Perfect time to start moving (and contributing) to decentralized services.
I've been following the development of https://beakerbrowser.com and I really hope it captures wider attention. -- It's not just super user friendly already, it's actually easier to set up a Beaker website than one on the regular net (literally one click).
Ask the people arrested and jailed for posession of cannabis. I mean, both you and the parent comment are right: we, the people, shall resist; but we, the people, must also do our best to prevent such legislation come to pass.
My point was that marijuana has remained popular in the US, despite several decades of draconian suppression. But perhaps people won't care so much about freedom of expression online.
Yes, it's time. But notice how everytime there is talk about a decentralized project, some of the comments are like "so how will this censor child porn or copyright infringement on the network" or similar.
Decentralized projects will have to resist the urge to listen to these people, because otherwise they shouldn't even bother if the decentralized projects will have built-in censorship mechanisms.
Law enforcement should go straight after the criminals, not after the platforms, just like when they go straight after the people publishing child porn on the Tor network, not after the Tor browser. That's how it should work.
> Decentralized projects will have to resist the urge to listen to these people
Think about it like this: "how will this censor calls on the network to censor the network". It's quite a conundrom.
Your proposal to well just don't listen to them is a form of self censoring -- not in the usual sense but I don't know a better term. Two sides of the same coin. One is the optimal case, you stay ignorant and it goes away, all do their best. On the other side, you can't just shut your eyes and ignore everything, which leads to various problems, some you don't want to or can't deal with and others can be resolved satisfactory. ...
Funny by-the-way. Zensur in german also means school-related "mark", "grade". Sp census is just evaluation. Weighting. Multiply content by its grade and you get zero contentrating for zero census votes. ... does that make sense?
Yeah, let's outlaw public, centralized, easy to track and target forms of communication about sex work! If we don't let people talk about it where we can see it, it must mean people aren't doing it!
No way they'll just move to loosely structured, encrypted p2p networks.
"Sponsored by Senators Portman, Blumenthal, McCain, McCaskill, Cornyn, and Heitkamp"
Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), a cosponsor of the bill, derided Craigslist's announcement. “If Craigslist is really telling us that they can’t run a page on their website without knowingly facilitating sex trafficking, that would certainly be a damning admission,” he said in a statement
Like everyone knows, it's not that they can't, it's just no longer economical for them to do so. I dislike this linear thinking from our politicians and surprisingly it's often not for show or the media. Some of them truly believe that, but it's mostly in the House not the Senate.
They've been trying to pass something like this for years and I remember reading about this back in the day and actually feeling neutral with the bill if they were able to do it the right way. Given the power of the internet giants I assumed that that would happen, but I guess not. This was awful implementation.
There is a bright side. Now within the new law, this gives a small business a good opportunity to create something similar while testing the legal grounds. If you try hard to prevent all sex trafficking/illegal activity, will the law bend and allow some leeway? Now that many sites are exiting the personals market, it's a good time to try. The advantages these sites had were not due to UI or tech features, but due to wide adaptability so this means it could be a free for all and one business could create a vastly greater user experience because those sites had no reason to innovate.
Do I have the guts to do it? No way. The penalties are too scary and any prosecuter trying to make a name for themselves could destroy anyone's reputation and life.
The danger for a resonable small business now are civil lawsuits, not state or federal prosecution. That litigation can be absolutely frivolous, but costly.
I still don't understand what is a problem if you keep this small business outside the US. What prevents a European company to replace Craiglist in this regard?
> If Craigslist is really telling us that they can’t run a page on their website without knowingly facilitating sex trafficking, that would certainly be a damning admission
That's a really disingenuous statement, though I'd expect nothing less from a person who has everything to gain from making Craigslist look shady.
The law very intentionally uses the word "knowingly", which has a lower legal bar than other considerations, like "intentionally". In this case, that means that even if Craigslist took active measures to prevent people from using Craigslist for sex work, they would still be liable for anybody who successfully circumvented their methods.
