#Eleicoes2026 : #Lula victory speech:
"We had to overcome foreign interference through #digitalplatforms, which we will have to regulate.
We cannot have monstrously huge corporations earning millions & billions, paying no taxes to this country & trying to steer this country's election results."
@eliasulrich Hell yeah! We don't want that either. Regulate the billionaire media. Break them up.
@eliasulrich Regulate Meta!
Regulate Social Media!
There are many industries throughout time that have been heavily regulated because of the potential for harm. We are coming to the realization that social media is one of these. We will look back on this time of unregulated social media as a period not unlike before the FDA or EPA. It is hard to imagine a time when drugs were unregulated, and polluters just pumped out poison into our air and waterways. May it be so with social media.
@mastodonmigration @eliasulrich
Antitrust is regulation
@GhostOnTheHalfShell @eliasulrich
Indeed it is.
@mastodonmigration @eliasulrich @gerrymcgovern
There are no 'social media' apart from mastodon.
Adtech companies that steal personal data by offering free services are earning criminal money + are the largest money launderers in the world #AML
@ellent @mastodonmigration @eliasulrich @gerrymcgovern Why does this entire comment section behave as if the US Big Tech-lobbied ID verification laws won't be enforced also on the fediverse and open-source operating systems?
@fionescu @ellent @mastodonmigration @eliasulrich @gerrymcgovern my guess is that "regulate social media" doesn't always mean "ID verification". If I were in charge, there'd be lots of regulations way up the chain, far away from the consumer side of things. Like, forcing Meta to actually fix their platform, not just who has access to it.
Television is regulated, but it doesn't really use consumer level gates like ID verification. Instead, the FCC regulates what's allowed to be broadcast at all.
With social media, ideally they'd create rules less focused on banning certain kinds of content, and more on forcing the algorithm to work for the user, and to open up the range of acceptable expression on the platform. As well as hopefully making it so that competing platforms have a chance to properly win out in the market if their offerings are actually better.
@riverpunk @ellent @mastodonmigration @eliasulrich @gerrymcgovern The Meta-backed lobbying trend worldwide, including Brazil, has meant trying to shove "consumer level gates", as you put it, everywhere it is possible, see the whole debate regarding whether Linux or the BSDs can be used in Brazil anymore or not.
@fionescu ID verification is unrelated to solving the problem of election manipulation by the platform itself. That won't stop the platforms from raising it as a (self-serving) "regulation" proposal. But do not mistake calls for regulating abuse by platform _owners_ as an endorsement of regulating platform _users_. Mastodon in fact would benefit from the playing field being leveled by restrictions on social media's advertising, botnets, and algorithmic timelines.
@cczona Every piece of law I've seen - not in Brazil? I've looked up the Digital ECA framework and it doesn't address this - that purports to regulate social media algorithms and the infinite feed is tying these up to age-verified curfews, hence the inherent connection to ID verification.
@fionescu
If tracking of the users an their datas will stop, there is no more profit for the platform-owners and their partners. It could be possible, to make this but it is a question too of the politicans of a nation this would do. In Germany we had have a federal data-protctor with this idea.
@ellent @mastodonmigration @eliasulrich @gerrymcgovern
Oct 26, 2026, 2:19 PMI'm wary of calls to "regulate social media." If a government sets out to regulate social media without a clear plan of exactly what it's going to do, it will end up with the regulations favoured by the lobbyists with the most money. Thus, age verification, chat control, indiscriminate mass surveillance to find all the bad guys, and so on.
Call instead for something more specific:
The things you mention are regulation of social media. What you are legitimately worried about is regulatory capture.
@eliasulrich so say us all.
