Olives @olives@social.cleverlibre.org

Precedents don't apply because it's not a government entity, someone says.

Well, I'd rather they didn't have any excuses to justify whatever it is they do. If they're going to arbitrarily and unilaterally do something, that is on them.

@LouisIngenthron For example, if someone mentions transgender, that word, and someone flies in going woo woo, is there a nonce here. Then, that is pretty clearly bigotry.

Exaggerated for dramatic effect but that is what they do.

@mc We literally just had precedent after precedent showing that platforms won't be held liable for random things someone posts, unless they're involved in it.

Even the frivolous lawsuits over whether Twitter made a mistake in it's moderative decisions over child porn, and Reddit simply had a piece of child porn on it's site (even if they would get to moderating it), were dismissed. Two things where there might've been potential liability.

It was very questionable whether these lawsuits had merit, even several years ago.

This is honestly consistent with First Amendment principles that liability can lead to chilling effects where far more than just intended content is removed. If it would apply in a book store, I don't see why it shouldn't apply when so much more expression is at stake.

https://qoto.org/@olives/110547472857036416 I wrote some about what the EFF got wrong about Reddit. They completely missed puritanism, whether it's censorship, suppression of content, or all those discussions where they were going to do censorship.

Policies are unilaterally changed without any real justification to it (and it's down so rather arbitrarily). It's all down to corporate priorities. All of this has been creeping up for the past five years. If the EFF doesn't want events like this happen, they've got to be far more proactive about spotting it as it develops.

Patreon is a hate group.

@LouisIngenthron They have practically no excuse to point to or pretend is the "real problem". That's the point.

If they're going to engage in pretty brazen bigotry, and try to pretend it is really about this or that, then that knocks out that angle.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/ftc-approves-final-order-requiring-mastercard-stop-blocking-use-competing-debit-payment-networks Federal Trade Commission votes 3-0 to put Mastercard Inc under a consent decree to force them to stop blocking the use of competing payment networks.

Ashcroft worked for that other guy who lied about there being weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, who didn't even win the election but got seated by the Supreme Court, who had war crimes happen under his watch, and who opened Guantanamo Bay.

If you don't know, Attorney General John Ashcroft was an infamously puritanical man who used to cover up historic statues, because he reckoned their nudity to be vulgar.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/15/hawley-blumenthal-team-up-to-push-nonsensical-ai-230-bill/ These two are always looking to set the Internet on fire...

Patreon might want to read up on a case called "Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition" where the CPPA was deemed unconstitutional, because it had a ridiculously broad definition of "child porn", although given the sorts of things they're censoring, I suspect this is merely a conservative excuse to harass LGBT communities.

@mc There are also some forms of content which are so odious (for instance, actual child porn) that no company wants that on their sites.

It's important to look past the "what if someone posts something which could get us thrown in prison" angle and to look at other angles as to why a platform might over-moderate with an error-prone filter.

This is a great example of the E.U. trying to "help" with some problem and ending up opening a whole nasty can of worms.

https://edri.org/our-work/open-letter-make-vulnerability-disclosure-in-the-cyber-resilience-act-more-secure-not-less/ Disturbing.

It's almost akin to an exam question in "spot all the flaws in this survey's design".

When the "won't anyone please think of the children?" brigade try to run "surveys" to make it look as if some selection of people (likely their own supporters or staff) supports their censorship efforts, it is usually filled with leading questions.

Leading questions like "what if your own children were the ones being abused?", a strong frame about the status quo being equivalent to inaction (despite this being demonstrably false), and them otherwise trying really hard to try to influence someone's answer towards what they want them to answer.

They also lean heavily on "something must be done", although they're often vague and don't mention what that something is.

"Far more recently" is half a decade ago. It's not a week ago. It's not a month ago. It's not "2022". They're been doing all of these things for quite some time, and somehow, that has gone unnoticed by the EFF, and that is what drives me up the wall.

The problem is that the company has gotten annoyingly puritanical and corporate. Period.

It isn't the lack of "transparency".

It isn't the lack of "an accountability process".

It isn't an inability to attend round tables with the EFF and other stakeholders.

The latest middle finger is just icing on cake. Frankly, it's one which has been a long time in the making.

Ugh. The EFF is wildly off the mark on Reddit. Reddit might have been a great proponent of freedom a decade ago, but far more recently, it has become far more puritanical, far more "man in a suit", and as evidenced by the current strike, far less caring about their users.

They are clearly looking at the company in how it operated in the past. That company no longer exists.

Did you know the infamous chat control actually started as a proposal to *improve* privacy but got hijacked into a proposal to destroy everyone's basic human rights?