I wonder why nobody is considering the most obvious solution to all this complication around what is NSFW and what is not: Children shouldn’t be on these platforms at all to begin with. They shouldn’t be anywhere near social media until age 14. Definitely not free roaming everywhere on the internet.
For us adults, I honestly cannot say whether moderation instigated by a company is better than moderation instigated by the users. The devil is in the details. This place isn’t moderated by a company and you’d probably think the moderation here is superior to Meta’s.
I disagree with this point.
I used the internet extensively as a minor to socialize and find friends and to be exposed to viewpoints different from those of my peers. If I only had my peers to socialize with, things would have been much worse off for me. I found kind and supportive influences as a minor that kept me away from the hate/conservatism/fascism that many of my classmates descended into. I learned about the world and gained skills that made me a more well-rounded person. I even met up in person with thousands of strangers and had a grand time.
I see the gatekeeping of minors from internet spaces and worry about the impact that would have had on me and my development as a young person. If I hadn’t been welcomed as a minor online, I would not have been welcomed anywhere.
That said, I stayed the hell away from corporate spyware like facebook and twitter that only serve to reinforce existing problematic systems, expose people to the toxic IRL social environments that they may otherwise be trying to escape, and amplify the kind of hatred and bigotry that I personally was evading.
I miss the old internet where kids were safe. I don’t think that the solution is to ban kids; the solution is to ban platforms and profiteering incentive structures that create unsafe environments. The kids are the canaries in a coal mine. If the canary isn’t doing well, you don’t just ban it and keep digging: you get the hell out and find somewhere else to be.
I’m with you on this. My childhood church was christo-fascist, and it was my wide wanderings on the web that showed me a different way was possible.
I found kind and supportive influences as a minor that kept me away from the hate/conservatism/fascism that many of my classmates descended into.
Do you think your classmates found those influences from somewhere outside the internet? At least in Europe, the alt-right has been way more efficient at reaching young people online, especially boys and men.
I’m also talking about 15-20 years ago.
The influences I had were furries (queers), science/scifi nerds, academics, service members of the military who were otherwise separated from community, etc. The internet brought us together.
It was that or rural Florida where if you went outside and got stabbed by one of those poison palm you’d just get told that those have to be there because they kept the slaves from escaping the circus in the good old days.
What you’re talking about with kids today is what I mean about them being canaries.
Pretty much all social media has a minimum age of 13 in their ToS. So what exactly are you suggesting? Raising it by 1 year?
Actually verifying it and punishing the companies if they let underaged people use it. Alcohol stores are also punished when they sell products to children.
This is a terrible idea, and only makes it 10x easier for surveillance capitalism to track, profile, and propagandize the entire population.
This line of reasoning is basically using “won’t someone think of the children” fear mongering to hand over the keys to big brother.
This is a terrible idea, and only makes it 10x easier for surveillance capitalism to track, profile, and propagandize the entire population.
I don’t see how that follows. Can you elaborate?
If you have to verify children’s identity, you have to verify everyone’s identity. This is part of KOSA. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/12/kids-online-safety-act-continues-threaten-our-rights-online-year-review-2024
Ah, right. It’s possible yes that this would make it easier for them, but my understanding of technology is that it was pretty much possible like 10 years ago to track practically everyone who isn’t actively doing a countermeasures against it.
I personally think this would help, but there’s a lot folks online who scream “free speech” when you start talking about verifying age online. And honestly, I don’t know a good solution to balance it
Raise it by 3. Under 16s shouldn’t have access to any social media.
Posts with LGBTQ+ hashtags including #lesbian, #bisexual, #gay, #trans, #queer, #nonbinary, #pansexial, #transwomen, #Tgirl, #Tboy, #Tgirlsarebeautiful, #bisexualpride, #lesbianpride, and dozens of others were hidden for any users who had their sensitive content filter turned on. Teenagers have the sensitive content filter turned on by default.
Kids wont even know what they will lose with his representation going missing on Instagram. So depressing. Wish that lizard freak the worst.
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Try existing in the rural parts of the country where no one is “like you”, and increasingly they claim all that “Hollywood media” is just propaganda.
Seeing people like yourself, actual real people, has a huge impact in helping kids avoid isolation and in some cases connect with communities and avoid suicide.
Feeling alone in the world is something teens are already prone to and this makes it so much worse for the LGBTQ kids out there. Their existence now being labeled on the same level as sexual content and gore.
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Right, gayness is a symptom of social media, and invented by the online liberals.
