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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
There's freedom of speech in the USSR: In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan," and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan," and you will not be punished.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Oh it's pretty obvious with an internal perspective too as long as you don't fall for their propaganda about being to the left and instead look at their policies
Vocalized support in favor of it and asked for it to be passed, so it seems. About as far as he can go until it's on his desk, so it's understandable to expect he would sign it if it does.
"Republicans and Democrats, Unite Against Big Tech Abuses
Congress can find common ground on the protection of privacy, competition and American children."
This is what gets me about conservatives trying to shit on Biden and expecting a rise out of us. Motherfuckers, we know he's mid lmao. Better than the alternative though
Some of my last days on reddit every bad thing I said about Biden triggered some dem true believer to tell me how actually Biden is the most progressive president in history. I get they don't want to acknowledge bidens conservative leaning in fear it might hurt him at the polls. What they dont realize for every one person you're telling don't believe your own eyes you're maybe only keeping one person from straying from party line. But that person you just showed the dems true colors to, for them, you've tainted the party forever.
He's a corporate piece of shit. I have to vote for him every time but he's absolutely on the wrong side and if America burns I will consider him like Nero having done nothing but played his fiddle to the tune of the screams of his constituents as he refuses to change things that might upset his benefactors.
Truly a waste of a presidency and a failure of those in power to try and make things better instead of hiding and playing passive line holders to fascists at the gate.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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 :(
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 😅
I would appreciate governments, especially the American government, refraining from passing laws "for the children". They never are. They never work. They are a scam that gives the appearance of being beneficial to all while only benefiting a few. They accomplish nothing the scam indicates it will and instead turns out to be another overreach of government power.
No more "for the children" nonsense from any government - it's not about them and you know it.
You want to pass something for the good of the children? GET RID OF THE GODDAM GUNS.
Funny how you did the same thing though, get rid of the guns "for the children" after your tirade about the government restricting freedom under that banner. It's OK when you do it, but not them.
I see the both the same, bullshit appeal-to-emotion power grabs to reduce the freedom of the citizenry. The "get rid of guns" talk is bullshit because that is just not a possible thing to ever accomplish.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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?
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.