based or cringe? One one hand human right activists in these countries are using Twitter to create awareness about the local isseus. On the other hand, CIA also uses it to manufacture consent to whatever plans they got
based or cringe? One one hand human right activists in these countries are using Twitter to create awareness about the local isseus. On the other hand, CIA also uses it to manufacture consent to whatever plans they got
Banning social media is the single most dangerous thing to progressive movements in the world today, I say progressive rather than "leftist" for a reason since liberals are very much affected by this also. Social media has created an absolutely massive power shift from corporate billionaire controlled media towards people controlled awareness of issues. Yes it is partly manipulated by algorithm and other factors on the ruling class' side but it has still monumentally improved our ability to spread leftism and other issues.
In history the newspaper was the tool that spread awareness. Banning newspapers was the method to repress that. In the modern day the modern newspaper is social media.
Social media is a newspaper where the audience itself picks the topics to highlight with input from moderators and the site defined algorithms. Banning social media is akin to banning and shutting down newspapers in the Bolshevik's time.
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Yeah if the Fediverse ever matures it's gonna be real hard to stamp out.
I don't think the problem is maturing Fediverse but incentivising bodies into it. Big money is what seems to move internet populations around these days and I don't know how you combat that without big money yourself. Fediverse needs monetary investment to blow up in the same way that Cryptocoin needed monetary investment to blow up. The key to creating fully decentralised social media in my opinion lies with also incentivising people into pushing it because they can profit from it.
That is probably going to be an unpleasant thing to say for some people on this site, but it is a fact of the current society we live in and the left tends to overlook this reality a bit too much. I think it's a mistake for people to think we can take on the giants without some sort of investment, fighting fire with fire.
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Ultimately I think the service that figures out how to make a social media tech that's both decentralised and also attractive to people the same way crypto was will really take things along to the next step. I have no idea what that will look like, some sort of revenue sharing decentralised social media sounds weird.
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Yeah you can't really do it as a revenue sharing thing. Functionally it has to work differently. Bitcoin is TECHNICALLY a revenue sharing thing though, "do work for the network by adding compute power to authenticate transactions and we'll share money with you in the form of blocks you mine". This is however a cleverly reworded and disguised revenue sharing model, hidden behind mining as a proxy and longterm incentive to expand the network.
Striking the same incentives but with social media is hard but I believe someone will come upon something eventually. I don't know if it'll be fediverse or not. I just think that when money and decentralisation mingle in precisely the right way we'll see an upheavel of existing centralised systems. This will happen in particular because ancaps will push the ever loving fuck out of it for the same reasons they pushed bitcoin, and I think that it will be easier to blow it up by attempting to appeal to those types of people as opposed to just everyone generally. Interestingly, the left and these shits have a mutual interest in decentralisation.
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Coops are a tool but they're not magically better in all cases and it's foolish to assume they are or always will be. They are better statistically. Factors like having the right team members and actually-pursuing-the-profit-motive are important, coops actually pursue profit.
A major issue in leftist groups I keep seeing is teams that get bogged down in ideological thinking instead of doing what's actually best if they want to profit. There is a balance, but a lot of leftist groups fail to find it when they don't have the right people to push for it.
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Oh absolutely. I just also see problems that need to be overcome. Teams that start as coops without an income seem to struggle to maintain motivation to grow a product until the point they can actually live on it for example.
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How hard would it be to stamp out fascists and imperialists though?
Always hard, always been hard, that's nothing new since they have almost all the power
I mean on the fediverse, not generally.
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Well put
Good fucking post
This comment doesn't say anything about why Nigeria might be banning it. It's just an idealist "ban things is bad because free speech". China banned Twitter, Facebook, etc. but they have their own social media platforms not literally controlled by US companies and the US government.
In this case it seems more akin to Nigeria banning a British or French or American newspaper or something. Twitter is not some local left-wing newspaper.
