WATCH NOW: The Senate Commerce Committee is about to mark up #KOSA, the "Kids Online Safety Act"

You can watch the livestream AND take action at the same time here: badinternetbills.com/#livestream Lol at @SenatorCantwell who apparently doesn't even know what bill they are voting on today. She called it the "Kids Online Privacy Act," which is extra ironic since this bill will take away kids privacy rather than enhancing it.

While politicians are racing ahead with proposals based on the premise that simply encountering content on social media is causing ... harms, the APA notes that the actual research is far less conclusive and far more nuanced than lawmakers’ rhetoric washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/… In this new report, the APA also specifically note that there is a significant lack of research on how young people from marginalized communities (like Black and brown kids and LGBTQ kids) experience social media and associated benefits and harms.

URGENT: We've just heard that @SenBlumenthal and @MarshaBlackburn plan to reintroduce the controversial Kids Online Safety Act (#KOSA) tomorrow.

They will say that they've engaged with LGBTQ groups (true) and addressed all concerns with the bill (NOT TRUE!!!)

Here's what's up: When #KOSA was first introduced more than 100 human rights and LGBTQ organizations signed on to a letter that we organized explaining how this bill would be a disaster for LGBTQ rights, free expression, and kids safety. cnbc.com/2022/11/28/kid…

Has anyone done a deep dive on the privacy and security implications of Netflix fingerprinting your home WiFi Network and essentially creating a record of when you are home or not … just to crack down on password sharing? Oops, I was like genuinely asking not trying to do numbers but here we are. A reporter reached out to me about my thoughts on this and I'm still formulating but here's what I've got:

weird to me how many organizations that say they want to "rid the Internet of disinformation" never seem to say anything about the fact that police routinely lie as a matter of practice, and that crime rates and statistics in the US are essentially a giant disinfo campaign 🤔 it's just funny to me that an entire industry has formed around the idea that people lying on the Internet is the greatest threat that our society faces, but it willfully refuses to call out the biggest source of lies because it's looking to those same systems to stop the lies

Oh. my. god.

Madison Square Garden used facial recognition to identify and stop a mom from attending a Christmas show with her kid because she's an attorney at a firm who is engaged in litigation with them.

Ban this shit yesterday.

nbcnewyork.com/news/msgs-faci… This is exactly why it is NOT ENOUGH to just ban government and law enforcement use of facial recognition and biometric surveillance. There are so many ways private corporations and even individuals can abuse this tech. It should be banned for all commercial use & public use.

Hark! Today I am releasing an 4 song EP of Christmas songs. I wrote the music, but the lyrics were generated by #ChatGPT.

I love it and I hate it. Maybe you will too. All proceeds go to @fightfortheftr supporting our work fighting against the AI dystopia
evangreer.bandcamp.com/album/automate… The EP is titled "Automated Christmas Joy,"

The lyrics came from these 4 prompts:

1. Write a Christmas song in the style of Blink-182
2. Write a song called "Christmas at the Gay Bar"
3. Write a song where Santa fights the fascists
4. Write a Christmas song set in Boston

I honestly need to talk to my therapist about why I did this, but…

I gave ChatGPT prompts like

“Write a Christmas song in the style of Blink 182”

“Write a song where Santa fights the fascists”

Then I wrote and recorded music for the songs

🤶 EP coming tomorrow. I’m sorry I am genuinely thrilled with how this weird project came out and terrified about the implications of AI for art, music, human rights, and the world. This project will only be available on Bandcamp & it will be a benefit for @fightfortheftr’s work to strictly regulate unethical AI

THREAD: There has been a fair amount of discussion about how, even with the changes, the #KidsOnlineSafetyAct (or #KOSA) would be weaponized against LGBTQ+ folks & especially queer and trans youth.

But there's another huge problem with the bill: it would censor abortion content. #KOSA creates a broad "Duty of Care" for tech companies that goes way beyond dictating what kinds of privacy or security they need to have in place and gets the government involved in dictating what kinds of content they can allow or recommend to minors.

THREAD: There is a new version of the Kids Online Safety Act (#KOSA).

The bill's sponsors are claiming that these changes address the concerns raised by more than 100 human rights and LGBTQ+ organizations.

