Agreed. I’ve voted center-left in pretty well every election of my adult life. Generally in favour of a socially progressive / fiscally conservative approach irl. Donated to green party campaigns. Was a card carrying member of Greenpeace for years. But on Lemmy, when I express a generally neutral viewpoint on a topic, and/or don’t support hard-left positions, I’ll be accused of being a right-wing republican nutjob who’s destroying America and supporting Trump and crew’s agenda. Even more amusing in that I’m Canadian, make no attempts to hide that fact, and am vocally part of the “don’t buy american stuff” crowd.

I do think it feels insular/hostile, though my take is different than yours. Yes, I’ve had some folks nitpick posts and one up, though I imagine you get that in many similar social media sites – there’re reasons for the running joke that in order to get a correct answer online, you gotta post a question as a woman, and confidently answer it wrong on a male account, and then people will pile on with correct answers and judgey-ments.

Many of the sites that seem to get posted to lemmy are on VERY fringey locations, locations that often seem highly likely to be hosting malicious content. There’s also far fewer people posting topics, with a very small group of users having like 10k+ posts per year. So it feels a lot more ‘concentrated’, especially on particular subjects, due to those posters’ bias’: if you’re an aggressive poster, it’s fairly easy to astroturf lemmy. Which feels insular / bubbly.

Adding to that, Lemmy has mods who are just as heavy-handed as on Reddit or any other heavily moderated setup – though lemmy’ll moderate things in a far more ‘progressive’ friendly way than most alternatives these days. Pejoratives are allowed for some groups, but not others. Even calling that sort of thing out in more explicit terms, though still in a neutral tone, can get you banned from many communities on Lemmy.

Other guys comment, and the note about pension funds, is more about how things like the CPP will invest in SpaceX – as will many ETF/bundled type ‘funds’ that people use. Things practically outside your control.

Yes, you and others can invest your personal wealth into whatever you want. But your gov old age stuff will invest into stuff like SpaceX regardless, and be exposed to potential risks should things collapse catastrophically.

Lemmy skews left, and censors moderate views / comments. You’re generally ok in various areas to be openly hostile towards certain demographics – typically white people, cisgendered people or men in general. You can use pejorative language to describe those groups with impunity. You can get banned from lemmy sites for questioning left-leaning narratives. Functionally, it’s not that dissimilar.

Censorship is used in part to cater a site to its market niche / audience. Whether you agree/disagree with a sites censorship approach, is generally based on whether you’re in that target audience / intended marketing bubble. If you’ve never been censored on a site for moderate views, you’re just squarely in the target group.

Meh, X skews right-wing, sites like Lemmy skew left, every social media site uses censorship along the lines that their intended bubble-market prefers.

Not exactly news, nor surprising in any way.

Also not all that ‘tech’ oriented really, it’s more mundane political drivel.

It was an example of use cases for wearable tech and people with disabilities. Cameras aren’t ‘technically’ required for the other example I noted related to eavesdropping. There are plausible reasons why people with disabilities would need glasses with cameras, and ‘recording’ people extends beyond just camera-based recordings. The issue is more with ubiquitous, covert, wearable smart-tech.

Yeah, I’m not as fussed over having laws on books, but on whether those laws are realistically enforceable. Like I recall reading at some point that lots of jurisdictions in the states define things like Orgies as a group of three or more people in a private dwelling without shoes on, based on ancient prudish attempts to describe what goes on. That’s a law that’s “on the books”, but practically unenforceable.

Same sort of thought pattern, to me, generally applies to the recording of people in public. It’s practically implausible that govt can enforce it uniformly, and it’s on the books just so they can ‘throw another book’ at a perp who’s been arrested for far greater offenses. There are also potential issues with ‘two party consent’ type recording setups, where one party is wanting to document events for legitimate reasons (recording an interaction with police, to CYA).

Idk. People taking pictures / recording public ‘things’, doesn’t seem like a practical area for privacy legislation to come in overly heavy handed on.

