Save the 'Net

[erimir]

An idiolect, a linguist would definitely say.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Y'all should see the facebook recipes I'm now getting from reading that post.

Borscht.

[JoeP]

On a completely unrelated note, I also think Pea is flying some of these planes.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by lisarea

So then, that Backpage case came along, where some underaged girls who'd been trafficked on the website sued Backpage for damages, and IIRC, a couple of DAs wanted to charge them with violating state laws. Those failed, in part because the lawyers for the victims just didn't make their case. Since then, though, several victims brought much better argued cases and settled out of court with Backpage, Backpage took down their adult services section, and it is an open secret that there is right now a federal grand jury considering the case. All under the CDA 230.

So it's working exactly as intended, and exactly as it should.

Oh, hey. Hey.

Guess what's happening right now.

The FBI is seizing Backpage.com and raiding one of the cofounders' houses. (Sorry about the stupid Slashdot blurb, but the Reuters article is not coming up for me.)

SESTA was all predicated on the notion that none of this could be done under existing laws because CDA 230 was a safe harbor for sex traffickers and all, but SESTA is not the law yet.

Oh my goodness, how is such a thing possible?

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Thrad about Backpage and sex workers:

Start:

It’s a tribute to how successful the “anti-trafficking” advocates have been at shutting out sex workers from the conversation that people are surprised to hear the Backpage seizure is not good news for everyone. I think it’s terrible news, and will make things worse for everyone. https://t.co/oLCmAomgvo

— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) April 7, 2018

Somewhere in the middle:

Or that “losing business” is actually a BIG FREAKING DEAL since all the statistics make it clear that the development of online classifieds has meaningfully cut down on homicide rates from women who would have been working on the street without it.

— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) April 7, 2018

[lisarea]

Well, Backpage really did need to go down. They were allegedly actively and intentionally trafficking minors for sex.

What didn't need to happen was passing a law that penalizes every platform that anyone might be using for consensual sex work, which is what SESTA-FOSTA would do.

So far, Craigslist has shut down all their personal ads, Reddit shut down a ton of marketplace subreddits (looked like pretty much anything related to personal services, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms), stuff started disappearing from Google Drive, and I think I'm forgetting a few other things too.

Bet some dating sites start going down or getting lots harder to use soon. Instagram might take a hit, too, but with Facebook's massive surveillance machine at their disposal, they'll probably just up their censorship filters.

But yeah, I don't see a way around shutting down Backpage, at least temporarily, SESTA or no.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

In other news:

Congress Asks FCC Not to Kick Poor People Off the Internet - ExtremeTech

lol?

[The Man]

I should've just posted this Jim Jefferies segment when it got posted to YouTube (aired on the 3rd, posted on the 4th), but better late than never:

Jim Finds Flaws in SESTA/FOSTA

Really, you should just be watching him on principle anyway. Anyway, he's pretty much right about everything in this segment from what I've been able to ascertain.

[lisarea]

SESTA had nothing to do with Backpage being seized. It had nothing to do with them shutting down their personals section, which they did some time ago. I don't think I've seen a single media story that's gotten it right.

Again, SESTA (or whatever we're calling the SESTA-FOSTA hybrid) is not law yet. It probably didn't exist in any form when the investigation began, although I'm not positive about that. I'm positive it wasn't the law, though, and had nothing at all to do with that case and how it's playing out, because it is not the law. The laws this is happening under are all preexisting laws, including but not limited to CDA 230. Everyone needs to stop fucking up this incredibly basic fact.

In fact, it's almost exactly the opposite. SESTA was written to ride the wave of the Backpage case, and the facts being argued in that case are pretty horrendous. The claims are that Backpage was intentionally and explicitly helping pimps--not sex workers, but pimps--sell underaged girls in their personals. Doing things like helping them rephrase such common code words as "Amber Alert" so they could continue advertising the sexual services of children. And leave their pictures, which were child pornography, up on their site.

The Backpage case, by all reports, has zero to do with consensual sex work, and everything to do with enabling serial child rape. And if the accusations are true, they needed to be taken down, charged, and those responsible need to go to prison.

There are arguments to be made that a platform that allowed advertising for minors could be a harm reduction kind of thing as well, but actively helping people who are trafficking children to slip under the radar is not an effective harm reduction technique, and that's what Backpage is being accused of doing.

So it is a very good thing that Backpage was taken down.

It is a very bad thing that it's not going to be replaced with a platform for those offering consensual adult services, because that is an enormously effective harm reduction tool.

The assholes who proposed SESTA came up with it in order to convince ignorant people and the media that it was necessary because of child trafficking on Backpage. They knew full well that existing laws would hold Backpage liable, and that they were settling out of court with victims and there was a jury empaneled, but they counted on the media and the public to be shortsighted and incurious enough to assume that the laws that already exist were somehow letting sex traffickers off the hook.

Literally no even remotely mainstream media I've seen so far has gotten this right. It's not even debatable. SESTA is not a law. Any action being taken now is being taken under laws that actually fucking exist.

[lisarea]

LOL I emailed the guy who wrote this LA Times story telling him it was wrong, and he changed it.

It used to say, "That shield was stripped away late last month when Congress passed a measure to carve out an exception in the communications law after a high-volume political battle. The new law allows states to proceed against websites that knowingly assist or support sex trafficking."

Now it says, "Congress moved to strip away that shield late last month with a measure to carve out an exception in the communications law after a high-volume political battle. When signed into law by President Trump, the measure will allow states to proceed against websites that knowingly assist or support sex trafficking."

I thought you were supposed to point out when you've corrected something in a story, but what do I know? I'm glad they fixed it, though.

The real story here is that Congress just passed incredibly reckless, far reaching legislation by lying about the protections offered by current laws that were and are, for now, working just fine, and we should all be asking what their real motivation is.

