Did that come from the Patriot Act? 
Following Meta’s refusal to fund the educational programmes, the Rohingya youth groups behind the request decided to initiate a complaint against the company under the OECD Guidelines via the Irish National Contact Point (NCP). The complaint was transferred to the US NCP in June 2022. As of August 2022, the complaint remained under consideration. In addition to seeking funding for educational programmes, the complaint also asks that Meta “[a]djust its business model through the lens of equity, human rights, and compassion”
– Amnesty International
Show me the money!
nope. plain old scotus making shitty rulings.
That’s where I was headed too.
Why stop at online? Enough with these pesky TV shows! “Why has this been allowed?”
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So, yes, the facts have indeed changed here in the United States and around the world. Fascism these days is no longer a hypothetical in an academic debate about freedom of the press.
He’s right there. I never thought I’d see such an open, even begging invitation to fascism in the American press.
Don’t these lunatics realize their favored apparatchiks won’t always be in charge?
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Jesus. I had no idea.
NEW YORK, N.Y., Feb. 15, 2023 — On Tuesday, a federal court halted enforcement of a misguided New York law that forces websites and apps to address online speech that someone, somewhere, finds humiliating or vilifying. The court ruling means that New York cannot legally force blogs and other internet platforms to adopt its preferred definition of hate speech or be drafted into New York’s “speech police.”
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New York’s online hate speech law was passed after last May’s tragic mass shooting by a white supremacist at a supermarket in Buffalo. FIRE argued that the law compelled all manner of websites — from blogs to social media platforms — to parrot the state’s message. It also chilled online discourse, stifling the constitutionally protected speech of platforms and users alike.
This bugs me. Ad hoc heat of the moment legislation is a waste of time, and god forbid some of it stick.
The New York law ensnared bloggers, commenters, websites, and apps around the country due to its broad definition of “social media networks” as for-profit “service providers” that “enable users to share any content.” This vague wording meant the law could impact virtually any revenue-generating website that allows comments or posts and is accessible to New Yorkers.
And there’s nothing NY does better than separating one from one’s money.
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More coming from Taibbi
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Donald Trump may indeed be a dangerous lunatic, or simply a crackpot — but the attempt to “secure” the US information environment from his supposedly malign influence has proven to be far more destructive than anything Trump actually did as President. As our brains were turned into battlefields by political operatives and government bureaucrats, using their power over private companies to manipulate and censor information in the service of what they regarded to be publicly beneficial falsehoods, it is hardly surprising that public confidence in the American press has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded. Only 16% of American adults in a recent Gallup poll expressed “a great deal” of confidence in the information they receive from newspapers, with 11% expressing similar levels of confidence in what they see on television. Among Republicans, the number expressing confidence in newspapers is 5%. This decline in confidence has no parallel in any other Western country. Americans, it turned out, were no more susceptible to domestic information operations than Muslims were in the Middle East two decades earlier.
Now America, just like Afghanistan and Iraq, must face the challenge of how to govern a country in which trust has been comprehensively shattered, and all that is left is a landscape of endless information operations run by warring tribes who define their opponents as “insurrectionists” and “terrorists”. None of these efforts to define reality seem likely to do much to promote social peace in the US, any more than they succeeded in bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East. Twenty years later, it would appear that bin Laden’s paradoxical understanding of asymmetric warfare was right: the most powerful weapon against the West is the West.
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An excellent article which covers the evolution of online censorship and information warfare as it has evolved over the past couple of decades.
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Just about to post that…
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I think JD did a few days ago!
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I missed that, but many threads it would have been suitable for.
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Some things cross over.