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531 points empressplay | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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not2b ◴[] No.42071538[source]
Instead of the laser focus on TikTok as a threat, it would be better for the US and Canada to have real data protection laws that would apply equally to TikTok, Meta, Google, Apple, and X. What the EU has done is far from perfect but it bans the worst practices. The Chinese can buy all of the information they want on Americans and Canadians from ad brokers, who will happily sell them everything they need to track individuals' locations.

Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.

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imgabe ◴[] No.42071557[source]
It is not about the data. It’s about a foreign government controlling the algorithm that decides what millions of people see, and their ability to shape public opinion through that.

Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.

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cool_dude85 ◴[] No.42071833[source]
Let's take this one step further, then, and ask why we should allow private media ownership if it's this important. Why should some malevolent billionaire be able to own CNN or NYT and decide what stories they could publish? Does it matter if the billionaire has a US passport or not?
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rgrieselhuber ◴[] No.42071848[source]
This is one of the main reasons we're seeing the legacy media lose legitimacy. People want to hear authentic voices and go to where the new ideas are.
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UncleOxidant ◴[] No.42072058[source]
"authentic" voices are sometimes not so authentic. And sometimes they start out authentic and end up being paid by foreign interests (some high profile cases of this earlier this year - "we didn't know the $100,000/week was coming from Russia")
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rgrieselhuber ◴[] No.42072076[source]
Sure, but at least you have options and get to choose.

Long form content, unrestricted by executives telling people how to run their show, all that makes a big difference. There is no need for corporate bureaucrats to try to run things.

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UncleOxidant ◴[] No.42072253[source]
I'm an old-ish person (61). I started watching the news when I was about 12. I think we were better off as a society when there were basically 3 TV/radio networks (ABC,CBS and NBC) each dispensing basically the same dull, boring (by today's standards) newscast. There were newspapers, of course, and they tended to be where you'd find the more opinionated stuff, but there were limits on how many newspapers an entity could own in any particular market. The fairness doctrine reigned over broadcast news, so you wouldn't have stuff like Fox news and probably not even a lot of what's on MSNBC. It just feels to me like we had a more cohesive national vision and weren't nearly as divided as we are now. I'm sure this will be unpopular here, but I'm not sure more options has helped us in terms of being able to live together. So many families can't even meet for Thanksgiving dinner anymore, for example, because of the arguments that break out. People are living in completely different truth bubbles now which makes it almost impossible to communicate.

I'm don't want to be completely pollyannish about the past - there were probably things we weren't hearing about from those fewer outlets. But I'm also not sure how we move forward as a society in a situation where there are so many different shattered views of what is true.

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rgrieselhuber ◴[] No.42072691[source]
I respectfully disagree. That state of affairs made people more “united” - perhaps, but it was at the expense of knowledge about the true nature of our reality.

We are “divided” now because we are basically in a battle for what is consensus reality, and the only way to have a satisfying answer to that question is to have unfettered access to the underlying facts and knowledge of who is who.

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UncleOxidant ◴[] No.42072903[source]
> We are “divided” now because we are basically in a battle for what is consensus reality

I'm concerned we're going to get to the point where people are willing to kill each other over what they consider to be their view of "consensus reality". That's happened often at other points in history. In many cases it was due to religious differences over what constituted "reality". I'm not so sure that many of these current squabbles over what constitutes "consensus reality" aren't religious in nature. Social media already seems to be pushing the limits of human nature in some destructive directions such that politics now is like holy war.

I think we need to focus more on the "consensus" part (including peacemaking and bridge building) instead of the "battle" part. I'm not seeing a lot of that happening. That requires a lot of humility as in we're all like blind people groping our way to figure out reality and none of us has the complete picture. Until we're ready to take on that kind of humility on a societal level, I think this "battle" you refer to can be a very dangerous endeavor.

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1. rgrieselhuber ◴[] No.42072970[source]
In guess it comes down to: on what terms?

It wasn’t long ago that we regularly witnessed rhetoric hinting at putting people into camps and denying them access to food because they didn’t buy into the official narrative about vaccines.

Is that a better option? I don’t think so.

I do agree that there is a basis for building bridges and finding common ground but this is better done at the local level between people vs. trying to force it from on high. And definitely, in my opinion, not via some controlled medium.

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2. UncleOxidant ◴[] No.42073086[source]
> It wasn’t long ago that we regularly witnessed rhetoric hinting at putting people into camps and denying them access to food because they didn’t buy into the official narrative about vaccines.

And where was that rhetoric happening? On social media. Outside of China (and maybe some similar regimes), I don't recall any government official suggesting anything about camps or limiting access to food (even China delivered food to the people they welded into their apartments, so not even there), certainly not in the US.

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3. rgrieselhuber ◴[] No.42073236[source]
Everybody's favorite "anarchist" himself, Noam Chomsky, promoted just such an idea.

(Proving that he's not really an anarchist.)

Of course, he couched it terms of plausible deniability but anybody with the ability to read between the lines knew exactly what he was saying.

This was during the environment in which small and family-owned businesses were being destroyed (yes, in America) and people were losing their jobs as well. It happened to a number of personal friends.

There were far worse excesses in other Western nations too, not just in China. The only reason things didn't go further in the US here is because Americans have fewer vulnerabilities than citizens in other countries do in the face of this sort of oppression.

And it was all cheered on by those who believed themselves to be on the right side of the establishment at that time. It was a regular thing to see and hear people fantasizing about the idea of forced injections, online and in real life.

And we learned about all this on, yes, social media (which was heavily censored at the time too).

The legacy media outlets were not telling the truth.

All this was only three years ago.

Things are a little different now, I'm sure you will find in many cases that forgiveness is possible in light of true apologies, but there will not be a forgetting.

And these things need to be honestly discussed if we are ever to achieve anything resembling national cohesion again.