Also that the two 'bipartisan' authors of SESTA, Rob Portman and Richard Blumenthal, are obviously the same guy. Look at that little weasel face and tell me that happened twice.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

misc thrad on slow and insidious changes so as to not shock the rubes. (Of you don't own an ISP, you're the rube.)

THREAD: There have been a lot of inaccurate reports that the FCC's repeal of #NetNeutrality will officially go into effect next week on April 23rd. That's not true. It's a bit more complicated than that. Ready? Here we go:

— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) April 19, 2018

[lisarea]

AT&T will ask Supreme Court to cripple the FTC's authority over broadband | Ars Technica

AT&T on net neutrality/privacy regulations: We are not a common carrier! We are a free market, self made business that owns all of our infrastructure! This is unfair, and we should be treated just like websites and other privately owned businesses, which are regulated by the FTC, not the FCC! All we ask is to be held to the standards of every other red blooded, independent American enterprise!

AT&T on FTC enforcement: We are a common carrier, not a regular business! It is a grave injustice that the FTC is trying to hold us to the 'truth in advertising' standards of regular, privately owned, free market businesses, when we are in fact a common carrier! Help us! We're poor!

(See also, for background on the Bell diaspora's long history of hybrid regulations.)

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Any Americans who enjoy yelling at their Senators should know today's reason is Net Neutrality vote.

[lisarea]

And thanks also for popping the thread back up, because I need to post this:

Police Realizing That SESTA/FOSTA Made Their Jobs Harder; Sex Traffickers Realizing It's Made Their Job Easier | Techdirt

And this:

Congress is forcing sex workers to revert back to a more dangerous, pre-internet era - The Verge

Great job, you venal little shits.

[lisarea]

So I've been predicting that SESTA-FOSTA was going to be used as a wedge to start instituting a Content ID like scheme for the whole internet, so I just assumed this type of proposal would originate in the US rather than the EU:

The EU's Copyright Proposal is Extremely Bad News for Everyone, Even (Especially!) Wikipedia | Electronic Frontier Foundation

So I guess I got the narrative a little off, but this is that worst case scenario.

Already, the majority of internet traffic (like 60%) is from mobile devices, which are walled garden environments controlled by the corporations that own them, and streaming services and IOT traffic is I dunno what percent, but it's got to be a whole lot more, and people actually intentionally and knowingly using the internet are a minority. And if this or something like it passes, that's just about the last step in the long march toward turning the internet into nothing more than a tool of the oligarchy.

[Ari]

So, how long till a content aware bot sends a bunch of people who look like celebrities copyright infringement letters for posting copyrighted content? and how racist will it be?

2026 BBC -- Hundreds of thousands of people across europe have reported receiving letters accusing them of copyright infringement, claiming they had all posted pictures of Denzel Washington. Software makers say they don't understand the mistake, they never used the Matrix to train the AI, it's on the strict no list.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Verizon throttled fire department's 'unlimited' data during Calif. wildfire | Ars Technica

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[JoeP]

This being our official™ SESTA/FOSTA thrad, it is here that I shall place this stuff related to Tumblr. Of course it's also a gay issue and a gender issue and fuck da internet police issue.

Twitter thrad:

“Why are Tumblr and Facebook cracking down on sex so much? And why is Facebook in so over zealous about it? It’s all Apples fault!” Etc etc

I can explain all. It is largely the fault of a set of US laws called SESTA and FOSTA.

— Cookie Cyboid (@CookieCyboid) 6 December 2018

Moar.

Tumblr’s 'Adult Content' Ban*Is About More Than Porn - The Atlantic

Even the BBC.

Tumblr's porn ban abandons the marginalised - BBC News

Both articles make good points.

[lisarea]

That's not bad, but neither the house nor the senate voted for it unanimously as she claims. It was a bigassed majority, and Democrats were in on it for sure, but there were some who voted against it. Ron Wyden for a pretty obvious one. (He wrote CDA 230, the law that the sponsors and supporters were making up all those lies about.)

[JoeP]

Does that make the situation any better?

[lisarea]

Not significantly, but just because the 'essence' of a story isn't much changed doesn't mean that it's not important to get your facts straight before you go making objective claims, especially when you're doing it on the internet where you can look things up.

She says it first, then one of the people responding repeats it as fact, and now there's a slightly exaggerated, slightly oversimplified, and factually incorrect version of the story getting spread among people who are just hearing about it for the first time. Not a big deal to most people, except maybe the representatives who voted against it, but it's also not a great argument to make if you're trying to convince people to be informed.

[lisarea]

Bogus Net Neutrality Comments Linked To Trumpland | Techdirt

Not a huge shocker, but at least it's out now. And I hadn't seen that specific George Soros controlling the internet thing before. It's telling that none of the anti-NN arguments have any basis in fact at all.

And I guess there's not much to do but wait on this:

What we learned from net neutrality's big day in court - The Verge

[Ari]

It's amazing just how utterly bad they are at it as well. If the system wasn't so utterly stacked in their favor this would be on dumbest criminals shows. It's like they are that guy that thought rubbing lemon juice on his face would make him invisible when robbing a bank, only in a twist, the bank is owned by the guy's brother who pays everyone extra to go along with bank robbery wednesdays (helps break up the week) so his brother can feel special and get some extra cash.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Goddam it, made me laugh.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Nobody ever listens to me when I warn them, but goddamn it, I'm going to write this down here so I can come back later and say I told you so. It's cold comfort, but it's all I ever get.

And here we go.

Is it really time to update Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act?

(This is mostly about intellectual property. They're going to talk about terrorism and harassment and porn and such because that gets people's blood up. But if and when the CDA goes away, watch for some sort of Content ID system to roll out on social networking sites about five minutes later.)