Lawmakers across the country (United States) are trying to protect kids by age-gating parts of the internet.
Everytime i see a bill that includes “child safety” in the title, i know it’s just going to be another attempt at turning the internet into a garden walled, big corpo controlled shithole, with the glowies being able to read any and all messages, and encryption being illegal.
An internet devoid of unacceptable “deviations” from gender and sexuality too. Given the effort to erase trans and gay people from public spaces, this seems like a parallel effort to destroy their digital ones too.
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Not just any rant, a blatantly discriminatory one!
You DO see the contradiction where you claim to not care about somebody’s sexuality, yet get offended when you hear about it, right? And what’s worse, you don’t just get offended, but you turn around and directly insult those people by insisting they have a mental illness!
What you’re really saying is that you’re so offended by someone else’s harmless actions that you wish they would disappear.
Eh, I think you’re missing their point. This is one of those “Why do you get to claim you’re special, but nobody is telling me I’M special?” kind of comments. They’re saying they just want people to suck as much as anyone else and it all be equal. It’s a stupid argument, but definitely different than your interpretation and response.
Not really harmless tho, i’ve seen countless places turn into a trans circlejerk.
As for the “caring” part, i don’t care whatever you are, just don’t mention it. I don’t need to hear “im trans” every second, or it being mentioned in every message, or your name, your blog etc etc
Please elaborate, how exactly are you harmed by a trans circlejerk?
Someone tugged too hard 😥
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I want to hear it.
And it’s a discussion community, there’s a topic and people respond. If you don’t like it just move on. No reason to tell anyone to shut up.
Eh, in general i agree with you, but i think in this case it could be considered as “ironic”. Like someone complains “I’m tired of hearing about trans in public spaces, pls keep it for yourself, we dont care”, and someone replies “Im’ tired of hearing complaints about trans in public spaces, pls keep it for yourself, we dont care”. I think we all agree that the argument is not really good in any case, but as the second one was a reply, maybe we can see it as an application of first comment’s logic to itself.
Help my fragile gender identity is being harmed by the trans agenda
It was probably unproductive of me to try to talk about it further with them, and I really wanted to sign off with “btw I’m nonbinary” on every reply I made
Not really harmless tho, i’ve seen countless places turn into a trans circlejerk.
What exactly would that even be? “hnghh, we respect other people’s choices and individuality, hngggh” How awful. All we want is to have the same respect and autonomy granted to straight and/or cis people to be granted to us.
As for the “caring” part, I don’t care whatever you are, just don’t mention it.
And that’s harmful because unless you truly are consistent and also don’t want men to mention their girlfriends or wives and for women to never mention their boyfriends or husbands around you, you’re treating people differently based on their gender or sexuality, allowing someone to talk about their home life, what they may have done over the weekend with their partner, but only if it ain’t gay or trans.
Literally the entire point of pronouns is defeated if people don’t know what pronouns a person uses (and this applies to more than just trans people too), so there is some use for people that put them in their name.
Beyond that though, even if there’s no need to say or publicly display something, that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t say it, and it definitely doesn’t mean one should be forbidden from saying it. There’s no need for people to tell me about their hobbies, or wear t-shirts or put up bumper stickers with messages on them, or put up religious symbols everywhere. Perhaps I’m tired of seeing messaging for political candidates I don’t like, and wish they’d keep their preferences to themselves, or perhaps I don’t care if people are married, they could just keep it between themselves rather than wear some rings to tell the world about it. But you know what? If I were to support making it illegal to say and show and wear an express such things, especially on the internet where the stakes are even lower, I’d be closer to the leader of something like the Taliban or North Korea, than to a good citizen of a democracy.
Even if you think saying/displaying/supporting something is “attention seeking”, well, people have a right to do that. To try to restrict that would be to restrict the right to free speech itself, because you cannot communicate with someone without first getting their attention.
True that, but i never said it should be forbidden, i just said i’d prefer if it would be
You seem like a pretty solid poster except for this one pretty bad take. Don’t let dramatic internet discourse and a few attention grabbing media personalities or allies shape your viewpoint for an entire group.
I know you probably already know this but I don’t want good posters leaving Lemmy because of silly disagreements or pet peeves. There are annoying people pushing toxic discourse on any issue. Generally people will live and let live if you don’t personally attack them. Someone specifying their pronouns isn’t attention seeking behavior (usually) it’s just a courtesy. Your comment is just begging for the kind of responses that will require you to give people the kind of attention you claim to hate giving them.
Nah if people with crappy beliefs are posting content everywhere, that’s just more avenues for those bad beliefs to seep out. I’d rather Lemmy loses contributors with those types of bad takes instead of groveling for content like there isn’t enough already.
