denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
Denise ([staff profile] denise) wrote in [site community profile] dw_news2024-09-17 08:41 am

In which we update you about our lawsuits, and welcome a wave of new friends!

As usual, I looked around and realized that the news update I just wrote was actually months and months ago, so I thought I'd take a few moments and update you all on the progress we've been making recently with Netchoice in our fight against the wave of terrible and unconstitutional social media bills that have been sweeping the country. (And if you live in the US and you have a moment, please call your Representative and tell them to oppose KOSA, the "Kids' Online Safety Act": it passed the Senate, but there's still time to stop it in the House. It's the national version of all these state laws we've been fighting, and if you've been around for a while, you know why they're a problem, but if you're new, the EFF has a great short overview of why it's a problem.)

First, though, I'd like to offer a warm welcome to our new dwenizens from Cohost, which is sadly shutting down at the end of the month. You can check out our tips for new users that we posted when we had an influx of folks joining us from Reddit; to that, I'd add that you should check out the beta features. You can ignore the "Temporarily revert updated journal page components" beta (we have that lingering around to help people who were having trouble with some elements of the design updates) and the "Two-Factor Authentication" beta will let you add your 2FA provider but not actually issue 2FA tokens yet (we keep finding more and more legacy methods of "log in while you're doing a task" that we have to figure out the 2FA workflow on), but the New Create Entries beta and the New Inbox beta are both (we think) a much superior version of those pages. We'll be enabling them for all users sometime relatively soon (okay, 'soon' by our standards), so we want to hear your feedback now, especially if you use assistive technology! If you're coming to us from Cohost and are looking for other Cohosters, feel free to matchmake in the comments. If you're looking for new friends, the unofficial community [community profile] addme is a good start, and browsing [site community profile] dw_community_promo will let you find (or promote!) communities on all sorts of topics.

Anyway, since we last spoke, Dreamwidth has joined on to two more of Netchoice's lawsuits challenging unconstitutional deanonymization and mandated censorship bills. In addition to the two we've already let you know about, Netchoice, LLC v Bonta in California and Netchoice, LLC v Yost in Ohio, we've added Netchoice, LLC v. Fitch in Mississippi and NetChoice LLC v. Reyes in Utah. (That last one was originally filed before we became members, but Utah pulled a fast one where they pinky swore to the court right before the deadline that they were going to repeal and replace the law with a much improved version, and then the version they replaced it with actually made things worse and affected a lot more sites, so we were thrilled to join on the revised lawsuit.)

The July Supreme Court opinion in Netchoice v Moody (consolidated with Netchoice v Paxton) made it clear that sites' content moderation decisions are protected by the First Amendment, and there's an upcoming case this term (Free Speech Coalition v Paxton) that will tee up the constitutionality of "age verification" requirements. (The scarequotes there are because there's no conclusive way to "verify" the age of the person who's using an account at any given moment: at most you can approximate it at account creation.) Until then, remember: there's no way for a site to treat adults and minors differently unless they're able to conclusively identify who's an adult and who's a minor, and the only way for a site to conclusively do that is to deanonymize every single vistor and require you to upload your government ID in order to make an account. As I keep saying over and over in our declarations in support of these lawsuits: we don't want to ask you for that data, and we know you don't want to give it to us.

There's a whole heap of other issues with these bills, too: for instance, it's getting more and more common for states to throw in "parental consent" clauses, whereby a parent can write in to a site and demand access to or control of their under-18 kid's account to various degrees. That's also impossible for a site to establish: we have no way of telling who's the parent of one of our users at all, much less establishing whether they're the parent with legal decisionmaking authority, and there are dozens of scenarios where that ends incredibly badly. (I usually cover so many of them in my declarations that the outside lawyers Netchoice is working with have to politely ask me to pare them down a bit!) Most of these bills also include an obligation to restrict access to "content harmful to minors", and the definition of "harmful to minors" is always, always politicized: you probably all can sing along with the refrain by now because of how often I climb up on this soapbox, but there's well-established evidence that content by creators from historically marginalized groups, and especially content by queer creators, is judged "harmful to minors" at a much higher rate than functionally identical content by creators from groups that aren't historically marginalized. Each of the states that have included a "harmful to minors" clause has had a different range of what's considered "harmful to minors", but there's no doubt all of them sweep up a broad range of speech that can be helpful to at least some minors who would be denied access to that content.

