitter and all that chaos to themselves.
You should take your armchair to be reupholstered or something, because sorting things is like the primary type of algorithm. Even if it’s as straightforward as “sort by date”, since objects in the database are not stored by date, they have to be sorted to get them displayed by date.
Fair enough.
The algorithm part is a sticky point for me, because it’s always been my contention that you could directly map most of the systemic issues of social media with the rise of engagement algorithms.
In other words, reverse chronological order is the only way to do healthy social media in my opinion. (Or maybe I should say, healthiest). Algorithms introduce too many pernicious incentives. They optimize everything around the worst things.
Most people love algorithms though. And it seems most people don’t want to trade algorithms away. A reason that many fall off mastodon is the lack of an algorithm.
Absolutely agreed. I’d love to say that I left Facebook and then Twitter for heroic reasons but both of them pushed me out when there was no longer a way to just get the reverse chronological. Facebook when the algos took over and then Twitter when they started forcing people to pay for Tweetdeck.
Kill X already
Fractured internet here we come
It’s already here
Oh cum on! Don’t tell me you gonna try for twitter?
This is what I was worried about with tiktok being banned.
I don’t have a tiktok. I don’t like the concept. I won’t be joining loops. I just don’t like the core concept.
Now add in that it’s a chinese spying tool, and I’m all the way out.
Buuuuuuut it does pose a tricky situation. Ban it, and set a precident that banning social networks is ok. Maybe they ban the fediverse next. We all know this country is run by billionaires and big business. We all know that the onlu reason tiktok is banned is because it competes with X, and Elon is basically president now.
So what stops them from banning the fediverse? Every single instance is now illegal. And since the fediverse is so unknown, it’s not like there would be much pushback politically.
So. Ban the chinese spy tool, or defend net nuetrality?
TikTok competes with X
So 1: your chronology is wrong, because this was all done under Biden, 2: Trump apparently is asking the SC to intercede on TikToks behalf and keep them going, and 3: in what way does a short video thing for braindamaged teens compete with twitter?
I’m sorry to say this, but the web ≠ the internet and foreign services ≠ the internet. If it was a question of starting massive invasive national firewalls, or segmenting the national net away from the wider internet through either routing or physical separation, then we are in agreement.
But tbh Twitter and Meta’s platforms should be carpet banned from Europe. Reddit can stay, and so can TikTok, but after the history both Mega and Musk’s Twitter has had, I think it’s perfectly defensible to tell them to fuck off - especially when they target vulnerable people who are impressionable, like the elderly.
And please, no American “slippery slope” argument, because it should be added to the logical fallacies list.
It IS a logical fallacy and it predates the US…
What’s the name for the logical fallacy when you attribute a type of logical fallacy to the country that happened to name it?
Ban the chinese spy tool
Americans: “TikTok is an insidious weapon of a foreign government used to brainwash our children into believing all sorts of horrifying leftist ideas.”
Also Americans: “If you don’t like Twitter, just turn off your phone. I don’t see what the big deal is. Edward Whoden? You sound like a Russian bot.”
At what point did I discredit Edward Snowden, or defend twitter?
Yes, please.
