Hey all, this is BáiYù and Sauce here with something that isn't necessarily SnaccPop related, but it's important nonetheless. For those of you who follow US politics, The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate yesterday and is moving forward.
This is bad news for everyone on the internet, even outside of the USA.
While it's officially known as "The Kids Online Safety Act," KOSA is an internet censorship masquerading as another "protect the children" bill, much in the same way SESTA/FOSTA claimed that it would stop illegal sex trafficking but instead hurt sex workers and their safety. KOSA was originally introduced by Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass. and Bill Cassidy, R-La. as a way to update the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Act, raising the age of consent for data collection to 16 among other things. You can read the original press release of KOSA here, while you can read the full updated text of the bill on the official USA Congress website.
You can read the following articles about KOSA here:
EFF: The Kids Online Safety Act is Still A Huge Danger to Our Rights Online
CyberScoop: Children’s online safety bills clear Senate hurdle despite strong civil liberties pushback
TeenVogue: The Kids Online Safety Act Would Harm LGBTQ+ Youth, Restrict Access to Information and Community
The quick TL;DR:
KOSA authorizes an individual state attorneys general to decide what might harm minors
Websites will likely preemptively remove and ban content to avoid upsetting state attorneys generals (this will likely be topics such as abortion, queerness, feminism, sexual content, and others)
In order for a platform to know which users are minors, they'll require a more invasive age and personal data verification method
Parents will be granted more surveillance tools to see what their children are doing on the web
KOSA is supported by Christofascists and those seeking to harm the LGBTQ+ community
If a website holding personally identifying information and government documents is hacked, that's a major cybersecurity breach waiting to happen
You don't have to look far to see or hear about the violence being done to the neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ communities worldwide, who are oftentimes one and the same. Social media sites censoring discussion of these topics would stand to do even further harm to folks who lack access to local resources to understand themselves and the hardships they face; in addition, the fact that websites would likely store personally identifying information and government documents means the death of any notion of privacy.
Sex workers and those living in certain countries already are at risk of losing their ways of life, living in a reality where their online activities are closely surveilled; if KOSA officially becomes law, this will become a reality for many more people and endanger those at the fringes of society even worse than it already is.
I previously mentioned SESTA/FOSTA, which passed and became US law in 2018. This bill enabled many of the anti-adult content attitudes that many popular websites are taking these days as well as the tightening of restrictions laid down by payment processors. Companies and sites hosted in the USA have to follow US laws even if they're accessible worldwide, meaning that folks overseas suffer as well.
If you're a US citizen, contact your Senators and tell them that you oppose KOSA. This can be as an email, letter, or phone call that you make to your state Senator.
For resources on how to do so, view the following links:
https://www.badinternetbills.com/#kosa
https://www.stopkosa.com/
https://linktr.ee/stopkosa
If you live outside of the US or cannot vote, the best thing you can do is sign the petition at the Stop KOSA website, alert your US friends about what's happening, and raise some noise.
Above all else, don’t panic. By staying informed by what’s going on, you can prepare for the legal battles ahead.
THE KOSA BILL HAS MOVED OUT OF THE COMMITTEE WITH A UNANIMOUS VOTE, BUT THE FIGHT IS FAR FROM OVER. BILLS NEED TO GO THROUGH MANY OTHER STEPS BEFORE GETTING PASSED SO THERE'S STILL TIME TO STOP IT. DON'T STOP SIGNING PETITIONS AND DON'T STOP MAKING CALLS TO SENATORS. AGAIN HOPE IS NOT LOST. IF WE GET ENOUGH PEOPLE IN POWER TO OPPOSE KOSA IT WILL NOT MAKE IT PAST THE SENATE. DON'T STOP FIGHT AND DON'T LOSE HOPE!!! WE STILL HAVE POWER IN NUMBERS!
