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In which we level up our fight for your digital civil rights
We're starting out our 2024 with some extremely exciting news that I've been bursting to share with you all: we are proud to announce that Dreamwidth has joined Netchoice, the industry organization that's been fighting many of the plague of terrible and unconstitutional social media laws being passed across the country.
As we mentioned in our year-end roundup, most of these laws proclaim to be "data privacy" or "child protection" laws, but if you actually look at them, they're backdoor censorship and deanonymization bills that threaten the privacy, safety, and anonymity of everyone who exists online. Dreamwidth is excellent proof that these laws are pretextual. As a service that accepts no advertising, does no data brokering, and has incredibly strong privacy and security features, if these laws were actually what they say they were, they shouldn't affect us at all: we would be able to comply with them without having to make a single change. Instead, the way these laws are written will require us to collect more information about our users than we want to collect, and require us to make it impossible for people to browse or register for the site without identifying themselves (often by forcing people to submit government-issued ID).
The terrible laws that aren't pretending to be data privacy or child protection laws are all tackling the issue of content moderation, either starting from the position that social media sites are engaging in too much content moderation and need to be stopped, or the position sites are engaging in too little content moderation and need to be forced to do more. (The fact that both arguments are repeatedly made about the same sites should cause anyone who gives it half a second's thought to realize the issue is a hell of a lot more complicated than the thirty-second soundbites, but that's another rant y'all have heard me rant before.) Both propositions have the same flaw: they're the government trying to forcibly impose editorial standards and dictate a site's content moderation decisions.
Every one of these content-moderation laws will also force us to place restrictions on constitutionally protected speech (that we don't want to place). There's a long history of jurisprudence in the US stating that the government placing restrictions on protected speech is unconstitutional, which is bad enough, but more than that: the first casualty whenever anyone starts making content-based laws restricting speech is always content posted by marginalized people, because the enforcement of content-based restriction is always disproportionately targeted at the marginalized. We've gone to the wall for your right to post legal adult content with providers before -- for anyone who doesn't remember, we once spent several months unable to accept payments at all because first PayPal and then Google Checkout decided that they wanted us to remove posts containing legal adult content they objected to, and we refused to do so -- but these laws also target a wide range of speech other than adult content, including political, scientific, literary, and artistic work. We object (strenuously) to the idea that the government should be able to dictate our editorial standards.
We also know that online anonymity is a popular target because of the perpetual myth that people posting anonymously online are more abusive than people whose identities are known. (It's a myth! Studies have repeatedly shown that people behave more abusively when their comments are identified with their wallet names than when they are purely anonymous, and the least abusive configuration is "stable, persistent pseudonymity" -- exactly like we offer here on DW.) Even though that myth isn't true, it refuses to die, and "just require everyone to identify themselves" is a frequent proposal for dealing with online abuse. Online anonymity is an important protection for any number of people, though: people living under oppressive governments, people engaged in many kinds of activism, whistleblowers, marginalized people who are looking to protect themselves, victims of domestic abuse, and many, many other groups of people all benefit from being able to use the internet without the risk of having to prove their identity first. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the right to anonymous speech is protected by the First Amendment, and we're not going to give up that right without putting up a hell of a fight.
Us becoming Netchoice members not only gives us more of a chance to be useful in these fights, it gives Netchoice more options for how they argue their cases: the annoying paradox with challenging internet content regulation laws is often that the small sites that will be most impacted by the really bad laws don't have the resources to fight them, but the large sites that do have the resources often don't have the legal standing to challenge them on certain grounds because they also have enough resources that complying with the law won't be an undue burden for them. With us as members, Netchoice's challenges to many of these laws will be stronger, and we're both very excited about the opportunities this will open up.
We'd like to thank Netchoice for the opportunity (and the folks on their litigation team for being such generally kickass people to work with). We'd also like to thank you all: a huge reason we can do this work is that we don't have outside investors, venture capitalists, or advertisers to keep happy, so we can make choices about which legal challenges to lend our (tiny) weight to based purely on whether we think the law is constitutional or not, without having to worry about what anyone but y'all might think of our participation. We are so very thankful that y'all like it when we get fighty about digital civil rights (again) and that you understand that legislators can say that a law has good intentions all they want, but good intentions don't magically make an unconstitutional law consitutional.
We'll continue to keep you posted about the legal challenges we help out on and the victories we're able to help score in defense of your legal right to be as anonymous as you want online and against the attempts of the government of any US state to control or limit your ability to post content that's legal for you to post. And I get to gleefully anticipate picking yet more fights with people who are Wrong About The Internet.
