Just in time!
This is basically what happened with early newspapers over a hundred years ago … if you don’t regulate the sources of daily / regular news information sources that the public consumes, eventually the information will be taken over by those people who will want to control and manipulate people for their own benefits or the benefit of a few people in power.
All social media is the new newspapers of this era and the main source of news information and the public’s way of gathering information about the world on a daily, almost hourly basis now.
Governments have to regulate all social media in the same way that TV is regulated, or movies, or films, or newspapers
If there is no heavy handed regulation to control the main sources of information in our world and we allow billionaires to decide what is relevant and what is not … or what is important and what is not … then eventually all we will be fed is misinformation, propaganda and disinformation.
As it is now, because social media is not in the control of the public but in stead in the hands of billionaires, the billionaires get to decide how our world thinks, how it acts and how it sees reality.
Whoever controls the information in our world today gets to have control over everything and everyone … and right now, none of us have control over everything while a handful of billionaires control everything.
You realize however that government regulation also stifle progressive radicalism? It’s why all newspapers and then radio and TV became status quo centrists which collaborated in obscuring and preventing every progressive policy from anti smoking campaigns to climate change. And that is without mentioning that regulations can be captured by the right through rich lobbyists or straight up fascist politicians. At which point the whole “regulated news” becomes a fully controlled propaganda machine. Just look at places likes Russia
The only annoying bit of this is that I’ve seen Steam labeled as the latest hive of unregulated social networking. Valve has often been very hands off in their moderation, which allows for some pretty extreme far right types to post content and conspiracies in bubbles around Steam Community.
It could be a good thing, though, could lead to Steam also getting positive change.
Good thing we have Lemmy where the people control the instances and the community and we can filter out any users or communities that are full of lies. This works on a personal level but the information is still there and any new users must suffer until they can vet the info themselves or create their own echo chambers.
I do worry about platforms like Reddit or Lemmy. We can see potential manipulation happen from either user submissions or comments. I worry about how to identify this and deal with it, whether it is a dubious source, something shared with an ulterior motive, a bad actor, or even AI generated comment.
