Olives @olives@qoto.org

Notice how Facebook (and others) kept taking these authoritarian (and unconstitutional, remember the state pressure) steps to make someone in the government happy, and the problem didn't really go away, it just violated people's rights.

I think what is particularly concerning about this, is that when someone like this talks about "sex offenders", they're typically conflating any crime of a sexual nature with a "child abuser".

Except, someone who has committed such a crime still has rights.

It is also a violation of the First Amendment. Also, whatever he is doing there doesn't seem effective (and the article admits as such). It seems to be pure grandstanding.

I took a short trip through memory lane there as it's important to understand the historical context of some of these things here.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/12/international_censorship/ 2010. Complaints about Facebook (and other giants) being puritanical go back over a decade.

https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/04/myspace_offenders/ 2009. That doesn't sound like it would be effective, and it's unconsti- Hey, is that Blumenthal? It is. The EARN IT Guy. Grandstanding quite a ways back, huh.

https://www.theregister.com/2008/10/22/social_networking_privacy_germany/ 2008. German agencies already mad at FB over privacy.

https://www.theregister.com/2007/09/25/facebook_subpoena/
https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/17/facebook_agrees_stronger_controls/
2007. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo uses "safety" as an excuse to get Facebook to also be "tougher" on porn, it seems.

Didn't he have a sex scandal of his own more recently?

https://www.theregister.com/2006/09/07/facebook_update_controversy/

"News Feed appears automatically on every user's home page and automatically updates members about recent Facebook activities by that person's friends. For example, Facebook would automatically notify users whenever a photo is posted by friends or they split up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. The feature is designed to make it easier for friends to keep up to date with each other. But many users are unhappy that the feature has been pushed upon them.

"News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go," a statement by the newly formed group Students against Facebook News Feed states, Reuters reports."

How people reacted to the unveiling of the "News Feed" in 2006.

It's not like they recanted or withdrew any of their stupid policies after courts made very clear the scope of the law (it being narrow).

I understand that new pieces of legislation can nudge platforms towards making stupid decisions (and people really don't think enough of this chilling effect) but these stupid decisions are ultimately on them (though, obviously you still have to be wary of holding people liable for things they can do nothing about).

"Ever since the passing of FOSTA in 2018, it is near impossible to talk about any subject even remotely related to "sex" (including both sex education & sexual abuse prevention) without getting censored"

While I'm not a fan of FOSTA (the anti sex trafficking law which led to many deaths of sex workers and which failed to decrease it), some people have really got to stop blaming it for every dumb policy decision.

https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/fake-google-ssl-certificates-made-in.html

"Google has found that the French government agency using unauthorized digital certificates for some of its own domains to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on a private network."

"Google security engineer Adam Langley described the incident as a "Serious Security breach", which was discovered in early December. Rogue digital certificates that had been issued by French certificate authority ANSSI, who closely work with the French Defense agency."

As someone pointed out, there is precedent for #eidas type mischief within the E.U., therefore it's likely it might happen here too.

#chatcontrol

I think the posts which self-destruct on social media, if that is a thing now, probably comes from "we have all this money, and we have to implement things to distinguish ourselves from other companies".

I don't think that is a deliberately evil one but part of an eternal feature creep (feature creep can be a bad thing). It ironically falls under scale.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/11/03/twenty-five-years-of-the-dmca-some-good-but-mostly-bad/ Reminder that the DMCA is also an awful law.

https://reason.com/2023/11/02/brickbat-the-crime-of-reporting/

"An Iranian court has sentenced two journalists to more than a decade in prison for their coverage of the death Mahsa Amini. Amini died last year in the custody of the morality police after being arrested for violating the nation's Islamic dress code."

https://reclaimthenet.org/visitors-to-the-eu-will-soon-face-fingerprinting-and-facial-scans

"The new rules state that visitors will be subjected to both face and fingerprint scans aside from surrendering other biometric data. It’s disconcerting that this data will be reserved within the European Commission’s Common Identity Repository (CIR), a database accessed by numerous agencies, including law enforcement."

"The implications of this regulation change could be even more disconcerting from a privacy perspective. Critics and advocates of digital privacy have sounded the alarm on not just the possible misuse of this extensive data pool by governments, but also the potential exposure to hacking threats, be they criminal outfits or invasive foreign governments. There’s also the risk of rogue insiders dealing with this sensitive information."

I think one of the arguments around the screen time was that while mental health declined in the United States, it improved in Europe, despite social media use, and Europe is also known for having less of a helicopter parent culture.

https://reason.com/2023/11/02/a-missouri-cop-shot-a-familys-dog-and-threw-its-body-in-a-ditch/

"In August, a Missouri family's dog, Parker, wandered away from the family home during a violent storm. When the neighbor who found the dog called the police for help, instead of returning Parker to his family, an officer shot him and threw his body in a ditch."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/03/online-vitriol-could-undo-decades-political-progress-dutch-deputy-pm While I'm particularly sympathetic to her, as they've pushed for some good policy, such as opposing the chat control:

"anonymous accounts" Curbing the use of anonymous accounts would be quite problematic for the freedom of expression. Also, I don't think this actually worked out when they tried it in South Korea.

"doxing" Maybe, something could be done about doxxing?

"hate speech" Ugh, the problem is that the particular argument which people use for this is one which tends to also be used elsewhere (and that is both bad for expression and often inappropriate as well).

I think you'd be better off breaking up Facebook into several smaller social networks. It would be very politically difficult but it doesn't involve fiddling around with matters of content.

The problem of mainstream social media (and why half-baked fixes don't really work).

The problem is scale. Scale. I don't mean millions of users. Or tens of millions. I mean these sites with over a hundred million users. They become a bigger than life staple of the political consciousness (and also attract the sort of problems you might run into in politics, particularly the nastier side of politics).

It is also prone to context collapse. Truth is, we operate in different contexts all the time. Present ourselves differently in different scenarios. Mainstream social media pumps in a load of information and collapses everything down into the same one arena. There also isn't much breathing room without "taking a side".

Even imperfections of the moderation, inability to get correct information to inform such moderation. Scale. Also, due to scale, every mistake is now political and a million eyes will scrutinize it (sometimes, in an uninformed manner, as guess what, the hearsay also spreads at scale).

Ridiculous conspiracy theories? Again, the problem is scale. We've always had conspiracies.

They're also all in the same pot. Right up against one another. Not much breathing room.