Winding people up as a business model.
Media communications that exploit cognitive biases, insecurities, prejudices, fears, cultural conditioning, and misunderstandings—studying these conditions and delivering tailored content to exacerbate them—are intentionally designed to drive behavioural change.
This includes, of course, social media platforms, which are explicitly designed as advertising delivery systems, as a business model.
This business model includes building in processes that extract more online time from users, that encourage addictive behaviours, that exacerbate emotional reactivity, incite consumer behaviour to maximise advertising spend to sales efficiency and unfortunately this provides malign actors access to vulnerable individuals, at scale.
Such tactics are used to incite hatred, to promote bigotry, to spread misinformation and disinformation, in order to manipulate voting behaviors through emotional and irrational drivers, and increase sales. These practices are economically and politically exploitative.
This activity constitutes psychological abuse.
If legislation were introduced to identify, define, and criminalize such actions as intentional psychological abuse, media providers would be unable to permit this behavior on their platforms as a revenue stream.
In regards Domestic Abuse legislation the precedent of identifying psychologically abusive speech as a criminal offence has already been set.
We need the same logic to apply to all advertising delivery operations on social media.
Their AI algorithms would then be legislated to be designed accordingly.
This would not inhibit free speech. Instead, it would protect vulnerable individuals from predatory actors..
Free speech, from the citizen's perspective, entails the responsibility to speak truthfully and publicly. It also requires that the State and other powerful institutions refrain from using their power to harass honest critics, witnesses, whistleblowers, and truth-tellers.
The State and all other institutions must listen to citizens when they present testimony and evidence of avoidable harms being caused and acknowledge those testimonies, admit the evidence, and then take corrective action, as the core duty of healthy governance is to avoid avoidable harms.
The power imbalance between the State, corporations, and the individual is immense.
Legislation is necessary to prevent bad actors from exploiting this disparity.
This is a matter of public, political, cultural and social health and safety
Corneilius
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