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Time to Call Your Senators Again
Nov. 18th, 2022 07:16 pmThe SESTA and FOSTA people are having another go, this time called the Kids Online Safety Act. Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation explaining it much better than I could, but essentially it's a censorship bill requiring all websites that might possibly be used by minors to remove any information that could be construed as promoting self-harm, substance use disorder, or eating disorders.
And we all know who's enforcing those things, and what it will be used to do. Never give the government any power you're not okay with the other side having when they're in power. (I'm not even okay with my side having this power, honestly. I don't trust anyone with that power. I frequently spend time thinking "would I still find this old and outdated if I didn't hate the viewpoint being espoused? Is it old and outdated even though it's saying things I agree with?" about every nonfiction book passing through my hands. Most people who are not librarians don't do that. Heck, too many people who are librarians don't do that, at least on social justice issues.)
To make the censorship worse, it allows/requires quite sweeping identity verification for websites so they can ensure their content isn't being looked at by minors, with a plan to make a hard-wired government-run identity verification system to allow anyone to use any internet beyond the parentally-controlled government one.
This is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, but even with a reasonable court we wouldn't want to have the immense loss of existing internet that we'd have while waiting for it to wind its way through the courts, and the current court can't actually be relied upon to make the correct ruling here.
Incidentally, it was unanimously passed out of the committee and one of the people on that committee was Markey, so we MA people can't rely on the idea that our senators have better sense. Call your damn senators.
And we all know who's enforcing those things, and what it will be used to do. Never give the government any power you're not okay with the other side having when they're in power. (I'm not even okay with my side having this power, honestly. I don't trust anyone with that power. I frequently spend time thinking "would I still find this old and outdated if I didn't hate the viewpoint being espoused? Is it old and outdated even though it's saying things I agree with?" about every nonfiction book passing through my hands. Most people who are not librarians don't do that. Heck, too many people who are librarians don't do that, at least on social justice issues.)
To make the censorship worse, it allows/requires quite sweeping identity verification for websites so they can ensure their content isn't being looked at by minors, with a plan to make a hard-wired government-run identity verification system to allow anyone to use any internet beyond the parentally-controlled government one.
This is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, but even with a reasonable court we wouldn't want to have the immense loss of existing internet that we'd have while waiting for it to wind its way through the courts, and the current court can't actually be relied upon to make the correct ruling here.
Incidentally, it was unanimously passed out of the committee and one of the people on that committee was Markey, so we MA people can't rely on the idea that our senators have better sense. Call your damn senators.
