The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse (US focused)

The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.sdf.org to Technology@lemmy.ml – 766 points –
The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse
buttondown.email

Charlie Jane Anders discusses KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act).

If you're in the US, https://www.stopkosa.com/ makes it easy to contact your Senators and ask them to oppose KOSA.

"A new bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is sailing towards passage in the Senate with bipartisa>n support. Among other things, this bill would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue Internet platforms if they allow any content that is deemed harmful to minors. This clause is so vaguely defined that attorneys general can absolutely claim that queer content violates it — and they don't even need to win these lawsuits in order to prevail. They might not even need to file a lawsuit, in fact. The mere threat of an expensive, grueling legal battle will be enough to make almost every Internet platform begin to scrub anything related to queer people.

The right wing Heritage Foundation has already stated publicly that the GOP will use this provision to remove any discussions of trans or queer lives from the Internet. They're salivating over the prospect.

And yep, I did say this bill has bipartisan support. Many Democrats have already signed on as co-sponsors. And President Joe Biden has urged lawmakers to pass this bill in the strongest possible terms."

256

You are viewing a single comment

Why is it that liberals only source is wikipedia??? Please read other things.

China is expanding clinics for trans people. Notably for trans children, who it built its first clinic for in 2021 and has built a further 8 since.

This alone makes them incomparable to the UK, where the children's clinics have been institutionally attacked and set back for the last 5 to 10 years. There is an enormous difference between a state actively stepping up their transgender healthcare accessibility vs a state rolling it back.

People claiming China is much better on this than the US and the UK are wrong

Says the person whose entire fucking understanding of the matter was gained from wikipedia 5 seconds before making this comment. Jesus fucking christ.

The UK in particular, most of the transphobia I experience is from institutions and media rather than "on the ground" (though this def. happens too), and the way the government is going with using us as a scapegoat is very concerning. But the - for now - lower amount of control over communications means I got started on DIY HRT pretty simply and pushed my way through the "official" system.

I want you to read this then try to imagine it being written by the terfs destroying our lives at the BBC or Guardian.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202103/1219743.shtml

China is doing us right. Our countries are not.

but fuck me if the dems aren't spineless at opposing this stuff or (as can be seen in the op) sometimes support this.

They're not spineless you naive idiot. They see us as a tool, they don't give a fuck about us other than for pretending they're good and wielding as an electoral weapon to say "look trans people will die if you don't vote for us". Actually helping us would mean they need to find something else, so they don't.

false idea that China is communist

China is a socialist state building towards communism. Your inability to understand this is a personal failure to understand it, not a failure of theirs.

Why is it that liberals only source is wikipedia??? Please read other things.

Not a lib, and my source is wikipedia because it has it's own sources as well and provides a decent summary.

Says the person whose entire fucking understanding of the matter was gained from wikipedia 5 seconds before making this comment. Jesus fucking christ.

Yeah because you're from hexbear and I don't trust you to engage in good faith or not immediately jump to the worst possible interpretation of something I said or missed (like you have done with the trans clinic thing), or do the whole thing where you assume only you are right and people can't reasonably disagree on something, or always pivot to "but the us/uk did..." and act as if the inevitable and only correct conclusion to any debate or discussion is that the US and "West" (which is itself a messy concept) is worse in every aspect of every single thing than anywhere else in every possible action. And I, you know, can read the information and compare it with the uk/us pretty quickly, without listing every single tiny factor that went into my consideration.

Frankly, the behaviour of hexbear users has made me always check the accounts of people with square-brackets pronouns before engaging unless I'm in a community on an instance that has defederated. I should not feel this way when pronoun tags are a trans supportive thing and would usually make me feel more comfortable when talking with people. But blegh.

I will probably block after this because all engaging with 95% of hexbear users does is cause me irrational amounts of stress every fucking time because of the constant goddamn micro-nitpick and aggression on every fucking thing, constant assumptions of superiority and assuming they are always completely correct in ever single debate or discussion, it's like they can't even conceive of being wrong on something. Honestly this is just a vent at this point lol, not even something you specifically have done since you're nowhere near the worst I've come across from hexbear.

Engaging just makes me feel the need to analyse every single thing I say to see if it will set the hexbear folks off on a tangent or completely dismiss you and do the weird misdirection and whataboutism and such. It makes me afraid to ever engage with hexbears in any manner, or overanalyse every tiny thing I say in case they use it to deliberately evade my main point like I was forced to do when younger in very hostile situations as an autistic person to avoid unpredictably angry people, and just like then it brings very little practical success because all my effort is spent trying to find any tiny way what I said might be interpreted in the worst possible way and there's always some excuse anyway.

China is expanding clinics for trans people. Notably for trans children, who it built its first clinic for in 2021 and has built a further 8 since.

True. This doesn't change the other stuff I mentioned, and the UK also claims to be "improving" clinics for trans teens while doing the opposite, so forgive me for being a little skeptical of the persistency, especially since the hrt stuff is from 2022 and this is from 2021. It's also only in a couple provinces. However, if it pans out, which it seems to from what you see, it's a positive move, but again, it seems to be Shanxi and Beijing.

This was also explicitly mentioned in the wikipedia article and I did see it. But it was only a single province, compared to the entire government's more negative actions >.<

Yeah because you're from hexbear and I don't trust you to engage in good faith

Aight I stopped reading right here.

If you don't think my response was in good faith, I won't participate. Eat my ass. Don't waste my fucking time.

You're a white nationalist, just like the other user. Which completely explains your desire to defend white western countries. You don't realise it but these are unexamined brainworms that you should absolutely do self-crit over. This emotional reaction you have to leap to the defence of the west and attack any claim that somewhere outside of it is better is at its source white western nationalism. And yes it makes you a lib, especially when it one country is demonstrably committing genocide against us while the other is not yet you still leap to its defence and to attack the other.