In my country, India, these platforms are used less for free speech and more for brainwashing and spreading hate and misinformation. Most of these posts are in Hindi, a major language around here, and call for all kinds of hate such as suppression of a specific religion, call for genocide, invading and acquiring neighboring countries etc.
I've tried reporting such posts multiple times but hate filled posts are neither removed, nor restricted. If a platform cannot provide adequate moderation, it should stop operating in my country and be held responsible for providing a platform for spreading hate pseudo-anonmously.
How is this example any different than what the parent has said? If people feel these platforms are negatively impacting them, they should stop using them. Or do you believe others or the government has a right to disallow what people want to watch via their own choices? You may call it brainwashing but others may disagree.
> If people feel these platforms are negatively impacting them, they should stop using them.
The problem is how to stop the mob attacking you from using them.
An American equivalent might be if social media existed a 100 years ago and was being used to encourage lynchings. Yes, it really is that bad in some places.
The problem is that FB does moderate things relevant to the US but ignores the rest of the world. They will remove white supremacist material in the US, but not the equivalent elsewhere.
Yes, but how do you get "everyone" to stop using the? I use FB purely because of network effects. I hate it, but there would be a real cost to not using it.
What is the cost? The excuses in this entire thread are quite weak and overblown. Some people are really saying their kids should continue using these apps they know are harmful simply because they would be socially outcast otherwise, which is simply not true.
> do you believe others or the government has a right to disallow what people want to watch via their own choices
Yes. As an extreme example: watching cheese pizza is not allowed by governments. We have collectively also come together to consider murder as socially and legally unacceptable. We can and should regulate social media if posts read as follows:
- we should invade and bomb that country to bits
- we should destroy all places of worship belonging to XYZ religion
- we should vote for XYZ because only he is going to save our religion from PQR
- and much worse which I can't type here as moderation team of HN would omit those
IMHO: give the current form of social media another few decades and it will come out shinning bright just like opioids did in the USA.
These same social media platforms, when required by law, become very effective in moderation but there's next to no moderation in my country and most of the hate and abuse is counted as just another engagement metrics.
Watching CP and murdering people is in no way comparable to any of those bullet points you made. Generally in the US at least, uniquely among many nations, the principle and constitutional right of the freedom of speech reigns supreme over many, many others, so there is no chance that any of those bullet points would (or should, given such a principle) be regulated.
One can and should be able to espouse those beliefs, regardless of whether they are true or not, because the alternative is much worse, where the rights of such exposition are severely curtailed. Hell, someone got arrested for taunting the Queen in the UK, something that legally cannot happen in the US had a similar person taunted a government official.
Hate speech and incitements to violence against the Rohingya precipitated for years on Facebook. Deleting the app would not have saved the Rohingya from getting genocided.
I have seen some of the same with Sri Lankan posts. Loathsome stuff in Sinhala. Not calling for genocide, but definitely encouraging persecution and bigotry. One group that was particularly poisonous was removed after a campaign by many people. One person complaining gets nowhere. I am sure there is more similar material elsewhere.
I think the underlying issue is that American companies view everything through the lens of American culture and if its not a problem in the US, then it is not offensive.
I once reported a racist comment on FB. Someone said that people of their race should not "interbreed" with people of another race because the latter are evil. FB said it did not violate their community standards.
IMO it was probably because it was a comment by a black person (probably American) about white people. That is not the major problem is the US so its fine.
Social media has absolute changed the way people live their lives in my country - India.
Personally, it has made me lose interest in my favorite outdoor activity i.e. hiking because of too many people showing up. Ex: I won't set foot on a trail on weekends[0].
Social media (or any other means of advertising, past or present) has affected these things everywhere.
Even I complain about my inability to be alone on a trail in CA, or struggling to find campsites, occasionally shaking my fist at social media for it.
But the linked images from India showing extreme overcrowding has far more to do with the population size than social media. When you have that many people, any little force generating focused interest is getting multiplied by a huge number.
There are plenty of trails in India, this one just got advertised. You shouldn't conclude the world is overpopulated by looking at footage from a football cup match.
Is Japan over-populated? Tokyo's trains are extremely crowded. Is US over-populated? LA traffic jams are crazy.
What is the definition of over-population? Over what area are you measuring it? Those train images are likely from just one city. There are other places where the trains just run like any other place.
India is such an outlier as a country... it's a unique combination of both massive absolute population of 1.4B+ and density of over 1000/mi^2.
We can split hairs about other places, and obviously lots of places have their population/crowding issues. The planet has a lot of people.
But India is just not useful as a data point for blaming social media for these phenomena because it's such an outlier. Practically anything informing the people of India of something somewhere of interest is going to generate a thundering herd of exceptional proportion. You don't need social media's help.
But where is that 1000/mi^2 measured? Because I went to plenty of places in India where I saw no one or very few people for a long time driving or hiking. It sounds, like always, this is looking at cities and around cities. Most countries are pretty empty if you don’t want to live in a city (and fortunately, I don’t).
