.coda: “…It’s a tale playing out in cities and states across the country, as a book-banning fever courses through the country’s body politic. Nationally, attempts to remove books from school and public libraries are shattering previous records. The effort is being driven by a loose collection of local and national conservative parents’ groups and politicians… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Free Speech
Inventing the dark Web: Criminalization of privacy and the apocalyptic turn in the imaginary of the Web
Inventing the dark Web: Criminalization of privacy and the apocalyptic turn in the imaginary of the Web by Thais Sardá, Simone Natale, and John Downey. First Monday, Volume 27, Number 11 – 7 November 2022. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i11.12691 “This paper examines how the deep Web, i.e., Web sites that are not indexed and thus are not… Continue Reading
Elon Musk, Fox News, and Free Speech Absolutism
Teri Kanefield – “Free Speech Absolutism” – Elon Musk abolished Twitter’s moderation policies and allowed “America’s most prominent Nazi,” Andrew Anglin back onto Twitter along with Donald Trump. He declared himself a “free speech absolutist” and said all voices should be heard. Then, on Thursday, he went on a binge and suspended the Twitter accounts of a number… Continue Reading
Here’s When You Should Use Tor Instead of a VPN
How-To-Geek: “If you’ve been looking into the different ways to browse anonymously, two terms will come up regularly: VPNs and Tor. However, when you compare these two, you’ll quickly see that they have very different use cases. To figure out when you should use Tor rather than a VPN, let’s first go over how they… Continue Reading
Twitter’s Rivals Try to Capitalize on Musk-Induced Chaos
The New York Times $: “New start-ups and other social platforms sense opportunity as Twitter grapples with changes from Elon Musk, its new owner…A race is on to dethrone Twitter and capitalize on the chaos of its new ownership under Elon Musk, the tech mogul who bought the social media company for $44 billion in… Continue Reading
The Uncensored Library
The Uncensored Library: “In many countries, websites, social media and blogs are controlled by oppressive leaders. Young people, in particular, are forced to grow up in systems where their opinion is heavily manipulated by governmental disinformation campaigns. But even where almost all media is blocked or controlled, the world’s most successful computer game is still… Continue Reading
How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms (without ditching your friends)
Cory Doctorow: “Online, a lot of us have been unhappy with our social media platforms for a long time, but we hang in there, year after year, scandal after scandal, because as much as we hate the platform, we love the people who use the platform. We don’t leave because we don’t want to lose… Continue Reading
We’re Publishing the Facebook Papers
Gizmodo – Here’s How Meta Became the Internet’s Biggest Hub of Covid-19 Misinformation: “…From the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, Facebook understood the outsized role its platform would plays in shaping public opinion about the virus and the safeguards that governments would inevitably institute in hopes of containing it. Ten months before the first reported… Continue Reading
Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?
The Atlantic: “Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more… Continue Reading
Book bans are spiking in the US
Quartz – Here are the most targeted titles: “This week, ALA is holding its annual Banned Books Week, from September 18-24, to advocate for open access to information. While in the past bans usually targeted one book at a time, advocacy groups are now going after multiple titles at once, according to the association. So far… Continue Reading
The Supreme Court’s new term could be even more consequential than its last one
Vox – The Republican justices who overruled Roe v. Wade are only getting started. “The headline of this piece is likely to turn a few heads. The Supreme Court’s last term, after all, was an orgy of conservative excess unlike any since the Court’s Great Depression-era attacks on the New Deal. And it culminated in… Continue Reading
Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door
The New York Times: “Battling far-right extremism, Germany goes further than other Western democracies in policing online behavior, testing the limits of free speech on the internet…Hate speech, extremism, misogyny and misinformation are well-known byproducts of the internet. But the people behind the most toxic online behavior typically avoid any personal major real-world consequences. Most… Continue Reading