I don't want to talk your ears off about all of the problems in all of these laws, because we'd be here all day -- my declarations in Netchoice v Reyes and Netchoice v Fitch cover a lot of the problems, but there's even more I didn't have time to address. (And that's with my declaration in Netchoice v Fitch running 23 pages!) Fortunately, there's good news: judges, and even appellate courts, across the country have been agreeing with us that these bills are unconstitutional, and it's not even close. Here's our win record so far:


  • Netchoice, LLC v Bonta (5:22-cv-08861) N.D. California: Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted the preliminary injunction preventing the law from going into effect on 18 Sept 2023.
  • California appealed: NetChoice, LLC v. Bonta (23-2969), 9th Circuit. About a month ago, on 16 August 2024, the 9th Circuit affirmed the district court for the most part and kept the injunction in place. The case now returns to the district court for further development.
  • Netchoice, LLC v Yost (2:24-cv-00047) S.D. Ohio: Judge Algenon Marbley granted the preliminary injunction on 12 Feb 2024. To Ohio's (tiny bit of) credit, they didn't bother dragging out an appeal of the preliminary injunction: we have now moved on to the motions for summary judgement, in which both sides make their arguments to the judge on why the other side doesn't have a possible case, and are awaiting the judge's ruling on those.
  • Netchoice, LLC v. Fitch (1:24-cv-00170) S.D. Mississippi: Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden granted the preliminary injunction preventing the law from going into effect on 1 July 2024. (This is good, because the law was passed on 30 Apr 2024 and set to take effect 1 July: I could not believe how fast Netchoice and their outside counsel got that turned around!)
  • Mississippi appealed: NetChoice v. Fitch (24-60341), 5th Circuit. We're still waiting for a ruling on that one, and the Fifth Circuit is known as the "Fifth Circus" for very good reason: I would not be surprised to see this one make it all the way up to the Supreme Court, too, because nobody trusts the Fifth Circus to be sensible. (Of course, nobody trusts the Supreme Court to be sensible, either, sigh.)
  • NetChoice LLC v. Reyes (2:23-cv-00911) D. Utah: This is the one that made me realize "oh, I haven't updated everyone on things in ages"! Judge Robert Shelby granted the preliminary injunction preventing the law from going into effect on 10 Sept 2024. (Check out page 31: our declarations have been cited in the other decisions, but this one devoted nearly an entire paragraph to judge-speak for "hey, uh, you claim this law is narrowly tailored, but Dreamwidth easily disproves that". This one is especially funny because Utah governor Spencer Cox spent a lot of time loudly yelling at first amendment attorneys on Twitter about how of course the court would agree with him! The court really, really did not agree with him.)


I always struggle with trying to figure out how much of an update on our advocacy work is significant enough to deserve a full [site community profile] dw_news post, because I know there are folks who want to stay informed, but having sitewide announcements for every little thing would quickly get annoying. To solve this problem, we've started [site community profile] dw_advocacy, an announcements community in which we'll post announcements of wins, announcements of new cases we're participating in, and (if I have time!) deep dives into the legal issues that show up frequently in these challenges and the cases that keep getting cited over and over again. Subscribe to the community for everything from my glee at getting to scratch another state off the "I helped sue you!" list to my "hopefully reasonably okay for a non-lawyer" explanations of landmark cases that show why the latest state to pull some shenanigans should already know why their shenanigans are unconstitutional!

As always, our deepest gratitude to Netchoice for picking these fights and for inviting us along for them. We don't always agree with every lawsuit they choose to file, but that's precisely why Netchoice member companies don't have control over which fights Netchoice decides to pick, only which lawsuits we'll choose to give evidence for. Even when we disagree with them, the folks at the litigation center are extremely passionate about digital civil liberties, and they're a delight to work with. My main contact at the litigation center always tells me how heartening and inspiring he finds it to see how absolutely enthusiastic our users are about these issues and how much you all care that we're fighting (and winning!) these battles!

And one last announcement: if you didn't see our notice in [site community profile] dw_maintenance, we've switched our offsite downtime notification/status page away from Twitter (excuse me, "X") because of their sharp decline in Trust & Safety standards, the inability for people to see posts or timelines without being logged in to a site account, and the general ongoing instability of the service. Our new offsite downtime notification/status page can be found at dreamwidth.org on Bluesky. Please bookmark that page! In the event we can't reach [site community profile] dw_maintenance to let you know of any issues, we'll post there.

