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It's Official: The Internet is The Worst Thing Ever

The Atheist said:
Ah, good old Meta...

www.theguardian.com

Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content

More than 50 organisations report sites being restricted or removed, with abortion hotlines blocked and posts showing non-explicit nudity triggering warnings
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Two weeks ago, these messages escalated to a warning, in which Meta noted its new policies on nudity and removed a post from the Sex Talk Arabic’s page. The offending post was an artistic depiction of a naked couple, obscured by hearts.

Ibrahim said the warning was “condescending”, and that Meta’s moderation was US-centric and lacked context.
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Imagine if Meta was based in an Islamic country where showing any skin is considered 'nudity', and so felt it necessary to remove posts or shut down entire websites run by people in the US. You would be able to hear the howling from Space! But hey, Meta is a private organization just like the International Skeptics Forum, and our rules are probabaly more prudish than theirs.

I don't see this as any indication that the internet itself is 'the Worst Thing Ever'. I have my own website which isn't subject to such censorship and costs hardly anything to run. But of course I don't provide the services or have the exposure to attract thousands of visitors from around the World. I would have to actually work at getting patronage. These people are getting a ton of value for free and then complain when they breach the rules. Maybe those rules are somewhat arbitrarily applied with poor feedbeck, but what do you expect for nothing?

Remember when conservatives were complaining about being censored on Twitter? The evidence for partisan bias was weak, but liberals pooh-poohed or even encouraged it. Then we got upset when Musk bought it to counter the perceived bias. Funny how it's a different story when abortion hotlines and Arabic sex talk channels are involved. I said at the time when people were calling for Trump to be banned from Twitter that it was a bad idea, and now here we are.
 
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arthwollipot said:
You're not aware that doi.org is an online system of cataloguing scientific publications? Allow me to introduce you to the Digital Object Identifier. You are one of today's 10,000!

en.wikipedia.org

Digital object identifier - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Thanks for that. No, I was not aware. Does this mean they are legit? So hard to tell these days...

In any case I'm not a fan of text being presented in an image (unless it's a cartoon). Nor am I a fan of url redirection. The best way to quote is to put the text directly into your post. Websites go down, links expire, images get deleted. I understand why you did it this time, but it shouldn't be standard practice.
 
arthwollipot said:
I think that's a stupid people problem rather than an internet problem.
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No question it's about stupidity, but it's exacerbated by clowns needing IG photos. If you're stupid enough to die for a post, crushing frogs isn't going to bother you.

Take a look around you - politics, antivax, anti-fluoride, ivermectin: whatever bad there is is amplified by social media.
 
www.abc.net.au

Teens sentenced over deadly brawl fuelled by Instagram group chat

A social media feud between teenage girls in Wollongong in 2023 erupted into a deadly street fight, leaving Kristie McBride dead and several teens now sentenced for her manslaughter.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au

In short:​

A social media feud among teenage girls in Wollongong in 2023 escalated into a violent street fight, leaving Kristie McBride dead.

The teenagers were sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court today.

What's next?​

The four teenagers received sentences ranging from prison with parole eligibility to a community-based corrections order.
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luchog said:
Nothing that didn't happen elsewhere on an equivalent scale.

Want to know where ISIS, neo-Nazis, and other terrorist organizations get the majority of their recruits?
Prisons. That's the primary pipeline for radicalization in much of the developed and developing world.

As for Incels, they have a new name, but I knew plenty of that sort growing up before the Internet, and few had any problems making their misogynistic self-importance known in person.
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Is that true? Believable that they get a lot of their requits from prison but most?
lobosrul5 said:
I've made several repairs on my vehicle that I would have had no clue how to do without YT. Easily saved over 2 grand in total I'd estimate.
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Back in the day we had Hayne's manuals for that. There was another brand too. Basically, when car is produced a bunch of mechanics tore it down and put it back together, then published a manual about how to fix it. Lots of nifty diagrams and step by step instructions.

dann said:
I know that "suicidal doomsday cults also existed long before the Internet," but they were different from the Heaven's Gate.

Jim Jones started out as a Christian-Socialist-Humanist Utopianist, and only turned 1) authoritarian, 2) paranoid, and then 3) homi-suicidal when it became increasingly obvious that his Utopianism was actually Utopian, i.e. a delusion, and that the authorities were on to him.
The weirdness of the Heaven's Gate with their cult of castration and "the level beyond human" was much more obviously weird from the outset.

I don't think that there's any reason to assume that Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes would have been a serial killer. Maybe an auto-mutilator ...
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I'd bet Heaven's Gate started a lot less weird too, UFO not quite cults and other hippie dippie groups were a dime a dozen in the 70s and early 80s. Heavans Gate is the one that stuck around and got real weird as opposed to those that just kind of disappeared.

Roger Ramjets said:
Correlation <> causation. Do people become anxious and lonely and have lower self-confidence because they use social media 'excessively', or are lonely people with anxiety and low self-confidence likely to use social media more as a result? I think the latter is far more likely.

The truth is, the internet provides people with more opportunities to interact socially at lower risk than 'traditional' methods, enabling them to reduce loneliness and boost self-confidence in an anonymous environment where nobody knows (or cares) if you are a dog. The internet also reduces anxiety by providing more information about things people fear and how how others are handling it.

The internet isn't the cause of those 'mental health' issues, it's the cure!
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So, the correlation has been demonstrated pretty convincingly in my opinion, causation not so much but I don't see any evidence that the internet has mitigated more mental health issues than it has harmed at all, let alone that it is a cure. For that to be the case, something else must be causing all that loneliness, anxiety, and, low self-confidence. And even then, we'd be left with correlation that is a lot less compelling than the correlation going the other way.

Skeptical Greg said:
What really is the point of increasing productivity if it only means you get a new one of something, you already, have that works just fine..

Pointless consumption is pointless and wasteful.
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What counts as pointless consumption?
arthwollipot said:
My job existed before the internet, but has been made much more weird by it.
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My existed, the internet has mostly made it easier. We used to have physical copies of building codes. Just the sections I deal with are 1000s of pages across dozens of publications.
Nosi said:
This is just parents deciding to not do their jobs and ban their stupid brats from accessing social media.
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Easier said than done, there's a bit of the tragedy of the commons with that. If just one kids parents do that, their kid is a weirdo missing out on most of his friends' communications.
arthwollipot said:
Whenever I google something, it gives me an unsolicited AI-generated answer.
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I find it better than googles standard results these days.
 
TLDR, the internet has a lot of bad and a lot of good, as to which his has more of? I have no idea, and I distrust anyone who's certain on the matter.

And another thing, most folks are really online that much, everyone here is a bit weird when it comes to that. The internet appears to be a lot more polarized than most folks who aren't online all of the time. The evidence for that is mostly proxies. Things like most folks on twitter not talking about politics and most post about politics are by an even smaller percentage of folks that talk politics.

I strongly suspect most folks are just on the internet to shop, check in on their socials of choice and log off.
 
i think every major social media platform is pushing a lot of political content for engagement purposes. and other reasons as well. and it's incredibly popular and works.
 
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