That’s a double edged sword right there. If you don’t allow external influences, you block both good and bad types of conversations. What you’re left with is only the local conversation, which might be balanced or biased depending on where you live.
If you live under a dictatorship, you might really want some of that external influence. If you can trust that the local conversation is good and balanced, banning Twitter and Meta won’t have any serious drawbacks.
Commercial social media platforms already mark certain conversations as bad and censor them. Both Zuckerberg and Musk seem to have political goals and have changed how their platforms work to promote them.
If they were a free marketplace of ideas, I’d agree. But while Facebook is hiding news in Canada, YouTube is promoting rage-bait, and Twitter is making weird tweaks for Musk’s self confidence, they seem like they’re trying to promote a US worldview.
It’d be interesting to see what would replace them if they weren’t available.
I’ve also noticed that every LLM I’ve used has a political agenda of some sort. If you try to make it write material of controversial or questionable nature, you’ll run into some issues. You’ll also notice, that many LLMs prefer to give everything a rather wholesome twist whenever possible. Not really a bad thing IMO, but I must say that these tools are not completely neutral when it comes to sensitive matters. Personally, I don’t really have a problem with these moral preferences, but I also know some people who most certainly do.
When companies have a vast multinational audience, they need to consider these kinds of matters. It applies to social media companies too, and they already have experience with this, while various LLM companies are still learning this game. We’ve already seen how social media platforms have been used to promote the agenda of the company behind them, and I believe we’ll see the same with LLMs. Once LLMs become an inseparable part of everyday life, there will be more political pressure to push a specific narrative to the users, just like there currently is with social media platforms.
The question is not about banning foreigners from our social media, it’s about banning foreign-controlled social media. The Americans can join us here on Lemmy.
I guess I should have use a more specific term. “External influence” is just such a short an convenient concept, but it’s clearly way too broad. What I meant to say is pretty much what you seem to be getting at. The idea is, that banning websites and services will limit the extent of influence one government can intentionally have on another nation. Individual citizens are going to be doing their own thing anyway, and that’s a separate matter.
Here’s a clarification that didn’t fit into the previous post. You can view these things form the perspective of the local government that aims to maintain status quo. If some foreign social media platform is having a negative impact on your country, banning the platform should be a net positive. However, who defines these values? Is it good for the freedom of the people, good for the people in power, or something entirely different. All of that depends on the circumstances and the country you’re in. If the EU blocks Xitter, it’s not quite the same when China is doing the that.
That’s a double edged sword right there. If you don’t allow external influences, you block both good and bad types of conversations. What you’re left with is only the local conversation, which might be balanced or biased depending on where you live.
If you live under a dictatorship, you might really want some of that external influence. If you can trust that the local conversation is good and balanced, banning Twitter and Meta won’t have any serious drawbacks.
Commercial social media platforms already mark certain conversations as bad and censor them. Both Zuckerberg and Musk seem to have political goals and have changed how their platforms work to promote them.
If they were a free marketplace of ideas, I’d agree. But while Facebook is hiding news in Canada, YouTube is promoting rage-bait, and Twitter is making weird tweaks for Musk’s self confidence, they seem like they’re trying to promote a US worldview.
It’d be interesting to see what would replace them if they weren’t available.
I’ve also noticed that every LLM I’ve used has a political agenda of some sort. If you try to make it write material of controversial or questionable nature, you’ll run into some issues. You’ll also notice, that many LLMs prefer to give everything a rather wholesome twist whenever possible. Not really a bad thing IMO, but I must say that these tools are not completely neutral when it comes to sensitive matters. Personally, I don’t really have a problem with these moral preferences, but I also know some people who most certainly do.
When companies have a vast multinational audience, they need to consider these kinds of matters. It applies to social media companies too, and they already have experience with this, while various LLM companies are still learning this game. We’ve already seen how social media platforms have been used to promote the agenda of the company behind them, and I believe we’ll see the same with LLMs. Once LLMs become an inseparable part of everyday life, there will be more political pressure to push a specific narrative to the users, just like there currently is with social media platforms.
Unshockingly I have found that it’s very hard to make an LLM be critical of LLM and AI in general.
The question is not about banning foreigners from our social media, it’s about banning foreign-controlled social media. The Americans can join us here on Lemmy.
I guess I should have use a more specific term. “External influence” is just such a short an convenient concept, but it’s clearly way too broad. What I meant to say is pretty much what you seem to be getting at. The idea is, that banning websites and services will limit the extent of influence one government can intentionally have on another nation. Individual citizens are going to be doing their own thing anyway, and that’s a separate matter.
Here’s a clarification that didn’t fit into the previous post. You can view these things form the perspective of the local government that aims to maintain status quo. If some foreign social media platform is having a negative impact on your country, banning the platform should be a net positive. However, who defines these values? Is it good for the freedom of the people, good for the people in power, or something entirely different. All of that depends on the circumstances and the country you’re in. If the EU blocks Xitter, it’s not quite the same when China is doing the that.