cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3320637
YouTube and Reddit are sued for allegedly enabling the racist mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead::The complementary lawsuits claim that the massacre in 2022 was made possible by tech giants, a local gun shop, and the gunman’s parents.
The difference between reddit/youtube and a video game is that a video game doesn’t have an algorithm that creates an echo chamber.
Social Medias want clicks, so they create echo chambers. Go watch one alt right video on YouTube and you will see them pop in your feeds
How far do you go, do you blame what he ate that day or lack of and was hangery? Just cause you get served videos from whatever source that doesn’t change it from just being what it is, information. If a psycho decides to do something with that information, he’s a psycho criminal. This is perfect to continue further censorship. Getting rid of echo chambers is impossible unless they get rid of the algos all together and people go back to building their own rss feeds but thats not gonna happen and even if all you craft is the same echo chamber what changes, nothing still a psycho. Hard to rationalize the irrational.
If it was simply serving videos, that would be fine.
The problem here is that the platform is trying to give you certain types of videos.
Even more than that: even though you try to avoid certain types of contents, youtube for example, will still give you that content.
And thats where the problem is. Because that content is often alt right speaking points that get served to you even though you don’t want it.
That’s the difference between a video game and a social media.
It’s a simple matter of normalizing.
I’m torn, on one hand, you are right. On the other, I will say that while we disagreed, my extended family used to get along. Enough time with social media and there’s basically people that can’t stand to talk to each other at all, let alone be in the same room. Folks that grew up together, spent decades hanging out. Same thing for a friend of mine that had been a friend for over a decade. Went down a rabbit hole and frothing at the mouth rage with all sorts of extremist talking points.
While direct responsibility is certainly tricky, social networks have allowed people’s worst inclinations to fester. The neat tendency for them to group “like-minded” folks together while guarding them from “unlike-minded” has really caused deep societal problems.