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This order is thoroughly - and deservedly - brutal. Like bring popcorn levels of brutal.

a functional political party would make hay with this

When Mitch McConnell finally shows back up someone needs to make sure it’s not actually five turtles in a trench coat.

Good luck, kitten. Good luck.

ProtonVPN is the rec for most people in most use cases. Their free tier has no usage limits and doesn't do any of the scuzzy shit most free VPNs do, and their paid tier is even better.

ProtonVPN is the answer for 99% of people. They aren't scuzzy, don't sell your data, don't keep logs, and will accept payments anonymously in crypto or "an envelope of cash mailed to their office" if you strongly need to preserve your anonymity.

Call your representatives to oppose AB 2246 (legiscan.com/CA/bill/AB22...) and AB 1709 (legiscan.com/CA/bill/AB17...)! Especially if they're on the sponsors list. Or are Buffy Wicks, who's never met a censorship law she didn't love.

Nothing formal but you can review the posts in dw-advocacy.dreamwidth.org for some talking points, and I'm working on a project that will help considerably (just need to finish the data validation)

Techbros & the religious right fooled blue states into voting for this. Peter Thiel wants age verification so Palantir can scrape everyone’s data. And the far-right? They want it because of this: www.heritage.org/gender/comme...

I do not think we should hand Donald Fucking Trump (or, indeed, any politician!) the ability to control whether trans people or Jewish people or queer people can talk about their lives online without having to deanonymize themselves and be put on a government watchlist, and neither should you.

"But we have to protect kids from TEH ALGORITHMZ!" What is The Algorithm (tm) showing people? Other people's speech. The entirety of this moral panic is directly fueled by a dozen people -- I can name each one of them -- who want the government to be able to control what speech you can see.

"Minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them." Erznoznik v. Jacksonville, 422 U. S. 205, 212–213 (1975)

The idea that social media is bad for teens is a textbook manufactured moral panic that is not based in reality in the slightest, and it's been pushed entirely by people who have a strong reason to want to end anonymity online and exert much stronger control over the speech of marginalized people.

--consistently coming up between 5% and 10% depending on the study (and it's only very weakly correlated to amount of use), neutral for half the rest, and beneficial for the other half. The number of teens whose lives are better because of social media is *at least* 4x the number harmed by it!

So, so, SO MANY people have studied this, and the only people finding negative effects have a very strong personal and career bias pushing them towards findings that aren't grounded in good science. Here's some methodology critique and more links: kidsplaytech.com/wp-content/u...

This is absolutely a myth! Here's a collection of papers showing the reality, which is that any negative effect from social media use is tiny (for both teenagers and adults) and a small number of overall users, and far more people get a positive effect: bsky.app/profile/raha...

Completely and utterly ABSURD to suggest kids had carefree lives before the internet LMAO

This is so fucking invasive and creepy and police statey jesus fucking christ This doesn’t just police children, this tracks and polices everyone and hands ALL of our information over to mysterious “third parties”.

The law passed quietly in 2024 but implementation was delayed until the regulations for what forms of age verification were acceptable were codified: legiscan.com/NY/bill/S076...