They do not. We still oppose #KOSA and it should not be in the #omnibus. We appreciate that #KOSA's sponsors made changes that attempt to address some of the concerns that we raised in this letter: fightforthefuture.org/news/2022-11-2…

But the new version of the bill still poses a significant threat to LGBTQ rights, abortion access, privacy, and free expression.

just gonna say it: I'm seeing a lot of trans people on here showing solidarity with @nytimes staff and ... jeez it would be really nice if they could return the favor Workers don't need to be perfect to deserve our solidarity. I'm never gonna not support striking workers. But would love to see some of this collective leverage be used to push back on the tranphobia, imperialism, and racism that the NYT peddles on the daily

Okay despite being a tech policy "expert" I am actually not very tech savvy. I was pretty confused when I first started getting myself set up on #mastodon, but i figured it out pretty quickly (with some help from friends!) and you can too. Here's the steps I took if helpful🧵 First, our brains our so trained to think of social media in a centralized way, so some of the terminology around #Mastodon can feel a little confusing. But really it's pretty simple. Think of it like email. Choose an address on a provider (server) you trust, or host your own

🧵Okay it's #ElectionDay (go vote! voting is a valid harm reduction strategy.)

I know this birdsite is going to hell in a handbasket, but while we're all still here, I put together a THREAD on what the midterms will likely mean for tech policy fights that impact human rights. This is going to be a bit of a ruthless analysis of how I see the election results impacting hot button tech policy issues like Section 230, content moderation, privacy legislation, the FTC and FCC, antitrust and Big Tech accountability, etc.

Honestly mad respect to @elonmusk for making the new Twitter TOS so much more transparent, clearly readable, and easy to understand I was really skeptical of his leadership but if it's gonna be straightforward and transparent like this then I'm feeling a lot more optimistic time.com/6228045/elon-m…

not today, satan nightmare shit

I can't believe this is actually a thing I have to tweet, but the @TrevorProject, who are supposed to help queer and trans kids, have signed school surveillance software company Gaggle (notorious for outing LGBTQ+ children to school administrators) up to be a corporate partner.

https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1554803282907987969

What. The. Actual. Fuck? @TrevorProject you need to immediately cut ties with Gaggle, and apologize to the queer and trans youth who you are supposed to serve. Boosting school surveillance is the OPPOSITE of what any organization supporting LGBTQ+ youth should be doing right now

Hi, I'm director of @fightfortheftr, a working musician, & helped organize this letter along with my colleague @liaholland (also a writer and longtime music industry worker.) You may disagree with us & the 300+ authors who signed but calling us "tech astroturf" is an absurd lie

https://twitter.com/jkdegen/status/1575241776742424582

Do a quick news search for "Fight for the Future." We are literally leading the fight against Big Tech monopoly power and abuse. We've helped organize some of the largest efforts in support of antitrust and privacy. We are actively fighting AGAINST actual "tech astroturf" groups.

Huge yikes in this story about school surveillance: schools sent teens home with chrome books pre-loaded with Gaggle spyware. Teens plugged their phones into their laptops to charge them. Gaggle sent administrators alerts when teens texted each other nudes wired.com/story/student-… Teens were texting on their phones assuming the conversations were private. Meanwhile their school was monitoring everything they were doing on their personal devices. Instead of uninstalling the dangerous spyware, the school told kids to stop charging their phones off laptops 🤦‍♀️

This is why protection Section 230 is life or death post Roe:

"The National Right to Life Committee is lobbying states to enact legislation it’s drafted that would make it a crime to advertise information about abortion pills or other methods of ending a pregnancy." Warned in this @Wired op-ed about this exact thing. Section 230 provides immunity for state criminal law (not Federal). Weakening 230 would mean that the legislatures of states like Mississippi & Alabama get to dictate online speech rules for the Internet.
wired.com/story/section-…

wow. this is the actual page where cops can go to request Ring camera footage from Amazon without a warrant or the camera owner's consent. it has a big "submit emergency request" button. when you click that button it takes you to a form. it's so clear how easily abused this is chilling. source: theverge.com/2022/7/14/2321…

re: Corporate Publishers suing the @internetarchive one of the scariest aspects of this is that they desperately want to turn libraries into Spotify / Netflix, where you have a subscription and everything is licensed.

this would be a disaster for privacy and free expression Libraries have a long history of resisting government surveillance. In the wake of the Patriot Act, librarians spoke out saying they would refuse to comply with government demands to know what books people have been checking out.

But if libraries become Spotify, we're screwed.