US, UK: Please take a moment to contact your elected officials!

[denise]

We're currently in the middle of an unprecedented wave of governmental attempts worldwide to control social media through the legislative and regulatory process, often in the interests of protecting children. Unfortunately, the methods being proposed as a solution are dangerous and damaging to everyone. If you live in the US or UK and have a few minutes today, we at Dreamwidth would like to ask you to contact your elected officials and ask them to oppose several of the worst of the pending bills.

If you live in the US: KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, claims to be a bill that will protect children's privacy and restrict them from viewing harmful material. If you've followed our efforts to help overturn California's AB 2273, you likely already know the problems with KOSA, because they're the same problems: requiring websites to age-gate the internet will require every website to identify, deanonymize, and store information about every single one of their users, not just people under 18, to determine who shouldn't see content deemed "harmful to children". It also politicizes the question of what's "harmful to children" in ways that will disproportionally affect the marginalized. If you don't want to be forced to upload your government issued ID or subject yourself to unscientific, unvalidated, black-box biometric 'verification' every time you visit a website, learn more about the issues with the bill and then contact your elected officials to tell them you oppose its passage.

If you live in the UK: The Online Safety Bill will criminalize a large amount of lawful speech, ban strong encryption, and empower Ofcom to block access to websites with no accountability and no recourse. Multiple providers and services have already said they'll stop offering services to UK residents if it passes, including Wikipedia and WhatsApp. Please take a moment to learn more about the issues with the bill and then contact your MP to tell them you oppose its passage.

There are dozens of other terrible bills in various stages of the legislative process worldwide that will threaten your right to express yourself and hand the government the power to censor and deanonymize you online: those are only the two biggest threats right now. We will continue to do everything we can to contribute to the legal fights being fought by various organizations that are working to protect your right to be anonymous and speak freely on Dreamwidth and elsewhere online, but the best way to do that is to not have to have the legal fight in the first place. Please let your elected representatives know that you oppose efforts to require age verification to access content online and to force websites to engage in government-mandated censorship.

Comments

[sheron]

Not in either but thank you for raising awareness!

[profrobert]

"will require every website to identify, deanonymize, and store information about every single one of their users"

You mean you don't do that already and sell the information to any buyer you can find?

Hey, how about this: Congress repeals section 230 and "social media" companies become liable for the harmful falsehoods they refuse to remove? That'll go very far in improving the nation and the world.

[razyrs]

She does mean that, yes. As you would have known if you had consulted the privacy policy of the website you are using, Dreamwidth does not sell the personal information of its users. This information is also available on their "Guiding Principles" page, as well as in the news post directly preceding this one.

How about this, instead: users of social media learn to research whether or not something is a falsehood before they say it.

[denise]

While I seriously doubt I will be able to logic you out of a position you clearly haven't logicked yourself into in the first place, and while it is impossible to prove a negative to the satisfaction of someone who is determined not to believe it, the exact code that runs this site is open source, freely available for inspection, and fully auditable. It contains no provisions for data gathering and brokering. We do not sell user data. We do not collect any user data that is not required for the running of the service. We use one third-party tracking script, Google Analytics -- a library that's used by nearly every website on the internet -- to gather browser and operating system information so that we can make technical decisions about what browsers and operating systems we need to support: that script is used only on site pages, not journal pages, and we provide instructions on how to block that script in the privacy policy.

You aren't going to believe that, but think practically: We do not accept advertising, passing up (conservatively) a few million dollars a year in income, because we believe advertising on social media is ethically indefensible. Why on earth would we loudly and repeatedly take that position and then turn around and sell user data (which would be significantly less money, given that we, again, don't collect or collate any of the data that data brokers will actually pay for, which, again, is verifiable by looking at the code that is running this site)?

If you want to believe that we're somehow fooling the entire universe by maintaining a separate code repository that's not the actual code the site is running and the actual code the site is running is full of trackers and data gathering and all kinds of evil garbage, you're welcome to believe that, but I promise you, we are too old, too idealistic, and too exhausted for that shit. We have so many other things to spend our limited time and energy on.

[soc_puppet]

Goodness, the mumpsimuses are coming out of the woodwork for this post, aren't they!

[pilottttt]

Have you ever thought about creating a DreamWidth mirror inside the Tor network, as Facebook did, for example?

[denise]

We've thought about it a few times, but the amount of work it would take to get it working is a lot more than we have the capacity for, and we're not experts in it so I'd be nervous we'd do something wrong and have it be less secure than people thought it was. We also, sadly, see a lot of spam, flooding, and other abusive traffic coming via Tor already, and adding the potential for more would be a problem. (I spend a ridiculous percentage of my work time cleaning up after what we're getting now; if it increased I'd literally never have the time to do anything else, sigh.)

Last remark

[volchara]

If you keep freezing my questions, please don't expect me to fight for your freedom. Maybe it is hard to understand, but I think you should have the same freedom as we all have.

Re: Last remark

[veryroundbird]

i

Did you know? You are free to make a post to your own journal at any time on Dreamwidth.org!

Re: Last remark

[denise]

You aren't asking questions: you are making statements that rely on inaccurate premises that have been explained to you multiple times, after you have repeatedly been asked to stop because they are not relevant to the issue at hand. You are welcome to post whatever you would like to your actual journal! News posts comments are moderated because they are an official channel of the site, you have been asked multiple times to stop engaging in the conduct you are engaging in, and you have now been banned.

[disneydream06]

Typical government repair job.
Screw everybody over. UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[satyrica]

Thanks for highlighting this

I wrote...

[nosrednayduj]

...to my legislators with a print letter. Hope it helps. Of course it won't be delivered for a few days.

[ndrosen]

I will communicate with my Congressman and Senators.

(frozen comment) Is everyone demented?

[dreamingincircles]

Is everyone here insane? Hello!!! Is there anyone out there!!

(frozen comment) Re: Is everyone demented?

[ilyena_sylph]

but also, please be more specific about why you're asking?

[magid]

Called both senators and my representative, left voice messages for them all.

[honestmistake]

Unnfortunately the tories are still in power and don't give a damn. Even if it was labour they'd still try for getting some back door for encryption. It's the way the world's going because encryption is a big scary world. Until some tories find out it means their porn habits are no longer private.

[omnipotent]

It's really frightening that this is the place I had to come to, in order to hear about this. By that I mean, I've heard nothing about this in the press at all. Then again, I live in the Sunshine State, so that's probably part of why . . .

[nondenomifan]

My sympathies for having the governor you do. I have a friend who lived there and even once worked as an Imaginarian. She has since lost all joy for the state and moved a little west--not because there's less chance of her house getting ravaged by a hurricane again, but because there's a better chance of her getting to enjoy her time there with the people and area she loves.

And, my family is still trying to figure out how to get my elderly diabetic aunt, who lives in your state, an updated COVID-19 booster...as the governor is forbidding masking requirements at all Florida businesses/institutions during the holiday travel season when the big three contagious illnesses are known to be at their height.

[dandylover1]

If it's just a matter of clicking that I am over eighteen, I don't mind it. I've done that on various sites in the past. If sites are going to require that I upload an image of my identification, that is taking things too far.

[nondenomifan]

Seconded.

[nondenomifan]

OMG, I had no idea. I'm glad I logged in when I did! Our elections are coming up very soon, and I live in a very conservative area that is trying to keep LGBTQIA+ authors out of the chilren's section of the public libraries, let alone stuff like this! I will definitely do what I can to spread the word. I'm afraid I'll have better luck on the state level than I will on my local county level, though. My governor is the very reasonable "that woman from (insert my state here)" Trump and his followers hate so much.