I live in the United States. Crime is not about behavior or adherence to law, but who we are. Those of us who cannot afford lawyers will be framed by law enforcement or coerced into confession, or extorted into a plea deal.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
So we're not a liberal, democratic society with rule of law.
As an anarchist, I'm be tempted to start a Snapchat account and then send NSA Haikus. (The website generator is defunct, but GitHub still has a repository.)
In fact, the appropriate response is to start regularly including phrases that the AI might flag (say quotes from fiction, cited as such) to generate false positives. Especially if your criminal and political records are completely benign.
So the lesson to the rest of us is DO NOT USE SNAPCHAT especially for private messaging.
I use Signal, was pressed to do so by privacy-minded friends and have pressed other friends to adopt the client.
So long as you don't accidentally include Jeffrey Goldberg in your chat, you're okay.
Real US judges have ruled that click-wrapped ToSes are not legally binding, since they commonly are bypassed, and app developers use dark patterns to discourage end users from reading them.
Also, ToSes and EULAs are notoriously verbose and difficult to read. People with college level reading skills struggle with them.
So no, blaming the end user is not appropriate here.
My concern is that, as I said, they lied to me and I believed them. My first logic and critical thinking class was in freshman college, where I learned that media literacy is about checking multiple sources that don't like each other very much. The facts that are consistent between them are most likely the actual facts. I was the sucker who got owned by the indoctrination system.
Media literacy became super important in the aughts during the George W. Bush administration. The White House started giving preferential treatment to correspondents that covered only approved stories and kept the US in a positive light. (It marked the beginning of the end of free journalism within news agencies) Foreign sources started covering the extrajudicial torture programs and the use of PMCs in Iraq and the International War on Terror. It became really important for Americans to cross examine sources to determine for themselves what was really going on.
Today, it creeps me out to hear kids talk about the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war and the international war on terror, and cite as fact details where I distinctly remember otherwise.
In the present era, we have huge swaths of Americans in FOX News silos, since FOX, like an abusive domestic partner, encourages its viewership to cut off all other sources. We need to be teaching media literacy in grade school. We should be teaching how to use the internet as a tool and not a substitute for social interaction.
When the US proscribed alcohol consumption from 18 years to 21 years, the rate of alcohol related crime and DUIs didn't change, rather they just got older, and more people were imprisoned for it because they were old enough to know better (allegedly). If we cut off internet access to kids until they're 18, or even the current proposals to raise the age from 13 to 16, it only means kids will be less experienced and less prepared at a later age.
And kids who are diverse, and fit outside the white, straight, normal mainstream, presently are utilizing resources on the internet to help them cope in a society that doesn't like deviance very much. These resources literally save lives.
I think an education system that actually took itself seriously, and intended to teach kids in good faith will be able to not only handle kids having internet access, but will be able to integrate its use into education, better preparing children for adulthood.
But also, as I said, I am an outlier. I'm neurodivergent and I'm queer, so I do not have the pulse of the children of the US. In the way I assume not all men are in concurrence with the manosphere, I also submit not all children are daft and need to be taught in single syllables without distractions. If they are, we should get rid of school sports leagues. I suspect more kids would benefit from internet access and robust training in media literacy (including social media savvy) than would be aided by a device ban in school (or by age-gating social media).
Note: There are actual studies about the harms social media has on kids, and the scientific consensus is that harms are significantly less than what is being claimed to promote age verification. It's looking a lot like the same moral panic that occurred about video games, violent movies and television. But then big social media companies like Facebook, X and Google would enjoy the reduction in competition from smaller sights that would result from an AV mandate, hence they are lobbying to mandate locking up the internet.
My disagreements with the policy are twofold, but I was a weird kid. And I am a weird adult.
Firstly, when my social studies teacher or my American history teacher tries to pass state propaganda as fact, I want to have the internet available to find sources either that confirm what I'm being taught or refut it. And similarly when our chemistry class can only provide a poor, hazy image of what we're doing, I want to be able to go online and get a better one.
We didn't have the internet when I was in school in the eighties, and instead, we had shitty textbooks and a state mandated syllabus. It was evident, even then, that we were being indoctrinated with an agenda, and being denied informed consent.
