*Musk has spent days beefing with politicians over the far-right unrest sweeping the UK. *
Elon Musk could be summoned for a grilling by British MPs over X’s role in race riots that have rocked the U.K. over the last week, as well as his own incendiary comments about the violence.
Labour MPs Chi Onwurah and Dawn Butler, who are competing to chair parliament’s science, innovation and technology committee, both told POLITICO they’d press the billionaire X owner and other technology executives to answer questions about the role of social media platforms amid mounting unrest in the U.K.
Musk has spent days beefing with British politicians over the riots, and is locked in a war of words with Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the U.K’s handling of them. Musk on Sunday wrote “civil war is inevitable” in the U.K. and claimed that the response by U.K. police has been “one-sided."
Love it that you’re getting downvoted for this highly controversial comment.
Proof #52895167698 that downvotes shouldn’t even be a thing
Nah. Downvotes should exist to show how unpopular radical or extremist views really are. It doesn’t apply here obviously, but I think the reason Meta and Twitter etc. are so negative/toxic is because you can’t discourage that content on popular posts. It just looks like there’s fewer likes.
Many Lemmy instances do just fine without them though, and unpopular extremist views are still unpopular. Frankly that sounds more like a case for moderation than downvotes.
One of the main problems I have with downvotes on Lemmy is that when people browse All, niche communities tend to attract a lot of drive-by downvotes (which is why many instances that host them opted to disable downvotes) that tend to drown out votes by people who are actually in those communities and push the content lower when using a sort that takes votes into account.
Yes there’s all sorts of lofty ideas about how downvotes should be used, and eg people are not “supposed” to downvote things just because they disagree (and no I’m not talking nazism here). Never goes that way in real life.
So far in my time on lemmy, browsing all means I have to block most communities I come across. Not because they’re invalid, usually because I don’t speak the language. It’s simply clutter to me. That being said I really wish there weren’t hundreds of new anime instances every day. It’s getting really old blocking them and thinking you’ve gotten rid of them all, then 15 more pop up. I don’t downvote in either situation, just kind of a sidebar here.
Yeah… really hurtful all those negative internet points. I don’t care though. They do serve as sort of a thermometer of the comment. But in this case… it makes me smile.
Funny thing to me about downvoters is they don’t seem to realize everyone likes to look for the downvoted posts because they’re often the most amusing. There’s a reason “controversial” is one of the first few sorting options.
My hypothesis is they’re mostly the younger people on the platform, trying to rely on peer pressure like this is HS or something, because that’s all they’ve really experienced so far in their lives.
Sells ads too
Oh yeah it’s not like it makes any real difference – although the points may be fake, whether we like it or not people do seem to let them influence how they look at a comment or post. It’s just a bit silly that so many people cling to the idea that downvotes are a valuable tool (apparently we’d be overrun with nazis if we couldn’t downvote things)