Re: the December 17th protest
I’ve been seeing a post spreading around like wildfire encouraging people to post like hell on the day the recently-announced NSFW ban will go into effect.
FYI, this will achieve nothing because the recent changes are primarily caused by the recent republican-backed FOSTA-SESTA laws. This is a political issue so American users can only really do one thing: vote.
But FOSTA-SESTA creates an exception to Section 230 that means website publishers would be responsible if third parties are found to be posting ads for prostitution — including consensual sex work — on their platforms. The goal of this is supposed to be that policing online prostitution rings gets easier. What FOSTA-SESTA has actually done, however, is create confusion and immediate repercussions among a range of internet sites as they grapple with the ruling’s sweeping language.
In the immediate aftermath of SESTA’s passage on March 21, 2018, numerous websites took action to censor or ban parts of their platforms in response — not because those parts of the sites actually were promoting ads for prostitutes, but because policing them against the outside possibility that they might was just too hard.
All of this bodes poorly for the internet as a whole. After all, as many opponents of the bill have pointed out, the law doesn’t appear to do anything concrete to target illegal sex trafficking directly, and instead threatens to “increase violence against the most marginalized.” But it does make it a lot easier to censor free speech on small websites — as evidenced by the immediate ramifications the law has had across the internet.
Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-230-internet-freedom
There is another Twitter thread about this here. Most notably:
Facebook yesterday announced its policy on sexual solicitation. Which is ludicrously overzealous, bans the discussion of anything related to sex, including incredibly vague language like “I’m looking for a good time tonight”. The reason they’re so overzealous isn’t because they’re screaming “somebody think of the children” It’s because if they miss *one* ad, they can be sued. They know algorithms for this suck, so they’ve decided to overcompensate for that and effectively ban talking about sex.
Now, it’s not 100% because of these laws (trying to attract advertising money is obviously at play here) but they are the primary—and overlooked—cause.
It’s easy to think as politics as something that doesn’t affect your life, or only in very intangible, remote, hard-to-grasp ways, especially if you’re not a minority.
Don’t forget to vote. (And to join the efforts against voter suppression if you can.)
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