As always, thank you all for using and supporting Dreamwidth. We have the freedom to be so passionate about these fights for online civil liberties because we don't have to worry about keeping our advertisers or investors happy: the fact we're 100% user-supported gives us so much more leeway to give states the finger when they want us to compromise your privacy for the sake of "protecting the children" efforts that will do nothing to actually protect children online. (Isn't it so interesting that Senator Wyden's Invest In Child Safety Act, which would actually make a meaningful difference in protecting kids online, has gone nowhere? Why, it's almost like none of this is about protecting children at all.)

We remain committed to keeping Dreamwidth 100% free of advertising, venture capital, and outside investment, no matter what it takes. People ask us all the time whether we can raise the limits on some of our restrictions like image hosting and icons (two of the most expensive features we offer), and we would love to be able to, but our costs keep rising and inflation has outpaced the advances in disk space and transfer costs in the last few years. Your support is still covering our costs of operation, but the fact we've been in business for 15 years and our prices have remained the same has been nibbling away at the leeway we have. We aren't in any danger, but we've been starting to have the extremely difficult internal conversations about raising our prices that were first set in 2009 so they better reflect 2024 costs and the 2024 value of the dollar in order to make absolutely certain that remains true. Right now, we're still in the very early stages of that discussion (and we'd love to hear your thoughts!) and it's too soon to say what we'll end up deciding, but in the meantime, if you have a few dollars to spare, please consider buying some paid time, for your account, for a friend, or for a random active user. The financial support of those of you who choose to pay us is what allows us to keep offering the site for everybody, and we're incredibly grateful to those of you who keep offering that support!
dannydevidaloca: (Default)

[personal profile] dannydevidaloca 2024-09-28 11:48 pm (UTC)(link)
Ok, the ID thing makes sense bc that's also just super invasive. I think the best thing would be for adults to just not let non-teenafed kids use the web for anything other than education, and teens use it sparingly. People really let their kids do anything now and that's the real problem. Also, maybe they should focus more attention on getting real creeps locked up instead of on probation-vacation...lol. I get what ur saying now. I needed the excerpts because I couldn't read all that reliably. Thanks.
Edited 2024-09-28 23:49 (UTC)
verbminx: (retromom)

[personal profile] verbminx 2024-10-02 08:40 am (UTC)(link)
(Followed your link from my other comment over here!)

Yeah, like [personal profile] dragonspine said, I don't think a lot of people would mind that two month purchase option disappearing from the regular accounts at all. People who want to buy two months can just buy once month twice, or x amount of points.

I think the use case for a Paid Premium is probably really different in practice these days than it was when you came up with the idea for the account tier. The original idea was "a way to give the site more money." But roleplayers actually use and "need" the feature set -- I find it actively kind of annoying to RP without that account tier. (You know how it is, I'm putting "need" in quotation marks because it deserves, like, three sets of quotation marks, lmao! This is not a real need! It's a preference, though. The icons are useful and fun and a big part of the culture and I also use a lot of the other features, especially tracking. Tracking/notification is incredibly important to me as a roleplayer. I don't use the DW inbox hardly at all except for actual inbox messages, nor do I use my reading pages; I use email notifications with automatically applied labels almost exclusively with Plurk posts as a backup. This works most of the time unless a news post has killed email notifs, which is a really rare occurrence, maybe once every couple of years anymore.)

I think most RPers who purchase Paid Premiums do not and would not experience choice paralysis about the purchase at all, but would really appreciate the option to buy either monthly or quarterly blocks of time with that feature tier, particularly in the event of price increases. It's just easier for a lot of people to spend smaller amounts of money at once, and the option would be wonderful. I suspect this would probably bring more money in for the site if it was an option.
skulltaffy: (β™“ i fully expect this to be for puns)

[personal profile] skulltaffy 2024-10-05 04:45 pm (UTC)(link)
coming at this more then a little late, so don't feel any pressure to reply - but a flash promo in may for the anniversary week would honestly be really nice? not even just because "yay more points", but... it's like a celebration almost, and the site deserves that. it's survived 15 bloody years on the internet when most socmed websites crash and burn after a third of that, that's something to be proud of!
sugaronthecream: (pic#17091052)

[personal profile] sugaronthecream 2024-10-07 01:05 am (UTC)(link)
Every time I check in on what you all here in DW headquarters are up to, I feel more and more proud that my LJ exodus led me here. It's been incredible to have y'all embrace our silly little RPer comm and I am glad that tossing around money for paid accounts for silly digital barbie-kissing time can help keep things rolling.