And as a naïve kid, I believed my schooling and grew up Republican... Eventually, I'd learn how much bullshit was spoon fed to me, and that our school districts, in fact, do not have an agenda to equip students for adult life, rather are instruments of control.
And secondly, the internet provides lifelines online for kids at risk, such as neurodivergents, LGBT+, kids in dysfunctional homes. And they should have access to them. I didn't have those resources, and I believe my outcome is worse for it.
I get it, regarding bullying. Social media harassment is a problem, but by comparison I was cornered and outnumbered three to one by kids twice my size. Kids do not require social media to hurt. Since it was their word against mine school administrators sided with my assailants. Every time. I'd work out later they just hate weakling kids, and believe I should be able to hold my own against such odds.
I can assure you kids will be bullied anyway, just as sex trafficking increased when SESTA / FOSTA cut off internet resources to sex traffickers (and killed personal ads and ended online sex worker support groups.)
But then, I'm neurodivergent and was in that gap in which I was quite bright and interested in learning, but had testing difficulties so I wasn't eligible for gifted programs. The mainstream school district wasn't intended for me. But then there wasn't a place for me at all.
The US state education districts are not being run in good faith, prioritizing obedience over critical thinking skills, ideological doctrine over factual history and enrichment of companies and administrators over paying faculty and budgeting learning materials. Restricting students from their own resources is yet another admission that the US does care what happens to students, and reinforces the notion that schools are not institutions of learning, but detainment centers to lock kids up and keep them out of mischief until they are legally responsible for their actions.
But as I said. I was a weird kid. And my schools assured I would never live it down.
Funny thing, UK camera'd up London in the aughts on the pretense of fighting crime.
That didn't work either.
The entire tech sector screamed about the vulnerability of IoT devices, plenty of which are now participants in zombie botnets.
Does anyone remember in 2015 when YESCO billboards by the thousands were hacked to show Goatse instead of an AT&T ad? Pepperidge Farm remembers. IoTs are still vulnerable, including big municipal ones and, yes, Flock Safety cameras.
And CISA ~~was severely broken~~ had its staff severely reduced by DOGE.
In unrelated news the CDC, also a victim of DOGE, is entirely unprepared for the next epidemic.
According to our peerless leader, I blame it on Minnesota because they are grossly incompetent
But then he tells California (and Canada) we are to blame for wildfires for our failure to rake our forests.
Generated: Produced entirely from prompts and LORAs
Altered: Changed significantly so that the spirit of the moment represented is starkly different from the original
Edited: Changed while mostly preserving the essence of the moment represented.
Cleaned: Making minor alterations such as removing obstructions, correcting colors or illuminating details
And then, for completion, another boilerplate would be used in official images that have been shopped (or GIMPed or otherwise altered with image-editing software.)
The US is in a unique situation in which the President has tossed all illusions of regularity out the window, and checks from Congress and SCOTUS have been completely nullified. (Though Congress is shifting as Trump is making Republicans unelectable.) The federal government has been literally captured by corporate and oligarch interests.
Before Trump, the US was not a democracy -- not really -- but it pretended to be one, and did so convincingly for a large enough number of voters that little was done to assure rights were preserved. (For the record, a report from Oxford quantifies the US as behaving like an oligarchy with some democratic features.)
And after the 9/11 attacks and during the International War on Terror, a lot of rights were quietly stripped away, since everyone was afraid of foreign Islamist extremist terrorists... completely ignoring the radical far-right home-grown terrorists we have. The FBI's disinterest in white supremacists through the George W. Bush and Obama eras is conspicuous.
Most people don't realize the Bill of Rights has been gutted until they're on the business end of a police encounter. And by then it's too late.
Anyway, depending on the results and aftermath of the midterm elections this November, the US might pull back towards democracy the way it has at prior points in its history, or go full Third Reich.
It depends on how pissed we are without food and healthcare and an ongoing war that's being poorly conducted. But maybe the big propaganda machine will keep us wanting to own the libs and hate on trans folk (and concentrating and torturing immigrants) for a while longer.
No paywall or anti-adblocker bullshit