this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
55 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

44128 readers
404 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

How is you experience using them ? (I know BlueSky is invite only, but perhaps someone got lucky) I registered in Mastodon recently and i'm getting the same feeling(and problems) when started using lemmy.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] comfy@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure if that's really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It's an element of it, you're right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they're a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we're in, they're affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

  • They're filtered by the investor demands to censor.
  • They're filtered by advertising demands to censor.
  • They're vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
  • They're vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don't mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.

[โ€“] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

More referring to when websites pushes certain kinds of content against the will of its users. Youtube pushes right wing content. Twitter and Reddit on that crypto bs. Facebook pushes disinfo and terrorism. There's no benefit for doing things that way, they just do it because they can.

[โ€“] comfy@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I'm not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it's still a fault of the platform if it's being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust 'the algorithm' that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.