internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she
How would they even enforce this if the site is hosted in a different state or even country?
you’re asking a question they don’t care about, which is the first problem here. the purpose is not to have a legally bulletproof regulation, but to cast doubt on the ability of websites like this to operate in Texas without incurring liability and thereby force them to block users from the state or another such action. this is also how most abortion restrictions work in practice: they muddy the water on what is legal, so risk-averse entities or entities without the revenue to fight back simply avoid doing/facilitating the practice in a given jurisdiction or completely move out of state.
is this dubiously legal? yeah, obviously. but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the money to pay a lawyer. and the vast majority of these sorts of websites obviously don’t–they’d likely need someone to represent them pro bono, which is not likely.
it’s unclear how many votes either of these measures would have, but once session begins next year there’s really no check besides themselves (and maybe a lower-level court) for what Texas Republicans can pass.
i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:
The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.
The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”
RTFA before replying
imo if anything the opposite causality is true: this DOJ was banking on a continuation of Biden in Kamala Harris, and because that is no longer forthcoming they’re now trying to get something out the door before the administrative changeover in the hopes it can stick. it almost certainly won’t, but most of Trump’s appointees are gigamad about “censorship” and they hate Google for “punishing conservative voices” or whatever so it’s hardly the most contrived hail mary if so
it is not okay to deadname people for any reason (as everyone under this post already has stated), and if you do this again on the instance you will be banned from Beehaw for at least a week.
Surely it can’t just be because a town name happens to contain “lsd” in the middle of it?
Facebook is a remarkably bad website so i think you’d be quite surprised at how stuck in the past they are over there
this is an interesting discussion that’s gone on for long enough and been substantive enough that i’ll leave it be, but as an FYI this was a better fit for the Politics section and had it been caught sooner i would have told you to repost it there.
With no voices in support in the original post and currently the only two voices in support here being the mods themselves.
bluntly: this is not a democracy, we don’t pretend it is, and we’ve never run it that way so this is not a particularly relevant consideration for us. democracy at the scale of communities is an incredibly fraught issue that requires a lot of time and energy to administer we don’t have. in any case none of our referendums in the community (which we’ve done before) have been majority votes, they’ve solicited feedback that informs our judgement. our judgement here is this is a good idea regardless of how the community feels about it, and that even if we didn’t implement the moratorium we’d be cracking down on posts, handing out bans, and doing sweeping removals because we’ve been more permissive than our usual moderation on the subject and let behavior we’d normally step in on go.
in short: even if the moratorium were removed, that’d just mean heavier-handed enforcement from this point forward. if people really want no moratorium then they should be prepared to start catching 30-day bans (or permanent bans if they’re off instance) for any unkind behavior.
Why are you doing this if you don’t think what happens here matters?
if you think something has to arbitrarily “matter” to be socially valuable to do then there’s your problem. in any case, i certainly don’t think the value of this platform rests on “people knifing each other about a presidential election they have very little power over the outcome of.”
If one takes that attitude, you’re right, you won’t change the world.
i think you’re conflating “having value” with “changing the world” when these are two essentially independent qualities. at no point have we ever sought to “change the world” with this (because we’re five people running this in our spare time, that’s not in our capabilities as people), and from the beginning we’ve said we’d be content with only a handful of people using this place as long as they get something out of doing it (because that’s what we consider valuable, not whether or not this can have sweeping social impact or importance).
because you can play meaningless “what if?” games like this forever. at the end of the day you don’t have to be a pessimist to realize the odds of something here changing the world are so minute that it’s fine to put a moratorium on certain kinds of posts. you’re not going to convince me otherwise. and even in the optimistic scenario: virtually all of what’s discussed here, while interesting, is designed to be fleeting and buried. conversations on link aggregators tend to have a shelf-life of no more than a week, and that’s not really where you’re going to find ideas that make change. here the conversations usually die down after an even shorter period (about two days).
frankly: if the next Lenin or whatever is actually on Lemmy, i’d tell them to get a blog instead of hashing it out in link aggregator comment sections. it’s a better use of their time, it’s a better place to test and hone their ideas, and they have actual editorial control over everything.
A lot of people are understandably upset right now, and yes, all the facts of the election are not in yet. But do you really want to have a moratorium on election posts for a whole month?
yes, the mod team is in more-or-less unanimous agreement on the subject. and if we were moderating to the exact same standard we usually do we’d likely be removing, locking, or severely pruning nearly every thread posted in the politics section on the subject in the past few days. maybe we’ll shorten if it need be but moratorium itself is not controversial and i do not anticipate us reversing course on it. please remember that this cannot be a day job for any of us.
Who’s to say some random comment in a random post on the presidential election doesn’t come up with some incredible idea or solution?
if someone does this i trust they won’t limit it to a niche social media website with like 500 users, where it will have no actual visibility and will reach exactly zero actual powerbrokers. i don’t think this is a remotely convincing hypothetical, personally, and its logic would extend far beyond talk of the presidential election.
Does this extend to not discussing plans, posting information about which states may be taking measures to protect their citizens or how effective those measures might be, or discussing things like resistance or mutual aid?
no, why would it? even way you’re describing them makes it clear they’re not about the presidential election. don’t be too clever by one half–if there’s a problem with a submission we’ll just tell you.
one thing i’d be interested in: is it possible to make a fun 4X-style game that challenges the very premises of 4X (which are mostly patterned after the models of expansion we’re familiar with in the West)?
The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30 percent of its workforce and completely eliminated its advocacy and global programs divisions, TechCrunch reports.
“Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We’re revisiting how we pursue that work, not stopping it,” Brandon Borrman, the Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief, said in an email to The Verge. Borrman declined to confirm exactly how many people were laid off, but said it was about “30% of the current team.”
note: i’ve proposed this to the community mods, if we think it’s a good idea (i think it is, and i’d like to enforce it asap) it’ll go into effect soon.