I don’t see reporting on this from any reputable sources. If this were true, every major blog covering tech and gaming would be all over it. All I can find is random YouTube channels and nobody websites discussing it.

I’m not gonna pay it any attention until there’s reliable evidence they’re actually planning on doing this.

there’s never been a bigger hive of scum and villainy

You know, I somehow very highly doubt the Kremlin cares much about how sex workers might be affected.

Yeah, I bet his throwing arm is strong enough to make it a couple thousand feet in the air.

The majority of the people in those instances are probably not working with the state, they’re just what the Soviet Union used to refer to as “useful idiots”. So they would indeed be blocked if Hexbear and lemmy.ml are hosted in Russia.

If everybody but the state is blocked, then any connections from Russia would be pretty fucking obviously the state. Honestly, that’s the best thing that could happen, since it would make figuring out what they are doing easy as fuck. But I have no doubt they are smart enough to just send their teams to China or something like North Korea does.

Well if they cut themselves off, then why wouldn’t western nations just finish the job and block all Russian IPs from connecting? Make them travel outside of Russia to set up propaganda machines. Sure, it won’t have much of an effect, but it’ll annoy them, and that’s something.

Wait, so just like that, we’re gonna lose access to lemmy.ml and hexbear? Oh no! Woe, woe unto us! How will we survive this?

Yes, but that’s not the only benefit to it. It’s a metasearch engine, meaning it searches all the individual sites you ask for, and combines the results into one page. This makes it more akin to DDG, but it doesn’t just use one search provider.

I understand your argument, and I don’t disagree with it. Nor do I agree with the absolutely ridiculous reasons the government has given for the ban. It’s the end result that doesn’t bother me.

As for federated sites, they aren’t as threatened as you might think. Sure, the government could shut some of them down if they tried. But that’s only true for those that are hosted and ran by people in jurisdictions that the US government can affect. That’s the strength of federation. Not only can platforms like Lemmy not turn out like Twitter, since you can defederate from instances that allow things like white supremacy, effectively purging those types of people from the fediverse at large, the decentralized nature of the system means that there’s no practical way for any one government to take down the entire ecosystem. A good example of governments trying to take down something they collectively hate, is piracy. Even united behind the cause of capitalism, and with the billions of dollars of the recording and motion picture industries behind them, nations across the world have not had great success in stopping piracy of any kind, mostly due to the patchwork nature of takedowns. I don’t have any fear that the US government would be any more effective in tackling federated platforms.

I would go so far as to say that federated sites are the only social media people should be using, because it’s much easier to control things like disinformation, since the power in adjusting the flow of information isn’t centralized to one group with one agenda. Some would say that just creates an echo chamber, and for some instances that’s true. But unless those admins defederate from everyone, their users are going to be exposed to viewpoints that disturb that echo chamber, from places they don’t have power to control.

I don’t get why people like you are being dishonest. Just admit you like TikTok and don’t want it to go. You don’t need to frame it as a supposed free speech issue, I would respect your option more if you were honest.

Either way, I don’t feel like hearing more about your body, so I’m blocking you too.

You commented on a thread you weren’t a part of, just to tell me you rolled your eyes.

Thanks for that valuable contribution, but you don’t need to let me know when your body does something.

Peer reviewed science.

Listen, we both know your mind is made up. You’re not actually interested in the science. Let’s not pretend you are, or that you’re open to changing your mind on the matter.

Now, I’m not saying you have to admit you just desperately want TikTok to keep being a thing. I’m not saying that, because I don’t have the patience to sit here and waste time arguing with you, so I’m going to block you immediately after writing this. That way, I don’t have to listen to you move the goalposts, and you can get back to doomscrolling through dance videos. We both save time.

Don’t bother replying.

Yes, however, using a public SearXNG instance makes your searches effectively private, since it’s the server doing them, not you. It also does not use generative AI to produce the results, and won’t until or unless the ability for normal searches is removed.

And at that point, you can just disable that engine for searching.

If you are actually serious about asking, then I’m sure you can find no shortage of articles interviewing doctors regarding the perils of social media on young minds, or news reports linking dozens of teen suicides to the network. That’s a rabbit hole that’s deep enough that some psychologists have dedicated their entire careers to studying it. The problem isn’t unique to TikTok, it just happens to be one of the worst offenders, considering how popular the short video format is, compared to something like Twitter.

I feel like, judging from the tone of your comment, that you’re not really interested in knowing, so I’m not going to bother linking you anything.

I didn’t lie, I specifically stated they weren’t doing it for altruistic reasons. But the why isn’t what’s important to me. If them being shitty is a net positive, then I don’t really give a shit.

I didn’t say you were wrong, I said you’re insufferable.

Yeah, normally I would say fuck the government, but in this case it’s exactly the same as the people who got pissy about Juul getting in trouble for targeting children. I’m all for “freedom to choose”, as long as whatever it is you’re choosing isn’t directly targeting kids with something that has an actively detrimental effect on their health, and that’s being tracked as an emergent medical problem by psychiatrists around the world.

Well, TikTok refused to abide by the law saying they had to be sold to a US company, which is why they’re being banned, so it’s technically the same situation, if for different reasons.

Uh, there are several countries that ban Amazon. And amusingly, the EU Parliament has also banned their employees from entering the building.