22 Democrats Sponsor a Bill That Could Censor Abortion Info From the Internet::The Kids Online Safety Act is “a blank check” for Republican AGs to “intimidate any way they can,” a digital civil liberties advocate told Jezebel.
Cmon democrats, you’re supposed to be the lesser evil…
What a simplistic way to look at the problem.
I’m pretty sure no one can “help” the working class
How’s that?
Raising minimum wage and spending loads of money causes temporary boosts but it gets worse after the boom dies
Actually the conditions are either going to improve in the long run or the jobs will be replaced by machines. This is because the world population increase is starting to slow down. In the US for instance the main population is decreasing if you exclude immigration because people are having less than two children on average
People have less kids when times are shit. There are fixes but with the economy, state of the world, politics, global warming and environmental issues ppl just don’t want kids and I don’t blame em.
That’s not it though. Times are much better than they were 100 years ago. It has more to do with people becoming more educated.
American life expectancy is declining. Theory doesn’t mean anything if you never observe reality.
Well the working class could. But that’s why they keep us divided.
This isn’t about kids and it isn’t about abortion it’s about limiting people’s access to unmediated information. The Democrats have just as much to lose as the Republicans if a third party which is a lesser evil than either emerges. Or, seeing as this is America we’re talking about, greater evil.
Whatever. They don’t want people being able to just organise themselves as they please online.
If you can only vote for one option then the better a 3rd party does the more it hurts the main party closest to it. I would expect Democrats and Republicans to be funding 3rd parties in the hopes of improving their chances of getting the most votes.
For the 2020 election in my state, republican groups funded the campaign to collect signatures for the green party to be on the ballot. So your expectations are met.
It is depressing when people get less representation in their government by voting for a party they want the most to represent them (or worse; the only party they want, or even worse: not having the option of voting “none of these, do this again”).
Depressing but not shocking. The more niche you are the less people you can find that agree with you.
Who gets to date more people the person with low standards or the person with impossibly high standards?
That is not an issue. When an area only gets one representative that causes a large misrepresention error.
I think that was to keep votes away from the Democrats but its still interesting
Republicans have funded the Green Party for a long time now at least. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dems were funding the libertarian party.
Was there ever proof that the Republicans donated to Nader in the 2000 election? Seems they did just about everything they could to deny the popular vote…
I’m not American so I wouldn’t know. Do you have 2 votes, 1 for president and 1 for insert noun here?
Barking up the wrong tree, I’m a Londoner.
They are, but the question has always been how much evil is acceptable to you, because the democrats know what they are and they’ll run whoever they can get away with. The worse the Republican option is, the lower the quality of candidate the Dems will forward. They know what their donors want.
lesser, but still evil.
The internet threatens their power base and they value their power more than they value any principle
If the leopards don’t come for their faces from the right, those they betrayed on the left will.
If you continually vote for the lesser of two evils, youll end up with the most imaginable evil.
They are full of baloney.
Dems are the faces, and repubs are the heels. But they’re both working towards the same goals, for the same boss. Every notice how all the really damaging legislation is always bipartisan?
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting evil. It’s allowed this country to continue to slip AS A WHOLE in the wrong direction.
Logically? It’s actually not. Democrats are still not alt right facists even if this bill is based in stupidity.
A third party right now can’t mathematically win, and the thing is with the current Republican party (which is basically our Nazi party) if you vote for a third party at this point, you are outright throwing your vote to the nazis.
So, yes- it shouldn’t ideally work like this, but in reality, does. And not voting Democrat right now or voting third party means voting for Republicans, which is even riskier, and arguably, voting for an even greater evil given Republicans have our Supreme Court packed right now and we can’t afford to lose it any elections from here forward.
I’d argue many democrats don’t support progressive policies. I’d argue many of them are where they are from straight ticket voting. If dems could actually move the needle on policy impacting the general population noticeably, far right repubs wouldn’t stand a chance. Instead you have a huge percentage of the population refusing to even participate in elections because they think it’s a waste of time. Voting for any and every dem just cause they’re a dem sends the message their current policies and performance has been acceptable.
If dems could actually move the needle on policy impacting the general population noticeably, far right repubs wouldn’t stand a chance.
You also have to ask yourself: why do we have a populace that might vote for a party that will do literally zero for them and will impose a dictatorship (Republicans) vs. a party that has actually passed some decent legislation despite barely having a majority (Democrats).