That's fair. I don't know anything about why the ban is occurring and have not at all looked into it. Mentioning India made me assume it being bad for us though. I did want to sound off on what social media is enabling for us and why we should defend it wherever possible though even if it is largely establishment controlled. It being less controlled than older media is a significant benefit.
If this happens in India I believe it is certainly a negative. I know very little about Nigeria's conditions though.
Yeah it seems like an entirely different situation in both countries.
Could you elaborate? I would be quite interested in understanding the Nigerian issue a bit better.
I know next to nothing about Nigeria but from the CNN article alone it looks like Twitter deleted one of Nigeria's president's tweets. See my other comment here. It also looks like Nigeria is part of Belt and Road.
yayyyy it's ok for Nigeria to ban online platforms used by Nigerian leftists because he's launching Buharitube tomorrow!!! yayyyyy big wins for anti-imperialism :DDDD
Good post but I reject the comparison to Bolshevik newspapers that were not nearly as corporate or profitable as today's big news media
Totally fair. I don't mean to imply they are, I just mean to imply the effect is to remove the power of proles to influence the masses, that's what social media is doing.
Are you saying that banning social media removes the power of proles to influence the masses, or are you saying that social media itself (by being an imperialist mouthpiece) removes the power of proles to influence the masses?
I'm saying that social media is the modern newspaper except it is audience controlled to an extent. In essence, it is a newspaper that is prole created.
That's not 100% true of course because the site admins control content via algorithms and rules. But it still places massively more power in the hands of proles than the traditional newspaper where the editor has 100% of the power over content. They still have a lot of power (especially if you really want to flex and shape the narrative), but not 100%.
So with that understanding of it, the removal of social media removes power from the proles.
I should clarify this part. If you run a subreddit or facebook group or any community for example, you can act rather ruthlessly and do INCREDIBLE work shaping that community into literally anything you want it to be. I have watched first hand 3 communities now get taken over by communists who understand this "it's a newspaper and we're the editors" concept. Those communities went from liberal to full-tilt unfiltered communism in weeks with almost no drop in overall traffic and activity. The shift was largely accepted as long as the mod team worked hard at ruthlessly crushing liberal opposition and played it the right way. So yes there's a huge amount of power that lies on the admin and moderator side on social media but in the vast majority of spaces it is not being flexed that way because so many truly do not understand what social media is in this kind of way. I do not think many people even among the social media crowd have figured this out or written about it either. My background is in marketing and community management so I'm fairly up to date in the field.
A bit of an aside, but do you have any particular or immediate reaction to the words "we're launching a new community" ?
You can't launch a community. :marx-joker:
Excellent, that's exactly what I was looking for
Wait, how was this possible if the liberal mods were still there?
Most mod teams on reddit operate on consensus driven by internal discussions in moderator discords. If the communists in the modteam become the consensus the liberals get pushed out.
But how did the communists get on the modteam of a lib subreddit in the first place?
Usually because libs aren't selecting moderators ideologically or because a person who used to be a lib becomes a communist. Internal fighting occurs and the communists are usually the correct side in that kind of shit.
On top of this, in reddit modteams the person who puts the most work in becomes the most influential in the team and this is often the communists.
There's also the redder over time effect to consider. Any space with communists in it inevitably turns everyone around them redder over time. It only takes one.
Could this happen on the big news subs? Are those too closely monitored by admins and ideological fascists?
Heh, I'm reminded of the old r/cth. Didn't even know how it happened exactly.
right? I started off as a fuckin obama lib, what the fuck.
Communists are just really, really good at arguing apparently. People moan about the struggle sessions, but those were pretty damn informative.
It absolutely could and there already are communists in some of those teams. The problem you have however is that the modteams themselves are absolutely enormous. The larger the team the harder it is to gain communist consensus. The smaller the team the easier it is to gain communist consensus through mod team expansions or flipping existing mods.
Now that you say this, it doesn't sound all that bad to me.