The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse (US focused)
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."
More of them “freedoms” that you yanks are always going on about?
No, no, it's "free dumbs". As in, they were giving away stupidity for free, so we each took as much as we could carry.
Experiencing a protracted regression of sanity, similar to Brexit.
lmao gottem
Pretty much. Just don't post how much oil your home country has.
Hey now, American kids love oil and it's good for them. They should rewrite the bill to remove all content that isn't about oil. Not avocado oil or malarkey like that though. That stuff is bad news, unlike petroleum oil. They may call it crude but we gotta make sure the kids know crude means good. The more crude the healthier the babies, that's what I always say.
Ah yes.. forever and again, the siren song of children being used as an excuse for draconian, rights eroding legislation.. its amazing how much responsibility parents have shirked to the state as they replace babysitters with cellphones and tablets.
It isn't so much parents shirking responsibility as folks in power doing what they want and just saying parents demanded it. When actual parents want something there's a lot more hue and cry, hearings, and suchlike. When there isn't, dig a bit and you find convenient lies and excuses.
Ah yes, children security. Of course.
And then everybody slaps a "Only for 18+, fill in your birth day" on their site and nobody can legally claim it's harming children.
And suddenly everyone was born on Jan 1st, 2000
I'm not doing maths to keep it at 18 each year.
I do 1900 lol
You still live in 2018?
People born in 2000 are 23
I didn't say I was going to do maths for you either ;)
It has more the implication that there are either an incredible amount of +120 year olds, or their system sucks.
I'm well over 18 and I give the year field a good scroll down to be like 80y/o because it's such a bother to click 3 sliders. F that.
Funny how websites actually accept that birthyear.
Was curious, so I looked it up. The oldest living people were born in 1907 currently.
Which you will need to prove by sending your personal identification to a commercial third party provider. Who will eventually get hacked and your data will be leaked.
Meh, it is already out there anyway. Several times over.
This is how it works on YouTube now, the rules for kids content are draconic and you risk your account, so everybody just says "this is not for kids" on all videos.
YouTube music will not let you put a “for kids” marked song on a playlist! It kind of sucks for putting my KID’s favorite goofy songs on my KID’s playlist. The kid’s playlist that is composed entirely of content not marked “for kids” because that’s all that is possible.
Fun fact, press the three dots on the video and you still get the option to add it to a playlist!
This is the adult tour, it's not FOR kids
this law requires positive proof with IDs. it's also going to be used by red states to go after online queer communities.
I'm curious how that's going to work in international context. Everything to do with the queer community suddenly has a link to .ca or .mx domain and server park outside the country where this doesn't apply for example. Or reddit suddenly checks with the authorities in Zimbabwe if the ID is valid.
lol the US doesn't care about international law
There were enough American companies having an office in Ireland to avoid taxes. And soon also to avoid red state litigation.
the US controls the international money supply. the loopholes employed by those companies are very easily closed as is the ability of companies headquartered outside the US to operate within its borders. companies will fall in line. and any support granted by other countries are easily neutered by shocking the money supply.
Unfortunately this is just ONE of MANY bad internet bills currently up for consideration and with bipartisan support. Help fight all of them at https://badinternetbills.com
!bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org is tracking all the bad internet bills ... right now KOSA's where the most action is.
The internet is about to move to the rest of the world if this passes, no one will host a web server in the US after this.
which, considering that the U.S considers accessing a server based in the U.S grounds to extradite a person from the otherside of the world and try them for a capital crime might not be such a bad thing.
The problem is where? The EU is trying to apply similar censorship via the DSA, Russia we all know is LGBTphobic and not truly for free speech, Canada is a joke, and China is lol. Not even sure if Japan is viable.
What do you mean by China is lol?
Didn't a lesbian kiss get edited out of Star Wars Rise of Skywalker for the Chinese release? Just as one example
If we're using anecdotes, one of China's most famous TV personalities (Jin Xing) is openly transgender
This is like saying, "I'm not a racist I have a black friend"
I'm trans. No it isn't.
Claiming that China is actively repressing this while literally employing and front-facing transgender people is absurd. Where are the famous transgender TV personalities employed by the BBC? Britain's state owned media.
China is visibly trying to improve things for trans people compared to the country I'm currently in (the UK) and your absurdness about it is obviously built on racism because you don't behave this way about white countries. You only behave this way about non-white countries. Where is your equal criticism? Where is this behaviour when it's all the white countries that behave this way? You're american right? Where is it for YOUR country which is currently illegalising trans people, undergoing state sanctioned murder against trans people and having an internal refugee crisis because of it. Where the fuck are the federal protections to prevent this genocide being perpetrated by red states? Non existent. Because democrat support for trans people is performative.
So excuse me but fuck off about criticising China on trans people. You're a shit.
Lol
China isn't censoring their internet because you're a trans person who lives in the UK, BBC doesn't have trans personalities, and certain US politicians are attacking trans rights? Wow, what an argument.
