The Social Media Thread

For me personally, I actually had a pretty good experience with social media. Like, I'm able to talk about movies, TV shows and video games much more freely with people than I ever could in school or at my job and I was able to meet up with some great people who also have similar opinions to me.

But, in terms of if social media has really helped in the overall sense, well it's kind of mixed on that. On the one hand, many people are much more aware of what's going on in the world and are able to get more active in trying to make things better for people. But on the other hand, this has caused some people to get way too nasty with their comments and some of those people ended up bullying or trying to emotionally harm a person for having a different opinion or having an opinion on anything and that has caused many people to be affected emotionally and mentally in a negative way.

EDIT So, about cancel culture, should we talk about that in the social media thread or should that go to the Psychology thread?

Edited by Rabbitearsblog on Mar 27th 2024 at 11:38:33 AM

I've had more good than bad experiences on social media, but I've also gone about it aware of the risks and having taken steps to mitigate the bad.

EDIT: Yeah, cancel culture is off topic.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Mar 28th 2024 at 5:12:53 PM

Ultimately a lot of content creators that have had controversies are still going. Pro Jared and Jon Tron are the ones that come to mind. They have much less viewers than Pewdiepie who could weather the storm a bit more.

I also don't remember Pewdiepie's n-word controversy stretching out like Pro Jared's or Jon Tron's breakdown.

"Cancel culture" doesn't belong in the Social Media thread. Mostly because people demanding public figures be boycotted or shut down for whatever reason is not something that started with Facebook or Twitter.

It's not anything new.

Edited by M84 on Mar 28th 2024 at 5:01:55 PM

Any one who thinks otherwise has zero experiance with east asian culture...

Heck, anyone who thinks otherwise is unfamiliar with...just any culture.

Did people just forget Moral Guardians are a thing? That whole Satanic Panic nonsense with D&D?

Then there's Lenny Bruce back in the 1960's. He was probably the only comedian who was actually canceled for his material. And by "canceled" I mean he faced fucking legal trouble over his dirty jokes.

Edited by M84 on Mar 28th 2024 at 5:11:26 PM

Well since this is off topic, I'll just PM you about some questions.

New topic, is Twitter still operating? Lasting longer than expected. At this point, might last the next decade.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Mar 28th 2024 at 5:12:02 PM

Yeah, social pressure is a thing in every culture. People who thing it does not apply to their culture are making a lot of unexamined assumtions.

signed some european

Edited by Risa123 on Mar 28th 2024 at 10:14:12 AM

Anyway, the general point about social media being a mixed bag is because it accelerates and amplifies everything about human communication for better or worse.

It's faster for information in general to spread...including the lies. And lies have always been faster than truth.

It's easier to find peers who share our interests and struggles. It's also made it much easier for us to find echochambers to avoid being confronted with anything that challenges our worldview.

And of course we can't forget that social media companies don't treat users as customers — because most of us don't pay anything to use them — but as the product. So they have an incentive to make us as addicted to their use as possible.

Edited by M84 on Mar 28th 2024 at 5:25:49 PM

Yeah, no one is saying that Cancel Culture is new in this thread. Sounds like some passive agressive complaining from people, but that's off topic.

On the general topic, I'm generally happy to stay off Twitter.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Mar 28th 2024 at 5:30:37 PM

As far as I know, Twitter is still around. But for me, I rarely use Twitter, except to promote my videos. But, I never liked having discussions on Twitter because Twitter is such a toxic place and when you say something wrong, then many people will attack you for no reason there.

Like you, I only used X/Twitter to promote my books. Ocassionally, I talk to my favorite English voice actors who have accounts there and talk to fellow fans of certain works of fiction I enjoy. Rarely do I get involved in anything political.

It also helps that I don't show my real face there.

Edited by HallowHawk on Mar 28th 2024 at 2:53:25 AM

I use X to follow topics and people that I'm interested in. Within those interests, it allows me to gain highly specific and up-to-date information in a way that I wouldn't if I just followed specific news sites. It also allows me to become involved in all of the dramas and stupidity inherent to any large body of people. I don't post much since I'm not selling or sharing anything.

Pros: Extremely rapid and timely communication, the ability to expand one's social circle by finding people who share one's interests.

Cons: It amplifies all of the downsides of social dynamics, such as tribalism, and amplifies the loudest voices disproportionately. With timeliness comes a lack of vetting, so one has to be really alert to sort out the bad data from the good.

Personal example: I'm really into rockets and spaceflight, so I can curate my feed to deliver the most timely information on that topic. However, it would be just as easy for me to fall into the flat-Earth cult if I didn't know any better going in.

I could find other ardent environmentalists, but then have to dodge radicals and doomers. Good and bad.

Something social media excels at is lowering my opinion of humanity as a whole, and/or making the exceptional people stand out even more, depending on how one frames it.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 28th 2024 at 8:53:58 AM

I only use Twitter to look at and find fanart / handle commissions from people who prefer communicating over it to other sites because of them giving better notifications.

I still use Twitter, but only for the people I already follow. Very rarely I'll go to the For You tab because sometimes you can get some pretty cool random fanart on there, but that's about it.

