This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins::The global town square is in ruins.

This war uncovered the conventional one sided “reporting” by most big media outlets especially here in the US which was in favor of Israel, turning a blind eye to the blight of the Palestinian civilians. People called them out because of social media and media outlets changed their tune to be more “neutral” as a consequence.

Social media sucks and but one thing it’s extremely good at is disseminating information, good and bad, and it should be used with that in mind.

By comparison, that Atlantic “article” is paywalled and can’t even disseminate its point beyond the headline.

Lol.

@theluddite@lemmy.ml
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291Y

The purpose of a system is what it does. "There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” These articles about how social media is broken are constant. It’s just not a useful way to think about it. For example:

It relies on badly maintained social-media infrastructure and is presided over by billionaires who have given up on the premise that their platforms should inform users

These platforms are systems. They don’t have intent. There’s no mens rea or anything. There is no point saying that social media is supposed to inform users when it constantly fails to inform users. In fact, it has never informed users.

Any serious discussion about social media must accept that the system is what it is, not that it’s supposed to be some other way, and is currently suffering some anomaly.

I’d say all these articles about social media saying it’s broken are just about maintaining the illusion of something better. As long as they can keep it up, people are going to think “it’s bad but it shouldn’t be!” and just keep coming back hoping it improves. And that can keep social media alive with everything it can do for everybody using it as an income stream.

It has never informed users and a pet peeve of mine is governments using fucking twitter to communicate. And businesses too lazy to create their own webpages (or pay somebody to do it for them) and pay for some hosting (deductible as a business expense, by the way) so they use fecebook instead.

Also, as somebody mentioned in a different comment, it is actually the town square, as it always was (I believe their comment evoked witch trials as an example).

@nodsocket@lemmy.world
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211Y

Imagine believing that a service as important as a “global town square” should be a private company.

@davidgro@lemmy.world
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21Y

Do you think it should be run by the (US) government instead?

I’m pretty lefty and think the government should be large and powerful, but not like that.

Fediverse is the best compromise I’ve seen, still private but a little bit democratic because of instance hopping if you don’t like the policies of the one you started on.

The news, as always, is conflating capitalism with freedom and truth. Capitalism promises neither, only money.

Perhyte
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361Y

This War […]

Unfortunately you’ll have to be a bit more specific than that, too many wars going on at the moment…

… I guess the concept of internet cancer is finally breaking into the mainstream.

@_number8_@lemmy.world
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51Y

once musk jumped the gun and started openly making the site shittier without even bothering to justify it with UX positives, everyone else eagerly followed

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