Social media is old hat now.

As someone on the "safety side of tech", social media is being exploited to increase surveillance and government control precisely because its actual social influence is heavily on the wane, and capital is happy to sacrifice what's left to increase the profits of the expanding public/private tech surveillance industry (with "protect the children" controls on social media like age verification being the usual backdoor route it always is).

Society may be growing tired of Tech, but governments aren't, and in fact they're heavily expanding their back channel reliance on not-traditionally-military Tech as an extension of their Defense spending.

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intended 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Cyber security has the maturity that trust and safety hopes to achieve at some point.

Social media was being exploited from inception. Palantir had sales documents for sock puppet management software back in the PHP era.

I don’t disagree that Government is interested in tech, but I will push back on the dismissal of child safety that is inherent in your comment, intended or not.

For all that some people in the firm may have tried to do the right thing, Social media firms have created bad outcomes for children, and executives were briefed on the harms they were going to cause.

This is the dismissal that concerns me, because it ends up miscalculating the level of anger and unhappiness amongst the voting populace, and therefore the political will to pass regulation to reign tech in.

	▲	ang_cire 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The political will is already captured and redirected. There are numerous bills to limit AI access for consumers, to combat deepfakes hurting children. There are no bills introduced or passed to prevent AI being used to target dronestrikes that kill children abroad, or surveil children domestically. What the public wants doesn't actually matter right now, only what the government will allow to let pass, which in this case is additional internet surveillance. Under a future, better government this may change, but (sadly) nothing is going to sink tech's dominance right now. The anger and unhappiness against tech is good, and hopefully someday they'll burn down all the data centers and I'll never have to hear the words Cloud Computing again, but (to paraphrase a famous Eve Online interaction) it's not going to be today, and it's not going to be us.