Also I'm racist for pointing out authoritarianism from an authoritarian government?
You're doing a terrible job with your concern trolling. Put in some effort at least.
The point isn't about censorship which for the record here was performed by Disney for the sake of more profit. Not by the state.
Nothing about this comment string was about the internet. This is a non-sequitur.
The point here is that it is demonstrably obvious to trans people living in the US and UK that China is better to us than the US and the UK, one of which is currently performing a genocide against us and the other of which is transphobic on a near daily basis and is expected by the community here to follow in the US' footsteps if it gets the chance.
You didn't say a damn thing about that. You dismissed an argument about China being better about trans people than multiple major western governments. I gave concrete examples of why that is, and only now are you bringing out "muh authoritarianism", which frankly I don't give a shit about compared to the ongoing real genocide of trans people the US is doing.
It is painful talking to you morons when you can't even remember what you fucking said, or be bothered to go back and check it. But yes I am calling you a racist because you clearly have different standards for white countries than you do for non-white ones.
China is pretty blegh actually.
They are actively making things worse w.r.t accessing HRT online, and require even more nonsense than the UK on changing legal ID, including shit like spousal approval, familial approval, and permission from various things like work, school, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_China
Access to hrt is also comparable to the uk by the looks of it. More importantly, the illegality of gay marriage combined with the massive approval process for id change means that trans people with different-gender partners can't marry legally, and trans people with similar-gender partners are probably? in an unfortunate position here, though the page doesn't include info on this >.<
The more sex-segregated components of various aspects of China also causes significant issues >.<
I'd say it's worse in terms of being able to socially and medically transition, but there's less overt hate. It's more death-by-bureacracy and a need for even more extensive social approval to transition (I'm almost impressed that they managed a worse system than in the UK). The greater hold the Chinese Government has over their internet means accessing DIY HRT is likely much harder :/
People claiming China is much better on this than the US and the UK are wrong, they both have different issues. 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.
On a side note, stuff like this is one of the reasons opposing authoritarianism especially w.r.t communication is important, it makes it easier to do things the government has not approved of because the infrastructure is not in place to control communication and coordination as effectively.
The US is as always a clusterfuck because of it's more federated nature, some of their states are trying to do genocide while others are acting as refuges and have things like informed consent HRT access and active protection against the more hostile states ^.^ - but fuck me if the dems aren't spineless at opposing this stuff or (as can be seen in the op) sometimes support this.
Honestly most large states constantly try and censor the internet with stuff like this, though in the US/UK/Europe it has been a lot less successful at least. In this case it's a more brazen attack on queer people, but this sort of stuff seems to happen every couple years. It's very frustrating >.<
People definitely have some double standards though - maybe racism or the false idea that China is communist - but it doesn't mean the Chinese govt is good on things, in my observation, just that people underestimate the things European countries, the UK, and US states do.
They may be better or worse and just because people often have double standards doesn't make the Chinese government better (though it is often not worse in some respects, but the overall greater control of communication and computing infrastructure means it is harder to evade the subjugation or organise around it via tools like Tor, and the greater centralisation means that if the government decides to do something particularly awful it's both harder for public dissent to occur and harder for regions to undermine efforts like that or even actively counter them :/).
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.
Says the person whose entire fucking understanding of the matter was gained from wikipedia 5 seconds before making this comment. Jesus fucking christ.
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.
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.
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.
Not a lib, and my source is wikipedia because it has it's own sources as well and provides a decent summary.
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.
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 >.<
Why are you automatically blaming China for that? How do you know that decision wasn't made by the film directors/company? Unfortunately, propaganda runs deep and people easily believe whatever they want to believe
"Authorities in Dubai and in Singapore’s media regulatory board, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), threatened Disney and Lucasfilm to either cut a brief lesbian kiss from the end of Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker or else lose their film’s PG-13 rating ... While Chinese censors allowed the kiss to stay, an R rating in Singapore would’ve made the film inaccessible to its younger fans, hurting its financial success abroad."
It was the first Google search result
Disney and Lucasfilm are the ones to blame for chasing profit
many such cases
Don't know about the kiss, but they basically edited out John Boyega almost entirely for the overseas release.
I consider that an absolute win for queers. Corporate pandering can eat shit.
Seems pretty clear from context, China is an autocratic state well known to engage in censorship when it fits the party's desires.
And which governments don't engage in censorship when it fits their desires lol
Your whataboutism isn't really useful here, I'm just responding to the question about China. The point of his response was that there isn't really any place left to go. And even if your response was relevant it would be laughable, the censorship that the Chinese government perpetrates puts most other countries to shame.
Whataboutism, checkmate tankie
I mean, you are a tankie. You sub to hexbear. China isn't an autocratic state hahaha okayyyyy surrrrre. Just a single party "democracy" right?
