Wrote to Tammy Baldwin about how Republicans want to censor LGBT content with the KOSA bill that she is sponsoring! I included the following Techdirt article in my email! Not one word, about it, in her reply to me (which is just a form letter)! In fact, I didn’t bring up anything that she mentioned! As she is a LGBT person, I thought that she’d be concerned but I guess not?!
Meanwhile, Republicans are now freely admitting that they’re going to use KOSA to force websites to censor LGBTQ content. They’re literally proud of it. The Heritage Foundation, which at least used to have some principled stances before being taken over by culture warriors without any principles, is bragging about how it will use KOSA in this manner:
‘The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country,’ the Twitter owner told BBC’s James Clayton, when asked about the take downs.
from the the-eu-approach-is-dangerous dept Fri, Jan 6th 2023 10:41am – Mike Masnick
Last summer, I mocked the EU a bit for setting up a new office in Silicon Valley, and sending an official here to “liaise with Silicon Valley companies affected by EU tech regulation,” noting how it felt weird to have EU internet police setting up shop in Silicon Valley. Given that, I was a bit surprised that the new office invited me to “moderate” a panel discussion last month about the Digital Services Act (DSA), a bill I have regularly criticized and which I think is going to be dangerous for free speech on the internet.
There’s been ample insinuation that these agencies were politically motivated. But all of this was happening at a time when President Donald Trump was in power and his people were running DHS and the FBI. Rather than agencies intent on swaying the 2020 election for Biden, their actions seem like run-of-the-mill paranoia and attempts at control.
This brings us back to the money the FBI gave Twitter for “time spent processing requests.” In the last installment of the Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi reported on some of those requests, many of which were related to potential election misinformation. Twitter looked into the flagged tweets and accounts, sometimes complying with the FBI and sometimes not.
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Twitter’s “Guidelines for law enforcement” does state under a section titled “Cost reimbursement” that “Twitter may seek reimbursement for costs associated with information produced pursuant to legal process and as permitted by law (e.g., under 18 U.S.C. §2706).” But the fact that this garnered millions from the FBI was not, as far as I can tell, known until now.
But this is a misreading/misunderstanding of how things work. This had nothing to do with any “influence campaign.” The law already says that if the FBI is legally requesting information for an investigation under a number of different legal authorities, the companies receiving those requests can be reimbursed for fulfilling them.
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I do think it remains a scandal the way that 2703(d) orders work, and the inability of users to push back on them. But that is the law. And it has literally nothing whatsoever to do with “censorship” requests. It is entirely about investigations by the FBI into Twitter users based on evidence of a crime. If you want, you can read the DOJ’s own guidelines regarding what they can request under 2703(d).
Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, law enforcement must obtain a court order under 18 U.S.C. §2703(d) (2703(d) order) to compel a provider to disclose more detailed records about a customer’s or subscriber’s use of services, such as the following
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If TikTok is such a threat, why did the Biden Administration train TikTok influencers to propagandize others about Russia’s special military operation?! Even though TechDirt makes some good points (privacy laws and the xenophobia), it seems like they—and Buzzfeed—are just creating another moral panic!
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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