• 1 Post
  • 306 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • donuts@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Hamas says no more hostage releases until war ends
    16·
    1 year ago

    a reason, and that’s to give Hamas more leverage during the eventual ceasefire negotiations

    I don’t find “leverage” and political bargaining to be a good reason to take innocent people hostage.

    But even if I did, I think Hamas has a pretty fucking terrible track record of negotiating anything on the behalf of Palestinians. The October 7th terror attacks brought Gaza from the frying pan into the fire, and I doubt there will be anything resembling a ceasefire until the hostages are freed.

    The morally right thing for Hamas to do is to free the hostages and to turn over anybody who was involved in the October 7th terror attacks. The morally right thing for Israel to do is to implement an immediate ceasefire, facilitate aide into Gaza, and call back all illegal settlers in the West Bank. Will either side do the right thing? I don’t know, probably not, but I can only hope.

  • donuts@kbin.socialtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•Instead of only voting for one candidate we should be able to upvote or downvote each candidate
    3·
    1 year ago

    As a note, Ranked Choice still has bullet voting. About 30% of voters in a ranked choice election bullet vote.

    I think that stat could easily be attributed to a lack of familiarity with what is, to a lot of people, a new and different method of voting. You’d be surprised how many people don’t adequately read or understand directions.

    In other words, what you’re describing isn’t inherent to the system itself and it could be much worse.

    I’d guess that the number of people who bullet vote will decrease as the level of education and familiarity around “new” voting systems like RCV increases.

  • donuts@kbin.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.world•Polls on reactions to Threads
    4·
    1 year ago

    I can see from your other post that you’re talking about Facebook’s role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:

    The internet.org initiative was brought to Myanmar in 2015. Myanmar’s relatively recent democratic transition did not provide the country with substantial time to form professional and reliable media outlets free from government intervention. Furthermore, approximately 1% of Myanmar’s residents had internet access before internet.org. As a result, Facebook was the primary source of information and without verifiable professional media options, Facebook became a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation. “Rumors circulating among family or friends’ networks on Facebook were perceived as indistinguishable from verified news by its users.”[227] Frequent anti-Rohingya sentiments included high Muslim birthrates, increasing economic influence, and plans to takeover the country. Myanmar’s Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees. [Emphasis added by me, btw.]

    Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don’t use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this shit, don’t you agree?

    So what’s my point? Why is any of that relevant?

    As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.

    There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I’m saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it’s actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta’s staff would probably agree to that.

    So what’s the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?

    Frankly I’m not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.

    I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that’s why we’re talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that’s simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.

    As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.

  • donuts@kbin.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.world•Polls on reactions to Threads
    143·
    1 year ago

    For me personally there are two main forces at play here:

    1. I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don’t use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.

    2. Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it’s a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.

    I don’t really know for sure, but I’d have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We’d be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it’d also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it…

    So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.

    I’m perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I’m willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).

    From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.

    From a cultural standpoint, I’m also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc… Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase–and that’s the Fediverse working as intended, imo.