I absolutely advocate for the price gradually increasing. $50 a year for a paid and bumping up the premium paid is a good idea and I will still budget to support and to get the icon slots, the thread tracking, etc. I am extremely happy to have my money going here.

Proud of you all for fighting so hard for freedom of expression and against these bullshit Christo-fascist censorship bills constantly being forced into the pipe.
duskpeterson: The lowercased letters D and P, joined together (Default)

[personal profile] duskpeterson 2024-10-09 12:50 pm (UTC)(link)

Thank you so much for keeping us up to date on this and for your testimonies. I think the creation of [site community profile] dw_advocacy is a great idea.

thedarkmaterial: An image of a feral forest princess with golden eyes and long black hair wearing a crown of antlers and leaves. She is standing in front of a full moon and framed by bare trees. There are fireflies in her hair. (Default)

[personal profile] thedarkmaterial 2024-10-15 11:43 pm (UTC)(link)
Late to the party as usual, but wanted to throw some "hell yeah this would be amazing if it could be implemented appropriately" toward this one! DW is one of the only services I pay for regularly (and I really appreciate that you've let us keep the monthly option even though it's less economic for you because I wouldn't be able to manage it any other way!) and I'd consider it worth the cost even if it was slightly more, but at that point it might be less about whether I was willing and more just straight whether I was able (disabled adult; every time the SSA gives us a cost of living adjustment, the state cuts our other benefits because prices haven't actually changed since the twenties so that's just extra money we've got lying around, and the COLA has never affected the amount my payee gives me for myself, so that couple of dollars people are always like, "You can't find two dollars somewhere? You can't skip [small luxury] once?" Good sir, I am eating a sixty-cent packet of generic "turkey", and if you take it from my hands, they are not going to start pouring gold doubloons!)

So I could definitely see some manner of applying (for lack of a better term) for a directed "user subsidy" being a potential paid-account-lifesaver for some people! (Especially if it was set up in a way that kept it from feeling like just begging for handouts - that way, the potential givers (hopefully) wouldn't get annoyed, and the potential recipients wouldn't have to worry about whether they're being annoying. (And if we're going full "And while we're dreaming, I'd like a pony" level with it, maybe even options for both "I'd like to continue paying what I can, and am just looking for help with what's over my original budget," and "I have fallen on really really hard times and would graciously accept someone covering it completely", so that there's more to go around!))
cesy: "Cesy" - An old-fashioned quill and ink (Default)

[personal profile] cesy 2024-10-16 06:12 am (UTC)(link)

You may find [personal profile] paidaccountfairy unofficial community useful for this.

(reply from suspended user)
mixiethebunny: (Default)

Its up to parents

[personal profile] mixiethebunny 2024-11-04 06:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Ik AO3 posted about this same thing, and like said in here, theres no way of knowing if a child is behind the screen. At this point, it's up to the parents to decide to give their child a phone/tablet/laptop/computer/anything with a web browser in it such as the nintendo 3ds/wii u/nintendo switch
(if that child knows how to use the switch browser, the switch is a safe thing for a child to have, just dont let them have youtube on there, they will find out that there is a web browser on it, only certain websites work (unfortunate to me))

I've been on the internet since 2019, i had a tablet, but my mother took it from me in 2021, i've been using school laptop(s)/computers, ps4 web browser/wii u, nintendo switch web browsers ever since. It really is up to the parents to decide if they want their kids to discover things such as wattpad AO3, more underground websites like dreamwidth, one day i would like to create my own website (written in ruby like ao3 if its for a spesific fandom/ship AND my own fanfic website where you can write whatever u want :))

sorry 4 long comment
Edited 2024-11-06 12:33 (UTC)
nostalgia: (Default)

[personal profile] nostalgia 2024-11-05 02:29 pm (UTC)(link)
um is there any way to hide this post from my homepage, i already read it and it's longgggg
no offence, just i don't know how to avoid scrolling it every time, so if someone could tell me how that'd be neat thanks x
nostalgia: (Default)

