this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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Millennials: It's ok to mourn the death of social media::Wired writes how "first-gen social media users have nowhere to go." Ouch.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You seem to think that social media is about giving people a voice. It isn't. Most social media is set up either to harvest users personal data to sell for profit or to sell products to and push ideas on users. In most cases, both. It has become the primary method of distributing propaganda and influencing public opinion generally.

Cancer

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

you're basically Alex Jones with that level of paranoid delusion, they're just a service that exists not a communist plot to turn frogs gay.

And yes of course people attempt to control narratives on social media, you think it was better when Murdoch could just print anything he liked? and if even if you could prove it's bullshit the only thing you could do was moan about it to some dunks down the pub.

Social media isn't perfect but your characterisation of it is absurd and based on nothing but kneejerk hatred of change

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If propaganda comes from Fox News it's easy to identify as propaganda, but when people you know are citing seemingly well written and researched studies it's more complicated. Propaganda has become more believable and widespread because of social media.

But even if you ignore the propaganda, social media is still used to push products with targeted advertising and harvests data to sell to whoever will pay for it. It's not a conspiracy at all it's just how capitalism works.

Even if you remove money from the equation all together, you're seeing the highlights of everyone's lives which has been shown to lead to depression and feelings of inadequacy.

Not to mention that half the posts and comments on Reddit aren't even made by humans. Lemmy might be a bit better, but honestly not much.

Literally the only thing social media is good for is memes and even that distracts people from what they're supposed to be doing and have been shown to be an effective method of spreading disinformation.

Social media is cancer.

How about instead of getting pissy over a valid criticism of companies that you have no duty to defend, either explain why any of the above isn't true or come up with some positive aspects to social media.