Everything you said is facts, glad to see you're learning from us thanks to the federation
this is a thread about the US though? Who whatabouts the whatabouter?
Your reading comprehension is pretty low. My original comment was specifically in response to another individual questioning why the idea of hosting servers in China to escape censorship was "lol". That's it.
Which is his point,right? Like where else would you go to host if all governments engage in this BS
The arguments presented are so terrible and devoid of any meaninful substance
The first one was "China lol"
Then the one I replied to in support of "China lol" said "autocratic state" which is absolutely false unless all of your knowledge about China's governance system comes from reading CNN headlines and skimming Reuters articles written by a dude with a bachelor's in journalism that doesn't speak Chinese
They also said "well known to" which implies it's a special case when every state exerts overwhelming control and censorship over the media that occurs within their country
Isn't the CCP given explicit power and privilege in the Chinese government and isn't the CCP's officially headed by a permanent leader as it's "core"? I've been trying read about the political structure and it's hard to not argue that it seems very autocratic.
The CPC (not CCP) is the guiding force of the government, and adapts to the will of the people through the mass line/being comprised of 10% of eligible persons. The highest level of the CPC (after the various levels of party committees/congresses) is the SC of the Politburo of the Central Committee, which is comprised of members elected through all levels and with terms of five years, and the highest individual position is the General Secretary (also terms of five years), elected by the Central Committee. Provided the persons in these positions are fit to serve, there are no definite term limits (one can be elected for a term of five years indefinitely until they are too old to serve (age limit), wish not to in which case a subordinate would the replace them, or are voted out by the CC) although I fail to see how a term limit can be justified when it is merely an undemocratic method of preventing the election of someone regardless of their success/the will of the population.
So what is the "core" position in relation to that? When is the next election for Xi Ping for that position?
Xi Jinping was re-elected as GenSec in 2022 (third term), so the Central Committee would foreseeably be doing a new election in 2027 (for the SC of the Poliburo as well).
And that has affected you outside China operating a server based there when?
I don't understand, please rephrase your question.
What don't you understand about it? How has it ever affected you? Can you name a single time it has?
China does not care unless you live within its borders, and even there it only really cares when it is someone of influence, such as the rich capital owners or the celebrities.
I just didn't understand the way your question was worded because it was garbled. I don't have any reason to host a data server and I don't live in China, so you got me, I've never been personally impacted by Chinese government censorship and repression. Obviously that means it doesn't exist, QED.
But oh, as long as I make sure not to upset anyone rich or in power I would be fine, don't worry. Do you ever read what you type?
“The Chinese government has never done anything that has negatively impacted me or anyone I know, I have never known a Chinese person I disliked, yet I passionately despise China. I am extremely different from Republicans who have never set foot inside an American city yet are terrified of doing so. It’s you tankies who are propagandized, not me!!!!”
Strawman city over here. I do not despise China or the Chinese people. I have actually visited China and loved my time there, the people I met, and the food I ate. I think it is a beautiful country with wonderful people and a rich history. I can also recognize that their autocratic ruling party represses and censors their citizens, and I don't think that is a good thing. I wish the best for China and truly hope that some day, all their citizens will be able to express themselves freely.
The USA imprisons more people per capita than China. There are also limits to free speech in the USA, as evidenced by the bourgeois regime’s brutal crackdown on the George Floyd protests among countless other examples. Which society is more free exactly?
Dude i recomend you to let this one go. Those guys are from hexbear and looks to me that they are raiding this thread for some reason. Theres no way their tankie takes would get this most upvotes normaly, they are usually bashed outside of this thread but the up to downvote ratio is suspisous af. And besides their takes shouldnt be taken seriously. One of this clowns where claiming that china defends trans people and are actively making life better for them... fucking china, the ccp, really now? Ive seen that there are some centers for lgbtq+ studies, and while the name of Jing Xing sounds like dislexic joke for Xi jing, shes actually real and trans and very popular on chinese tv, but there are no laws that explicitly protect them and its reported that they still sufer a lot of harasment from the general population and the ccp isnt really looking into fixing this anythime soon if ever. But other than that just let this one go, its not worth it.
My friend, read the thread. You're getting triggered over someone laughing at the idea of westerners hosting web content in China to escape censorship.
How is the DSA in any way similar to this?
In what way is Canada a joke? Like, I'm not saying it isn't, but our online freedom is pretty good. We don't actually have a state sponsored censorship campaign, VPNs are legal, TOR is legal, all we legislate is that you aren't inciting violence or calling for the extermination of a protected group of people or doing shady dark web shit. Pretty much everything else is good to go.
There's some wisdom in the old soviet anecdote
The Internet is still mostly connected, the law enforcement is not as much. Many businesses exist only because of this. You are free to host (produce, store, distribute) your content where it is legal and access it from where it is not. Access to foreign resources may eventually be outlawed or the access itself restricted. This is already the case in EU, Russia, China, etc. - but for now Internet is mostly connected.
