We shouldn’t be forced to use toxic platforms that track and profile us in order to get public information.
Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube track and profile their users so that they can target advertising towards them.
Their business models fuel online harms by pushing more and more extreme content to users. Despite this, these platforms are one of the primary ways that government departments share public information.
Tell your MP to support the EDM calling on the UK Government to ensure that all public sector social media content is published on open, decentralised and federated platforms!
#socialMedia #UK #politics #UKpolitics #fediverse #initiative
I appreciate the peertube link for this video.
Yah, my local (all Republicans) county board shares their videos on YouTube only and we all know why that sucks.
They don’t need to choose a platform. They have to be forced to put all public-facing communication onto their website without exception. From there, they or anyone else who wants to can copy it to any platform there is.
When covid started I didn’t know anything about it. I wasn’t on Twitter or reddit or Facebook. I was in college, doing that and had a baby. We watched cartoons and when they slept I’d read and write. I had no idea until no one was on the road or at Walmart with me. I had no idea how to even get information about what was happening, so I went to the county website and found nothing. my professors stopped livestreaming and sent helpful information about it the same week so I got it.
Turned out the city had a Facebook page that people were getting their information from. And there was also a Twitter.
Then my kid gets to be school aged. The fucking school used Facebook and twitter to communicate with parents. I missed so many programs, and lacked information about everything that happened there.
Fucking hate it.
Damn… We should really start fighting for a world where people making the option of not using digital technologies are respected, as written in the Off-Punk Manifesto…
Dang, that sucks.
You should really pay closer attention to the news…
Did you watch the news much when you were in your 20’s? Because i didn’t, hell I still don’t. Plus taking 50 credit hours with a little toddler baby raising them alone took every bit of my time.
I don’t watch TV but I read the news on the news websites on my phone.
If I wouldn’t have a phone I would subscribe to a newspaper.
That’s cool. My reading time was divided around the 6 college textbooks I was reading at one time and being judged on my comprehension of the texts, and as I was paying for the chance to be judged, I took it pretty seriously. I didn’t even have a news app at that age, besides the newsbreak factory install with my phone that I immediately deleted.
…yeah?
What did you watch CNN, BBC? In your 20’s you were doing that?
I don’t think I watched what I wanted on TV for more than an hour a week in my 20s.
Is this the same UK with the Online Safety Act whose main purpose (in the sense of “the purpose of a system is what it does”) is to legislate all forums and platforms not run by big tech companies out of existence? I somehow don’t think that country in particular will do that, but best of luck to the ORG!
Governments will move when these platforms have the reach as the toxic ones do. They’re not on Facebook and Twitter for fun. They’re on them because it’s incredibly easy to reach people without much hassle. The toxicity they can generate is just a happy byproduct for them.
It is important to make distinctions:
- as politicians they can use and campaign in whatever platform they want.
- As Government officials, they must be forced by legislation to use a Government Federated instance so everyone has access to their communication and no Big Tech oligarch has the power to decide how these messages reach the population.
Being government, they ate uniquely positioned to create reach by moving to ethical platforms anyway and forcing the public to follow.
They don’t have to move. They can simply use both.