Democrats aren’t perfectly progressive, it’s true. It’s annoying, but at least still keeping our democracy to gradually change things over time is the logical thing to do and not the emotional one, I guess is what I’m saying.
And we have gotten progressive Democrats in FYI. We just need to add more of them in state races.
Trump’s presidency was incredibly damaging. The propaganda is incredibly damaging. It isn’t going to be easy but it’s gonna take some time.
For me, I’m considering not voting for certain Dems if they make it because they were willing to throw marginalized people under the bus. I get negotiating is negotiating, but with Biden leaving train workers out to dry, flip flopping on immigrant rights, quietly making life harder for trans athletes, and now with his support of Israel’s government and its treatment of Palestine… At some point I have to have my own boundaries about what I am willing to publicly support. I get not everyone has the same ethics as me, but I don’t know that many people who would actively go against their ethics intentionally.
Edited cause I accidentally skipped a word
As someone from Scandinavia, I’ve wondered for quite some time but been too scared to ask; How has Trump’s presidency actually damaged anything? Did he actually do anything worse than the previous presidents, except being super blunt at speeches? (Honest question, sorry if I sound like a supporter of any political party <3 )
It’s a long list, but the long lasting bit was his incompetence and failure to fully staff the government made it impossible to function properly. Note, federal government workers are located nationwide, not just the capitol. Plus with the top secret docs he stole, some of which had information on the nuclear capabilities and defenses of one of “our” (US) allies, that’s a whole other mess.
As for the consequences, that’s still panning out. Lots of fraud cases, for example. Some think Hamas was able to attack, because it was Israel’s defenses that were in the leaked secret documents, but that has not been confirmed and is just gossip.
Denying the existence of the pandemic until it was already bad here led to way more people dying than what was unavoidable.
That’s not even touching on the amount of debt he accrued, foreign policy dealings, or general behavior.
No shame in asking. Half of Americans pay no attention to voting at all, and many here would ask the same if not so emotionally intense a subject.
Thanks for a well thought out answer! It clears things up for me :)
Let’s put it this way: you have one vote against the worst popular evil by voting for the other evil. So your vote is still necessary to keep the worst one at bay.
If you don’t vote or you use your vote for any other reason, one of the two big parties is still going to fill that seat. So your power in this situation is very limited.
If you don’t want a Democrat in that office, vote Republican.
If you don’t want a Republican in that seat, vote for the Democrat candidate.
Do anything else and one of the two above will take the post.
(Some local elections in the US have been improved from FPTP so you may have better options in those.)
Devil’s advocate: if total number of votes drop enough, then maybe a third political party might step up enough because they see there is enough potential voters who aren’t voting for D or R. Or maybe it will signal to more candidates like Bernie Sanders to run under existing parties instead of the run of the mill ones.
The closest we ever got was Ross Perot, who ran a huge third-party campaign and seemed to be talking sense at the time. He even had long-running infomercials about how he planned to set the Reagan-Bush economy back on track.
You can look up the elections of 1992 and 1996 and see how that worked out.
The problem now is that a Republican president along with a Republican congress would likely be able to neuter federal elections entirely, so that you would only get Republicans in federal office. Period. If they’re feeling extra fashy they might imprison (and execute) Democratic politicians, and then criminalize left wing rhetoric the way they’re trying to criminalize drag queens. Note that George W. Bush had an both the House and Senate on his side when he came into office, hence he went far-right distressingly fast, considering his compassionate conservative campaign image.
So your vote to slow down the rise of the white Christian nationalist movement and the authoritarian takeover (led currently by SCOTUS) is more important than trying to get a third party candidate into office. Especially since your third party guy even if he’s a Jimmy Carter x 11 principled statesperson is not going to be able to get much done without cooperation from the other parties to get laws passed. And they are still beholden to corporate interests. So getting a single third party dude into office is still only a tiny step forward.
The US system is (and always was) as fucked as this sounds. Look up Professor Larry Lessig and his TED talks in which he discusses the degree of corruption of the federal government. Sadly, all the long term solutions are likely to be outpaced by the climate crisis unless the public finds a way to threaten the power and legitimacy of our officials.
Accelerationist begone
Doesn’t this fall under first ammendment rights at that point? You can’t block discussion and sharing of information online without violating the right to free speech.
