DU:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217203708
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/xqfgua/is_this_the_beginning_of_the_end_of_the_internet/
https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/xqo2gs/is_this_the_beginning_of_the_end_of_the_internet/
https://nitter.net/search?f=tweets&q=Is+This+the+Beginning+of+the+End+of+the+Internet%3F
Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms. YouTube purging terrorist-recruitment videos? Illegal. Twitter removing a violent cell of neo-Nazis harassing people with death threats? Sorry, that’s censorship, according to Andy Oldham, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and the former general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.
Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, who has been writing for decades about the intersection of tech policy and civil liberties, told me that the ruling is “fractally wrong”—made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.” In theory, the ruling means that any state in the Fifth Circuit (such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) could “mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content” and even implies that “the state can now compel any speech it wants on private property.” The law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against the platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint. Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, told me that such a law could amount to “a litigation DDoS [Denial of Service] attack, unleashing a wave of potentially frivolous and serious suits against the platforms.”
To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Groomercord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible. This week, to demonstrate the absurdity of the law and stress test possible Texas enforcement, the subreddit /r/PoliticalHumor mandated that every comment in the forum include the phrase “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” or be deleted. “We realized what a ripe situation this is, so we’re going to flagrantly break this law,” a moderator of the subreddit wrote. “We like this Constitution thing. Seems like it has some good ideas.”
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Ive been talking about this for over a year. Look up the term "cyber-pandemic"
Same game plan as Covid, artificial virus released in order to lockdown, except instead of physical lockdowns it will be a virtual one. How exactly that will play out is up for debate. I think they are aiming towards an non anonymous internet. Like internet access will require ID at a certain point, same way you will be required (and briefly were required) to show your vaccinated status in public spaces. This will all be rolled into one system eventually for access to public spaces and online ones
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Did you forget to take your schizo pills?
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You disagree with anything I said? How can you not see how the wind is blowing
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You're rambling on about conspiracies over internet viruses and the unironic belief that people are going to have to show id to every website they visit lol. Just because the internet is less anonymous than before doesn't mean that your delusions are any more realistic.
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It's all pretty logical Im not sure where you are getting lost. The approach they took towards covid will be similar with the upcoming "cyber pandemic"
I didnt coin this term it's already been thought of. If the internet is getting less anonymous as you just stated then it likely will get less so as time moves on. Correct?
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Hahahaha. We have a Nostradamus here. Things trending in a certain direction does not mean that they will ramp up so much that your smooth brained conspiracy theories are going to happen.
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These aren't my theories, they have already been written about by people like Schwab. It's not like I'm coming up with this out of the blue
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When it happens, I hope you're banned from the Internet, you fricking nerd.
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What's your point anyway? You know, predictions are just fart-huffing if you don't use this knowledge in any way but doomposting.
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Speak for yourself, Im making my own ISP
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Are you making it or are you mostly going around telling people you're making it?
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Dont worry about it
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It makes sense, name anything else you can anonymously do anymore.
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you can post here
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Name another website besides this one that you can use in 2022 without providing a phone number.
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twitter and reddit, for however dumb they are, don't require phone numbers
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Twitter does. I tried setting up an account last year just to follow a few actual serious journ*lists but I can't without giving up my identity.
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it doesn't for me. you could just click use email instead when i signed up
although like the reddit sign up it is a bit of a dark pattern tbf
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You can buy a phone number with cryptocurrency: crypton.sh
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or get one for free with google voice
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yes
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I regret to inform you, but google knows more about you than yourself. I highly doubt a Google voice phone number is anything close to anonymous
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you're anon to the website you're signing up for or whatever
google already knows about you anyway so who gives a shit
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You can buy a burner phone with cash for like 30 bucks.
Yeah, enough investigative work can probably trace it to you, but it’s beyond the realm of possibility for like just making funny posts to troll people/make them laugh.
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If the US government either repeals or enacts legislation that completely undermines the 1st Amendment, then they may enforce your draconian nightmare scenario (absent of many other hurdles like public backlash, politicians, etc.).
Still, they have the NSA and other agencies tapping into internet traffic, so they can track people sufficiently enough while staying in the gray area. They would rather operate in the "gray area" with its FISA courts and unbridled monitoring because it's politically easier than messing with the constitution. Since that's the case, I don't see why they'd push for "internet ID" cards and deal with all the hurdles to get there.
One major canary in the coal mine is government requiring backdoor keys to any kind of encryption, and that's basically where we're at.
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Don't they already have them?
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it’s not possible to completely ban internet communication. just the Internet would be on lockdown
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