Japan has terrible international peering.
It is why more need to support the decentralized movement as then there is not centralized group you can choke to get your draconian ways.
I’m shocked that the first openly gay senator Tammy Baldwin is a co-sponsor for the bill. You bet I’m writing her.
Not really surprising to me. Gay (and now trans) people have long been accused of grooming and/or queerifying children
The first openly gay senator is probably hyper-aware of this, and I'd guess is probably very hawkish on anything protecting children
The other aspect is congressmen don't understand shit outside (sometimes) politics or the law. On its surface, this has a very compelling description - hold websites responsible if they let children access NSFW content.
It's not until you ask how (interpreted by the community as providing identifiable information to "prove" your age) that the first flaw comes up - this provides a way to collect data on online use, as social media is considered potentially NSFW by the nature of user submission
Then you get to the things most people without a technical background wouldn't see
The second flaw - companies are terrible at securing data. Get ready for every scammer under the sun to be able to find your ID numbers.
The third, this won't work. As a young teen, I blazed past parental controls, because there's a ton of porn out there and there's no way to hold back someone determined to find it. If you want this to work, we need to make a child Internet of known safe content and parental controls to keep you there... But just like finding or stealing a Playboy, the fact it exists means kids are going to be stealing passwords or IDs and probably sharing them. If we instead had sites declare content ratings and locked down at the device level, they need to go through a lot of work or get a secret device - it would give parents powerful tools to actually enforce this through Apple, Google, or Microsoft accounts
And finally, this won't work because it's inconvenient. Make password requirements too strict, and users write them down. Make content moderation too strict, and people will find shortcuts. People will find ways around this that will likely both end up in the hands of children, but also probably make everyone less safe
I don't know how American voters can stand for this, how can you re-elect people who cause your children to get shot in schools and believe the same people have set out to protect them with things like these?
A lot of them are really stupid hateful racists. They are figuratively and literally shooting themselves in the foot.
Because the way voting works in the US is based on assumptions from the days when getting all the votes together to tally them would have been a logistical nightmare. Instead of counting everyone's vote individually, the map is divided into regions. Each region tallies up their votes, and then one single vote is counted for that entire region based on the majority vote from that region. Those regional votes are tallied, and the majority winner of the regions gets the win. By drawing the regions correctly (a process called gerrymandering), you can put the majority of one party's voters into a small handful of regions, so all of them only count as a handful of regional votes while making sure the rest of the regions are drawn to give the other party a 51%+ majority. As a result, it's possible to have a candidate that would garner less than 50% of the individual votes win a landslide of over 75% of the regional votes.
We don't, enough of the US is gerrymandered as fuck and we use first past the post voting so most of us are voting to get a plurality for the guy other than the one we hate more, and that's if your even interested in politics here. The whole system is fucked and corrupt.
Edit: oh yea and the electoral college fucks us too.
Yeah, quite a bad system of voting. I hope my country moves away from that.
Propaganda from people who make a profit out of those opinions.
Fuck /u/spez
A third or so of the country believes the right wing propaganda machine that has been churning for decades.
For everyone else, we're constantly offered a choice between a center-right neoliberal, or an outright fascist. We're just voting for how fast the country falls.
Freedumb
Our votes don't actually matter in the grand scheme of things.
by design
Because Americans are hateful racists who care more about taking away from you than helping their community. Own the libs!
that's just generalization, a racist's most powerful tool.
The majority demonstrably are not. We have a horribly broken electoral system that gives outsize power to the fascists.
You owned those hateful Americans so hard by being hateful and stereotyping them.
Why would you oppose this? Don't you want children to be safe online? Won't anybody please think of the children? /s
"Why would you oppose this? What are you a pedo????" /sarcasm
'Free Speech' mfs really do like their blasphemy laws.
Yeah, no, it was always the second one.
Unfortunately I live in a backwards, ignorant red state represented by complete idiots. The last time I wrote to my representatives asking them to oppose something like this they wrote back saying "the agree fully" and then went on to explain that they would definitely support it and thanked me for backing them... Then went on to show a complete lack of understanding of the bill in question.
And I've been on his email list ever since despite clicking unsubscribe probably 30 times. The crusty sock puppet probably thinks that means "show me more" based on how he responded to my initial email.
If your unsubscribe isn't working, report them to the FTC: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/ If you take want to go the extra mile, report them to their email provider as well. You might be able to get their email shut down, and if their email provider is also their web host provider, maybe their website as well. Providers take CAN-SOAM violations seriously.
American here, and I am totally OK with a tiny bit of extra latency if people & companies want to move their servers to some place in Europe that actually respects freedom and people.
Though I suspect that if you’re a US company with servers located abroad, they will still make the law apply to you since you control it.
Also adding on to this, buy physical media.
