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US, UK: Please take a moment to contact your elected officials!
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.
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.
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(Rebloggable.)
It may not be (all of) why we are angry about this bill, but it can help to tailor your outrage to who you have to act on your behalf.
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I can't wrap my head around how people who are so loudly against governments having access to people's private information of any kind would approve being forced to literally show your ID to do anything on the internet :/
Also, they tend to be all about individuals taking responsibility for their actions ("guns don't kill people, people kill people") but they expect the *whole world* to modify their habits and give up their privacy to take care of strangers' children? Monitoring a child's internet use is up to the parents, nobody else.
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Hence why I call myself a small l libertarian, or a classical liberal.
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My suggestion is if you live in a hopelessly conservative area like I do, consider making a small donation to the ACLU, Electronic Freedom Foundation, or other organizations committed to fighting this sort of thing, because our local Congresscritter is worse than useless here. [I'm not saying don't e-mail, what I'm saying is people need to manage their expectations about what it will actually accomplish.]
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It's good to hit both approaches hard. We recently saw an example of that here in NM. I won't go into the details, but there were a bunch of laws that looked almost certain to go through - the party that supported said laws was the party that was in control of the legislature, and was also the party of the governor, who all eagerly said they couldn't wait to get said laws passed.
There was such an uproar among advocacy groups and e-mails and sudden increases in membership of the advocacy groups that even with that party in strong control of the state government... the bills just became too toxic to be associated with.
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