Fair enough - I don’t have one. At least not to hand. There has been a LOT of reporting about misinformation, disinformation, and fucked up cultural trends unique to TikTok, but I used that phrase hyperbolically to reinforce my actual point: that it is literally impossible to cite sources on TikTok, making it the only social network where credible, knowledgeable, expert, and authoritative creators cannot in principle be distinguished from hoeseshit.

If TikTok starts allowing standard hyperlinks it would dramatically reduce the platform’s peak harm potential. Tiktok’s single biggest problem rn is that it is literally impossible to cite your sources - that’s why it’s the runaway global leader for misinformation. Adding text would help, bringing it back down to regular Facebook levels of social erosion and election distortion.

I disagree with your interpretation of the article. They aren’t protesting policy that bends all sex related accounts. They are protesting inadequate and inaccurate enforcement of a policy that, in principal, allows for sex-positive education and bans pornography and trafficking. And the problem is that meta has done a way better job banning healthy and arguably necessary sex-positive education than jt has pursuing trafficking or child porn.

I’m also not sure why you bring up profit. The article does mention finances of one particular kink group, that isn’t the point they were making. They were saying that meta’s business model involves offering a public service - been online social space - and that the company arbitrarily violated their own terms of service by banning a bunch of people seemingly because those people belong to a group the company doesn’t like (i.e. people with non-vanilla sexual interests).

Moderation is hard and the legal questions are complicated (and way beyond me), but I feel like your comment really dramatically oversimplifies and sort of misrepresents what’s at issue here.

This is a really complicated situation. Yes, meta has created the leading platform for sex trafficking (Insta) and FB has similar problems.

However, that barely touches on the issues in play here. For one thing, the platforms have been far more effective at removing sex positive educators than they have at catching adult men using girl’s Insta accounts to sell child porn. For another, a repeating pattern involves major platforms being built by sex workers and then the platforms trying to purge sex work later on (Tumblr, onlyfans). For a third, removing all sexual content from a social space in unhealthy, repressive, and weird, playing into misogynistic and religious social norms and pathologizing one of the fundamental aspects of being human. Pornhub has account verification, for instance, not because of actual concern about trafficking but because of Nicholas Kristoff’s weird christianity-derived hatred of porn.

I understabd why beehaw prohibits sexual content given the legal environment we’re in. But trying to remove sex from social spaces, especially online, is NOT a good or even neutral idea.

I agree that cashing in is at least important part of this. As I understand it, however, past a certain point creating and using LLMs is in fact extremely expensive. That’s why GPT4 limits user interactions, for example. I also think that the more restricted these tools are in general, the better for everyone. It’s absolutely possible to use them in positive ways, but as it stamps they are mostly just flooding the internet with garbage at killing low level content jobs.