> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there.
But… it can kill people.
There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of causing injury to themselves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional).
When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. Unchecked, they are the tool of propagandists.
But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
I've always found the notion of "stochastic terrorism" to be elastic, effectively transforming "speech a given person dislikes" into "danger" so censorship looks like virtue.
Not to mention - you have to account for what happens if someone you hate may be in power and could wield any sort of system to stop "stochastic terrorism" against you. This is often dismissed as an abstract what-if, but....given what's been happening with world leaders these days, it should be a central consideration.
You are worried about the “what if” fallout over the multiple world leaders actually engaging in it. Their followers enact violence on their behalf while the leader maintains plausible deniability/enough perceived distance from the act they can never be explicitly blamed.
You can be worried about more than one thing but clearly one is a bigger issue than the other right now.
I never said "multiple". Just the leader in the jurisdiction you live in.
And I'm genuinely not sure how to interpret your last sentence. In the US we have a President that is increasingly going after people for their speech, in quite a few cases by using the laws and policies put in place to go after dissent. He is going after colleges and businesses who have "bias against whites" using policies put in place to punish hate speech against minorities and women.
I agree with that all that. That is why I am surprised you’re downplaying the idea of “stochastic terrorism” and discouraging the term’s usage. I don’t really get it.
It’s also important to note that the MAGA movement doesn’t care what restraint is shown when they’re out of power, they simply use every tool in their toolbox and bury the sword to the hilt every time.
Yes - and the point I'm making is that their toolbox has a few additional, nasty tools for censorship because they were originally enacted with the belief that only good, honest people would use them.
"Not thrilled with that" is also something they exploit to manipulate you.
Seeing this in black-and-white terms like "robs people of any notion" makes it easier to turn your dislike into a false choice, like any half-decent stage magician, between comfort and "not thrilled".
Humans are not machines. If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.
Were this the case, we could survive any poison or injuries, and discern truth from falsehood, simply by willing it so. We would never fall to drugs, nothing would get fetishised (in any sense of the word), political parties would be evaluated on merit alone rather than which name they proclaim.
And a lot of stage magic just wouldn't work. Special offers wouldn't be in exciting colours, gambling done with the same methods wouldn't ruin people; get-rich-quick schemes would fool nobody; photosensitive epilepsy wouldn't be a thing, and neither would the so-called "god helmet" (which, ironically, had one attempt to replicate the god helmet correlated only with suggestibility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
> If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.
The guidance I offer is only these:
1) you cannot escape a box whose existence you refuse to acknowledge.
It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.
Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.
Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
You reduce sugar intake, not eliminate it.
You eliminate cocaine intake, not just reduce it.
Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.