Olives @olives@qoto.org

What's that outside the window. Oh, it's Ylva, don't worry about her, she's just there to make sure you are not doing anything... illegal. #chatcontrol

If it's not obvious enough, this is a parody with her spying in from outside... She would do it... Just in case, of course.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture-council/articles/good-the-bad-and-the-music-separating-art-from-the-artist-1234853750/ Interesting view.

The closest thing to a "smoking gun" here are the likes, and even then, this framing of a nefarious conspiracy is quite dubious. Also, isn't this a form of feedback, it's not hard to see why it proliferates.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/facebook-instagram-accused-harm-youth-mental-health-lawsuit-1234861212/

The problem with this suit is that they take a bunch of features which are fairly bog standard (as they can be useful to users), and benign, and try to spin them as evidence of a conspiracy (even though they could never be ipso facto evidence of such).

"infinite scroll" is just a bog standard feature which sites use to make it convenient for users. The alternative would be to go out of their way to make their own sites harder to use.

"recommendation algorithms" Same here. While you could make an argument against them, I don't like this particular "won't anyone please think of the children?" argument, it's a tool which presumably helps people find the content they want.

"alerts" Alerts are convenient as you know when someone has responded to you without having to manually check.

"quantification and display of Likes" What site doesn't have likes?

Most of these features can be easily explained with "adding value for the user".

"Arguing the company’s primary “motive is profit” and “maximiz[ing] financial gains,”"

So, basically, someone is not allowed to run a for-profit social network?

https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-government-caught-surveilling-social-media-of-teaching-assistants-and-librarians

"A startling revelation indicates that the UK government has substantially amplified its surveillance of the online activity of educators. Ranging from leading education experts to teaching assistants and librarians earning modest salaries, the magnifying glass of surveillance closely monitors posts critiquing education policies."

"Cases have also surfaced of the Department attempting to silence voices critical of government policy. Early years specialists Ruth Swailes and Aaron Bradbury have previously faced attempts from the Department to cancel their conference due to their earlier critiques. Similarly, Dr. Mine Conkbayir, a renowned early childhood author, was allegedly threatened with funding withdrawal for a conference she was scheduled to keynote, due to her criticisms. As she recounts, the Department also attempted to curtail her talk duration and verify her speech contents, pulling the strings of academic dialogue."

https://reclaimthenet.org/french-politicians-facial-recognition-rollout

"Surrounded by controversy, Laurent Wauquiez, president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and affiliated with the Les Républicains (LR), has raised eyebrows with his call for legislative amendments to facilitate the implementation of facial recognition in high schools."

https://nichegamer.com/marvels-spider-man-2-removes-pride-flags-in-middle-east-version/

"The Middle Eastern (or at least Arabian) version of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 released, with pride flags and other content removed.

The censorship was required in order for the game to ship in the region with strict laws against LGBTQ+ individuals and behavior."

"Saudi Arabia also banned the recent Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse movie for its inclusion of a trans flag, as well as Final Fantasy XVI for having a gay character."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/23/uk-officials-use-ai-to-decide-on-issues-from-benefits-to-marriage-licences

"Government officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) and complex algorithms to help decide everything from who gets benefits to who should have their marriage licence approved, according to a Guardian investigation."

"Civil servants in at least eight Whitehall departments and a handful of police forces are using AI in a range of areas, but especially when it comes to helping them make decisions over welfare, immigration and criminal justice, the investigation shows."

https://walledculture.org/how-copyright-drives-internet-fragmentation-and-why-it-is-hard-to-fix/

"The EU Copyright Directive is arguably the most important recent legislation in the area of intellectual monopolies. It is also a failure, judged purely on its own terms as an initiative to modernise and unify copyright across the European Union."

"It has also fragmented digital copyright law, as EU Member States struggle to implement a badly-drafted and self-contradictory text."

https://www.kiratas.com/2023/09/07/federal-administrative-court-overturns-data-retention-and-inventory-data-information-2/

Germany.

"Another legal slap for the former grand coalition: The Federal Administrative Court (BVerwG) has now also decided that the obligation for service providers to store connection and location data for months, regardless of suspicion, which was inserted by Black and Red into the Telecommunications Act (TKG) is “completely incompatible”. with the European Electronic Communications Data Protection Directive. The provision that has already been suspended can therefore still not be applied. Deutsche Telekom and the Munich provider Spacenet sued and were proven right in lower courts five years ago."

