When you read about Bans of Social Media for Teens and Age Verification, you must remember what it truly means:

• Official identification of every adult using social media.

• Deanonymization of every account, endangering groups that often rely on pseudonymity for safety, such as victims of domestic violence, victims of stalkers, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.

• Putting every adult at great danger of exploitation, fraud, and identity theft by forcing them to share their official ID with a for-profit third-party company with no incentive to protect it. Breaches have already happened.

• Constructing a system of mass surveillance to attach every comment on social media to a legal identity. Effectively allowing authoritarian governments to silence their critics and opposition.

• Potential for dystopian censorship and cutting off means of organization for groups of resistance to oppressive regime and organizations.

• Endangering children online by putting a clear identification beacon over every child or family with children online.

• Endangering the data of children who will inevitably try to pass as adults, and have their information collected by the third-party for-profit company.

• Diminishing the value of official identification due to the inevitable data breaches, eventually pushing the system to require even more intrusive identification techniques, such as iris scans and fingerprints.

• Installing a system of mass surveillance capable of attaching even more information to everyone's legal identity. With a potential to built list of people in certain groups, and scale-up state censorship and discrimination in unprecedented ways.

• The list goes on and on.

This isn't about protecting the children.
It never was.

Do not be duped by this excuse used to convince you to let go of your human rights. They are only trying to manipulate people lacking information.

Stay informed on the issues related to Age Verification, and push back for your rights to privacy and democracy.

The future depends on us.

#AgeVerification #Privacy #HumanRights #MassSurveillance #Authoritarianism

as some of you know, I was raised in a fundamentalist proto-maga environment, and so I have extensive first hand experience with cognitive dissonance and cult tactics

I wanted to point out that if someone wildly disagrees with you: they’re not lying. No matter how stupid or obviously wrong you think their take is, they’re not lying to you about what they believe; almost no-one does that.

To be clear, I’m not talking about national politicians or billionaires or obvious influence campaign bots. I’m talking about real, normal people that you know perfectly well are real, normal people but their take is so ridiculous or extreme to you that you feel tempted to conclude they’re lying.

There are real, actual reasons they believe those things and real, actual reasons they feel the need to tell you about it. If you can’t engage with that, you’ve not only already lost any chance of convincing them, but you’re setting yourself up to believe patently untrue things yourself, because you have taught yourself to shut down contrary thoughts with “they’re lying.”

accepting that the people I was told were agents of Satan *weren’t lying about their beliefs just to hurt me* is a big part of how I got out of fundamentalism.

Brutal.

When Microsoft acquired GitHub.

Saw an article about this that linked to a video on another platform. I don't love posting content from elsewhere, but I will make exceptions....

Most autistic people, despite everything, actually like being autistic.

Not all, of course. But most of us.
And I don’t just mean ‘making peace with it’.

I mean: it's bound up with who we are.

A thread 🧵

1/11

(refs at the end)
#Autism #ActuallyAutistic #Neurodivergent

Good news for our trans friends:

The European Court of Justice on Thursday ruled that European Union nations must provide transgender citizens with identification documents reflecting their "lived gender" rather than their gender at birth.

To translate this for non-EU people, it's the equivalent of the US supreme court (the ECJ here) ruling that states (the EU Member States here) must respect people's gender choices.

Source: https://www.euractiv.com/news/gender-changes-must-be-recognised-across-borders-eu-top-court-rules/

So yeah, bottom line: I will not tolerate this identity verification bullshit on any platform.

I will not allow my absence from said platforms to dictate my ability to participate in public life.

And I will build spaces that respect and empower my neighbors.

It’s going to be inconvenient, but it’s also punk as hell, and the right thing to do.

Finally, to the authoritarian pricks trying to destroy my home, online and off; fuck you, I hope you choke.

As age-verification bullshit becomes more common, I am determined to simply not participate in any service or video game that requires it. The day I see the prompt, is the day I leave.

Maybe the government’s hope is that I stop participating in society, but I assure you that I will not. I’ll find or build alternatives, and refuse to comply with bad law.

I hope you will, too.

And as a silver lining, maybe the weird internet we end up creating as a result will suck less than the current one.

#Heliboard is gathering gesture typing data, so that we can implement a #FOSS alternative to the closed gesture typing library Heliboard currently relies on. The data we collect will be released under the CC BY-SA 4.0

I also made a video including details & instructions.

Boosts Please! The greater the diversity of people & languages in the data, the better we can test for correctness.

PT: https://makertube.net/w/cQECfDkuLGR9eUQquUEo4K

YT: https://youtu.be/CyjumVTWtJA

Text (instructions only):
https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard/wiki/Tutorial:-How-to-Contribute-Gesture-Data

Call to action to cis people: be assholes anytime you get asked for your sex assigned at birth. Write letters, complain to staff, refuse to answer. Make it impossible to collect sex assigned at birth. Be really offended that anyone would ask you. Make enough noise that if trans people want to quietly not answer or give whatever answer feels correct to them, no one will notice.

#Boost #CallToAction

Here's to all the kids who were born with non-default settings; to all you who put the effort in to figure yourselves out.

You're amazing and deserve to be celebrated.

I'm glad you're here 💝

Onleihe 3.0 startet schon mal amazing. Nicht.

re @claudeai

I've identified industrial-scale copyright violations on my content by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, X, and more.

These companies created thousands of crawlers incorporating the text of all my blog posts, open source code, and books into their paid AI models to profit exorbitantly.

So, nun kann ich es ja ganz offiziell machen, und in die Welt hinausposaunen.

Das freundliche #LMAA 😁 - aka "Liste Möglicher #Amazon #Alternativen" - ist nun erwachsen geworden!

Kein nerdiges Git-Repo mehr, mit dem ich das Gros der Menschys vom Mitmachen ausschließe.

Ich hoffe euch gefällt es und ihr seht einen Nutzen für euch darin. Natürlich freue ich mich über euer Feedback sowie konstruktive Kritik. Findet ihr Fehler, dann meldet sie mir.

Ansonsten teilt, shared, boosted was das Zeugs hält. Alle Peeps sollen davon erfahren. 😀

#DIT #DUT

https://lmaa.space