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The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

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Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#371

Post by aspenmayer »

noduerme wrote: post #360
aspenmayer wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The established social media sites have lawyers on retainer and will appeal every single case up to the Supreme Court if necessary, and as slowly as they like, just to slow roll those submitting civil suits. Opening up user-submitted content sites to civil damages would ensure that the largest social networks are the only ones that can afford to fight these cases in court. Smaller sites would become self-censored, ev…

I think you just jumbled up a lot of counter-arguments here, some of which are interesting and others purely speculative. But let's start where you wound up: The speculation that it's "dangerous" to push fake news to smaller fringe sites hasn't been proven. I've seen a lot of damage arise as a result of the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories from fringe sites onto major sites. I don't see any evidence to support th…

It’s not clear that smaller sites would have fewer lawsuits if the civil suits were to proceed, as they would be flooded with new users, and with new lawsuits, as soon as the large sites became hostile to them. There are already web3 social media sites that require login with a crypto wallet instead of a traditional user account. It wouldn’t be too difficult to create a site that would be immune to such lawsuits even on a small scale, so I’m not sure why you think that adding more lawyer paydays and violations of the right to freedom of speech and freedom to assemble are the answer. If the site doesn’t want to censor first amendment protected speech on their platform, but the government demands it, that’s a first amendment violation.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#372

Post by bsaul »

microtonal wrote: post #359
bsaul wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m surprised you’re happy about the pass. the only thing the pass does is insure the minority of people who didn’t want the vaccine are forced to be vaccinated. I suppose you didn’t have to be forced, so why do you care ?

so why do you care ? Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries. E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1] [1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...

We had this statistic in france too, but it happens that ICU saturation occures every winter, for flu and such. it’s been on the headlines for almost a decade every year. Mostly due to population getting older, and hospitals poorer. I wonder if it isn’t the same everywhere.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#373

Post by aspenmayer »

noduerme wrote: post #369
aspenmayer wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I told you why I thought your idea was logistically unfeasible and politically incongruent with free speech and right to assembly. You called me a shithead. I don’t think your argumentation strategy is convincing me, but I’ll admit I’m not the smartest guy.

I didn't call you a shithead! This may be a classic case of me using the general "you" and someone taking it to mean you, personally. I'm not talking about you personally. *unless you're Ron Watkins. I'm saying if (someone) wants to run a board for conspiracy theorists and it includes amplifying defamation, e.g. saying someone drinks the blood of babies and doxing people, then they should be held responsible for the…

I was mostly joking to prove a point, but I appreciate you saying that. I was just trying to cool the debate a bit, not stir the pot. I’ll admit I may have inflamed tensions myself, and for that I apologize. You seem to be arguing in good faith, even if I disagree with your position. You seem like a decent person.

I guess I’m more of a discordian, or a culture jammer type, and I view the kinds of conspiracies you’re talking about as cognito hazards that spontaneously occur when you have a large enough target demographic for them to appeal to. I suppose I just find your cure worse than the disease. I’d rather take the bathwater and the baby than just the baby. Call me crazy, but I think that variety is the spice of life. Some conspiracies are true, and are only theories until proved. I look at them as pathogens that are endemic, yet without them, we would have no EICAR test files for validating legitimate points of view and nothing with which to compare the status quo. Outsider voices have free speech rights too, even if they use them for ends antithetical to our own; that we oppose them doesn’t justify annihilating them, or their views.

If discourse got us into this mess, I can’t see how less of it is going to get us out of it. We need more spaces for productive discussions, and we need more outreach to the fringes. How else will we convince anyone? If all you want is compliance, then the law is a poor tool for that. It only incentivizes circumvention once ratified.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#374

Post by radicalbyte »

bsaul wrote: post #352
radicalbyte wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%. Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.

I’m surprised you’re happy about the pass. the only thing the pass does is insure the minority of people who didn’t want the vaccine are forced to be vaccinated. I suppose you didn’t have to be forced, so why do you care ?