One of the issues is that there are legitimate uses for the tech. Like there was a post recently of a girl with hearing disabilities, ecstatic that she’d gotten glasses that provide real-time subtitles to people she talks to. A business / space with a “No Smart Glasses” policy, could essentially be denying people with disabilities access, which could land them in hot water just the same as allowing unfettered smart glass recordings.

Having them become more ubiquitous will also likely have severe impact on regular day to day interactions, even outside of the pervo-sphere. Talking with friends, or even interactions with other parties, can become a lot more complicated when people can record every word, can take those exchanges out of context, and use them against you in things like court proceedings. Eg. friends will often embellish comments/positions a bit for dramatic effect / story-telling purposes, with an understanding that it’s not got to be perfectly accurate / you’re going to be held accountable for every phrase. So you’re right, that the more ‘obvious’ recording setup of phones limits this risk a bit… but not for long.

Yeah, I’d stopped short of noting that it’d prolly be more realistic to enforce regulations on wide-spread sharing / social media hosting of such content. Like in some ways, recording someone in public for whatever reason seems reasonable – recording interactions with police, for example, being an area that makes a good deal of sense – but posting those recordings, especially with the implied ‘hope’ that they go viral / generate notoriety and/or monetized returns, is pretty dicey.

Idk. Bans on recording someone in public without their consent, feel like a really difficult thing to properly enforce – with or without the glasses. The number of people doing it with Smartphones already, in most jurisdictions at least, would make such a law’s wide-spread enforcement seem implausible. And I mean, you’re in a public area, so you sorta need to expect less privacy… because it’s in public?

It likely doesn’t take too much for any group of coordinated individuals to significantly sway any social media. I mean, even on lemmy – if you had like 5 people who scoured ‘new’, or who had a program to scour ‘new’ posts for specific keywords, and just downvoted/upvoted specific content, it’d have an impact. Enough downvotes will hide posts from most other users, enough upvotes will amplify the message.

Similarly, if you look at who posts to lemmy, there are some folks with like 10’s of thousands of posts in a year, and those posts often follow specific ideological agendas. I once asked one of these sorts of accounts what their situation was, wondering if they were like a paid employee of a PR firm or something given that they had over 50 posts per day, and the response was “You have no proof”. I mean, a simple “Nah, I’m just passionate about certain topics” would’ve sufficed, but instead they chose to deflect the question and claim innocence via a lack of definitive proof. If I had ‘proof’ I wouldn’t have been politely asking/curious as to their response.

Social media is basically designed to be manipulated by propagandists. Doesn’t really matter what corporate structure is behind it, whether its federated or not.

Do you think banks and credit card companies / credit bureaus aren’t already using LLMs on their massive amounts of data?

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Ah, makes some sense. The mobile networks are even more erratic with how they assign IPs – though I’d still be a little surprised if it was the wrong country entirely. It’d imply the provider is using IPs from a single range in multiple legal jurisdictions, which’d inherently make things like geofencing more difficult. Sorta like VPN functionality to access foreign data regions, as a result of sloppy configuration and negligence by the ISP. Wonder if it could also be something to do with IPV6 – I think that’s more common to see amongst mobile networks, and I’m honestly not too sure how well that can get mapped to geo locations – I’d doubt the site, how its put together, would be tryin too hard to sort that out.

While I don’t disagree that most countries ought to be looking for what you imply, I think there’s a somewhat interesting counter point to it. The anonymous aspect of online interactions/actions has contributed to some really negative trends.

One easy recent example: private citizens in the Netherlands, having taken a course on ‘faceless influencing’, used youtube to push out a bunch of videos encouraging the breaking apart of Canada, while pretending to be Canadians. They allegedly did it because the rage-bait clips generated lots of clicks, and ad revenue paid to them by Google, a company which also worked to amplify their fraudulent personas – a company that’s also tied closely with America, given the administration’s ‘tight’ ties with their tech oligarchs, a country which has overtly expressed interest in breaking apart Canada. The anonymity of those users basically allowed America to crowdsource their nation-destabilizing work.