But I'm a nobody, no one bothers me. My experience is not the same experience as, for example, a voice actor who has to put up with harassment because they dared to call out someone who deserved to be called out.

I have an Instagram account, which is also basically for just following people, with the assumption that one of these days, most people are gonna jump off the X ship for good (several I follow already have)

Well, you could define "Cancel Culture" more specifically than that. It is, after all, a semi-organized if decentralized movement, and one could trace the origins and history of it's present form and discuss that. Probably should go into it's own thread.

The mod team have decided that the topic is not welcome and as such this should now be dropped.

Re: ProJared and JonTron

I stopped watching him after that debacle and I'm probably missing details, but iirc ProJared was able to survive by (mostly) exonerating himself. Though he definitely took a subscriber hit.

Pretty sure JonTron was fine because people are just shitty. Due to the context, a lot of his audience probably didn't even care about what he did.

Edited by Karxrida on Mar 28th 2024 at 7:09:17 AM

Pro Jared, I understand somewhat where the situation comes from and how it got out of hand, but I think the shittiest part is what he did to Ross by sleeping with his wife. This is not the kind of thing you do to one of your best friends. At the end of the day though, that's between him and Ross and I'm not really the one to make the final judgment.

Jon, he just avoids the worst by not being very productive in the first place, so his videos remain events of sorts. And much like IH, he has a fanbase of shitty people who see his views as a positive thing.

Edited by Resileafs on Mar 28th 2024 at 10:15:09 AM

Is Bluesky still a bit better than Twitter, in terms of having less toxicity than Twitter?

I've not got a clue about that personally, though I do have an account. I do remember seeing a post on Bluesky saying that there isn't an algorithim that promotes highly divisive posts here there (you know, the shitheel type) so reacting to them is how they would get buoyed up instead of being passively promoted. Memory is fuzzy on that, though, it was a while ago and it's 7 in the morning right now.

Anyway, what about that weirdass bi-partisan bill to ban Tik Tok?

...You know, I remember a convo here last year talking about the same thing, with Tik Tok and the Chinese government spying through it or using it to spy on people. I remember a few people saying that this seems pretty racially-motivated while Native did actually make a few good points about it being a national security danger.

Cut to last week when I saw a politician on CNN talk about the bi-partisian bill and when one of the anchors said that many of the problems you could accuse Tik Tok of (and indeed, the politician he was interviewing did just name some of them as a reason for the bill), it also applies to other platforms such as Instagram but you aren't trying to impose regulations against those platforms, that guy's response? "You can't regulate the CCP".

And that guy was a Democrat. I'm used to Republicans suggesting incredibly stupid and heavy-handed "solutions" to problems such as the dumbass Wall at the border or injecting bleach into your veins (as Seth Meyers once said, a conserative's second option will always be the most absurd and rediculous shit you've heard, the thing thing that would be 37th on a normal person's list and only attempted after literally every option was tried). But it's baffling to see Democrats support the same sort of thing with the same sort of content-less response you would get from a Republican, the sort that says nothing but reveals everything.

I don't think Native's points back then were wrong but...I'm starting to tilt back towards the Sinophobia angle.

Edited by fredhot16 on Mar 29th 2024 at 5:34:58 AM

China is flagged by the US government as a foreign adversary, and one of the goals of the current administration has been to try to pry away some of our economic dependence on trade with it. In particular, China is a dominant or sole supplier of many critical industrial precursor materials as well as electronics, and the risk that China would decide to restrict that trade is very present in the minds of officials. Plus there's the whole Taiwan affair.

Whether those are reasonable or valid concerns is not a topic for this thread, but to blame the actions of politicians on Sinophobia alone is a dramatic oversimplification of the issues.

I do think, and have said before, that calling out TikTok for promoting harmful behavior to children is a bit of a red herring, since it's hardly unique in that regard. That's why Congress is focusing on data privacy as a justification for the bill instead.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 29th 2024 at 8:34:32 AM

Note that the bill doesn’t actually ban Tik Tok, it says that the Chinese company who own it have to sell it to a non-Chinese company or be banned.

Tik Tok is the lead example for the problem of foreign adversaries using social media to exert negative influence on US politics because it has a direct ownership link to a foreign adversary. However it’s true that nobody is yet looking at either the issue of companies without ownership links being paid to do such work for a foreign adversary, or the issue of social media companies exerting such negative influence for their own purposes.

Edited by Silasw on Mar 29th 2024 at 2:15:21 PM

The question I have is actually like…does that negative foreign influence actually exist on Tik Tok? Because I’ve looked at the analyses and uh, it comes off like Tik Tok just has different moderation priorities than Facebook or Twitter do.

This isn’t to exonerate Tik Tok at all, but like, the “undue influence” seems to be that Tik Tok doesn’t really give a shit about what political stuff shows up and not that they’re pushing for a specific narrative.

With privacy, it’s also a little hard to tell if China is actually pulling any data, but it is a more legitimate risk, it’s just really hypocritical coming from the US, especially since the US does very little about places that seem to be Russian fronts, for example.