Canadian tech expert says social media ban won't work (mobilesyrup.com)

submitted 1 day ago by NightOwl@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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[-] ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 27 points 1 day ago

Banning social media has always felt like a kneejerk/emotional reaction. It's a surface level solution to a complex problem, a bit like drugs = bad therefore we should ban drugs. It might see some short term improvements but I don't personally see it as a realistic solution long term.

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's actually worse than that. Apparently, if you go down through enough layers of the movements pushing age-gating for social media in the US, you discover that one of the major funders is . . . Meta/Facebook (or at least this is what is getting batted around on tech sites). Whether they're actively funding it up here, or it's just slopover . . . 🤷

The most benign explanation for this is that they want more anti-lawsuit armour. The cynical explanation is that they want to harvest additional personal data from the organization doing the age-gating, so that they can sell more "personalized" ad spaces to their real customers.

(And the real solution? Make the toxic elements of large corporate social media illegal, period, regardless of the user's age group. And while you're at it, require any advertising-funded online service that shows different ads to different users to put up an annoying banner saying "we steal your personal data" in big red letters that has to be clicked through every time someone uses the site.)

[-] idunnololz@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

I think Meta is pushing it because they want to make sure ads are served to real people and not bots. It's the much simpler explanation.

[-] Reannlegge@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago

That is why I stopped using Reddit and Facebook, I have a community on Discord that I so want to move to Matrix. Because of all of this big tech stuff going down I am planning on spinning up my own home lab, mostly running off of raspberry pi’s. I have a measly handful of pi’s right now doing things like; pihole; HAOS; a bunch of apps to sail the high seas, nextcloud, wireguard, a few other things but the best has got to be searNINGX a self hosted search engine, sure it takes results from the google and bing and maybe some others but I have it setup more to my liking. I know there is arguments to using AdGaurd home over pihole but for everything that AdGaurd home does that pihole does not do I have worked it into my pihole setup. I do not want to be the product, I want to be the user.