Wait, Pro-LGBT speech IS NOT allowed!?!?! Holy fucking shit, this isn’t a cesspool, it’s an execution by firing squad.
I guess advertisers have no issues with Meta’s changes. Interesting. A few years ago, they’d be falling over themselves to signal that “hate has no place here”. But it is no longer profitable to be LGBTQ+ so let the hateful bell ring.
Eh. The advertisers will be back to supporting LGBTQ whenever that month of year comes back
This year? Doubt.
LGBTQ+Everyone, but LGBTQ+ people especially need to get the the fuck off of Meta services now, they’ve showed what side they’re on.Straight+cis people too. I’m downloading an export of my Facebook info as we speak in preparation for closing it down.
Did this about 5 years ago. Can’t believe people still use fucking Facebook of all things.
I just deleted my old, disused Instagram account I hadn’t touched in a long long time. Nothing even worth saving since I never uploaded anything to it. It was the only Meta account I still had around.
That sounds like encouraging queer folk to flee public spaces which sounds like a favourable outcome to the conservatives. Is giving ground the best idea really?
I don’t know how to stress this any more clearly: A privately owned social media site isn’t actually a public space. It’s literally the definition of a private space. It’s more akin to a mall than a library. That’s the whole issue, how does it help to be on a site where all the admins have to do is shut down your speech and ban you anyway? Where everything you do, every move you make is tracked and monetized and studied to be used against you? It’s by definition a surveillance state where you have no rights.
You realize they make money from ads and if the majority of people stop using their services they stop making enough money to function as a business? They may already have your data but you don’t need to be giving them more.
The bigger issue is that corporations have commodified public spaces. You can take back public spaces by choosing to not use their services and convincing others not to. Facebook is already dying which is why they rolled out bullshit AI profiles and the public response to that went really badly. But they live and die by engagement so if they already are needing to turn to faking engagement to keep people on and money rolling in, then isn’t a boycott literally the way to cut them off at the knees and stop them being a public space?
Forgive me if I didn’t make clear that everyone needs to do it, not just LGBTQ+, my point is there are very few reasons to keep using these services for any person with a conscience.
Like you’ve mentioned, real public spaces have been killed so by quitting FB and other corpo social media you effectively self-ostracise as there are little alternatives. Yeah, you’re playing their game but when you’re losing you need humility rather than some moral high ground. If you want to affect the change you need to talk to people.
There is no talking. There is no convincing them to change. Let them rot where they sit. Let them die off in their old folks homes, hating the kids and the queer. It’s not our job to sit on Facebook and leading them in a round of kumbaya. Since you can’t protest a private social media network effectively on that network, you just walk the fuck away.
But don’t delete your account, before you simply never login again, upload as much high def white static video as you can.
Screw Facebook and their advertisers. They don’t need our eyes while we tried to tell some racist bigots that they’re racist bigots.
You’re not going to win by waiting for old people to die off. We reproduce in lower numbers than before and tendency to go disillusioned as you grow older remains a constant. Currently that disillusionment is being harvested by far right but that’s entirely on how the left lost credibility in the west after allying itself with liberal elites.
We won’t get ourselves out of this ditch unless we stop participating in culture wars manufactured for us by those elites. Normal people don’t care about queers but society is so polarised that they assume default stance from their political tribe. When you say they should die off you only strengthen their belief. It was never about this but more serious underlying issues that we’re not addressing because it’s a proxy war that’s supposed to distract us from a bigger war by the rich against the regular people.
I’m not saying we need to abandon traditional gender and minority emancipation goal but we need to be mindful of priorities. Meta employees are more outraged about new hate speech policies but they didn’t care when Meta enabled genocide in Myanmar. See how skewed it got? People don’t like hypocrisy.
You are grossly wrong.
We don’t get disillusioned at the same rate we used to. The leading edge of Gen X’s in their '50s and they give a fuck about everybody.
Normal people do give a shit about LGBTQ, only these weird conservative assholes don’t.
Fuck Facebook, everybody out of the boat. Leave it like Twitter.
Normal people do give a shit about LGBTQ
Normal people do not give a shit about LGBTQ, and I mean that in the best possible way. Unless it’s shoved right in their face, in which case they will most likely be put out by it. Pretty much the same concept as with other (often important) things that rampant activism turns into something abhorrent.
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It’s so weird to me that people still use Facebook. Nobody under 40 uses Facebook. The women use insta sure but literally what are you going on Facebook for. It’s only boomer hate groups on there now
Real life exists dude. Facebook isn’t the only place to talk to people.
