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."
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.
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.
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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.
Meh, it is already out there anyway. Several times over.
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.
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
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.
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.
In the way that there are MAGAs up north. Like, come on bois, there’s no need for that shit.
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.
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
Freedumb
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.
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
“Republicans and Democrats, Unite Against Big Tech Abuses Congress can find common ground on the protection of privacy, competition and American children.”
“By Joe Biden”
In the Wall Street journal
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?
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.
“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.
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.
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