I've lost a grandma, auntie and am about to lose a father-in-law. All have cancer that was either detected late or was not operable because of there being no IC spaces available.

All because the hospitals and IC are full of people who chose not to vaccinate but who do get priority for medical care.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#376

Post by noduerme »

aspenmayer wrote: post #373
noduerme wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't call you a shithead! This may be a classic case of me using the general "you" and someone taking it to mean you, personally. I'm not talking about you personally. *unless you're Ron Watkins. I'm saying if (someone) wants to run a board for conspiracy theorists and it includes amplifying defamation, e.g. saying someone drinks the blood of babies and doxing people, then they should be held responsible for the…

I was mostly joking to prove a point, but I appreciate you saying that. I was just trying to cool the debate a bit, not stir the pot. I’ll admit I may have inflamed tensions myself, and for that I apologize. You seem to be arguing in good faith, even if I disagree with your position. You seem like a decent person. I guess I’m more of a discordian, or a culture jammer type, and I view the kinds of conspiracies you’re…

I appreciate you saying that. And I'm a big ol' Robert Anton Wilson fan, a life-long ACLU contributor, and someone who views free speech as the only way to disinfect hate, racism and lies. And I am very much talking in good faith; this is what I believe. I just think that free speech doesn't have to be equally easy. I remember when news channels in the US had to give equal time to opposite political parties. I watched how that morphed into "fair and balanced" - giving 3 panelists a chance to beat up on the weakest member of the opposite group. I don't think Facebook or Twitter are in any sense Discordian or Erisian in the tidy bubbles they ferment. I agree it's foolish to go about trying to silence people on them. I'd say just shut the whole thing down. If you want real Eris, let a million websites bloom. The information ecosystem was much better when people had to go out hunting than when it was fed to them in a news stream on an app that was designed for nothing more than monetizing their attention span. And a lot fewer people were exposed to truly bad ideas.

I do have a breaking point, as far as ideas and speech; I believe that some ideas are stalking horses for violence, and the people who spout them have no goodwill. Some ideas can't be reasoned with. I'm glad I live in a country that still allows people to speak those ideas, but very few people will defend that notion anymore. I'll defend their right to speak those ideas. I just don't think a private company should be immune from the result of providing them a platform.

The right to free speech should be absolute. But there's no right to be heard. Somewhere along the line, people seem to have misconstrued that, because social media made it so easy to be heard that people assumed that was the definition of free speech.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#377

Post by iopq »

bambax wrote: post #327
kragen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts. The existential threat this bill poses to free society and democracy is exactly why they're supporting it. It's not some accidental side effect. They're opposed to the existence of free society and democracy because it limits government power, which…

> Free society means limited government Strong disagree. A good government protects freedom from big private companies that feast on it. Antitrust laws cannot be enforced by a weak government, and without those, there can't really be freedom.

Then you think China is more free than the United States. Some people disagree

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#378

Post by Zababa »

radicalbyte wrote: post #370
roenxi wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which is also open to challenge, depe…

The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's still a very high rate - from the richest country in the world.

The USA may be the richest country in the world but it doesn't mean much when facing the virus, especially considering how widespread inequalities are.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#379

Post by roenxi »

radicalbyte wrote: post #370
roenxi wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which is also open to challenge, depe…

The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's still a very high rate - from the richest country in the world.

If the real number of cases is double that, then that would be a death rate of ... about 0.6%. And not everyone catches the disease in one pandemic wave, so the total population death rate in the US isn't going to reach that.

And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be especially useful in managing COVID.

There are basic questions about whether the hospital system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There were lots of instances I heard of where where some people didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished, an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't get death rates to 10% of the population.

It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never a possibility although that was less clear in the opening months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in practice with the worst response policy response of any country in the world.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#380

Post by kragen »

nirav72 wrote: post #287
oceanghost wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Thank you. I was trying recall the technology being pushed at the time that would have allowed the NSA to have a backdoor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_... actually passed in 01994.
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