Joshua Casey 😷 @JoshuaACasey@social.cleverlibre.org

Spoke briefly to Politico about the growing opposition to #KOSA, the poorly named “Kids Online Safety Act,” which would make kids less safe, not more safe, by exposing them to surveillance and cutting them off from online resources and community. It’s especially harmful for #LGBTQ youth who are already facing unprecedented attacks. Congress needs to stop using kids as pawns to score political points and pass real laws to rein in #BigTech and reduce harm.

move carefully and encrypt things

Fight for the Future, the ACLU, EFF, and a bunch of other groups are circulating a sign-on letter agains the inclusion of #KOSA in the omnibus bill. Contact me evan at fight for the future dot org to sign on

Mastodon has plenty of room for improvement, and I'm seeing lots of people posting about some of the problems... but it's odd to me that some people think those problems are permanent.

Especially with the new influx here, I expect we'll see new developments that solve many of the most obvious issues.

Nothing will ever be perfect, but the open nature of all this allows for rapid improvements & experiments.

In today's ReasonRoundup:

• No constitutional right to own pit bulls

• Dubious conclusions about marijuana

• Publisher merger appears dead

• Anti-abortion groups sue over abortion bill approval

• STOP WOKE Act canceled

• Carvana's demise

• The wretched Kids Online Safety Act

And more.... https://reason.com/2022/11/21/theres-no-constitutional-right-to-own-a-pit-bull-federal-court-says/

#libertarian #news #politics #law #marijuana #dogs #antitrust #freespeech

My latest post for Techdirt is about a stupid bill - the INFORM Act - that won't die but keeps getting shoved into must-pass legislation. And how it's a big problem b/c not only is it ultimately pointless and gratuitously costly, but the way it's written it's also troublingly unconstitutional.

Ex: want to sell t-shirts advocating for reproductive freedom online? This law gives Texas AG Ken Paxton the power to demand the site you use to sell them tell him who you are.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/18/for-the-umpteenth-time-the-inform-act-is-still-unconstitutional-and-has-no-business-being-attached-to-any-bill-congress-needs-to-pass/

mastodon would do so much better if they'd just call instances "neighborhoods" and said that you should pick your neighborhood based on your interests, so that if you look out your window you'll see your neighbors doing things you find interesting. and that it's okay if you find out you don't like your neighborhood, because you can just move to another one! and all your followers will move with you

and then, yanno, make it easier to search for people you wanna follow cause that shit just sucks