Not that these fascists care…
There are no rights unless they are backed by the threat of violent revolution.
Who’s gonna save you? The Supreme Court?
The Supreme Court is supposed to recognize the dangers of carving out exceptions to civil rights. They stopped a while ago, and started cutting into those rights severely after the PATRIOT act. The dominance of Federalist Society shills on the bench only facilitated this process more.
But that’s come at a cost. Dobbs demonstrated to the public the US Supreme Court is interested in agendas outside public interest (specifically those of the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation). It’s now clearer than ever the court system is not going to protect our rights. That includes our lives and persons from law-enforcement brutality and overreach. Your fourth- and fifth-amendment protections have been gutted to insignificance. And a lot of us know that, that our framers traded constitutional monarchy for unchecked plutocracy with extra steps.
So while we fear the police and the courts, we don’t trust them. Crime no longer is synonymous with wrongdoing. Conviction no longer means guilt so much as officers torturing a confession out of someone and judges filling jury boxes with bigoted imbiciles.
Those who want actual democracy know our establishment system doesn’t give them any power, so we’re going to obey censorship laws the way we obey speed limits.
But this mean the public won’t be going to law enforcement when it comes to more nefarous criminals. Where not going to report terrorists and mobsters or even CSAM traffickers when drawing attention to ourselves could get our house raided and our kids killed, which is what we face any time we see police (unless we’re affluent and in an upper-class neighborhood.)
The rest of us have more in common with the local rec-drug supplier than we do a police officer. And the dealer won’t kill our dog.
Censor something from the internet? good luck lol
“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
That was before the internet was five big websites showing content scraped from the other four.
I would argue most of internet is already being censored… probably for good reasons.
“Good reasons” for the people in power.
In a literal level, this person is not being unreasonable. Facebook moderators and the psychological conditions they face as a result of their work are a good indication of that.
You are right, most of it is probably to keep people in power and the servants in line, but there are also a lot of situations in which we actively ask for censorship. Moderators are needed for a reason. Censorship is our only relatively effective tool to counter disinformation campaigns and fake news. Even search engines censor their results either to avoid lawsuits or to prevent certain situations, like someone asking for suicide methods is redirected to sites telling him why life is worth it.
I still understand this is a double edged sword and im not sure if the risks involved with compulsory censorship are worth losing our internet freedom, but I do understand this shit is needed on certain situations
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Now imagine if they used the law to force Google not to provide any results in a search for abortion. While it may not remove content from the Internet, it effectively removes access to it.
This shows we need an open source search engine that anybody can whip up. To all the devs and volunteers out there, please make something like this, if there’s one already, I’ll see if I can contribute to the project.
In the meantime, you can use something like ProtonVPN to make sites think you’re not in the US. Google uses your IP address to determine your location and implement regulations based on that. You get better privacy options when it thinks you’re in Europe too.
I smell onions
A 16 year old girl who wants to know what to do after getting pregnant does not
You say that but the internet of today is a far more “sanitized” place than it once was.
Lol, this is very doable and happens in the western world all the time.
Even propaganda is rampant here.
Maybe it’s not gone, but it might as well be if 98% of the population can’t find it.
Genuinely baffled that Elizabeth Warren is cosponsoring this. She’s even said she regrets sesta fosta. Lawmakers simply don’t do their due diligence when throwing their support behind a bill, and its disgusting and disheartening.
It’s pretty obvious that Elizabeth Warren is not, and likely never was any kind of hope for non-conservatives.
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This is violently anti-intellectual freedom.
Factual information doesn’t “harm children.” If your kid isn’t ready to learn about the world, it’s your job to do some parenting.
The fact that these AGs won’t be using a bill like this to remove right wing propaganda from the internet tells you this is just a censorship tool, at best.
How many children did you rise? Just asking, because you seem to know how easy it is.
LGBTQ rights activists were complaining about this already, and people didn’t listen. Using a more highly motivating issue like abortion is sadly necessary to get people to care. It could censor so many important issues, it’s a travesty it’s gotten this far.
Slowly and slowly, it feels like parents are having less and less responsibility—and therefore control—over their children’s lives. Information is not a problem—if there’s something the parent doesn’t want the kid to see it up to them to enforce that, not the government.
Its cause a lot of parents don’t want responsibility.
They want teachers and tablets and cellphones to raise the kids, not themselves.
