- cross-posted to:
- technology
- usa@lemmy.ml
- bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org
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."
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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.
- Fazoo ( @Fazoo@lemmy.ml ) 27•1 year ago
Experiencing a protracted regression of sanity, similar to Brexit.
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
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.
Meh, it is already out there anyway. Several times over.
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
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.
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.
How is the DSA in any way similar to this?
Japan has terrible international peering.
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
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.
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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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
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 24•1 year ago
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.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 2•1 year ago
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.
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.
if people & companies want to move their servers to some place in Europe that actually respects freedom and people.
implying the EU respects freedom
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
Clearly you don’t know “Europeans” and have never net a gypsy.
Donate to the EFF.
How do I check if my senator has signed? Or is that not public information
here’s the list of cosponsors … if they’re there, then they’re certainly supporting it. It’s worth contacting them in any case; they’ll often send you a form reply saying their position on the bill.
They are, damn
That’s disappointing … but, enough pressure can get them to change their position (or, almost as good, ask Schumer not to bring the bill to the floor so that they don’t have to take a politically costly vote). In the Senate Commerce Committee hearing, both Cantwell and Markey voted yes but said they had gotten a lot of calls and email from constituents who were concerned about the impact on LGBTQ+ teens so there was work to do before bringing the bill to the floor … so the pressure is definitely getting noticed!
One of my senators in on this list. His replies when a constituent disagrees with him are always a dismissal. The other senator who isn’t on there is Ted Cruz…
It’s gotta be public info.
Right?
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- Fazoo ( @Fazoo@lemmy.ml ) 14•1 year ago
“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.
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.