I agree, but I don’t think that’s this person. I also poked around their post and comments and I didn’t get the feeling they were some rabid Proud Boy or whatever, and I would rather try to engage with people like Hurglet before the actual right-wing does.
I agree to some extent and think that defederation of instances that promote harmful viewpoints such as explodingheads and their users. For others I’d rather promote good behavior rather than engaging with them with a hostile attitude and let attitudes change organically. OP doesn’t exactly fit the bill of a proud boy but has one bad take. If someone wants to block him I understand but I’d rather change his mind
Personally, i am all in for that.
I really don’t think you are, because most people don’t realize how broad things will get. While right now, the targets are trans and gay people, people who write and pass these sorts of laws don’t want to stop there. When I said “deviations”, I wasn’t just speaking about ‘us queers’, but also about men with long hair, women with flat chests, literally anyone who doesn’t mould themselves into the right wing’s view of “Man” and “Woman”. I don’t think you want the colour of your shirts policed, or for cops to come in and throw a woman out of the restroom because she wasn’t “feminine” enough to someone.
I really don’t give 2 shits if you’re trans or gay or whatever. Just keep it in front of you. No need to put your pronouns in your name, or put a trans flag everywhere.
If you don’t care, then why does it bother you so much to see them merely existing in public or online?
I’d like to suggest that you ignore pronouns or pride flags since they clearly don’t appeal to you, but like many things in life, what doesn’t matter to you might matter to one of the other 7 billion or so human beings on the planet with you, and putting the pronouns in the bio or displaying a pride flag actively communicates safety and creates a welcoming atmosphere, while also helping us find like-minded people and make friendships.
can cis people put pronouns in their name
Hopefully nothing stopping you, and it can avoid some awkward situations. My company forbids us from including them in our email signature block, and there’s been some confusion due to people assuming I’m a woman and using she/her pronouns to refer to me. Even as a cis white guy, I wish my company let us add preferred pronouns to avoid dumb little situations like that.
I’m sorry to put you on a spotlight, but your situation is precisely what I was thinking about when I made my comment. Not queer or some woke SJW warrior. You’re just a person trying to live his life, and I have to imagine that a State Law banning you from putting them in anything official or public would be similarly frustrating.
But the thing is, you’re just collateral damage at best to the GOP, and speaking from experience, at worst the target of ire simply for creating such confusion in other people for merely having an ambiguous name, I assume.
Sounds like you need to find a new employer. That is a toxic and discriminatory policy that exists exclusively for one reason: because the executives are raging bigots.
IDK, if she lives in one of these authoritarian right wing regimes in the US, the company might not have a choice.
Obviously just adding pronouns would be better, but can you add “Mr.” at the beginning of your name in your signature?
Yes, and it’s actually appreciated by many trans and nonbinary people, because it normalises the concept.
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I get downvoted a lot too. But after reading this, I think the downvote buttons might actually mean you’re right, because there are a lot of retards on lemmy who drool their way through life and have no idea what they’re talking about.
Because you’re right. I can tell by the downvotes. The more you get, the fighter you are
Wtf is this argument ? Are you at the same time validating “Ugh trans people are attention seeker, they think they deserve it because people hate on them” and “Hey look at us, we are the heroes of this story because people on internet disagree with us” ? I know i already replied to your other comments, but it’s funny it’s the same in both case : you just do what you criticize other people for supposedly doing
Strange, it’s displaying as if I replied to a different comment than I intended to.
But really, I’m just mocking people who downvote others because they don’t agree with their comment. I think it’s really lame.
I’d like a place to talk to people, about contentious issues. I personally never use the downvote button and only occasionally even use the upvote button.
When I see a perfectly reasonable comment with -50 downvotes within minutes of posting … it makes me laugh at everyone who just can’t hit that downvote button fast enough.
So I’m really just mocking those people
Just because your opinion is different from the mainstream doesn’t mean you’re cool and unique, it might just mean you’re a dumb cunt
Tech bros and communist teenagers aren’t ‘mainstream’.
Don’t believe everything you read on social media
When I see a perfectly reasonable comment with -50 downvotes within minutes of posting … it makes me laugh at everyone who just can’t hit that downvote button fast enough.
I think it’s safe to assume that those 50 people who downvoted that comment thought it actually wasn’t perfectly reasonable
Sure, but they’re children
they’re all in for discrimination against trans and gay people
You spend too much time online.
