• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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    3 days ago

    This was something that was lost in the aftermath of the brutal killing of Charlie Kirk, I am not on Instagram, I never watched the video because why would I? I don’t condone shooting people because you don’t like them, so despite the fact that I fucking hate Charlie Kirk’s guts, why would I need to see the violence literally? To believe it? To witness it? Watching gun violence doesn’t do anything for me but remind me of how uncomprehensibly awful gun violence and in general violence is…

    The thing is, I noticed how many people around me who were on Instagram saw it without really wanting to, it was almost a foregone conclusion from their perspective they would be exposed to it. That is fucked up, why don’t we all collectively realize that?

    This is a choice in architecture, in social media governance, it is something that we shouldn’t let conservatives get away with, they can’t manage this stuff because they are incredibly childish and unserious about realworld consequences and are unwilling to learn from realworld lessons or history. Rightwing billionaires shouldn’t control our social media because they let this kind of thing proliferate, they encourage it. They want us to be shocked by a violence appearing on our feed without our agency, it puts our brains into a flight or fight response so we can be manipulated, made more afraid and intimidated into feeling powerless against forces of violence and wealth.

    • NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net
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      2 days ago

      After spending the past ten years or so being exposed to videos of Ukrainian, West Papuan, Hong Kong and Palestinian civilians being brutalized by their neighbouring countries, it certainly felt like a foregone conclusion that I was going to come across the video at some point.

      It was one of the reasons why I left Reddit back in the day, their userbase’s obsession with posting, upvoting and even celebrating uncensored snuff shit (especially during the 'rona times when half the posts were people celebrating the deaths of antivaxxers and random members of the American public that’d fallen for the antivax propaganda.)

      Even with the ‘this contains sensitive content’ filter being put on almost every insta post, one account straight up played it uncensored in the middle of a few memes, so now it lives alongside countless other fucked up things I’ve seen over the years of being online.

      It’s almost like these social media companies know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it intentionally. For what purpose, I can’t begin to speculate on without either sounding like some kind of schizotypal tinfoiler, or diluting the real societal problems by failing to address the millions of issues that have compounded until we got here.

    • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I feel this way about a lot of stuff including fail compilation videos. I don’t know why they exist and I’m glad I don’t use social media anymore because they’re so prevalent. I don’t want to watch someone get seriously injured or die. No thanks.