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."
https://buttondown.email/charliejane/archive/the-internet-is-about-to-get-a-lot-worse/Open linkView original on lemmy.sdf.org
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
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.
Ah yes, children security. Of course.
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
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.
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.
This is the adult tour, it's not FOR kids
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
![email protected] 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?
I'm sure tech company's could just stick their servers in the Virgin Islands or some other fucking tax haven.
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.
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.
In the way that there are MAGAs up north. Like, come on bois, there's no need for that shit.
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 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
This is exactly the bullshit policy Biden sticks his dick into everytime. I really don't want to hate the guy but what a fucking idiot.
Biden being anything but conservative lite is just the fucking truth.
From my outside perspective the whole democratic party is conservative lite.
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
It's because of what they named the bill I reckon but it's still bullshit like "citizens united" or "the patriot act" aka not what the bills intent is
Did Biden introduce this bill or vote on it?
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.
Biden is the President, head of the executive branch and does not have the power to introduce bills or vote on them.
He can only sign the bill into law or veto the bill.
Looks like he's in full support
In the Wall Street journal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/unite-against-big-tech-abuses-social-media-privacy-competition-antitrust-children-algorithm-11673439411?page=1
Welp, guess my next allocation for a gaming PC will be spent on books and camping gear.
Fuck it.
Well if it becomes law then he will have. Do you have reason to think he will veto?
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.
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.
"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
Why would a state attorney generally have any oversight over the content of the internet? That seems way out of scope for their job
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 😅
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.
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!
Somehow neither of my senators customers cosponsored, but I'm guessing they'll both sign. We passed someone similar in my state recently, so I'm not expecting much.
I'll contact them though. I guess it can't hurt.
Because she’s not a senator, she’s a representative.
It's just a list of Senators, I don't think there's an equivalent bill yet in the House.
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It's gotta be public info.
Right?
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.
"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.
Donate to the EFF.
Ooooh... the liberals are about to hand the fascists the keys to the tanks.
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.
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.
How is this line up with 'liberty'? The US gov can't stop intruding into the private sphere.
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.
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
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!
What the hell?
Wha... What the fuck!?!
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
So the internet is going to become just like Lemmy and Reddit.
Or have you never been banned/censored/deleted for bullshit reasons?
I have a feeling you get banned from all sorts of shit
You just went through my history, downvoted the most recent 10, and left a mean reply to each.
Hmmm.
Lemme guess. Banned from Reddit? Ya, me too.
I like Lemmy more than Reddit because the former doesn't ban me because I posted on a Sunday that doesn't start in the middle of the week.
Awfully bad idea
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.
How? It will just make it extremely expensive for people to host instances, and ensure that it's hard to find content on other platforms to link to.
What makes it expensive? Thanks.
Having to meet whatever age verification steps are required. If you need intake id information and pay to have it verified, keep logs that you only allow verified users or face jail, its going to be real hard.
Unless they define ActivityPub as a platform.
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.
If you don’t care then why are you asking?