imo if anything the opposite causality is true: this DOJ was banking on a continuation of Biden in Kamala Harris, and because that is no longer forthcoming they’re now trying to get something out the door before the administrative changeover in the hopes it can stick. it almost certainly won’t, but most of Trump’s appointees are gigamad about “censorship” and they hate Google for “punishing conservative voices” or whatever so it’s hardly the most contrived hail mary if so

“over-stressing workers and pressing them to be as efficient as possible, causing them to cut corners with safety” is such a universal point of failure that it’s frequent in every modern industry and a contributing factor in a huge number of workplace incidents and industrial disasters. respectfully, you would have to actively ignore reality to hold the position you currently do, and if you think that’s the worker’s fault and not the company incentivizing them to do unsafe things to keep their jobs, i can really only describe you as a corporate apologist or bootlicker

Every worker is and should be pressured and monitored to ensure they’re working efficiently. That doesn’t give them carte blanche to disregard safety protocols.

the latter will necessarily follow from the former in almost every situation, because “inefficient workers” often get fired or are led to believe they will be fired and they have to make up the difference in that perception somewhere. this is still the company’s fault

i am familiar with the analogy, but i think it would obviously be worse if they agree with what they’re platforming instead of just being kind of half-baked morons who don’t have good political positions or cynically platforming it because it makes them money. one can, in effect, be remedied by showing them social or financial retribution, but the other would be a manifestation of a much more serious social problem that cannot be immediately dealt with

I’m sorry what? The idea that smaller communities are somehow less radical is absurd.

i’d like you to quote where i said this–and i’m just going to ignore everything else you say here until you do, because it’s not useful to have a discussion in which you completely misunderstand what i’m saying from the first sentence.

When you ban people from a website, they just move to another place, they are not stupid it’s pretty easy to create websites. It’s purely optical,

you are literally describing an event that induces the sort of entropy we’re talking about here–necessarily when you ban a community of Nazis or something and they have to go somewhere else, not everybody moves to the next place (and those people diffuse back into the general population), which has a deradicalizing effect on them overall because they’re not just stewing in a cauldron of other people who reinforce their beliefs

imo if reddit couldn’t survive “purging literally its worst elements, which included some of the most vehement bigotry and abhorrent content outside of 4chan” it probably doesn’t deserve to survive

i go back and forth on how much i think this tendency’s willingness to host content like this and/or go to the mat for it is agreement and how much of it is just stupidity or ill-conceived ideology. a lot of these guys seem like they agree with elements of fascism, but a lot of them are also… just not smart.

a lot of your contributions to this section of the thread are very needlessly antagonistic. please chill a bit.

the weirdest thing to me is these guys always ignore that banning the freaks worked on Reddit–which is stereotypically the most cringe techno-libertarian platform of the lot–without ruining the right to say goofy shit on the platform. they banned a bunch of the reactionary subs and, spoiler, issues with those communities have been much lessened since that happened while still allowing for people to say patently wild, unpopular shit

techno-libertarianism strikes again! it’s every few years with these guys where they have to learn the same lesson over again that letting the worst scum in politics make use of your website will just ensure all the cool people evaporate off your website–and Substack really does not have that many cool people or that good of a reputation to begin with.

things have generally been going good in this section of the thread, but just a general reminder to all participants that thoughtful comments with some time put into them (as a few of the replies to this comment have been) are going to lead to more constructive discourse than quick, impulsive ones. you’re also definitely not obliged to respond to everything you disagree with or anyone who replies to you, so keep that in mind

And apparently, in the USA there is a whole party devoted to child marriage and other ways to have sex with minors. That might be the better point to start, because they actually have a say regarding laws on that matter.

i’m not sure why we’re acting as if condemning Richard Stallman and the Republican Party for their equally bad takes in this sphere are mutually exclusive of each other.

A lawsuit filed by 33 states in federal court in California, claims that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent, in violation of federal law. In addition, nine attorneys general are filing lawsuits in their respective states, bringing the total number of states taking action to 41 and Washington, D.C.

“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its social media platforms,” the complaint says. “It has concealed the ways in which these platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children.”

The suits seek financial damages and restitution and an end to Meta’s practices that are in violation of the law.

one conspicuous state absent to this lawsuit: Texas, which has otherwise gladly railed against “big tech” for dumb reasons that mostly seem to boil down to “you moderate too much and it’s affecting people’s ability to say heinous things on your platform”

correct. while we could fly under the radar, any DMCA we get for this would be completely inarguable and so we’d probably be obliged to prevent this after it happens the first time.

Maybe take away the ability to upvote a link post and reserve that for the actual discussion parts that take place?

this would probably cause its own problems as a design choice, but it’s also not even possible with Lemmy without changing the underlying code (which is a whole ordeal) so that’s not really on the table.

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

i feel like people have more than substantiated down thread why it’s not a “smooth brain” take to think Tesla cars aren’t actually that good relative to other options on the market.

i can only presume the remaining 5% is owned by NFTs Georg, who lives on the blockchain and is an outlier who should not have been counted

joint statement by GMG Union and Onion Union:

The Onion and GMG Unions are saddened to report that our colleagues at Gizmodo Español, a site that once housed original, quality Spanish-language reporting, have been replaced en masse by an AI translation service. Instead of relying on the talented journalists at Gizmodo Español, G/O Media has enacted an automation that takes English-language Gizmodo articles, translates them poorly into Spanish, and posts them on Gizmodo Español almost immediately, with no Spanish-language editing. We offer our deepest sympathies to the Gizmodo Español team and share in their frustration as jobs for working journalists continue to disappear worldwide. The Gizmodo Español team comprised of four full-time employees—one editor and three writers—who have been employed by G/O media for over a combined 25 years. Because of the nature of their yearly contracts, they will not receive adequate severance.

They were employed at half the rate of American staff writers due to the nature of these contracts, and were rarely offered raises. Unfortunately this move to eliminate the Español team represents yet another broken promise from G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller and Editorial Director Merrill Brown, who have repeatedly said that the company’s AI experiments were intended to supplement human writing, not replace it. This week, a team of four has been [replaced] by an undisclosed automated machine translation service. Adding insult to injury, when the Gizmodo staff objected to having their bylines attached to machine translations, G/O management removed all bylines from Gizmodo Español—even the bylines of the four journalists who were laid off by G/O Media this week. We remain stringently opposed to G/O Media’s use of AI-generated content and pledge to continue fighting on behalf of journalists and the indispensable public service they provide.

As always, we appreciate your support — and your continual support of real journalism.