Buy 8 tb hard drives and fill them up. It's cheaper than streaming even if you managed to fill one every year.
Cloud storage is just someone else's computer.
it's pretty horseshit that if you buy a digital copy of a movie, they can just revoke that licence whenever they want, under the guise of "well, we don't have the licence anymore".
Relative to this new proposal from the US gov....um yeah. The EU is far more free online. No Patriot Act or NDAA either.
I was going to say something about giving it to gypsies and you could probably literally see European fervor to ban something. Lol
Censor slurs or use the actual name for Roma people
Clearly you don't know "Europeans" and have never net a gypsy.
Knowing this will probably be passed like
This is how it feels like to not be American and seeing decisions like this. They affect the whole Internet since so much stuff relies on US Internet infrastructure, yet you can only watch as the citizens of Burgerland drive the 'net into the ground.
It will not affect the whole Internet. American-centered English-speaking "Internet" yes, but there's lots and lots of infrastructure and content elsewhere. Many Chinese-, Japanese-, Russian-, and German-centric resources exist almost independently from the rest of the world. Some of them are free to completely ignore the "bad internet bills", copyright, IP, GDPR, and any other regulation you can think of.
I was exaggerating a little, but it is still a huge swath of the Internet. And the Chinese and Russian parts of the 'net have enough of their own problems.
Guess I am learning German or Japanese because Canada is also on a train to censoring the Internet piece by piece.
"Think of the children" is such a dumb excuse that people keep using in the US to pass laws that restricts citizens and are anti-privacy.
It's such a dumb excuse that it caught on in many other countries!
It's not stupid if it works
Make sure you vote!!!!
For fucking what? This is bipartisan!
don't worry, they're making fun of liberals who claim voting will cure all societal ills
If someone without a website in their name and who has pronouns displayed says some weird shit 95/100 times it’s ironic
our usernames have @hexbear.net in them from other sites lol.
Damn
PSL, for example.
I keep voting and things keep getting worse anyway.
You’re not voting hard enough
I hang around a bunch of artists who make money through NSFW art...or shit, they just draw it for fun. This isn't gonna be great for them. Why should me and my friends' thirty year old asses have to hold back so Little Timmy doesn't see a boob or something? Shouldn't their parents be the ones making sure that doesn’t happen?
Why would a state attorney generally have any oversight over the content of the internet? That seems way out of scope for their job
part 2 of this bill:
just so we're all clear on the purpose of this bill.
All the fascist hentai guys on 4chan are about to commit mass suicide or a mass shooting
The guys who run 4chan are going to be facing life in jail.
Wtf
What the heeell? (can't get a more productive comment after reading that, sorry)
I don't know if I'm in the right here but I'm practically at the point where I'm just like fuck it, let them ruin the internet.
I want to hear them scream when because of their own actions they have tanked the companies that their retirements are depending on.
Let's see how fast they can fix shit when they have 35 million angry retirees that hold 78% of the wealth in the country mad at them and telling them to fix it.
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Only if they die of old age. If they are found dead before then, the wait could be much, much shorter. After all, aren't the conservatives (like Matt "child-fucker" Gaetz) openly calling for wide-spread violence now?
I wish the "Dark Web" hadn't turned into shit show, Just looking into it now gets you onto some fuckin watch list but it would have been a perfectly viable place to set up a proper censorship-free web. It also takes care of the user-quality issue by being slightly harder to use than a button that says "INSTALL APP NOW!"
It's gotten so the "dark web" is any website that doesn't show up on page 1 of a Google search result.
It's all bullshit and they'll keep shoveling it as long as they have arms to shovel with
"would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue"
What a weird distinction to make. I know they're getting squirrelly, but they still technically count in the "every state" column.
the distinction is because those red states have extensive efforts underway to go after queer people and this bill enables them to do so online.
There is no need for it though. It is a bipartisan bill and further down it is mentioned how the GOP would use it. The implication of red states being shitty is already there.
It's just bad writing.
I emailed my senators, both Democrats. One wrote me back telling me how proud they were of co-sponsoring the bill. The other told me how important it is to protect kids from the dangers of social media. WTF.
WTF indeed. But, thanks for emailing them -- they track how much email they get in each direction, and if there's enough they may rethink their position.
Ooooh... the liberals are about to hand the fascists the keys to the tanks.
We did the same in 2016. I forget what happened as I lapsed into a 4 year alcohol fueled amnesia. But I can't imagine that it was too bad. /s
Nope. Not yet. The right-wingers thought they could install overt fascism without the help of liberals - they thought wrong. They tried to win the streets - antifa beat booted them off it. They got their Great Orange Fuhrer into the Waffle House - liberal disdain isolated him and booted him out. What needs to happen is liberals being frightened to such an extent of working class revolt that the violence fascists offers becomes the "lesser evil" - and a good first step is to find hysteria "hot button" issues that liberals are too ignorant and naive to see through... like above-mentioned "protect the children" trope.
