Regardless of their intentions, granting outsized influence to any very small group of users skews our perceptions of public opinion.
As we know, anyone whose opinion about it is featured in the Globe and Mail has just the right amount of influence.
There is of course "astroturfing" on lemmy as well. But in such a human-scale social media environment it's harder for it to hide, easier for it to be seen for what it is. Many parts of the larger fediverse are slowly developing a culture of just blocking the accounts which appear to be there only to troll, mislead, discourage, and argue in bad faith. Instances that host too many of them get blocked themselves. There is no secret algorithm magically boosting outrage fuel to drive engagement. There is no censorship or manipulation of the discussion motivated by the interests of advertisers. There is no financial motive to tolerate everything that doesn't conflict with those interests. There is no way to buy the power to control the users.
With Bill C-63 Canada had the opportunity to enact an enormous bureaucracy with the power to disrupt our network, impose on it laws designed with the interests of giant corporate behemoths in mind, impose non-solutions to problems we don't have, create regulatory barriers to entry that protect the corporate social media platform mafia, and follow other countries down a blind alley we've been steered into by "big tech" lobbyists. It's a good thing it didn't pass, and I hope they don't try to revive it in anything like its previous form.
If the government of Canada wishes to begin fostering a healthier digital media landscape, let it first join the Fediverse. That will be a sign that there is some hope of it having the ability to make good decisions in this domain.
I remember it well. I think the biggest difference between OS/2 then and Linux today is that OS/2 wasn't all that much better than Windows in any easily understood way for the average non-technical user.
So many reports of "jailbreaking," so few of anything significant happening as a result.
Apparently you can get them to tell "a derogatory joke about a racial group." Neither those nor any of the other outputs mentioned are in short supply without any AI assistance being necessary to find them.
These things are at their most dangerous when they're misused for "good" purposes where they aren't capable of doing well and can introduce subtle biases and mistakes, not when some idiot spends a lot of time and effort to make them generate overtly racist shit.
90% is just a guess since that apparently wasn't the question that was asked, but with only 12% willing to confidently say they'd at least consider it getting to 1 in 5 "okay with it" is quite a stretch.
Alberta leading in support for Canada becoming a US state declares the clickbait headline writer describing a poll that shows Alberta is 90% opposed to it.
It just seems like a high price for what you get, considering that running a searx instance costs nothing. There being no way to pay for it anonymously also makes me less willing to pay that much.
a QR code that updates at regular intervals, encoding an ever-changing signature
That's brilliant. Any sci-fi authors in the crowd? The private key would be used to hash and sign a record of body movements including all one's crazy hand gestures and every word spoken. Location could optionally be encoded as well. Some kind of algorithm would be devised so that some reasonable loss in fidelity of any video recording would still result in a valid signature. It wouldn't be technically all that useful to display the signature as a QR code shown on a badge, but it'd be a fashionable thing to do and anyone who didn't would be seen as slightly suspicious.
Key infrastructure would be tricky, but anonymous and pseudonymous keypairs could certainly be allowed for if we go with the assumption that instant biometric identification of everyone isn't quite feasible for whatever reason. Maybe it's just banned, punishable by exile to the orbital asteroid mining colonies.
All we need is for everyone (except the underclass) to get neural implants that record their every movement.
kbal @ kbal @fedia.io Posts 13Comments 1,087Joined 2 yr. ago
As we know, anyone whose opinion about it is featured in the Globe and Mail has just the right amount of influence.
There is of course "astroturfing" on lemmy as well. But in such a human-scale social media environment it's harder for it to hide, easier for it to be seen for what it is. Many parts of the larger fediverse are slowly developing a culture of just blocking the accounts which appear to be there only to troll, mislead, discourage, and argue in bad faith. Instances that host too many of them get blocked themselves. There is no secret algorithm magically boosting outrage fuel to drive engagement. There is no censorship or manipulation of the discussion motivated by the interests of advertisers. There is no financial motive to tolerate everything that doesn't conflict with those interests. There is no way to buy the power to control the users.
With Bill C-63 Canada had the opportunity to enact an enormous bureaucracy with the power to disrupt our network, impose on it laws designed with the interests of giant corporate behemoths in mind, impose non-solutions to problems we don't have, create regulatory barriers to entry that protect the corporate social media platform mafia, and follow other countries down a blind alley we've been steered into by "big tech" lobbyists. It's a good thing it didn't pass, and I hope they don't try to revive it in anything like its previous form.
If the government of Canada wishes to begin fostering a healthier digital media landscape, let it first join the Fediverse. That will be a sign that there is some hope of it having the ability to make good decisions in this domain.