We should be cracking down on shitty parents, not passing censorship laws that will be grossly misused by the obvious actors.
Parents need to be restricting their children’s use of the internet. I barely “used” the internet in the sense of interacting and posting until college. That’s much harder in this day now. I wasn’t even all that long ago I was in high school either. The real challenge now are phones and tablets. It’s a lot harder to control what your kids do online. All kinds of devices have web browsers.
Absolutely not. Free access to the Internet and a public library as a kid was crucial to my development. I was raised by a bunch of strict Christians who tried to stop us from reading Harry Potter, for Pete’s sake (it had witchcraft in it). I am completely against any censoring of information in the name of ‘protecting’ children from ‘harmful’ information. You know what I did as a kid when I came across something I was uncomfortable with? I put it down and found something else to read. Kids are fully capable of making that call themselves. I’m not sure why everyone acts like they can’t.
Children are not mature enough to determine what they should have access to. Your parents kept you away from blatant racism. Children should not have access to ISIS videos. That sort of thing will screw them up for life.
A parent’s job is not to shield children from life. It’s to prepare them for life. You shouldn’t try to keep them from ever falling over. You just need to be there to pick them back up afterward. The more you let them engage with the world, with your support, the more mature they will become. Maturity isn’t something you magically acquire, it’s the direct result of confronting difficult things.
Part of being responsible means preventing children from doing things that will kill them or fuck them for life. Teenagers, especially boys, have a very bad tendency to seek out shock content. Facebook moderators literally have PTSD from seeing terrorism and CSAM.
Children need to be protected from certain things and anyone who doesn’t realize that is still a petulant child because they were given common sense restrictions by their parents.
The fact that you barely used it does transfer to kids now needing the same
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Is a parent shitty if, for example, their kids see stuff on the device another kid brought to school and shows around? Or when they visit a friend and their older sibling shows the kids something?
You all sound like 20 year olds with little life experience who believe you know how parenting works, when in actuality you have 0 idea about it.
Well, I’ve parented three children, so no.
Also— there is no reality in which a parent can completely control everything a child sees / interacts with. Nor should they, that’s not a healthy growing environment. Neither is one where the government does the same. And I don’t think they would by doing this—it would be just as successful as a parent trying. Because laws prohibiting stuff doesn’t make them disappear, people would still talk about stuff, and your child would still be mildly exposed in some way.
My point was that if a parent wants to try to limit what their child sees, that’s their prerogative. I do not, however, think it’s the government’s.
I’ve been following KOSA. Bad bill.
We want to force the entire world to block information that we don’t like (says the small government club)
Good luck with that
Isn’t that what the eu just did to Twitter and Facebook over hamas?
You sure are giving the word information a broad definition there.
Firstly, the EU is not about small government, so half of the joke is lost already. Secondly, rampant misinformation vs. factual information about abortion…
But sure, it’s all the same.
Creating a censorship apparatus is dangerous, because the person who gets to decide what gets censored has lots of power, and power corrupt over time.
And what might be considered flagrant propaganda to one party, might seem just like political spin to another party.
I think we’re all better off if we let people say what they say, and then evaluate the individuals by their words, rather than by approved content. I don’t see any sustainable way of approving content that doesn’t introduce bias and censorship unduly
Do you know that everything would be factual ?
Os there anyway to guarantee it would be ?
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But we all know that intent to “save the children” isn’t good enough,
I think that is frequently overlooked when it is convenient to do so.
Welp. Guess I’m giving my senator a call today.
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I firmly believe abortion is a sin. However, I don’t see why each party is fighting so hard for it. Just leave it up to the states.
Also this is goes to show that dystopian laws aren’t political
That’s between you and your god then.
The state has nothing to do with it.
Leaving it up to the states will not be advocated for in the long term by either party because that either 1) puts half the country in a dangerous position of not having access to healthcare or 2) still keeps half the country sinning against the emotional support daddy
Also this is goes to show that dystopian laws aren’t political
The word you’re looking for is partisan. This is absolutely a political issue as it is an issue of policy. And it is partisan too; the major parties have vastly different overall views and goals on reproductive healthcare, even if there isn’t 100% agreement in each party
Don’t care about separation from church and state then?
Abortion doesn’t have anything to do with the church. In fact, there are some churchses that support it.
Abortion is a sin
Abortion doesn’t have anything to do with the church
🤔
Bad choice of words
