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."
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.
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.
: “You REALLY want little Billy to read a tweet that makes him think he’s not perfect because he’s white!? YOU MONSTER! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to relentlessly stalk and then bully this freak I found on KiwiFarms for the crime of not being a good normal like me!”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.
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.
More of them “freedoms” that you yanks are always going on about?
Experiencing a protracted regression of sanity, similar to Brexit.
lmao gottem
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.
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.
This bitch
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Let me be clear here: I’m not saying that all these problems will be fixed if we simply stop adhering to the doctrine of human rights. Human rights are an outcome. A symptom of a specific social and political configuration, and you don’t fight the symptom, you fight the disease. If we recognize the problem with human rights, it is the social and political configuration that produces them that we have to change. So long as we live under capitalism and the liberal political paradigm, rights are absolutely necessary.
So, what would need to be done in order to establish a society that no longer produces or depends on the ideology of human rights? It would have to be a society in which the significance of community has been restored.
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.
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yeah, Rs have already been bragging that they’re going to use this to go after queer communities online.
Ah yes, children security. Of course.
We can’t have them looking at gay shit, they might get bullied and have to stay home and not get shot.
Fuck
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I think they do care about kids but it’s a dumb argument to take. Kids are helpless, everything can hurt them. Unless it’s something legal that is specifically causing kids harm and can be regulated, like guns, then bringing kids into the debate is just going for easy points.
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
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!bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org is tracking all the bad internet bills … right now KOSA’s where the most action is.
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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They’ll be in office until they’re dead or dying
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
Why would a state attorney generally have any oversight over the content of the internet? That seems way out of scope for their job
How do I check if my senator has signed? Or is that not public information
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It’s gotta be public info.
Right?
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.
Damn had to call both my senators. I always hate calling because I have no doubt that it wont do anything.
Thanks for making the effort! On bills like this, enough pressure can make a difference – we stopped KOSA from passing last year, and have a good chance this year as well.
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It’s just a list of Senators, I don’t think there’s an equivalent bill yet in the House.
Because she’s not a senator, she’s a representative.
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…
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.
God in a campaign defined by hilarious self inflicted pratt falls I can’t believe they slapped Tim Karnes dumbass into Hillary vp slot.
And then tried to whitewash him as “your boring uncle (please don’t look into any of his actual policy positions)”