HERE IS A LINK TREE WITH LINKS TO PETITIONS AND NUMBERS TO CALL YOUR SENATORS (WITH SCRIPTS)
(For those who are not aware: KOSA is a bill that will give the government a ridiculous amount of power over the Internet. It will make you unable to access the Internet without uploading your ID. It will also limit your access to human rights issues [homophobia, transphobia, slavery/racism, abortion etc.]. It says it's to protect children's mental health but it's not! It's all about control.)
With Ninjago finally falling into a state of calm again, the Ninja finally find a chance to take a well deserved break after the whole Prime Empire debacle. What better to have time off than to visit the Kingdom of Shintaro upon official invite of King Vangelis, for his daughters birthday celebration. Only, Cole can’t help but feel that he’d already been to the ivory city before. The name at least rung a deeply hidden bell in his mind, the only issue was that he couldn’t place the memory. 4518 words
It wasn’t every day that being a ninja coincided with celebration and relaxation, but sometimes karmic justice did work in their favour.
Keep reading
as you may know, israel has begun its ground operation in rafah. they dropped leaflets last night ordering people to evacuate, and bombing in east rafah has already begun.
The border is about to become unreachable.
Rafah is trapped.
We have literal hours until no-one, all the GoFundMe's you've scrolled past, all the people desperately begging on TikTok, will be able to escape.
Give now. Give whatever you can.
I am fundraising for the Odeh family, which is only 3k away from meeting its goal.
you will not get another chance.
CONGRATULATIONS SAG-AFTRA!
"I’m personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived.
My grandparents were killed in Aushwitz and most of my extended family were killed.
I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Aushwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.
There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent - that’s what’s called the 'Nakba' in Arabic; the 'disaster' or the 'catastrophe'.
There’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you’re not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.
I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it’s much worse than it was then. It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century.
I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit! So then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an 'outdoor prison', which is what it is. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that’s a complete falsity.
You think the worse thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.
And 'anybody who criticises Israel is an anti-Semite' is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true."
in a show of solidarity with the hunter college protesters/palestine in general, please don't post about the met gala this year. no business as usual during a genocide!
So I haven’t talked about this on main before, but the situation in South Gaza has gotten so horrifying that I’m p much throwing caution to the wind to desperately plead for eyes on this. I’m raising awareness about stories from activists in Gaza right now, including one of our own.
My lovely, wonderful friend Swin (aka tumblr user @combaticon) was deployed as a volunteer medic to a Gaza hospital on the 9th.
When the bloodshed started, she heard they needed extra hands in Gaza, she spoke Arabic and had the training, and she went.
I’ve been in contact with her throughout. She’s so incredibly brave it takes my breath away. My heart bleeds for these children she’s taking care of and how resilient they are is… astonishing.
Swin and these poor people have been under siege for so long, and they’re in desperate need of critical supplies. They have to filter water through their clothes, and it’s getting dangerously cold. Foods finally been getting through, but there’s not enough blankets and jackets to go around and there’s no fuel for the generators.
Their comrades in the West Bank have been completely pushed out by settler thugs. It’s incredibly unsafe to even be doing humanitarian work for Palestinians. Remember this the next time a Zionist tells you they’re doing this to ‘feel safe’. The IOF is arming lynch mobs.
On a personal note, this has been the most gut-wrenching week of my life. Every day when I wake up without a text from her I feel so much fear. I fight back the grief but I don’t know how to help or what to do. It’s terrifying.
Swin has asked for nothing, absolutely nothing other than something it can show the people around it to make them feel like they’re not going to be abandoned. To make sure they’re not forgotten in some pit praying Rafah opens before Israel decides to slaughter them all.
Today was a bad day. She’s alive but beyond worrying about her privacy now; she’s asked me to share this and to beg that we not lose steam and forget about them. Please share this, and please keep being fucking annoying and loud and digging your heels in with fury because we cannot let these people die silently.
[Times of Gaza] [QUD network] [Eye on Palestine]
Realistically I could never get rid of tumblr because it gives me the illusion of a community of strange young women all around my same age, all slowly figuring out how to live too