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

(frozen comment)

[volchara]

Of course kids need protection. That was the reason for the previous migration, wasnt it?

(frozen comment)

[volchara]

Again: if you can't tell the difference between "the government is applying state power to restrict what citizens can say and what information they can access" and "we, a private business, have decided to stop doing business with another private business because we don't believe they're behaving responsibly", I can't help you. The entire reason we are seeing these waves of legislation trying to establish government censorship and deanonymization is because a large number of people believe that the voluntary Trust and Safety efforts private businesses are taking are inadequate. Putting pressure on private businesses to improve their handling of Trust and Safety issues -- such as through their customers withdrawing their business and their users finding alternate service providers -- is itself a form of speech. We are not the state and we cannot employ the power of the state to compel Cloudflare to do or not do anything. We are a private business who does not want to do business with another private business whose Trust and Safety systems are inadequate to the point of their continuing to provide services to a client whose website contains child sexual abuse material and behaving as though continuing to provide services to that client is a righteous act.

It is a pity that was frozen and I can't answer there. Because I totally, absolutely, without any doubt agree!
The part I disagree is that self-censoring not enough, this is the reason why Government needs to bring more laws and regulations so private business as yours would really comply. And I hope they will bring even more regulations so you would see the light at the end.

Because kids need to be protected at any cost! And if your clients are deanonymized, so what. The Law is the Law!

(frozen comment)

[denise]

The previous thread was frozen because we have been over this question multiple times, across multiple posts, and the people advancing the argument have demonstrated that they are incapable of understanding the difference between government mandated censorship and a private business choosing who to do business with. It is offtopic for the topic of this news post. Comments referencing it will continue to be frozen, and repeated starting of new threads to circumvent an existing thread being frozen are grounds from being banned from commenting in dw_news.