A bill like this has merit if it's targeted at real problems, like the sources of fascist growth and propaganda that have existed on the internet for decades.
As per usual the US isn't interested in going after the fascists though. This will absolutely be used against already marginalised people and the left, by which I mean socialists. There's a reason it has bipartisan support.
yeah, Rs have already been bragging that they're going to use this to go after queer communities online.
You really can't pick and choose. There's really no such thing as 'good' government censorship of the internet, you have to block all of it or you're getting the bad stuff.
Yes there is. And yes you can. The only people that say this absurd fucking bullshit are literally nazis who don't want to be targeted.
"Hurr hurr you have to block lgbt with the fascists or you have to accept them both" is a fucking stupid thing to say and you should be ashamed of yourself and the general state of your life leading you to say this stupid shit.
Legal principles preventing government censorship are simple and effective. If you erode those, you have not a lot protecting you from shit like the OP bill. Nothing stupid about that, just how it works.
You and your libertarian brain
Preventing how? Clearly these principles don't work because the government that's supposed to be following them can just choose not to.
As evidenced by the myriad of "human rights" abuses done by a state founded on the idea of "civil rights".
The rights of man are predicted on power. Otherwise it's just talk.
It is a mistake to think of a government making choices in the same way an individual might make choices. A government is not a person, and a collection of people is not equivalent to a single individual in its ability to have coherent values and act on them. Instead, some framework for cooperation and compromise must be used. If your framework sucks, if it's especially wishy-washy and subjective, power seeking assholes will be more able to twist it around and abuse it. Civil rights don't always work perfectly, but they work better than the alternatives (like hoping a dogmatic ideology will be able to seize absolute power, agree with itself, and maintain sane values all at once).
It seems obvious to me that if free speech protections are eroded in the United States, that opens the door to the right in particular suppressing the sort of speech they clearly want to suppress and are actively trying to suppress. They have control of state governments, they get in power federally and pass laws on a regular basis. Is there any reason to think that wouldn't happen? This bill seems to be a perfect example: bipartisan legislation giving both sides censorship and intimidation powers.
As for whether the approach works in practice, and can avoid being a bare expression of the power of whoever is in charge at the time, here is a summary of historical supreme court cases related to Free Speech. I don't think all of these are necessarily for the best, but it seems clear that for the most part (with some notable exceptions) they are not egregious deviations from the principle, and are not expressions of the whims of whoever is in power at the time. It represents an actual restraint on those who would like to exercise power over others.
Since you seemed to reply in earnest, I'll link this and highly suggest you watch it. Even if you don't end up agreeing, I think it lays out the crux of the issue with human rights as an idea in a clear concise manner. It's only 20 minutes long and it's well put together.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q (I dunno how to do the in line text link)
I'd go point by point through your post (which I did read) but I'm swamped with work and shit.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
There is a lot here I agree with. I've seen stuff from this channel before and it's pretty good. Human rights are somewhat arbitrary, and are influenced by what makes a convenient compromise between power interests. However I don't think that necessarily contradicts what I am saying, because what I am arguing against is not the rejection of civil rights as a concept, but the catastrophe that would come from the dismantlement of this particular one in this particular way given the context of our present society.
From the video:
So removing rights is not by itself a solution, and can do harm. We do not exist in a society where the fabric holding it together is "significance of community". The spirit of discourse I see from authoritarians is very far from suggesting a way to reorder our world around "significance of community". Rather on all sides it seems to be rage manifesting as a desire to silence and dominate their enemies, with the consequences only an afterthought, that can or should not be seriously considered. Even while claiming mutual hatred, they pursue this shared objective together, and things like this bill show that they aren't even very committed to hiding it. The reasons why the success of one means the success of the other in this case are obvious; the loss of the right of Free Speech in this context means the empowerment of people who want to use censorship as a weapon, and weapons don't discriminate.
If you learn more about political science you'll find that there is more nuance, it's not so simple as all or nothing.
How so?
You'll have to go and learn to find out! Can't do any harm.
This book is excellent https://www.amazon.ca/Canadian-Regime-Introduction-Parliamentary-Government/dp/1487525370/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2YHH09AXAW3HG&keywords=canadian+regime&qid=1693850943&sprefix=canadian+regim%2Caps%2C259&sr=8-1
You can also ask pi for an introduction https://pi.ai/talk
I was more prompting you in case you wanted to elaborate on your argument. If you wanted to cite relevant passages from that book to support it I would read and consider them and maybe read the rest, but as it is I can't help but interpret your intent as being snidely condescending. Am I wrong about that? You're citing the entire field of political science, throwing a book at me that may or may not have anything to do with the internet or the erosion of legal rights, and linking to an AI chatbot.
I keep making the mistake of commenting on things that I have no desire to dig into. Apologies if I was rude. It really is an interesting area if you find yourself curious about it one day.