Secondly, sex trafficking is not the same as sex work. The bill purports to target sex trafficking, but it really applies to sex work - that is, to consensual sexual activity in which money changes hands.
Blumenthal, I should point out, has a long history of targeting Craigslist specifically, going back all the way to his days as AG. He failed to secure the case he wanted against them as AG, so he's going for a scorched earth approach now that he's in the Senate. For him, the Craigslist shutdown is a personal victory, and sticking it to Craigslist was honestly probably one of his motivations for cosponsoring the bill in the first place.
No, what they are saying is that they have a history of being harassed by the legal system for adult ads existing on the system even with the stronger version of Section 230 in place, and they know that with it weakened that it would only get worse.
Our legal system is not one in which only those actually liable under any reasonable reading of the law bear costs, and when you widen the scope of liability you also widen the sphere outside that scope where claims that lack genuine merit still aren't trivially dismissable and, especially when you’ve got a prominent (inter)national-scale target and politically driven (and often publicly-funded) opposition, there is a huge chilling effect outside the actual zone of prohibition anytime you expand the scope of legal liability for being a vehicle through which communications flow.
And Senator Blumenthal isn't a big enough idiot to fail to realize that's what is being said, he's just twisting it because he doesn't want to engage with it.
That’s an absurd statement. First the conflation of sex trafficking and prostitution, and second, second the hazy definition of “facilitating”, third the shocking criminal penalties.
Yeah, Craigslist was scared. And so are a lot of people. Laughing that off is what’s damning.
It's sad how little progress we've made in terms of freedom of speech and expression. In the 1800s the church was the censorship machine, with sex as the main vector. Today it's the government, still with sex as the main vector.
They are puritanical yes, but they've hardly become more so in the last 200 years. I think it is merely that the law has become more prevalent across the country.
The US has made negative progress on sexual liberation on the whole of history. Prostitution was common and generally legal in the late 1700's and 1800's. The temperance movements in the late 1800's and early 1900's (yes, the same movement that caused the 18th amendment) led to the illegalization of sex work and other vices. America has not yet recovered from this criminalization, despite being one hundred years in the past.
Denying the progress of sexual freedoms over the last 300 years can only come from an exclusively male/white/adult/heterosexual perspective.
Some freedoms that quickly come to mind:
the right NOT to have sex (rape within marriage, or of slaves, was legal. Other rape laws were largely unenforced)
gay sex, interracial marriage (and sex), sex among teenagers
Access to pornography is legal, and vastly easier due to technical reasons than in the past.
Women have been recognised as sexual beings equal to men, and their pleasure is no longer ignored.
The possibility to have sex and not get pregnant arose and became easier. So did abortion.
Norms around age of consent were lowered.
Specifically for prostitution: It's a point of heated debate in the feminist community if the liberalisation in, for example, some European countries actually led to better working conditions and less human trafficking.
That's why that community, which advocated for legalisation in the past, is now split on the subject. It's just not clear if legalisation was successful.
Are you seriously saying that prostitution having become mostly illegal is a greater setback to sexual liberation than all the other advances we have made with regards to women’s rights? (For example, women being able to legally resist having sex with their husbands?)
From a public behavior perspective, yes we have regressed. Women's rights are much better but you can show someone getting violently murdered on TV easier than you can show a tit.
Look, just such a simple fact women who are raped by their husbands can actually call and expect to be defended is to me obviously much more important than the fact that the tits on some statues are censored when shown on tv.
No. A dichotomy is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Since there is no suggestion of such a relationship between women's rights and nudity no dichotomy is presented. Which therefor can't be false.
Poster is implying it's a dichotomy by pretending that better women's rights is proof that sexual expression has improved. The implication is that you either admit expression is better because we have women's rights or you admit you were wrong. False dichotomy.
> Poster is implying it's a dichotomy by pretending that better women's rights is proof that sexual expression has improved.