As we mentioned in our year-end roundup, most of these laws proclaim to be "data privacy" or "child protection" laws, but if you actually look at them, they're backdoor censorship and deanonymization bills that threaten the privacy, safety, and anonymity of everyone who exists online. Dreamwidth is excellent proof that these laws are pretextual. As a service that accepts no advertising, does no data brokering, and has incredibly strong privacy and security features, if these laws were actually what they say they were, they shouldn't affect us at all: we would be able to comply with them without having to make a single change. Instead, the way these laws are written will require us to collect more information about our users than we want to collect, and require us to make it impossible for people to browse or register for the site without identifying themselves (often by forcing people to submit government-issued ID).
The terrible laws that aren't pretending to be data privacy or child protection laws are all tackling the issue of content moderation, either starting from the position that social media sites are engaging in too much content moderation and need to be stopped, or the position sites are engaging in too little content moderation and need to be forced to do more. (The fact that both arguments are repeatedly made about the same sites should cause anyone who gives it half a second's thought to realize the issue is a hell of a lot more complicated than the thirty-second soundbites, but that's another rant y'all have heard me rant before.) Both propositions have the same flaw: they're the government trying to forcibly impose editorial standards and dictate a site's content moderation decisions.
Every one of these content-moderation laws will also force us to place restrictions on constitutionally protected speech (that we don't want to place). There's a long history of jurisprudence in the US stating that the government placing restrictions on protected speech is unconstitutional, which is bad enough, but more than that: the first casualty whenever anyone starts making content-based laws restricting speech is always content posted by marginalized people, because the enforcement of content-based restriction is always disproportionately targeted at the marginalized. We've gone to the wall for your right to post legal adult content with providers before -- for anyone who doesn't remember, we once spent several months unable to accept payments at all because first PayPal and then Google Checkout decided that they wanted us to remove posts containing legal adult content they objected to, and we refused to do so -- but these laws also target a wide range of speech other than adult content, including political, scientific, literary, and artistic work. We object (strenuously) to the idea that the government should be able to dictate our editorial standards.
We also know that online anonymity is a popular target because of the perpetual myth that people posting anonymously online are more abusive than people whose identities are known. (It's a myth! Studies have repeatedly shown that people behave more abusively when their comments are identified with their wallet names than when they are purely anonymous, and the least abusive configuration is "stable, persistent pseudonymity" -- exactly like we offer here on DW.) Even though that myth isn't true, it refuses to die, and "just require everyone to identify themselves" is a frequent proposal for dealing with online abuse. Online anonymity is an important protection for any number of people, though: people living under oppressive governments, people engaged in many kinds of activism, whistleblowers, marginalized people who are looking to protect themselves, victims of domestic abuse, and many, many other groups of people all benefit from being able to use the internet without the risk of having to prove their identity first. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the right to anonymous speech is protected by the First Amendment, and we're not going to give up that right without putting up a hell of a fight.
Us becoming Netchoice members not only gives us more of a chance to be useful in these fights, it gives Netchoice more options for how they argue their cases: the annoying paradox with challenging internet content regulation laws is often that the small sites that will be most impacted by the really bad laws don't have the resources to fight them, but the large sites that do have the resources often don't have the legal standing to challenge them on certain grounds because they also have enough resources that complying with the law won't be an undue burden for them. With us as members, Netchoice's challenges to many of these laws will be stronger, and we're both very excited about the opportunities this will open up.
We'd like to thank Netchoice for the opportunity (and the folks on their litigation team for being such generally kickass people to work with). We'd also like to thank you all: a huge reason we can do this work is that we don't have outside investors, venture capitalists, or advertisers to keep happy, so we can make choices about which legal challenges to lend our (tiny) weight to based purely on whether we think the law is constitutional or not, without having to worry about what anyone but y'all might think of our participation. We are so very thankful that y'all like it when we get fighty about digital civil rights (again) and that you understand that legislators can say that a law has good intentions all they want, but good intentions don't magically make an unconstitutional law consitutional.
We'll continue to keep you posted about the legal challenges we help out on and the victories we're able to help score in defense of your legal right to be as anonymous as you want online and against the attempts of the government of any US state to control or limit your ability to post content that's legal for you to post. And I get to gleefully anticipate picking yet more fights with people who are Wrong About The Internet.