46 lines
1.7 KiB
YAML
46 lines
1.7 KiB
YAML
Title: Rethinking Social Media
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Subtitle: Exploring the Fediverse
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Event type: Talk
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Duration (in mins): 30
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Language: English
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Classifiers:
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- Ethics in Computer Science
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- Sustainability
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- Privacy
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Summary: |
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Social media - in their current form - are toxic. Instead of
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connecting people, they have become tools for disinformation,
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distraction, and divisiveness.
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Can we imagine a less harmful form of social media? If yes, how
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would it look like? And what role does free software play in this
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alternative?
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Description: |
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Social media - in their current form - are toxic. Instead of
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connecting people, they have become tools for disinformation,
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distraction, and divisiveness.
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The industry is a quasi-monopoly which disregards privacy laws
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day-in, day-out - yet goes unharmed because of regulatory capture.
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Their algorithms are built to capture as much of our attention as
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possible - leading to the promotion of the most inciting content.
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Having captured users and advertisers, social media platforms are
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enshittified to extract more money for shareholders. Sometimes those
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same shareholders decide to stop moderating content on the platform
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because of a misguided understanding of "free speech": with the sad
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but unsurprising result of more racist, sexist, xeno-, homo- and
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transphobic, and other dehumanizing content. Nevertheless, a lot of
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public political discourse is (still) happening on those same social
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media platforms - which is then immediately manipulated by political
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adversaries to serve their needs.
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Can we imagine a less harmful form of social media? If yes, how
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would it look like? And what role does free software play in this
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alternative?
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