Donate to the EFF.
i thought you meant the Economic Freedom Fighters💀
Horrifying to see Biden and the Dems unite with the Republicans on an anti-LGBT+ bill.
It is incredibly typical.
My reaction to the sponsor list would be the shocked Pikachu meme.
You should have seen Biden and the Dems unite w Republicans to make gay marriage and gay military service illegal the first time and they'll keep doing it too
Biden and the Dems are right-leaning centrists.
Actual progressives caucus with them because what choice do we have? Refusing to do so effectively gives control of the most powerful nation in the history of the world to a psychotic doomsday cult who never met a minority that they didn't hate with all of their Christian hearts™.
Kinda makes me wonder if we'll ever have a proper left-wing party in this country since, at this point, saying that poor people should be given a 30 second head start before being hunted by their social betters is considered by Conservatives to be radical Marxism.
most US dems have the stance of "compromise at all costs" which always just means the conservatives get what they want.
US dems are just conservatives with people pleaser syndrome.
Well, they sure aren't pleasing me.
In a few years, if you're not willing to vote with a brick and a molotov, then your vote doesn't count.
Thank you for noting the US focus in the title <3
So often I see sweeping headlines like this that are actually only about a single country, and the country is always named (as it's a key piece of information about the story) unless it's the USA, at which point they just assume you must be in the USA too and so being up front about what country they're talking about isn't a priority xD
Unfortunately this is about the first time, I'd (almost) disagree with you. If the US bans something on, or makes a law about, the internet it almost always affects the rest of the world. The only difference is the rest of the world has no say in the matter :(
Can you elaborate how this act could affect me in Germany?
Do you visit any websites that are hosted in the United States? It doesn't matter where you're located, it matters where the site you're accessing is hosted.
As an American, GDPR has affected me. Many sites have chosen, rather than deal with Europe and the rest of the world separately, to just make a version of their site that is GDPR-compliant. I've sent GDPR erasure requests to services and they don't bother checking if I'm actually a European citizen, they just remove my data because it's easier. I'd argue that GDPR was a net good even for America and other countries.
This is the same thing but in reverse. If KOSA makes Pornhub unable to operate in America, they may very well shut down due to the loss of revenue. If KOSA makes companies paranoid about allowing, for example, NSFW pictures, or LGTBQ or abortion information, or similar, then those companies may disallow it on their services altogether even if they have servers in Europe because setting up the infrastructure for, for example DailyMotion, to have totally separate databases of content in different regions is just too much.
This can affect you. Not as much as people in the US, sure. But unless you use sites and applications made only by European companies, it can absolutely affect you.
You make a good point! It's too early in the morning for me to think about solutions to the issue, they mainly affect platforms used globally but hosted in a specific country like the USA (Facebook for example).
Though, it's not like we have no say entirely, so there is hope :-)
For example, a major platform like Facebook banning/restricting gay/trans content would be seen as a pretty major case of discrimination and would certainly land Facebook in court over here, with their access to our market eventually closed should they not comply with our equality laws.
So sure, they could keep running in the USA, but their access to global markets would be reduced and fractured depending on how evil and draconian the USA continues to get, and how much freedom other countries have internally in their societies, to better protect from discrimination.
Which I'd say in a way is a good thing, allowing for local rivals to jump up to fill the gap and bring back some of the innovation and joy of the internet of 20 years ago! :-D
But there's down sides too, it distances us from others, making it harder for us to connect with and understand other nations and cultures. I think having a platform that everyone can use, run by a monopoly or not, is a very beneficial thing for us all.
Anyway, just a few extra thoughts there. It's a very complex and difficult topic, and I'm not even "armchair expert" level 😅
Lol, kosa means scythe in slovenian.
In all Slavic languages, if I'm not mistaken.
Screw both parties and Joe Biden in particular. I'll be asking my senators to oppose this, though I highly doubt it'll matter.
Biden's going to veto it for sure, lol.
Then why is he urging lawmakers to pass it? Just do he can veto it? That doesn't make any sense.
Maybe I'm being more optimistic about how much the average voter pays attention than I should be, but if the Senate passes it and he's braindead enough to sign it after how the Heritage Foundation bragged they'll use it he deserves the 2024 apathy that puts a felon in his chair.
Biden seems to actually like the bill. Here's a quote from the source in the article:
He's been actively campaigning for it for two years.
I don't regret voting for him because he did the two things I wanted:
I've disliked most of the rest of what he did, but he accomplished my two top priorities. I will probably go back to voting independent/third party this election unless Trump gets the nomination, in which case I might vote for Biden again because of priority #1. I live in a red state, so it probably doesn't matter regardless, but I think it would be funny if the GOP candidate lost here.
