They might be tracking the homeless who are living in their vehicles. As well as poor laborers who might be hiring out to do work for cash.

Thanks for the heads up.

Yep, a preview for what’s being done to the US now

Maybe the ghost of Robert A. Heinlein is haunting it.

(I will never not be angry that Musk stole the word from one of the classic sci-fi writer greats.)

I’m just curious if spaces such as that even exist, and if they do, what they lead to.

I don’t know about lemmy since I’m old enough to not care to go looking for that, but I can speak in generalities from a few decades back.

So, I ran an old-school forum in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I found that a complete lack of moderation leads to bad actors essentially ruining the vibe. Basically, there are human beings (and bots plied by state actors in this day and age) that will happily exploit a fully-unmoderated forum and fill it full of awful stuff.

Now, bad mods are awful, power-tripping and all, and lots of regular people who have never run a community of any sort have had run-ins with mods that have the HOA Karen mentality and come to the not-entirely-correct conclusion that ALL moderation is bad, but having no mods can ALSO kill a community if it gets big or noticed enough to draw in outsiders, because you end up with the bullies running roughshod over everyone else, and changing the vibe. And if the vibe gets too gross, you lose the decent, cool members because they’ll fuck off elsewhere and do their thing elsewhere because your community is too full of bullshit and crap.

what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?

Losing the Cold War. America wasn’t beaten militarily, but brought down via foreign propaganda. (It also hit the UK, with Brexit, and other countries with similar harmful things going on domestically to them.)

Livejournal was one of the earliest “modern” social media sites (for those who didn’t experience it, it was like a longer-form tumblr–longer text posts, fewer images), and it was sold to a company in Russia in the early 00s. I remember scratching my head as a 20-something about why the servers kept going down, then I learned that intellectuals in Russia had taken it up as THEIR social media and due to politics “on the Russian” side it was getting DDoS’d.

I was still too young to connect the dots then, or understand what all that really meant (hindsight is always much better, isn’t it?) but basically they perfected control via social media first on their own people, probably trawled through all the content of the original LiveJournal users posting in English, then perfected using what they learned there on later social media sites.

And because Americans A) thought the Cold War was over, and B) have a bit of a head-scratcher conundrum when it comes to free speech because it’s valued so highly and nobody likes censorshiop, nobody did anything or even realized anything was happening until the harm was already done.

Personally, again with hindsight, I think company-designed social media algorithms that just suggest content to you as “trending” or whatever should be illegal (and block buttons should be mandatory). Users should have to be forced to follow, one by one, the content they want to subscribe to.

Having “trending” algorithms that have no transparency in what they show or boost allows malignant actors to game the algorithm.

If you force people to follow others based on word of mouth or reblogs from their actual friends, and give people a way to solidly block someone that’s easy to find and instant to use, it will cut a lot of the bullshit down. People will be somewhat less inclined to fall down wells of stupidity. It won’t completely stop it, but people are lazy and if you don’t dangle shit in front of their nose many will go off and do something else instead of putting in the effort to find something horrible.