Olives @olives@qoto.org

https://reclaimthenet.org/bipartisan-letter-calls-on-biden-to-drop-charges-against-julian-assange

"Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, have established an alliance in their mutual objective to liberate the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, journalist Julian Assange.

Together with 14 other US Congress members, this unlikely duo has penned a candid letter to President Joe Biden, appealing for an immediate halt to the US’s extradition and prosecution plans against Assange. The collective voice warns of potential harm to US-Australia bilateral relations if Assange’s prosecution continues."

That would be a good move.

MySpace are wondering when their users are planning on coming back.

No one owes a site (particularly, one which isn't offering anything of substance) an audience, just because the site might have been hip and cool once.

Tumblr became big off the backs, effort, and hard work of adult content creators. They then stabbed them in the back. They deserve everything coming to them.

https://www.wired.com/story/altitude-terrorism-content-removal-tool/ It's probably not worth building a centralized censorship tool for this. Censorship apparatus' are not cost free. They have an inherent cost, that is your freedom.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23954412/tumblr-downscaling-employees-transferred-automattic How can you be so dumb and obtuse? It's the censorship. The censorship.

Bad faith actors like to drum up a sense of urgency, always acting as if the end is here. Does it stand up to scrutiny?

I'm okay with just banning conversion therapy. It has no legitimate purpose, it is just abuse with terrible consequences.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/11/01/alliance-defending-freedom-conversion-therapy-us-lgbtq/

"In Tingley v. Ferguson the ADF is challenging Washington’s ban on conversion practices for LGBTQ+ youth that seeks to change their sexuality or gender identity, with Tingley saying the ban violates his freedom of speech and right to freely exercise his religion.

So-called ‘conversion therapy’, which is not therapy nor rooted in science, has been disavowed as a form of psychological torture by major psychological, medical and human rights bodies."

On another note, when Elon disbanded Twitter's Trust & Safety Councils, I noticed something interesting. Polaris was on one of them.

Like IJM, Polaris is a religiously motivated (Christian) conservative "anti trafficking" group known to make misleading claims. They also don't seem to like porn. More interestingly, it seems that branch of Polaris has since been disbanded...?

Polaris appears to be associated with Palantir. They also are, or were, associated with Thorn.

They seem to be leaning a lot on "Zuckerberg might be a bit of a jerk", such as focusing on how he cancelled some meeting (presumably, to avoid an unproductive argument), or not answering his emails promptly.

But, this isn't really relevant, other than maybe being embarrassing to FB.

I mean... It's an improvement on the initial suit but unless you believe the government should be able to argue over every detail of how someone runs their business, I'm not really seeing the arguments here.

Last I checked, it wasn't illegal for FB to offer a beauty filter product.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/08/zuckerberg-meta-lawsuit-kids-safety/

What exactly is the "right" level of funding? Right level of funding? Wrong level of funding? I mean, it's easy to say "more funding is good" or the nebulous "more needs to be done". It's hard to argue in a suit someone is evil just because they didn't approve a particular funding request.

"The lawsuit also accuses Zuckerberg of rebuffing calls from his senior leaders to prohibit some beauty filters that might harm the mental health of women and young people."
"might harm the mental health of"

I'm not really a fan of such filters, but that is so nebulous.

"Massachusetts is using the evidence to accuse Meta of making deceptive statements about the safety of its platforms in violation of state law."

Except, a lot of this is very much a matter of opinion. Someone could argue this. Someone could argue that.

One bad faith actor is quite strange. He promotes a LGBT survey (and engages in other periodic lip service). But, if you know anything about him, you'll know he singles out LGBT scientists for harassment, jumps on conservative bandwagons, and has voiced "concern" about anal sex. Lowkey conservative?

Oh, cool, more groups with names we've never heard of before crawling out of the woodwork to lobby for some authoritarian law.

https://www.wired.com/story/chatbot-censorship-china-freedom-house/

"When you ask ChatGPT “What happened in China in 1989?” the bot describes how the Chinese army massacred thousands of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. But ask the same question to Ernie and you get the simple answer that it does not have “relevant information.” That’s because Ernie is an AI chatbot developed by the China-based company Baidu."

I think they're both censorious though.

https://reason.com/2023/11/07/lawmakers-try-to-insert-privacy-protections-into-the-feds-snooping-powers/

"A bipartisan collection of privacy-minded lawmakers today announced the introduction of a bill that would reform and restrain the authorities of federal agencies from snooping on American citizens and collecting data without getting a warrant first."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/observation-mission-stresses-key-elements-ola-binis-case-upholding-digital-rights Even if you act in good faith, engaging in some forms of security research can be risky.

https://reclaimthenet.org/signal-finally-tests-usernames-to-replace-phone-numbers Though, it seems that someone still needs a phone number to register.

"Twitter changed their policies so paedophiles could congregate on the platform"

This is QAnon disinformation. It is simply not true, though I didn't expect particularly honest argumentations from a Q gateway mouthpiece.

What actually happened is that Twitter was fairly free speech for many years. Remember, their slogan was that they were the "free speech wing of the free speech party". Well, the CEO said it once to the media (though, Vijaya Gadde seemed to be a bit less free speech).

Sometime in mid-2018 (a time when online platforms were facing greater scrutiny), Twitter erroneously suspended a few accounts (which did not engage in abuse and were just advocating for their own rights). They later reversed those decisions after consulting with 40 or so experts (and someone from Vice Media criticized the decision) in both human rights and even psychology. This all happened over the course of a few months.

What probably did change is that industry implemented more methods for tracking down abuse (though, it also came with a false positive footprint and collateral damage). That's not really related to any of these cases though.

Of course, it could be argued that Twitter was still overly censorious in some ways. Nonetheless, it doesn't make this conspiracy theory any more valid. Sure, we can criticize platforms for being censorious (art historically being one concern of mine), but this can be done without amplifying outright grifters (one appears to be the daughter of a Republican politician) and folk tales.

Just thought I'd comment on it, as a typical bad faith actor mentioned it.