Reclaim The Net

That is the exact point. A "best intentions" approach to e.g. solve age verification through a "privacy respecting" mechanism leads to the government mandating that only physical devices with the built in security verification mechanisms, as allowed via government approved signatures, would be able to run these age verification apps (because otherwise you could cheat the mechanisms). This is a direct attack on general purpose computing and facilitates digital fascism by requiring that all software is signed in a manner approved by the government (directly or indirectly).

This is not hyperbole - Android will be locked down in only 115 days [0]. Further, in order to enforce such an age verification mechanism, you will end up requiring all software to either account for why it would not need to be integrated, or integrate with such a government mandated mechanism. This introduces accounting, surveillance, and approvals for every possible use-case. How would an online forum dedicated to discussing political topics survive? They would have to prove that they are complying with such measures that increase the barrier to operate and ensures that any forum or other arena of interaction would have to be accountable and justify how they are verifying interactions within the bounds of these laws and mechanisms.

Further - beyond locking down devices you would clearly need to lock down networks and communication in order to enforce such restrictions - which leads to deeper and broader…

I just love how the pro-censorship crowd here is faking moderation and exasperated reasonableness, while the rest of us know full well how this game is played. We see it on literally all major social media platforms right now. It started (roughly) with banning Alex Jones and a few others. Why would you be opposed to banning of that screaming crazy person, right?

Fast forward just a few years, it's now impossible to use use social media to coherently discuss any major issues affecting our society if you don't mince words and don't subscribe to orthodoxy de jour. And the worst part is the smug, obnoxious gaslighting about it all that happens all the time.

"Twitter doesn't delete content for political purposes. wink wink"

Hunter Biden laptop story? Unity 2020? Suspension of people like Jordan Peterson? James Lindsey? Hundreds of other high-profile accounts. Probably tens of thousand of lower profile accounts.

"It's not censorship of it's a private company. node nod"

https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-biden-admin-held-weekly-censorship-meetings-with-social-media-giants-to-suppress-covid-and-vaccine-speech

https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story-right-in-facebooks-lap/

"We're just doing commons sense stuff. Like following science."

https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-quietly-dropped-covid-censorship-rules/

Etc, etc.

All these cliche arguments have been revealed to be entirely in bad faith, so I have absolutely no reason to trust people here who…

>The only place it has any advantage is crime.

What? Wikileaks was censored without even being charged with a crime.

The reality is people who have committed no crimes are financially censored on a regular basis.

According to the EFF:

>The actions of a small number of payment intermediaries— like payment processors, banks, and credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard—can heavily influence what kind of speech can exist online.

https://www.eff.org/issues/financial-censorship

For example, Subscribestar was censored by political activists - they committed no crime.

https://reclaimthenet.org/paypal-bans-subscribestar-after-the-site-is-targeted-by-activitists/

Paypal censored people for selling erotic fiction. What law did they break?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/legal-censorship-paypal-makes-habit-deciding-what-users-can-read

The ACLU is currently suing New York state for financially censoring an organization which likewise committed no crime.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/new-york-state-cant-be-allowed-stifle-nras-political-speech

>The problem is a social one: we need to lobby the government to ensure folks like Snowden are protected, and not allow the tyranny of the minority through spending money in a way that can't be traced or censored.

The problem is 9 times out of ten not the government. Here's a better idea: let's make censorship impossible in all forms.

Addendum: Not to mention the millions of people who live in censored countries…

I consider myself rational (at least enough to work in software). Here's a copy/paste of a comment I made before why I refuse the RNA vaxx...

- I already had long covid (lasted 14 months), and don't want the vaccine to cause a relapse. It did exactly that to a family member who also had long covid, and she's still not better. It's just anecdotal but I've seen on longcovid forums multiple people claiming the vaccine CAUSED their longcovid.

- I don't believe CDC recommendation that increasing antibody titers through vaccination offers better protection against the virus than convalescent immunity through prior infection. Antibody titers are just one aspect of immunity and BCells make antibodies when exposed to a virus again. Actually I'd be worried about training my immune system with only one part of the virus, it's possible that would hurt my robust immunity against variants, not help it.

- CDC is dishonest with numbers by not tracking mild/non-hospitalized breakthrough cases. There is no reason not to track them. From the UK Gov on Page 12... 37 of 73 deaths from Delta variant are vaccinated: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... According to the CDC and media such numbers of deaths among vaccinated would be statistically impossible.

- FDA not approving an inactive virus vaccine is BS. It's a monumental failure of the US government if they want a high % of people vaccinated to only offer DNA/RNA vaccines that are nothing like traditional…

I don't think it's silliness; I actually find it quite concerning.

In recent times, there has been lots of evidence about how the government and social media companies have been colluding together to "prevent the spread of misinformation" [0]. They have been very transparent about this, and discuss it openly [1].

However, it must not be up to the government to determine what is or is not misinformation - this transposes to government censorship in the worst case, and prevents a healthy marketplace of ideas in the best case.

In the case of the "Hunter Biden Laptop" story (which was misrepresented often), it wasn't Facebook deciding on its own to censor it - it was at the behest of the government.

You don't know what you don't know. What knowledge are you missing because it could never be shown, because it wasn't shown to you? In the last few years, I've seriously worried about this.
I've had to diversify my media intake as an attempt to mitigate this, even when the reporting itself was of worse quality in non-standard media channels. (In many cases, I found it to be of higher quality, which was surprising).

I would recommend the same to you, because, especially in this case, you won't know what you're missing unless you look for it.

[0]https://reclaimthenet.org/fb-cdc-misinfo-collusion/

[1]https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/07/15/psaki_were_flagging_problematic_posts_for_facebook_that_spread_disinformation.html#!

Your timeframe is right, but it's not just about ads.

In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1]

It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus.

In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2]

In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored.

Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content.

[1]…