Agreed but we invented other forms of communication for a reason. [edit] All I’m saying is - don’t roll over and let them win by default. You don’t have to use corpo social media in good faith. Break rules and fight back.
break rules and fight back
…and they will immediately delete all your posts and ban you. It’s an authoritarian surveillance state, remember? It’s way easier to “disappear” your voice and opinion from their website than it is to remove you from reality. They have literally all the control in that space, the technology is built against you from the ground up. There’s nothing sneaky you can do that they don’t already immediately see and can shut down. They automated bots roving looking for shit like that to take down.
How is that helping again? To be immediately silenced and others never see a word you had to say? How is that helping?
In the real world they still have to black bag you and throw you into an unmarked van to disappear you, something other people will see. Facebook makes it so that the unmarked van and black bag are never seen by others.
It’s like fighting with a moderator. It ain’t a democracy and whatever choice they make is “law,” even if we are users disagree and think what they did silly. Too bad, thems the breaks. They have all the power in that situation and we don’t. Zuckerberg literally employs mountains of people just to shut up voices like yours before they get a foothold. In my view, it’s more than a waste of time, it’s literally handing an enemy resources (data) while cosplaying being helpful.
Doing dumb shit like altering your language to use words like “unalive” to get around arbitrary filters is fuck stupid too and hurts language for the sake of people like Zuckerberg. You’re not changing language to fight them, no your changing language for them instead of dumping their fucking services and using ones that don’t do stupid shit like ban the word “suicide.” Language evolves naturally, but this evolution is in direct response to censorship and it’s a bad deal.
I didn’t say you wouldn’t be at a massive disadvantage but they didn’t have functional moderation before and they’re not going to pay for it now. What’s being suggested as an alternative is flat out giving up.
Okay, let’s be clear about this: staying on Facebook isn’t “humility.” It’s selfishly selling out to simp for the fucking enemy.
That’s the moral high ground speaking. I was like that too but at some point it was too hard to not notice that it wasn’t very effective. I’m pretty sure grannies on my local FB arthritis support group have bigger problems than navigating ethics of social media and politics.
Never used Facebook, never fucking will.
I haven’t in over a decade. I think I’m up to eight different word filters trying to stop news stories about this from showing up on my feed. If they didn’t have such a stupid name I could just block the term meta.
Plot twist: that was their plan all along.
What about WhatsApp?
What about Instagram?
Also does your Lemmy instance federate with Threads?
WhatsApp is encrypted and much less open to manipulation. Will be switching to matrix once 2.0 is stable and recommendable.
I was in admin chat on facebook and it was blocking any posts with links to https://lemmy.world/. I was talking to admins about firing up a lemmy instance and leave the FB group as a link to a lemmy community
I’m kinda shocked people still actively use Facebook.
Only ~3,000,000,000 people/month.
I would take the 3 B number with a pinch of salt. Its 3 B accounts, not unique individuals.
At one point last decade I had 11 seperate Facebook accounts, used for various purposes. They’re all deleted now, but my behaviour is not unique. There will be many, many people running multiple accounts, and don’t forget bots
Its 3 B accounts, not unique individuals.
No it’s 3B monthly active users
No, it’s 3B active accounts. Some people have multiple accounts, as the other comnenter noted, and I’d expect a lot of those accounts are going to be bots
It isn’t.
I remember there were plenty of little bitches saying that censorship won’t be turned the other way and that it allows to remove bad people from the Internet. That bad people should be censored, and Reddit\Twitter\Facebook when used for politics will not be abused by bot armies, and that censorship will not be repurposed very easily.
I was being accused of being a right-wing troll, a luddite, a retard, an incel and what not for saying that they were wrong on every point.
Yes, even bad people should not be censored. When they misbehave, they should be barred from the place they harmed, ideally not forever, but for a week or so maximum.
I’ve learned this not just in morals, but in practice, when repeatedly banned on one forum by an admin of directly opposite political views … for 24 hours max each time after multiple warnings, and only once a week or a month (can’t remember) much later when I joked about exploding Muslims. Despite that, I was (I hope) a good enough member of that forum for like 10 years after, till now. Apes waving banhammers today have something to learn from that.
But that’s not the point, the point is that even if you consider centralized censorship good, that’s how it works.
So getting back to little bitches loving censorship - where are they now and do they have anything to say?
Friendly reminder: Deleting your account won’t accomplish what you think it will.