I mean, you mocked them using the exact reasoning you criticize them for, like “making a show of being hated -> attention seeker”. But ok, let’s forget about that. You may consider that you are actually mocking communities that are the target of true violence, not just downvotes. Like they get hurt, killed, harassed, even by administrations and systems ? Maybe that’s the reason for your downvotes. And did you realized that this is really the main use of downvotes ? Just a quick way to react. If you agree/like, upvote. If you do not agree/dislike, downvote. It’s very simple really. Either you don’t get that, either you are mocking people for using tools the way they were intended to. Both ways seem dumb to me. If you want a place that do not allows this quick reactions that are up/downvotes, well maybe switch for other platforms that are not designed around it ?
I don’t subscribe to the idea that tweets or message boards or ideas or ‘silence’ is violence.
The upvote system was invented to put relevant discussion to the top, and hide irrelevant discussion. What people have done with it is use it as a like/dislike button.
If that’s what it was, that’s what it would be called. Like Facebook, which has an actual ‘like’ button
But I do think people who even interact with the system are losers. That’s my personal, anecdotal, opinion of them
These laws aren’t about children, that’s just a talking point to sell laws that tame the potential anonymity of the internet for private profit.
If American society gave the slightest shit at all about our children, we wouldn’t have literally starved our K-12 system into utter ruin for over half a century to cut the taxes of the corporations and already rich assholes killing the planet and those children’s future on it for private profit. We wouldn’t then say selling public education to for profit industry in the form of charter schools is a solution.
The United States doesn’t give a shit about its children. Not one tiny bit. Now our beloved economy? We’d throw all our (non-wealthy) kids into a fucking volcano if Wall Street told us it would protect that.
Not to mention, do people really believe that people shouldn’t be allowed to see sexual content until they’re 18? I started looking up titties when I was eleven, and as I understood it, the generation before mine either inherited or stole porn mags and tapes from older brothers/dads or got somebody to buy some for them. Given how useless sex ed was on the actual sex aspect of things, how are teenagers supposed to figure out anything besides anatomical structures?
The fundamental premise just seems weird to me, why are we trying to hide away pornography like it’s this shameful corruptive thing? I maybe knew a handful of weird kids that listened to the 18 year old restriction (all on extremely religious grounds), so the idea of actually trying to enforce it seems kinda crazy. I don’t know, it just reeks of the idea that masturbation is a sin, but everyone’s so uncomfortable with the notion of teenagers + anything sexual that nobody wants to touch it.
I just feel like the next couple generations are gonna be weird with the tug of war between book bannings, LGBTQ+ bannings, religion in schools/out of them, and all the other proxy wars being fought using schools as the battle ground. Not to mention all the shootings.
These laws are dangerous, kids are going to sneak a peek at adult things and when they do going to pornhub is far safer than having to avoid strong filters by joining a private discord group full of creepy old guys.
Honestly these laws are a groomers dream, keeping kids naive and then funnelling them in to poorly moderated or purposely immoral porn sharing communities creates actual dangers which aren’t present when a teenager sees some videos from the front page of pornhub.
What we actually need to do it have real conversations about things
For that to happen people would have to agree with the basic fact that “teenagers wanting to watch porn is normal”, which generally doesn’t go well. But ultimately it’s such a touchy topic that the people honestly wishing to protect their children cannot even do it effectively. Some don’t know how to handle it, many just ignore the matter altogether.
Then we end up with these moral panic-driven measures that at best help no one, or, more cynically, enable the erosion of people’s rights and unjustified persecution.
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What nooo you’re supposed to hate trans people enough to sacrifice personal freedoms and liberty!
I love how this “sticking it to big tech” is also funded by big tech. The general goal of someone like Facebook with this legislation is pass a bunch of rules that only large companies like them can comply with, and watch mastodon instances and other attempts to detrown them end in FBI raids and more regulations.
Not to mention none of this will actually protect children. When I was 14 I told an adult online about my life and they helped me make it through some rougher periods until I got to 18. I know the internet is highly imperfect but I think gate keeping kids out of it will just lead to more underground abuse and abuse that they don’t find was abuse until they are adults.
The people who wrote this bill want people like you to suffer
Exactly, they don’t view children as people, they view them as objects and extensions of their parents/guardians.
and that’s really the root of the issue, isn’t it?
Yes, I remember how it went when I was a kid. Internet probably is the only reason why I’m not joining army of warmongerers or died in Ukraine.
To be fair it seems some adults need to be protected from some kids, but it is their adult problem.
Think of all the extra info we can sell if we card everyone!
