Petition calls to ban Elon Musk's X in Europe

Yeah, but they're great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-"moderate" political parties.

This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won't do anything further about it.

Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would've been it if, it wasn't that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).

Maybe not quote, but embed. They should still quote noteworthy things on there, but don't force us to interact with the site

Closed it. Viva la France!

Agree with the first part, but news ought to still quote tweets while it exists, otherwise they cannot denounce many of the wrong things going on in there. I quote the Guardian's email I received this week (even if I prefer quoting to embedding, as tweets get deleted, and embeds brings traffic to the site):

Dear reader, Yesterday we announced that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our content elsewhere. This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse. X users will still be able to share our articles, and the nature of live news reporting means we will still occasionally embed content from X within our article pages. Our reporters will also be able to carry on using the site for newsgathering purposes, just as they use other social networks in which we don’t officially engage. Social media can be an important tool for news organisations and help us to reach new audiences but, at this point, X now plays a diminished role in promoting our work. Our journalism is available and open to all on our website and we would prefer people to come to theguardian.com and support our work there. You can also enjoy our journalism on the Guardian app and discover new pieces via our brilliant set of regular newsletters. Thankfully, we can do this because our business model doesn’t rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giants’ algorithms – instead we’re funded directly by our readers.

My twitter account is just a link to my mastodon profile, with a script that posts a link to it every week or so to stop it getting banned for inactivity.

I actually can't remember the last time I saw someone under 60 buy a newspaper. I think the cross over in the venn diagram is going to be pretty small.

write their newspapers that they would cancel their subscriptions if the articles quoted ... tweets.

Given the former and future president of the USA's habit of announcing policies there, that seems unworkable.

Has any petition here ever actually lead to any change?

Not going to sign it, too. Change.org is part of the problem, and not of the solution.

Exactly. This is the only correct answer. Change.org petitions are as worthless as a 7 euros banknote.

+1

They should discourage institutions from using it (and use government Mastadon instances of course). This is honestly long overdue.

Yep they should keep fining him exponentially till he leaves (he obviously will never fall in line with EU rules)

They only need to expand it a little bit. Add a rule against Nazi websites, and enforce it. That's not restrictive very much at all. Drag has gone drag's entire life without relying on Nazi sites

Does the article say anything about censorship? Usually bans like this are financial. So X offices would close in the EU and bank accounts seized and they wouldn't be allowed to conduct business (eg with advertisers) in the EEA

Let's at least block the government agencies from using it in favor of open platforms and protocols to communicate with its citizens.

Yeah. When public services solely use Xitter or Facebook pisses me off. We can and should make that shit illegal.

Germany did this years ago. Their government hosts a mastodon instance for various agencies

and the reddit Russian psy-op? certainly not helping

Yeah, keep X on and pile up the multi-million fines if they don't comply with laws. That's the only thing companies care about - something eating up their profits.

And if they keep not complying - then ban it altogether, like Brazil did. I prefer to recognize and ban it for the illegal activities it does, not because some folks don't like it and banded together against it.

They should pass a resolution that all EU member nations shall create official Mastodon and Lemmy instances. Moderators and admins would be actual jobs constrained by the relevant national or EU law.

(Or replace Mastodon and Lemmy with whatever open platforms you deem appropriate)

See it more like "preventing a website whose owner refuses to comply withEuropean law from operating in the EU".

fuck CSAM, but where do we draw the line?

let laws regulate society and don't let government regulate directly.

for example, instead of banning access to X, outlaw the use of Social media in direct advertising. Make the EU market so hostile towards their business practices they can't legally operate.

then, it's "X" that refuses to operate within the laws we as a people have required, not just an over-reaching autocrat.

It's short sighted indeed.

This is all they have to do

Whats wrong with bluesky? Ive been using it fornthe past week and its definitely more intuitive and accessible for the average joe than Mastodon.

Don't let the garbage sit until it rots. It will attract flies and possible more garbage.

Bsky has 20 million users, which is great, basically doubled in a month, but twitter has hundreds of millions of users. We talking a different order of magnitude.

Does the article say anything about censorship? Usually bans like this are financial. So X offices would close in the EU and bank accounts seized and they wouldn't be allowed to conduct business (eg with advertisers) in the EEA

That’s all well and good, and that’s currently my policy.

But that’s an entirely different discussion than whether banning a certain propaganda platform is worth doing and would cause the intended results.

I'm not going to get in to a hissy fit because someone uses Microsoft Windows or bought something from Amazon

You're more mature than some people here.

Found the market liberal.

You ban stuff not because it is bad and you want something better. You ban stuff that is so bad that is actually harmful.

The German government already has their own mastodon instance on social.bund.de

Much better alternative to a EU funded social network, as this would automatically drive critics to the assumption, that politicians are controlling the narrative and deleting critical content. Also supports the development of open source and self hosted alternatives this way.

Fascism

Obviously not what they have in use anymore, but for a golden few seconds the algorithm was open source: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

No.

There's absolutely no sensible reason to even consider not doing this.

Correction, we went from fanatical Elon worship to a sudden realization, that he's the greatest scam artist of all time (quite literally, nobody EVER burned more tax payer and inverter money) and went into sudden shock and disbelief.

we have moved to musk hating but i fail to see how all of it could be characterised as nonsensical; there are elements for sure

I never liked Musk, even when he was "In." Even the Mars colonization meme rubbed me the wrong way, as the science does not line up with that.

It felt like a cult of personality to me. He was always a fickle jerk, a mixed bag.

You have a point though, people's opinions were largely political, I think. Or just based on pure hope/cultism

It's like JK Rowling all over again.

There is a certain, disturbingly large, segment of the population which doesn't even appear to attempt to think for themselves.