Joshua Casey 😷 @JoshuaACasey@social.cleverlibre.org

🎉🎉Lawmakers in the House and Senate have officially re-introduced the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act of 2023, which would effectively ban law enforcement use of facial recognition in the United States. https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2023-03-07-massive-coalition-throws-weight-behind-reintroduced-facial-recognition-ban-bill

Along with dozens of coalition partners and thousands of action takers, we've been calling on lawmakers to #BanFacialRecognition for years, because the tech is invasive, biased, and does more harm than good. https://banfacialrecognition.com/

There have been more stories of Black men being misidentified by facial recognition and wrongfully arrested. As 🐦SenMarkey says, these tools pose a personal threat to our civil liberties, a threat disproportionately felt by marginalized communities.

QT SenMarkey: In 2022, Alonzo Sawyer, a Black man from Maryland, was falsely identified and arrested for assaulting a bus driver and stealing her phone. He spent nine days in prison.

From police tracking protesters to TSA scanning faces of travelers in airports, the tech is spreading. We have to stop this now. Congress must pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act to put an end to this terrible technology.

Senate is currently holding a bipartisan hearing about how best to destroy the internet (not how it's framed, but that's what they're really trying to do). Incredibly frustrating how both Democrats and Republicans don't understand how what they're saying would destroy the open internet.

A Native American tribal ISP seems to be handing out AppleTVs to users in exchange for their Roku devices after discovering that 71% of their IPv4 traffic was Roku-related, and deciding that this would actually be the cheaper solution.

https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s-2022-and-still-no-IPv6/td-p/759420/page/2

#ipv6

If you're building social media for humans, you need to thwart the impulse to treat it like a video game.

That means reducing the gamification aspects that make Big Social so addictive.

Instead, authenticity of social interactions needs to be prized above all else.

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are waiting for a viable Twitter alternative but are not actively making that alternative, there will be no alternative.

Today on Techdirt I wrote about two newly proposed state laws, one from the Texas GOP and one from the Florida GOP, both of which are blatantly, laughably unconstitutional attacks on free speech and the first amendment in pursuit of culture war nonsense. But never let the GOP claim that they support the 1st Amendment when they constantly pull shit like this.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/03/another-day-another-blatant-attack-on-the-1st-amendment-from-the-florida-gop/

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/03/texas-which-recently-passed-law-to-ban-content-moderation-now-pushing-law-banning-abortion-related-info/

"A ban on TikTok would be like banning a newspaper or TV channel, but worse," our staff attorney Ramya Krishnan tells the Washington Post. "It would shut down a channel of communication that tens of millions of Americans use to share information and ideas every day." More here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/02/resistance-tiktok-ban-is-growing-washington/