Facebook will still keep all data that is associated with other users as per their own disclaimer. They also still keep logs that are "disassociated with personal identifiers. "
So all training can still occur. And understand what while Jane Smith may have deleted her account, they still have all the data it takes to indicate that User 12345 was tagged in photos with John Smith at the Burger King on 404 Fake St. And, because of that, the data that User 12345 had previously provided is ALSO John Smith’s data. And Fred Wilkerson since he was at that Burger King once. And so forth.
And ALL that data is still there for training.
So do what you gotta do to make it less appealing to other users. But understand your data is already out there and is never going away. Same with reddit and all other social media (which includes Lemmy).
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Yeah but you know what? That’s still better than actively engaging with their “services”.
Eventually, it’ll just be bots interacting with themselves, given enough time.
Eventually, it’ll just be bots interacting with themselves, given enough time.
It seems like that’s a good chunk of it already
Yes. Like I said. Do what you gotta do to make it less appealing to other users.
But if, for example, you are an LGBTQIA+ person who thinks this will provide any form of protection…
If you’re in the US, sure. If you’re in Europe you can compel them to completely delete everything as per the GDPR.
No, I tried, they don’t comply, and tell you to make a complaint to your DPA and the Irish DPA or go to court if you have a problem with that.
And I am sure a company that is now openly training their LLMs on copyrighted materials is going to totally comply with all of that…
One of these days people are going to learn “But it is against the law” doesn’t apply to the rich and powerful, law enforcement, or megacorporations.
Training LLMs on copyright material isn’t illegal to begin with, just like how learning from a pirated book isn’t or having drugs in your system isn’t, only being in possession of these things is illegal.
GDPR violations are on the other hand - illegal. You’re right in principle, don’t get me wrong and I appreciate your healthy cynicism but in this particular case being slapped with a GDPR fine is actually not worth keeping the data of one user.
Edit: Downvoted for being right as usual. Bruh Lemmy is becoming more and more like Reddit every day.
Training LLMs on copyright material isn’t illegal to begin with
Reproducing identifiable chunks of copyrighted content in the LLM’s output is copyright infringement, though, and that’s what training on copyrighted material leads to. Of course, that’s the other end of the process and it’s a tort, not a crime, so yeah, you make a good point that the company’s legal calculus could be different.
Thank you, I’m glad someone is sane ITT.
To further refine the point, do you know of any lawsuits that were ruled successfully on the basis that as you say - the company that made the LLM is responsible because someone could prompt it to reproduce identifiable chunks of copyright material? Which specific bills make it so?
Wouldn’t it be like suing Seagate because I use their hard drives to pirate corpo media? I thought Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. would serve as the basis there and just like Betamax it’d be distribution of copyright material by an end user that would be problematic, rather than the potential of a product to be used for copyright infringement.
I’m glad someone is sane ITT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY9z2b85qcE
To be clear, I think it ought to be the case that at least “copyleft” GPL code can’t be used to train an LLM without requiring that all output of the LLM become GPL (which, if said GPL training data were mixed with proprietary training data, would likely make the model legally unusable in total). AFAIK it’s way too soon for there to be a precedent-setting court ruling about it, though.
In particular…
I thought Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. would serve as the basis there
…I don’t see how this has any relevancy at all, since the whole purpose of an LLM is to make new – arguably derivative – works on an industrial scale, not just single copies for personal use.
No, it means all speach is welcome. Freedom of speach is a fundamental right and anyone advocating for censorship should take a long look into the mirror before calling other people fascist.
Free speech absolutists are so annoying. Your tolerance of the intolerant is so stupid. Yeah, protecting marginalized communities is fascism.
Go outside and check the political landscape. Now figure out how this change of policy relates to that atmosphere.
Now shut the fuck up about things you know not of. Protecting LGBTQ+ people is fascism? The fuck out of here with that.
Clearly you didn’t read the article. The first paragraph is about Meta censoring LGBTQ+ content
On Monday, Taylor Lorenz posted a telling story about how Meta has been suppressing access to LGBTQ content across its platforms, labeling it as “sensitive content” or “sexually explicit.”
Posts with LGBTQ+ hashtags including #lesbian, #bisexual, #gay, #trans, #queer, #nonbinary, #pansexial, #transwomen, #Tgirl, #Tboy, #Tgirlsarebeautiful, #bisexualpride, #lesbianpride, and dozens of others were hidden for any users who had their sensitive content filter turned on. Teenagers have the sensitive content filter turned on by default.
When teen users attempted to search LGBTQ terms they were shown a blank page and a prompt from Meta to review the platform’s “sensitive content” restrictions, which discuss why the app hides “sexually explicit” content.