There is no Porn Big Tech big enough to be able to afford this legislation. From the article:
As recently as May, only a quarter of people trying to access Ford’s site even clicked the link to verify their age and only 9 percent of those users completed the process. Ford said it costs his company around $1.50 per person to verify their age, and there’s no promise that those who follow through will buy anything. Pornhub’s response has been far more aggressive, blocking all traffic from some of these restrictive states rather than paying the extra cost.
Remember it is part of the GOP’s published plan for 2024 and beyond to ban pornography.
Bourgeois governments gonna bourgeois
These laws are made by bad parents or those that want to control someone else’s children. It’s so easy to just talk to your kids about the dangers of the internet and to put on parental controls on all devices.
Honestly, I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s more by people who want to virtue signal. They get to talk about how they’re “protecting the children” and their opponents (if they dare to oppose it) “don’t want to protect the children.” I don’t believe many of them are doing it out of an actual desire to protect children, even a misguided one.
Oh that’s definitely part of it. I also think this is an attempt to scrub the internet of any mention of women freedoms, contraception, abortion, LGBTQ+, etc.
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Also, it’s never ACTUALLY about parental rights and protecting children. Plenty of parents want their kids to grow up believing that there is nothing inherently sexual about a naked body, or about women, but their perspective and rights never seem to be considered.
Think about how the reactionaries in control of many US states banned Drag Queen story hours and the like from libraries and schools, saying that it should be up to parents if they want their kids to go to them, only to then classify all drag shows as obscene and restricted to 18+.
UK “children” are just future UK “people” so how can they be cool?
The Scots and Welsh are included and theyre pretty cool.
Honestly man as a dad of 3, this applies to the children too.
I love them, but they are indeed
Fucking idiotic, thick as two short planks bunch of pricks, the lot of them. Cunts.
sounds like some fascist culture war garbage that was never meant to protect children from anything because it doesn’t
Spoiler Alert: It’s not about protecting children, it’s about the GOP keeping the gays off of the internet
This starts with some ambiguous “protecting the children” from porn argument to eventually requiring everyone to be “verified” with a digital ID before they can set foot on a highly controlled internet (or worse). We’re already seeing increasing glimpses of this and it’s in the government’s and big tech’s interest.
I’m so tired of the constant barrage of shit from all directions. This isn’t the beautiful future of humanity I imagined as a kid. No one will look out for us except for us, the actual people that these out of touch rich and powerful high society clowns try to control and keep occupied with stupid culture wars amongst each other, or placate with bread and circus. Enough already ffs.
Pretty sure that’s already the case in South Korea, having to use your real identity online in certain cases. We can’t let it expand worldwide.
China too. Everything is tied to your phone number
I haven’t read the article but I assume it’s an invasion af privacy under the guise of “protecting the children” as usual
It’s part of the GOP trying to ban porn. They know they can’t ban it due to the 1st amendment, so they’re making porn unprofitable for distributors.
Google has recently started telling me that they don’t know if I am >18. But I have been using Google for way more than 20 years.
So, Google is incapable of counting to 18? :-)
Maybe they think your parents made this account for you before you were born
If they did that should still be allowed. Despite the fact that I know it’s not allowed and against their TOS.
Humanity never changes. Teenage me found the entire idea that I might need “protection from harmful content on the Internet” ridiculous. Now I have been an adult for more than ten years, I still find it ridiculous that people younger than me might need that.
I just think that people should be given access to comprehensive sex ed early enough in life that it’s before they end up viewing something like pornography through their own actions.
It will be interesting to see the politicians responses when their porn accounts are hacked and they all have to explain why their ID is associated with profiles that frequent tranny incest porn
Please don’t use the t word, it’s generally considered a slur.
What is the current PC word?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It does seem like a very clear backlash to not just tech, but to any sort of movement towards allowing young people to make their own decisions based on the information that they can access,” Jason Kelley, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said in an interview earlier this month.
France has proposed similar age verification restrictions on porn in the past, leading its data protection agency, CNIL, to investigate the security of current services on the market, determining that many were “intrusive” and for new, safer models to be developed.
Over the last few years, more than a dozen states, including many that have implemented age verification bills, have passed resolutions identifying porn as a “public health crisis,” arguing that it encourages violence despite little research backing these claims.
“I think progressives had the idea that they wanted to regulate Big Tech without fully appreciating the degree to which they were playing with fire,” Evan Greer, Fight for the Future director, said in an interview with The Verge earlier this month.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued to unravel the language related to pornography and ultimately won in 1997 after the Supreme Court decided that banning the material would infringe on the First Amendment rights of adults.
Without more pushback, age verification bills, just like the ongoing book bans taking place in schools, will continue to fuel the right’s censorship fire all at the expense of speech protected by the First Amendment.
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