The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse (US focused)
https:// buttondown.email /charliejane/archive/the-internet-is-about-to-get-a-lot-worse/ 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."
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
85Unfortunately 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.
43American 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.
42"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.
39I 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.
35Why would a state attorney generally have any oversight over the content of the internet? That seems way out of scope for their job
34I 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?
34Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
just so we're all clear on the purpose of this bill.
33I 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.
30A 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.
26Thank 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
22America is a fucking stain, they get worse by the day.
17How is this line up with 'liberty'? The US gov can't stop intruding into the private sphere.
15If 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.
14"The internet is about to get a lot worse (US focused)" uhh
spoiler
everyday is the same but slightly worse
11This bitch
11It'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.
10I wish they would not use kids as a shield for what they really want.
Call it the "I despise transgender people and want them dead" bill so everyone can properly pick their side.
10Can... 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
10What the hell?
9Fascists 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.
9Wha... What the fuck!?!
7No!!! 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?
5I'm pretty much assuming at this point that America plans to slow-roll its own Great Firewall over the next decade or so until we have more restrictions than China does but they will be obfuscated behind a layer of "consumer choice". Capital has every incentive to crack down on the internet as much as possible, and there's no large system in place to prevent them from doing so. That said I also think alternatives will persist - so all of the good websites will end up hosted in the EU, and then as the EU catches up to their Anglo hegemon they will all move to BRICS countries.
3Fuck
3Awfully bad idea
2Not saying I support this bill, but the language in this post isn't accurate. At least not since the bill was updated:
They also added protections for support services such as the National Suicide Hotline, substance abuse groups and LGBTQ+ youth centers to ensure they aren’t unintentionally hampered by the bill’s requirements.
1I’m shocked that the first openly gay senator Tammy Baldwin is a co-sponsor for the bill. You bet I’m writing her.
1Attent #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?
1
in 2014: "Stupid SJWs, my rights don't end where your feelings begin."