You can’t seriously be saying that in the comments of a post linking to leaked internal documents showing that one of these companies is aware of the dangers they pose and damage they are doing. Did nazis falsify internal documents and this leak?

Did you somehow miss the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook, where they manipulated the emotional content of users’ feeds and gathered scientifically significant measurable responses in the emotions of the manipulated users?

Have you missed where each of these companies has had many public job postings for positions requiring applicants have psychology degrees?

People like to think of 4chan as the website that drove people to suicide, but every single one of the major social media sites has a fucking body count at this point, and almost every one is in the double digits.

Beyond all that, lemmy’s userbase trends older. I saw the tail end of the satanic panic into the moral grandstanding about the dangers of violent video games. I’d wager most of the users here lived through it.

I know firsthand what a moral panic looks like. They didn’t have the amount of research papers (that hold up to peer review) and leaked internal documents we can point at. They didn’t have body counts even remotely similar.

Keep on fighting for opressed teens to have more ways to get away from opressive parents. To have access to factual information that their parents don’t want them to have. It’s a good cause with not many people fighting for it.

That doesn’t mean though that anything you think challenges or opposes it is a nazi plot.

Teens are resilient and have astounding amounts of time on their hands. They’ll find a way to communicate, ways to make their own underground social platforms if they need to. The cat’s out of the bag. It’s the fucking internet. Corpos, government boots, no one can truly stop the signal. They couldn’t back in the days of dial up BBS. Good fucking luck now that you can get a device orders of magnitude more powerful for $50.

Don’t bother replying for my sake. I’m blocking you so I don’t get increasingly shitty towards you. Your mind’s made up on this, and so is mine. No point going back and forth if we’re just going to get more frustrated and exasperated at each other. Best of luck in your endeavours.

Some important context on this user before anyone else gets dragged into a discussion: check their post history, multiple to a “Youth Liberation” community.

No shade meant by calling it out, but I think that makes it much more clear how strong your opinions are on this. There’s nothing to be gained in trying to talk to you about this when your opinions are set so strongly. You aren’t going to see the dangers that the rest of us see because your focus is on allowing freedom from oppresive parental figures.

Edit: they also “won’t give an inch on this”

That’s the point, it doesn’t. Much like the argument about targeting marginalized people when you’re talking about children.

Edit: Yes, there are plenty of children and teens without access to information and the support structures they should have IRL. I was one of them and it’s fucking awful. The internet can help with that by offering exposure to different ideologies, evidence that you aren’t alone in what you’re feeling or going through.

But I don’t look back on everything I did and encountered online in mid 00s - early 10s era internet and go “that was overwhelmingly a great thing that I should have had the sort of unrestricted access to that I did”. And the internet has been even more corporatized and “skinner-boxed” since.

And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a bunch of other ways that I could have gotten the good I got from the internet without all the bad, and through things in real life that I had dismissed in my youth.

If you watch a decent amount of twitch streaming it’s pretty obvious. I’m sure there are a ton of whales out there willing to dump >$1000 in one go on a streamer, but just watch something like a “subathon”, or a “hype train”. You’ll see more dollars than viewers they have move around in the span of like 30 minutes.

Or when streamers “bet” each other large amounts of gift subscriptions. That’s explicitly money, and abstracting it behind subs only masks how damn much a lot of these “bets” are really for.

I’m not going to claim that anywhere near all of it is straight laundering, but it’s pretty damn obvious just how fucking easy it would be to use it all for washing/tumbling of dirty funds.

If you think that any nation-state with the money to implement this shit isn’t doing it already, I have a bridge to sell you.

Surveillance is a matter of power and maintaining it, far more than any ideological thing. There are already people being caught by this sort of shit in the UK and Europe as well.