+1 to this, as an Indian. There's been a recent trend in my country where people, educated or not, have suddenly started finding unnecessary pride in our past - mostly centered around culture and one specific religion - Hinduism.
This pride in the past, is helping our current government win elections in great majority.
But our past, like every other country's past, is riddle with good and bad. While there are many many good things about our culture, there are several things that were wrong and they still are.
For example:
- Women rights
- Caste system
- Servility
- Human suffering, exploitation of poor by the ruling class etc
The usual narrative is - everything wrong with the country is because of people from outside (invaders, colonists etc) and everything right in the country is because of our great Hindu culture.
And most "debates" with such people will end up with them mud slinging on another religion or country.
Well, not to take a side here, but it wouldn't, would it? The topics GP listed are (allegedly) 'continuing bad things from past', so why would someone with 'pride in their past' mention them?
Where has this 'pride in their past' narrative come from except for the comment that lists those topics?
The comment I appreciated kumarvvr posting makes no proclamations about pride or India or Hinduism, it talks about cleaning practices and traditional herbs almost exclusively.
> Where has this 'pride in their past' narrative come from except for the comment that lists those topics?
Nowhere, but that's the thread we're in. I was just pointing out you perhaps misread what it was a list of, because it seemed to me perfectly consistent with the rest of the comment.
> The comment I appreciated kumarvvr posting makes no proclamations about pride or India or Hinduism, it talks about cleaning practices and traditional herbs almost exclusively.
I appreciated it too - and still do - just perhaps more so before reading some of the others.
Again, not 'taking a side' here, I don't really even know enough to judge what I'm being told, if you see what I mean. Here I was only intending to make a sort of meta-comment about your reply and the comment it was on, I'd have said the same in isolation without seeing the rest of the thread/submission.
(E.g. note I said 'allegedly' and 'someone' - I wasn't making any claims about anyone and certainly nothing personal.)
Selected excerpts from comments of the user you mentioned, in this thread:
> The highest ideal in Hinduism is "Sarve jana, sukhino bhavanthu" (All living things should be happy)
> Spiritually, It is special, in the sense that Hinduism is not a religion but a philosophical way of life, that encourages debate, discussion, logical analysis and introspection. Historically, the only gift for questioning ones religion was a beheading in the case of Christianity and Islam.
More generally, "pride in their past" comes across in every comment they posted and the narrative that "disruption from outsiders caused poverty, before then food was plentiful, poverty as described in European middle ages was not present in India":
> In ancient times, right until the attacks by Islamist marauders and "civilized" Britishers, none of what you have mentioned were an issue. Your statement reeks of colonialist attitudes of seeing natives of other lands as some sort of brutes and degenerates living in destitution in poverty.
In response to someone claiming that there were (like in medieval Europe, the topic of this post) many poor people in India in the same time period:
> Come on, you can't tell me the poor, barely able to feed themselves, lucky to have fuel for cooking food, lucky to get porable water, barely a roof over their heads, had these luxuries?
The user in question replies:
> Yeah, no. Leaving aside a few famines here and there, India was mostly self sufficient and had plentiful of food.
No one said India was not "self-sufficient", we're talking about peasants in those times, having a low quality of life.
The only source the user shared for their assertions, seems to confirm peasants lived in poverty at the time (like anywhere else in the world):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32364750
It is strange to believe that my comment must remain accurate in perpetuity.
At the time of my writing, the user had two comments in this thread, one about cleaning practices and traditional herbs (that almost no one took issue with).
>In response to someone claiming that there were (like in medieval Europe, the topic of this post) many poor people in India in the same time period:
That is not at all what was claimed by that comment.
"No. You are the peasant. No lands for you, you aren't a lord or lady, you're a peon like 99.999% of people. Almost no middle class, and you aren't upper! You're lower class." is an ignorant statement.
>No one said India was not "self-sufficient", we're talking about peasants in those times, having a low quality of life.
You don't dictate what 'we are talking about'.
What you seem to struggle to comprehend is the linearity of time. When Kumavvr made their first and second comments, the topic was about medieval bathing.
Now it has changed as the conversation developed yet you think the comments made before the topic changed are expected to also cover the topic which did not exist at the time of their writing.
No country should be able to cut off anyone else's sunshine (or Internet). Internet, the western version of it, was not built and shared with the world with this disclaimer that we will cut it off if we feel like it.
If ICANN kicks out a country, we'd very soon see the end of ICANN because other countries will have no trust left in the organization.
I assume google cares about people who block ads because a month or so ago, google figured out how to show ads even though I am using a content blocker on iOS and macOS.
I don't think so. Disabling ads on youtube requires injecting JavaScript. It's not forbidden in manifest v3 (and it would be absurd to forbid it, as 99% extensions exist because of this).
For reference: I don't see ads on youtube using hand-crafted JS which was inspired by uBlock origin, so I think that uBlock origin should work as well.