No, they are specifically saying that expression has improved because the improvements in women's rights are more important than the restrictions or regression of nudity. There is simply no dichotomy there. In fact saying that it is "more important" suggests that restrictions in nudity is also a factor. Again, not a dichotomy.
> The implication is that you either admit expression is better because we have women's rights or you admit you were wrong.
No, you can acknowledge that we have women's rights and still think we have regressed. But for that to be true you would have to argue what is more important than the improvements in women's rights. Otherwise you would be the one making a false dichotomy by claiming that things can't have improved because one thing hasn't.
The problem is, the definition of obscenity is community based in the USA. It is totally allowable for the government to censor things which the public considers obscene and the government used to censor literature explaining how to get a divorce.
So, the views of the community have evolved since then and people no longer consider calls for divorce to be obscene. Therefore, the government is not allowed to censor them.
However, no changes have been made to the legal framework. You can easily fall back into Comstockery if the public overwhelmingly decides that such a thing is obscene. The Miller test is not something to be proud of as the safeguard of freedom of expression especially when you consider the current context: people finding discussions of safe prostitution to be obscene. Compare that to the protections offered to people calling for genocide (of Jews, of Muslims, of Atheists, of blacks, etc.) and it is rather perplexing.
You sound surprised, but the problem is that you're equivocating on the words sexual liberation. It may sound as though your example is related to sexual and liberation, but the phrase almost always refers to the liberation of the human sex drive from control by the church, the state, and community norms.
Edit: You seem to have a problem with the quotes, so I changed them to italics.
I’m sorry, but the post we are replying compares now to the 1700s and 1800s; the modern conception of “sexual liberation” includes freedoms related to marriage (e.g. divorce, premarital sex), and extending this back to the 1700s while not considering things like the obligation of wives to have sex with their husbands is anachronistic and myopic.
I’m not sure what your thought exercise about putting quotes around words is supposed to prove; feel free to read, say, the Wikipedia article on the subject.
Also, are you seriously saying that my example isn’t a case of community norms?
That happened like in the past few years, which is a tiny fraction of the past 2 centuries. And if extremist Republicans get to rule the government for another decade (whether directly or with the help of "moderate Democrats"), then I don't know if that will last either.
Exactly as planned. The goal is creating chilling effects that create self-censorship to be reasonably sure you are safe. And this will begin a slippery slope of "questionable" court cases until they find where the line is.
They just had to wrap it up in a noble cause, much like false patriots wrap themselves up in flags.
Businesses selling any controlled good are now being censored "just to be safe" and try to avoid further legal pushes to add more things to the list.
The thing that gets me is how people who drafted and supported these bills probably did it with the best of intentions. Most people who support these laws want to help individuals who are sex workers. However, it seems none of them actually talked to any actual sex workers here and some are even actively ignoring their voices.
Some of the worst laws are made with good intentions. But people who fervently believe in a good cause often neglect to consider negative side effects in their quest to "do good" and can sometimes be actively hostile to anyone asking questions about said side effects.
No they did not support it with the Best of Intentions...
I quote the EFF
"While we can’t speculate on the agendas of the groups behind SESTA, we can study those same groups’ past advocacy work. Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet or blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking."
I 100% agree with the EFF analysis of the motivations. This is the first battle in a bigger war over free speech, Free Speech has lost this battle, I hope we do not lose the war
Not yet. Fuck the US government, and Fuck Donald Trump. See? That wouldn't fly in a lot of countries. We are still mostly free. We need to gain back lost freedoms, and continue to defend the ones we've got.
I think you aren't cynical enough. The US government is jealous of China's clampdown on unmoderated forums and some how just "stumbled" on the perfect alibi to do the same here.
You might be right. In fact, the person who I'm replying to is saying it's their explicit goal.
I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised if for some of them it was. For those who tacked on the bill as well as some groups and celebrities (I think Amy Schumer and Seth Myers) some of them might have jumped on with the best of intentions.