People who comment on articles without reading the article itself should take a long look into the mirror before implying other people are advocating censorship.
So preventing underage people from seeing NSFW content is oppression?
LGBTQ =/= NSFW
Censorship is a constant. Power dynamics is a thing and will always be. Thinking that any of those big players truly care about any ideology is a mistake and the only true way of seeking “freedom of speech” is really to find your “tribe” that can support itself.
That’s why we came to Lemmy. We don’t want to be censored by big boss, we’d rather be censored by the owners of the Lemmy instances because at least they are closer to us.
What’s going to happen is that you will now start listening more to people that were censored while your guy was in power, while they got censored for their opinions, as bad or as good as they are, you had your chance to speak, now as long as you are using mainstream media you will sit and listen like the good user you are.
The choice is yours Neo, either wake up and understand power dynamics or sit and listen like a good cumsoomer.
The choice is yours.
All edge, no point.
I’m from the “old internet”, and I remember early experiments at “free speech absolutism”. Just let everyone say whatever they want, words are just words, truth will prevail over lies. Those forums slowly decayed into safe heavens of right-wing extremism, as people got accused of horrid crimes, then doxxed, if they dared to criticize the nazis hanging out there, to incite real-life violence towards them. However, the nazis demanded civility and acceptance from everyone left of Mussolini, as they supposed to be for free speech and tolerance. Then the people who ran them pulled the plug, which really pissed off those nazis.
Somewhere around 2006, the far-right started to play the optics game, especially in my home country, Hungary. They figured out they needed to control the language around politics. Just like how right-libertarians appropriated the word “libertarian” from the left, or how capitalist propaganda think tanks detached “socialism” from “worker ownership of the means of production”, they needed to redefine racism to mean “the irrational hatred of race of ethnic group for the sake of evil”, censorship needed to be defined in a way that mere criticism would constitute as such, and so on. They also exploited technicalities: if you called them out for Holocaust denialism, they argued they weren’t, they just think the numbers are overinflated. And of course, they went low by having de facto doxxing sites (in Hungary it was kuruc info, a neo-nazi news portal that used legal loopholes to avoid getting nuked for such activity), while expecting others.
These were enough to fool me into supporting them, but as I went deeper and deeper into their evil ideology, I had to realize I was groomed. After the 2010 elections, I had to realize Fidesz not only started to adopt far-right views to a more mainsteam audience, but they were hypocrites about almost everything, and this hypocrisy wasn’t a bug, but a feature reserved for those in the inner echelons. And every time I see this echoing all around the world, I can do nothing, but watch “western” democracy die in favor of oligarchic fascism trying to exploit both racial and theocratic fascists. Arguing with them does nothing good, instead I get called a “pedophilia supporter”, “Stalinist”, “anti-christian”, and “virtue signaler”.
My best current day example for why “free speech absolutism” will eventually lead to the rise of fascism is Chaya Raichik, aka Libs of Tiktok. She regularly doxxes LGBTQ+ people and their suppporters while calling them groomers. Her audience sends them threats, while Raichik does the “um, ackchually, I meant ideological grooming, parents have absolute rights over their children” switcharoo also likely perfected in Hungary (we had the term “political pedophile” instead, with loyalist media having a moral panic about children not being able to call each other homophobic slurs).
I also used to use Facebook, but left due to it let the right off with abuse, but the left got shadowbanned and suspended for criticizing them. According to the actual logic Facebook is actually operating by suspiciously close to the time progressives rejected generative AI, the word “racist” used for people calling black people the N-word is bullying.
I’m not saying however, that the left is perfect in every sense. Judging by your writing style and your instance, you might been called an evildoer because you liked a certain subgenre of anime/manga that often features erotic content, but due to the kind of erotic content, it’s often hard to defend to anyone, thus leftists started their often insane crusade against lolicon, even if a lot of right wing people defended it in pretty bad ways, or used it to weed out “not real” anime fans.
With moderation/“censorship”, we have to ask ourselves whether we do it to protect each other from actual harm (don’t forget, some “free speech absolutists” think real, actual CSAM is just “a recording of a criminal activity”), or do it to please some very arbitrary moral standard or a higher power. We obviously will make mistakes, and we need to realize the humanity of the other instead of doing things like “these transes called my loli hentai pedophilic, they deserve to be banned from going to the toilet”.
Freedom of speech isn’t a fundamental right. If you doubt this try publicly and clearly threatening people with the intent to harm. You will be prosecuted for that action.
You should avoid using words you almost cettainly do not understand which in this case is “fascist”.
