Musk sparked controversy this week by urging King Charles III to dissolve parliament in response to a UK sexual abuse scandal.
    • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      When your whole identity is consumed by boundless, baseless, joyless hatred of “the other”, yes, you’re gonna be negative.

      I don’t believe Musk is controlled by any of that though. He might share in it, but it doesn’t quite dictate him as much as it dictates those in actual misery. For example, he isn’t actually opposed to letting immigrants in, if they’ll make him richer. He’s motivated by greed and grift, and no small helping of pride.

      I suspect he just doesn’t want people criticising him and his cronies. Particularly when they inevitably start enacting policies that affect their base negatively (we’ve already seen our share of face-eating leopard voters shocked to find out that their face isn’t off limits), social media could help pissed off people realise how many others are pissed off too. I don’t think I need to spell out why that could be dangerous for him.

      Better to quell dissent entirely. If nobody can complain about the government, it’s harder to organise against it. Suppress criticism, censor the media, manipulate what you get to see to shape your view…

      Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

      (Obligatory note that calling a dictatorship communism doesn’t make it less authoritarian than a capitalist dictatorship. Red boots hurt just as much as any other color if they step on your neck, no matter how tasty they might be. That has nothing to do with the topic, I’m just bracing for tankie whataboutisms.)

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    121·
    1 day ago

    I mean in principle this is just a matter of moderation being different from censorship.

    But really, an “algorithm tweak”? I am still wondering when or why who decided that we needed to have “algorithms” that someone could “tweak” on the Internet at all. The first kind of “social media” I ever used was web forums where the entire “algorithm” was thread bumping, and even if you insist that we need to have the structure of a microblog: Mastodon does fine without an “algorithm” beyond reverse-chronological sorting.

    • zarkanian@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      21 hours ago

      I think Mastodon does fine, too, but I’ve often heard people complain about the lack of an algorithm. Like, they don’t know how to find things if they aren’t being shoveled into their feed

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        5·
        21 hours ago

        Personally I follow slightly more than 100 accounts plus less than 10 hashtags and feel I’m already getting plenty of things into my feed, nowadays I tend to unfollow things that post too many irrelevant things more than I follow new ones.

    • tb_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      20 hours ago

      But you had all these rightwing weirdos complaining they were being censored because “the algorithm” didn’t promote their weird little ideas enough!

      Back when.
      So tweaking the algorithm is quite literally censorship!

      Not that this “free-speech absolutist” has proven particularly true to his word.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        20 hours ago

        I strongly agree with the point made in the linked article that censorship is when a sender wants to send something, the receiver wants to receive it, but a third party (government, social media platform, whoever) keeps them from doing so.

        If I want to see “weird little ideas of rightwing weirdos” (or of leftwing weirdos or any others), I should be allowed to. If I don’t, I shouldn’t have to.