AKA the EARN IT Act. U.S. Congress has reintroduced a bill called the#EarnItAct. This is the most dangerous bill I have ever seen when it comes to online privacy and free speech. Essentially, it's going to censor the entire internet. The writers of this bill claim it will "fight CSAM". They claim tech companies do nothing to fight this problem which is a straight up lie. they're LYING. Tech companies sent 45 million cases to the NCMEC in 2019 alone and only a fraction was investigated What does the bill do? It kills Section 230, a law that says that users, not companies, are liable for what is uploaded online. This lets companies hold people accountable if they post something illegal and protects us from mass censorship online. Imagine if twitter was held accountable for every single tweet a user sent. They would be flooded with lawsuits. Flooded. Enough that it would either shut the site down or force them to heavily censor every single thing. Which is the *secret* goal of the bill. The bill creates a 19-person commission called NCOSEP led by the DOJ and@ncose, a conservative anti-lgbt anti-sex group that was known as Morality in Media before they rebranded in 2015 as an "anti sex trafficking org", yet they still meet with extreme homophobes NCOSE is also the group behind the FOSTA/SESTA bill from 2018 that forced tumblr to purge porn/nsfw. NO ONE talks about how NCOSE is antilgbt because they've grown to have so much power they're making bills for govts internationally just like#EARNITact This commission will create "best practices" for websites to follow, and you can bet those 'best practices' will be extremely broad so that is censors literally anything a Christian homophobic group wouldn't like. That means practically 99% of fandom. (read the rest here Thread by @lovingtaeonmain on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App Some, thankfully, are not buying it. This statement is from Ron Wyden: Wyden on Reintroduction of the EARN IT Act: Political Attacks on Encryption Will Make Children Less Safe, Won’t Aid Victims or Catch Predators Who Prey On Kids Graham-Blumenthal Bill Targets Private Communications; Uses Failed SESTA-FOSTA Model; Section 230 Does Not Protect Platforms Against Federal Prosecution for Distributing CSAM Washington, D.C.– U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., urged his colleagues to listen to human rights leaders, press freedom advocates and the broad coalition of civil society groups that opposed the EARN IT Act of 2020, following the reintroduction of the bill. “This sadly misguided bill will not protect children. It will not stop the spread of vile child exploitation material or target the monsters that produce it. And it does not spend a single dollar to invest in prevention services for vulnerable children and youth or help victims and their families by providing evidence-based and trauma-informed resources. Instead, the EARN IT Act threatens the privacy and security of law-abiding Americans by targeting any form of private, secure devices and communication. As a result, the bill will make it easier for predators to track and spy on children and also harm the free speech and free expression of vulnerable groups,”Wyden said.“I have spent my career in the Senate fighting to protect kids and aid victims of abuse, and I will do everything in my power to ensure every single monster responsible for exploiting children or spreading horrific CSAM materials is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But this bill does nothing to turn around the Justice Department’s tragic failure to prioritize child welfare and abuse cases.” CSAM is illegal underfederal law, meaning websites and internet platforms have no protection under Section 230 from federal prosecution, and websites are required to report and preserve any evidence of CSAM they find. Several experts sayEARN IT will make it more difficult to prosecute criminal predators. The EARN IT Act of 2022 mirrors previous versions, which were condemned by a broad array of civil liberties, human rights and internet freedom groups as an assault on free expression and private communications. Advocates including theAmerican Civil Liberties Union,Center for Democracy and Technology, Human Rights Watch, LGBTQ Tech, and more urged the Senate to reject the 2020 legislation. Experts said thatthe bill would harm private, encrypted communications, and the latest version does not address those concerns. (emphasis in the original)
also this part: Oh, and the worst part. The bill kills encryption. E2E too. You know, the thing protecting every single message, file, document, photo you interact with from being scanned by the govt/a third party. What would happen to activists? Domestic abuse survivors? Children being abused? People living under dictatorships oversees that rely on encryption to not be fucking killed?? The average everyday person who just doesn't want to have every fucking thing they do online be tracked? my family wouldve been killed overseas if there wasnt encryption to talk to them about day to day stuff. this bill scares me to my core. Encryption stops govt from seeing your personal activity. If 'regulations' restrict something, it would be flagged and sent DIRECTLY TO THE DOJ Imagine you post a SFW ART of your fav gay ship. Say it's innocent, two minors, like tddk. Oh, oh! It's flagged. Sent right to the DOJ. Now there's a file somewhere with your name on it. You even *accidentally* click on nsfw tddk and it's enough to get a REPORT written on you. Sit for a second and imagine what a right-wing Christian homophobic org would want to erase from the world. What regulations they'd write if they could control the internet. How they would twist laws to make *anything* "harmful" to kids. That's what's coming. You think sites like ao3 are safe? Patreon? ff.net? No where is safe. no where is sacred. This will affect the ENTIRETY of the internet, and your personal life using it. the fallout for this for us will be enormous and GLOBAL.
I'm not surprised. The tweet Nova copied came from a fandom account judging by the shout out to AO3.org and fanfiction.net, which is fairly progressive and queer but had had a lot of....debate for lack of a better word about how much fan writers should self-censor re: depictions of gay characters and some calling for AO3 to ban real person fic. AO3 is very liberal in what it allows on the site, which basically "if it's legal, we'll archive it ". My standard response to these types have been to tell these fools that if they got Congress involved with decency standards, they'll go for all the queer stuff first. And.....welp. But even apart from that, people in general kneejerk to wanting to #savethechildren even going so far as to speak over the many sex workers and trafficking survivors who have pointed out how these feel good measures are only just that. They do nothing to save victims when the vast majority of reports go unsearched.
