Vote in every election big and small. Tell your reps you are watching their votes on issues like this. This is how you keep these fuckers from implementing their dystopian plans. Don't like your options at the ballot box? Vote for the least evil of them all and/or run for office.
If you are an American and care about privacy:
- Write your representatives. Your message can be as simple as "I care about privacy". It's important they know you are watching their votes.
- Participate in elections, particularly downballot elections. Congressional makeup at the federal and state level matters a lot more for these kinds of things than who is president. Many recent laws like "right to repair" etc have happened at the state level since you can bypass federal congressional gridlock.
- Participate in primaries. Most Americans do not vote, most voters do not vote in primaries. If you don't like having to choose "the lesser of two evils", primaries give you much much more choice to express your preferences. As a primary voter, you have an outsized influence on the electoral system and can help determine the options other people get to choose from.
- Donate to PACs and non-profits working to protect your right to privacy. The EFF is an awesome non-profit. One benefit of donating to PACs is that they keep an eye on races across the country and help find and fund candidates who will advanced privacy legislation.
- "Vote with your dollar" when you buy things. In many cases, your purchasing power outweighs the political power of your vote.
This just makes me like AOC even more
If you are an American and care about privacy:
- Write your representatives. Your message can be as simple as "I care about privacy". It's important they know you are watching their votes.
- Participate in elections, particularly downballot elections. Congressional makeup at the federal and state level matters a lot more for these kinds of things than who is president. Many recent laws like "right to repair" etc have happened at the state level since you can bypass federal congressional gridlock.
- Participate in primaries. Most Americans do not vote, most voters do not vote in primaries. If you don't like having to choose "the lesser of two evils", primaries give you much much more choice to express your preferences. As a primary voter, you have an outsized influence on the electoral system and can help determine the options other people get to choose from.
- Donate to PACs and non-profits working to protect your right to privacy. The EFF is an awesome non-profit. One benefit of donating to PACs is that they keep an eye on races across the country and help find and fund candidates who will advanced privacy legislation.
- "Vote with your dollar" when you buy things. In many cases, your purchasing power outweighs the political power of your vote.
In the newspaper example, these are not newspaper employees having their content rejected, but readers or other random members of the public.
A better analogy to what’s happening would be if all the public parks and roads were owned by companies like Microsoft and Reddit, and they could ban you from the parks and roads for any reason.
Except that's not the situation. They don't have a monopoly, people can use other platforms (like we're doing right now). And it looks like users and advertisers are abandoning twitter, that free choice mechanism is working.
You're right, and it also shouldn't be controlled by the courts. Imagine a court requiring a newspaper to print an op-ed or a "letter to the editor" the newspaper didn't want to print. Sounds crazy, right? But because it's twitter, people are fine with it for some reason. Look to conservatives in the US who are writing laws in TX to require social media sites to "not censor conservative viewpoints". It's your website, you should be able to set rules for how it's moderated. Let people choose websites based on moderation policies. Twitter is already on its way to being a dead website due to their moderation strategies, we don't need to throw out out free speech rights in the process.
The long-term solution is decentralized networks like Activitypub/Lemmy/mastodon and nostr.
It is nonsense that courts can require an online platform to host content from somebody they don’t agree with, this is compelled speech. And we’re cheering it on because X is seen as a political opponent. It sure will be fun when the shoe is on the other foot and courts are thinking they have some right to force lemmy to host or not host certain kinds of content that doesn’t agree w the new party line or is “misinformation”. “COVID was a lab leak” was misinformation until the world government’s decided it might actually have merit as an idea. Handing the government speech control powers like this is dangerous. Democracy relies on people being able to choose what they say and don’t say and share or not share that information.
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Copyright is a classic case of "The few benefit at the expense of the many". Ideas, medicine, innovation, culture, these should all be shared as widely as possible as quickly as possible to all of humanity. Especially when we can copy those things for no production cost unlike the times of the printing press. But somebody realized they could paywall it and get rich instead.
Copyright is an antiquated idea whose time has come to arrive on the chopping block. Any politician who aims to curtail or abolish copyright gets my vote.
Pretty well established case law at this point. If it weren't, you'd see Tor relay operators, small ISPs, etc being hauled into court constantly.
There are no protections for me if I unknowingly let some stranger use me as a host or router for CP or some pedo shit. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take. There need to be legal protections in place, like there are for ISPs.
There are, at least in the US. That's why running a Tor node is legal and so is a coffee-shop sharing their wifi to customers. They are not legally liable for actions of users, they are just routers.
You can't outsmart supply and demand, period. No government ever has or ever will. Rent control doesn't work, every economist agrees.
Rent control privileges existing tenants over new ones and doesn't fix the supply problem. It incentivizes landlords to constructively evict tenants so they can re-rent at market rate instead of capped rate. Boneheaded policy which makes dems look bad. Voting for Biden but this is a dumb look.