"The federal government wanted to maintain the requirement despite multiple rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) against data retention without reason and appealed to the Federal Administrative Court – represented by the Federal Network Agency. The Leipzig judges initially suspended the proceedings and asked the ECJ specifically about the relevant German paragraphs in the TKG. This declared the regulations to be incompatible with the fundamental rights guaranteed in the EU. Taking into account the decision of the Luxembourg judges, the BVerwG has now come to the conclusion that the TKG clauses “prescribe the retention of a large part of the traffic and location data without any reason, across the board and undifferentiated in terms of personnel, time and geography”."

https://www.kiratas.com/2023/10/15/after-a-court-ban-portugal-makes-a-new-attempt-at-data-retention/

"For data protection advocates, data retention has long been a “zombie” that keeps rearing its head. This is currently being confirmed again in Portugal. There, the two major popular parties, the social democratic PS and the conservative-liberal PSD, with the support of other parliamentary forces and the government, agreed on another bill for the logging of user traces without cause. This is reported by the Portuguese weekly newspaper Diário de Notícias. Essentially, this is intended to introduce six-month storage of location and connection data."

"The initiative is surprising because in April 2022 the Portuguese Constitutional Court declared the crucial data retention clauses in a 2008 national law unconstitutional. The articles, which were found to be invalid, stipulated that providers of telecommunications and internet services had to keep user traces for a period of one year, even in the event of unsuccessful call attempts, and to release them in order to prevent and prosecute serious crimes. The Tribunal Constitucional (TC), in the light of the case law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), concluded that “an undifferentiated and generalized obligation to store” all traffic data of all individuals “disproportionately restricts the right to privacy and informational self-determination.”"

The #chatcontrol is like a condom with a hole in it and someone insisting the hole only harms "bad people".

https://www.insider.com/utah-city-rallies-around-pole-dancing-skeleton-halloween-decoration-2023-10

"Some residents of a Utah town are rallying around a pole-dancing skeleton after the city said the risqué Halloween decoration had to be taken down."

"Residents have swarmed the town's Facebook page with comments supporting the skeleton and condemning the city for deleting its original post. Even unrelated posts from the city on social media are now being deluged with dozens of gifs of dancing skeletons."

"The mastermind behind the display, Christopher Fujishin, did comply with the city's order, moving the Halloween scene into his front yard instead."

https://techpolicy.press/kids-online-safety-act-will-censor-the-news/

"Imagine you’re a teenager who just survived a school shooting, but the government says you can’t read the news about it on social media because it might make you depressed. It sounds too ridiculous for even the US Congress. But under a bill currently being pushed by lawmakers in both parties and the White House, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), it could become reality.

Based in part on moral panic and unproven claims that social media is irreparably harming children, KOSA purports to “protect” kids by incentivizing censorship of online content. More than 90 LGBTQ+, human rights, and civil liberties organizations already oppose KOSA, arguing it will make kids less safe.

It will also make kids — and everyone else — less informed. At a time when disinformation is running rampant, KOSA will cause social media platforms to remove real journalism. The impact will be felt by everyone, not just kids."

https://www.wired.com/story/livestream-hostages-israel-hamas-war/

"industry experts say social media companies are showing a lack of transparency and an unwillingness to take the measures needed to prevent execution videos from spreading on their platforms, such as suspending livestreaming capabilities completely during the Israel-Hamas war."

"industry experts" "Imran Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech on social platforms, tells WIRED."

So, no one is allowed to livestream now, because an extremist might abuse it...?

"If you have a snatch of copyrighted music in your video, their systems will detect it within a microsecond and take it down"

If we ignore all the false positives and abuses related to these systems...

https://nichegamer.com/the-coffin-of-andy-and-leyley-dev-anticipated-backlash-over-incest/

"criticism from social media users uncomfortable"

I wouldn't call that "criticism", it's abuse from random internet trolls.

By the way, if you think this kind of abuse is an Elon thing, it's not, it came long before.

They're probably going to withdraw it in the end, but they'll end up looking like complete idiots, like Apple did, and the usual suspects will see them as a weak target.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/23/google-decides-to-pull-up-the-ladder-on-the-open-internet-pushes-for-unconstitutional-regulatory-proposals/

"Facebook did it six years ago " Facebook tried it in 2021, and they backpeddled after they received nothing but mockery for it.

"It’s basically lobbying for age verification, just in the guise of “age assurance,” which is effectively “age verification, but if you’re a smaller company you can get it wrong some undefined amount of time, until someone sues you.”"

You have to remember that Google's entire business model involves collecting your data and targeting ads at you. They also want to reduce the number of false impressions (i.e. from bots) on particular ads. They also don't want to look like the villains here, thus all this nonsense and mincing of words.

It's useful not to look at this as an isolated event but one accompanied by tougher stances on ad blockers and an attempt to push DRM on the web.

"While cynical people will say that maybe Google is supporting these policies hoping that they will continue to be found unconstitutional, I see little evidence to support that."

Pushing clearly unconstitutional laws in the hope they'll be found unconstitutional is still very bad tactically.

“age assurance” I've seen people complaining about it on some other site, I think it was Instagram?, and they basically just permanently ban you, and don't care for false positives.

https://www.gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats

"We entrust Google with our most private communications because we assume the company takes every precaution to safeguard our data. It doesn't. A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses."

To embarrass Google, I'm gonna bring GCreep back up.