TikTok scared the elite class in ways we're not understanding. This isn't about protecting children, it's about indoctrination. You learn a santized version of the world in school and they keep you from an uncensored view of the world by controlling your access to information online. They're terrified of an informed younger generation not buying into the current political narrative. They know it's happening, because they told us that the war in Palestine was a fight against Palestinian aggressors, but young people with access to information online know it's a genocide. They want to kill that contra narrative.
We grew up with 24 hour cable news. Same thing, different medium.
Remember how they manipulated us into believing in weapons of mass destruction? They would have done it with the genocide in Gaza, if it wasn't for the ability of people to share uncensored information through social media.
No our algorithmic manipulation was done through corporate media. Same monsters, different medium. It was the church, then newspapers, cable news, and now social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Did they describe them as either wholesome or safe?
To me the difference is in the doom-scrolling, the shoving rage-bait in your face and the gaming for addictiveness.
Old-school forums, whether they were wholesome or not, didn't do that stuff. Hell, I used to be on Kuro5hin, which was incredibly toxic, but I have IRL friends from there and it just wasn't the same as doom-scrolling through algorithmically selected influencers while meta/tiktok shoved ads in my face.
Yeah, but should the state really be this deeply involved in the personal choices of it's constituency? We don't stick our hands into similar activities such as religion, political affiliation, or dietary habits. Sure you can make a slightly better case that children need greater protection but the evidence for the harms of social media are contentious at best. There's no scientific consensus on social media, but there is pretty strong agreement on calories and sugar, but we're not banning sugar for children. This to me just seems like a power grab.
I hate this. An explanation is only meaningful if it comes with accountability, knowing why I was denied does me no good if I have no avenue for effective recourse outside of a lawsuit.
The models are not smarter than us by far. Have you not run into issues with reasoning and comprehension with them? They get confused, they miss big details, build complicated code thats ineffective. They don't work well at tasks that require a larger holistic understanding of the problem. The models are weak, brittle reasoners, because they have an indirect and contradictory understanding of the wold. We're several breakthroughs away and several hardware generations from having models that are robust reasoners for grounded, non-kind problems.
I don't think people really adhere to Google's definition; most companies don't even have nearly similar scale. Most SRE I've seen are running from one Pagerduty alert to the next and not really doing much of a deep dive into understanding the problem.
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