Correct. It is not a monolithic block of supporters and that is _precisely_ why they had to wrap it up as they did. The goal was to find a way to do this that would win enough popular support to pass.
I fully expect all the non-professionals involved to be duped into supporting it.
The politicians, the wealthy, and the lobbyists involved, however, wanted this exact response. They now have the tools to leverage any platform that allows UGC to obey since none of them can fully evade the "knowingly" standard if they have employees.
> While we can’t speculate on the agendas of the groups behind SESTA, we can study those same groups’ past advocacy work. Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet or blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking.
The EFF basically called those groups out that are doing this out of social conservatism (rather than legitimate desire to render aid). They alone would not have been enough to push this bill through, just as they have repeatedly failed in the past.
So they needed new wrapping paper and a group of friendly lobbyists who wanted a tool to lean on people with.
> I fully expect all the non-professionals involved to be duped into supporting it
It's also not a coincidence that this passed right after Facebook shat on, at least temporarily, tech companies' influence in D.C. One takeaway is we need a broader base who will fight for digital freedoms than big tech companies. Betting on a single point of failure is a losing political strategy.
> "questionable" court cases until they find where the line is.
Until this law actually gets tested in the courts, it is basically impossible to tell what the long-term impact will be. My suspicion is that Reddit et al want to do everything possible to keep a low profile while Facebook is occupying the spotlight. After that has run its course, I would bet there would be a challenge in some form, whether via PR or directly.
I wish I lived in a world where the opinions of actual sex workers (and similar advocates) had the most sway regarding legislation intended to protect them.
Though I am tempted to say nominally intended to protect them. In this case, I suspect that actually protecting them is not the goal. The actual goal appears to be expressing weird puritan guilt or something. Geez.
I don't disagree. I also stand by my comment. Organizarions are acting out of an abundance of caution. That may persist or it may change depending on what happens when a company actually gets prosecuted under SESTA/FOSTA.
Clearly this isn't the case, since we're already seeing the chilling effects on platforms. The legislation is so intentionally vague for the benefit of prosecutors, and the very fact that it's ex-post facto (unconstitutional), you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that the sole intention was to produce a chilling effect, and those pushing it were intentionally dishonest.
Why? It is blindingly obvious to the EFF and anyone else who has dealt with politics.
This is literally just to wrap it up for the rubes and to find a packaging that could pass.
Craigslist, Patreon, Reddit, Youtube, etc. have all started self-censorship programs in response. Patreon did it last year when this looked like it wouldn't die.
Pretending it was an unforeseen consequence when it began before the law even passed and was literally called out by multiple parties as the cause after it passed for the final holdouts? That is literally burying your head in the sand.
I'm sorry but this is up there with denying the Earth is round when it comes to anyone who has dealt with these groups before.
Speaking of which, how long until the Internet Archive becomes a target due to illegal content? That's when the book burning allegories will start hitting close to home...
Thank you for the image! There are actually a lot of screenshots on the original page, as I know realize. Thankfully the site seems to have recovered more or less (still very slow to load here, but it does load eventually)
Do I understand correctly, the land of the free has appointed a bunch of authoritarians who push for censorship like in the peak of communism, the very thing America tried to fight for years? How is that not a treason? Why those people are not locked up?
You can see already the huge failure of this policy, before it has even become law. The clearly unconstitutional aspects of the law, and the chilling effect is tremendous.
The wrong thing to do is to run and hide.
The best response is to find ways to weaponize the law against more powerful groups to create a backlash.
Wait to judge on running and hiding until the inevitable cases reach the Supreme Court. Congress can pass any law, but that doesn’t mean it will stand.
I've been following the development of https://beakerbrowser.com and I really hope it captures wider attention. -- It's not just super user friendly already, it's actually easier to set up a Beaker website than one on the regular net (literally one click).