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The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse (US focused) (buttondown.email)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

264 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Charlie Jane Anders discusses KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act).

If you're in the US, https://www.stopkosa.com/ makes it easy to contact your Senators and ask them to oppose KOSA.

"A new bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is sailing towards passage in the Senate with bipartisa>n support. Among other things, this bill would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue Internet platforms if they allow any content that is deemed harmful to minors. This clause is so vaguely defined that attorneys general can absolutely claim that queer content violates it — and they don't even need to win these lawsuits in order to prevail. They might not even need to file a lawsuit, in fact. The mere threat of an expensive, grueling legal battle will be enough to make almost every Internet platform begin to scrub anything related to queer people.

The right wing Heritage Foundation has already stated publicly that the GOP will use this provision to remove any discussions of trans or queer lives from the Internet. They're salivating over the prospect.

And yep, I did say this bill has bipartisan support. Many Democrats have already signed on as co-sponsors. And President Joe Biden has urged lawmakers to pass this bill in the strongest possible terms."

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There is a lot here I agree with. I've seen stuff from this channel before and it's pretty good. Human rights are somewhat arbitrary, and are influenced by what makes a convenient compromise between power interests. However I don't think that necessarily contradicts what I am saying, because what I am arguing against is not the rejection of civil rights as a concept, but the catastrophe that would come from the dismantlement of this particular one in this particular way given the context of our present society.

From the video:

Let me be clear here: I'm not saying that all these problems will be fixed if we simply stop adhering to the doctrine of human rights. Human rights are an outcome. A symptom of a specific social and political configuration, and you don't fight the symptom, you fight the disease. If we recognize the problem with human rights, it is the social and political configuration that produces them that we have to change. So long as we live under capitalism and the liberal political paradigm, rights are absolutely necessary.

So, what would need to be done in order to establish a society that no longer produces or depends on the ideology of human rights? It would have to be a society in which the significance of community has been restored.

So removing rights is not by itself a solution, and can do harm. We do not exist in a society where the fabric holding it together is "significance of community". The spirit of discourse I see from authoritarians is very far from suggesting a way to reorder our world around "significance of community". Rather on all sides it seems to be rage manifesting as a desire to silence and dominate their enemies, with the consequences only an afterthought, that can or should not be seriously considered. Even while claiming mutual hatred, they pursue this shared objective together, and things like this bill show that they aren't even very committed to hiding it. The reasons why the success of one means the success of the other in this case are obvious; the loss of the right of Free Speech in this context means the empowerment of people who want to use censorship as a weapon, and weapons don't discriminate.