Biden has always been anti-freedom. He wrote a bill while in congress that he later claimed the Patriot Act was ripped off from, basically doing a lot of similar stuff to shit on Americans' freedom like the Patriot Act did but it was not passed. I was worried about him being VP while Obama was in office due to his bad record. He's one of the crappiest options America had in 2020, but still is better than Trump obviously.
I 100% agree. In my list of preferred Democratic candidates in 2020, Biden was second only to Kamala Harris in terms of worst candidate (to me). Basically, I would've preferred literally anyone else to the pair we got.
Yet I still voted for him over Trump because Trump was just that bad. It was my first time voting Democrat for President ever, and it was the hardest Presidential vote I've ever cast. I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 because I thought that Trump surely wouldn't have a realistic shot, yet the stars aligned and we elected a lunatic.
I live in Tennessee so that's, uh, not ever going to happen again unless the entire Republican party gets caught assassinating Trump, in drag, while holding Korans and admitting climate change is real.
Lol, that's probably not far from the truth unfortunately. My state is pretty similar. Despite a ton of people absolutely hating Trump (Trump did very poorly here in 2016 primaries), the election still wasn't close at all both elections.
I'm not a fan of Biden, but since my vote for President doesn't really matter anyway, I use it to send a message. Usually that's to whatever the biggest third party is at the time, but last election is was to the Democratic party.
How is this line up with 'liberty'? The US gov can't stop intruding into the private sphere.
If you live in CT contact Blumenthal and Murphy, this is Blumenthals bill... try to get Murph to put pressure on Blumenthal, at least Murph isn't a politcal fox.
"The internet is about to get a lot worse (US focused)" uhh ::: spoiler spoiler
:::
everyday is the same but slightly worse
It's always worth trying, but this is something I don't see us changing. And although it's helpful to have a prewritten letter to send, when they get 363826283636 identical messages it makes it that much easier to ignore because "they're just bots." I edited the message to add my own feelings about government overreach and corporations reaction to censor everything to protect themselves.
Great point about editing the letter -- and calling is even better!
In terms of whether or not we'll be able to change it ... last year the broad pushback succeeded in stopping KOSA, and there's certainly a decent chance to do the same this year. Who knows, but as you say, it's always worth trying!
you might be able to sway some corporate democrats by pointing out how this will destroy a lot of internet businesses. who knows? they might have invested in tech
Can... can you please just kill me now? Just a bullet between my skull, do it while I'm playing Baldur's Gate.. don't even wanna know you're doing it.
Just wanna fall asleep and wake up on some kind of astral plane where things make sense
This bitch
Fascists always use "protecting children" as the rationale for implementing mechanisms of social control. Their willingness to allow school shootings shows that they really don't care about protecting children at all.
Guess I'm gonna download a lifetime supply of porn before this goes through. Just in case.
Western Digital be all like
Ironically I am running WD drives. I've got a 32 TB server in RAID 1 running a Plex server and it's half full. I'm sure I can purge some shows if I need more space.
What the hell?
Wha... What the fuck!?!
What's going on in this popular thread?
Mix of concern, frustration, and what appears to be complex doomer mating rituals
No!!! Not when porn is so easy to get these days! I need my daily dosage. If this goes through, the we won't have access to California's greatest stars ✨🤩 in the business. Everything will be smaller and lower quality and possibly not in English. I only watch the videos for the articles. But if the articles are all in dutch or Chinese or Japanese, how am I supposed to you know? Like do my thing. You know?
do you have brain worms
Probably.
Thank you, I just signed this petition. Luckily my lawmaker is already against these bills.
I don't know if that's lucky. It means you are at the wims of others you can not influence.
Fuck
Awfully bad idea
Can a federal bill require state AGs to do something? Most of the bills I've heard of give resources to state actors if they agree to do something that the federal government requires.
this doesn't require them to do anything, it just gives them new powers.
Attent #452625 at destroying the Internet and counting.
They only need to succeed big once or small a couple of times. They already succeeded small big many times so yeah. Enjoy the internet while it lasts, 5 years from now it will be unrecognizeable and a fraction of what we have now.
But at least the kids are safe because THAT is why we are doing this, right? RIGHT?
I am not an American and I couldn't care less about their laws or the people in power. Why is content here so focused on the US anyway?
Then post tech news from your country.
In this case, sites could make content unavailable to everyone to make sure Americans using VPNs don't see it.
What about sites hosted there, or operated by Americans?
Because you'll be effected by this too. That's the reason. The internet is full of platforms that are related to the USA in some way, and because of this all of them will have to heavily censor themselves or shut down.
I feel you. I don't want to have to do anything with the USA. I don't even want to go there at all. As far as it doesn't hurt anyone outside I don't care what they do. But here we are.
If you don’t care then why are you asking?
The US likes to throw its weight around. Today it's websites inside the US the tighty righties are afraid of. Tomorrow it might be one of yours; just like the GDPR has caused a lot of USian websites to be even more annoying, USian legislation might do it to non-USian websites next.