With AI junk, that’s all going in to over-drive. The ability to fake ‘people’ is likely a big part of why govts have changed their tune on trying to ID people online. Demanding transparency is likely viewed as almost a necessary evil to combat the deluge of propaganda that’s coming out of places like America these days.

There’s also the general tone of online interactions, and the breakdown of certain social-communal parts of offline-life. “The male loneliness epidemic” for example, being partly born out of guys being captured by the manosphere, or being isolated ‘in real life’ due to their excessive presence online. Also the generally combative tone most people take on sites like lemmy / reddit – which pairs with the structure of most media content, which tries for sound bite click bait rather than nuanced constructive thought: you get way more upvotes, if you respond to a small out-of-context shock-value clip with your own short one liner type rebuttal, than if you actually engage with the other parties comment more genuinely.

Like the people generally demand transparency on government actions/decisions, because having those decisions exposed, and the people making them accountable for their actions, helps to reduce corruption / bad behaviour. Same general principle when anonyuser204956 is busy spouting nazi shit, if suddenly their friends/family/coworkers can easily see what they’re doing. People keep other people in check.

Hm, wonder why that’d be – it implies heavily that it bases the country on the IP address, which in theory is done by looking at what company the address is registered to, for the most part. Like I’m guessing it got my city wrong, because it used an address that the ISP provides for the IP range, which isn’t the same as the city I’m in, because the ISP uses it to cover numerous cities around the broader region. I reckon if you’re using something like Starlink, or other similar international-ish provider that may be very loose in how they associated addresses, it’d fail most times.

Heheh, a whole lot of mocking in this thread, but I don’t mind the site / its display.

Yeah, it’s overly melodramatic in its setup, and a bunch of the information doomerism is silly in terms of the info basically being required to provide data comms etc. It also tends to get things a bit wrong in a few categories – like for me, it said I was in a totally different city (still the right country at least - Canada), then it said my time zone was in iceland, which is kinda… no.

But the general message of the site, and the awareness its trying to raise in regards to how much data gets shared for basic comms establishment, and how that information gets used to fingerprint people, is worthwhile.

So… they’re taking advantage of one of the selling-features of streaming services, that being the ability to scale your spend pending your own personal preferences. In the early days of streaming services, they had enough content to justify paying a monthly subscription each month – it’s not the customer’s fault that streaming got enshitified. Hell, a bunch of them switching to ‘weekly episodes’ was just a very poorly disguised attempt to drag out how many months they thought their one flagship show could capture audiences. The old practice of dumping a whole season all at once in one month, because you knew you’d have another season of some other good show the next month, is practically gone – with streaming reverting back to the old network practices they’d usurped.

Same with games. Tons of titles are just shitty early access things, things that get abandoned mid-development, things that rely on a live-service platform that companies’ll shut down a month or two later, and so on. And some titles are askin like $80+ for their shitty offerings. Yeah, that’s not the customers fault in the slightest. They’re right to look for discounted offers, what sane person wouldn’t?

Yeah – I think a lot of people who took even just one stats course are in a similar boat. Though I think it’s a bit easier to understand the shift if you frame it within the context of Social Media sites controlling the population’s opinions / propaganda.

Most govts understand at this point, internally at least, that if a message is repeated often, loudly, and it saturates a people’s media, they start to believe it / agree with it. The survey, and the reporting storm surrounding a survey, isn’t so much about showing people an accurate representation of how people’s viewpoints vary, but rather a vehicle for govts/companies to tell people how to think. Sites like Facebook don’t so much as sell advertising, as they sell the ability to socially engineer its users to like your product / political stance: make enough general noise about a niche position, and people will think it’s a majority opinion.

Where the bots get used in the workflow, isn’t really that big of a concern.

Seeing as the vast majority of “polls” I’ve seen in the last 5-6 years have been “this was a poll done online, so we can’t assign any certainty or margin of error, cause we have no idea who actually responded and it could’ve been just like, two dickheads with bots spamming nonsense, but the results were click baity enough for us to run a story” … I don’t see how them cutting out the two dickhead middle-men, and just using their own bots, is really that much different.