[personal profile] nostalgia 2024-11-08 10:05 am (UTC)(link)
I'm in the UK and the bank charges a pound or two for an international transfer if I buy DW paid time (so I try not to do it too often), so it's not even all of us getting 0%!
nostalgia: (Default)

[personal profile] nostalgia 2024-11-08 10:07 am (UTC)(link)
Is that on a credit or debit card? I keep getting charged a pound or more for international payments if pay this site, but maybe that's a debit card/current account thing?
cesy: "Cesy" - An old-fashioned quill and ink (Default)

[personal profile] cesy 2024-11-08 08:18 pm (UTC)(link)

I use a credit card, but there's usually a couple of debit card options as well - https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/credit-cards/travel-credit-cards/ has a list.

nostalgia: (Default)

[personal profile] nostalgia 2024-11-10 10:27 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you! <3
ngtskynebula: (dilraba dilmurat (hazy and fantastic))

πŸ˜“πŸ˜“πŸ˜“

[personal profile] ngtskynebula 2024-11-18 07:04 pm (UTC)(link)
Hi, admin! Sooo... since The One Who Shan't Be Named will sit on the throne yet again next year, what will become of Dreamwidth as a safe space to express oneself? I heard pretty unsavory things about Project 2025 😣

Will you move Dreamwidth to another country? Some americans on socmed said the Project will make sites like AO3 and Dreamwidth illegal...
vaa: (Default)

[personal profile] vaa 2024-11-21 07:31 pm (UTC)(link)
the max year here is 2037. will this date ever get updated? it starts at 1970. did you ever have problems with the millenium bug?
moonfaerie: (Thank you - Nana & Hachi)

[personal profile] moonfaerie 2024-11-22 08:16 pm (UTC)(link)
This comment is late but please. If you need to increase the price of paid accounts do it. You guys go above and beyond!!! The fact I imported a lifetime’s worth of LJ entries AND you have the mass private feature I only just learned about??? I love this site very much. Online journals are my favorite form of β€œsocial media” and they must survive. I recently bought a year of paid account services and bought some extra icons. Perhaps I’ll gift paid account for one of my friends for Christmas.

On that note, I’ll look into whatever paid services there are. It all started for access to all my icons again. I didn’t realize just how much there is.
ariadne83: cropped from official schematics (city of atlantis)

Re: FEELING FREE TO MATCHMAKE IN THE COMMENTS

[personal profile] ariadne83 2024-11-23 02:59 am (UTC)(link)
Considering the bad mood my spine was in this morning, I agree 100%
vaa: (Default)

[personal profile] vaa 2024-11-23 08:23 am (UTC)(link)
weird, my PCs in the 90s used min value 1956
lavenderletters: (Default)

[personal profile] lavenderletters 2024-11-23 03:32 pm (UTC)(link)
i'm new but have known about dreamwidth for a while! it absolutely makes sense to raise prices and i def think its the right thing to do, especially since there's no ads on here and the functionality is pretty great!! hopefully one day i'll be able to support yall monetarily!
nondenomifan: Kurt saying "God, please, yes!" to the Spanish sub (Ricky Martin) (Kurt Ani graphicstogo26.lj)

[personal profile] nondenomifan 2025-05-21 06:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, parents/guardians need to return to monitoring what their children are exposed to rather than pointing fingers and blaming, "You did this to my child!"
nondenomifan: animated multicolor equality sign by dhamphir (equality 2 ani by dhamphir)

Re: πŸ˜“πŸ˜“πŸ˜“

[personal profile] nondenomifan 2025-05-21 06:29 pm (UTC)(link)
What will happen if someone reports the fan art with celebrity/character heads pasted on nude bodies? He-who-will-not-be-named just signed a bill making such things illegal. I agree with the "revenge porn" part of it, but not the generic term "cyberporn" that will cover fan art people work very hard to create out of love. Their work is no more porn than Michaelangelo's David, Venus de Milo, Rembrant's paintings, etc.

I'm very glad you're "fighty." Because I don't want the USA I was born in to become the Nazi Germany 48 of my mother's ancestors The Fuldauers were killed because of. So far, there have been book burnings, Black and Asian hate groups, and LGBTQA+ murders. Sounds to me like we're headed that way fast.

Page 10 of 10