I wanted to briefly touch upon
The EARN It Act, which does two things.
- Removes Section 230 Protections for any Platform having Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). Section 230 explained: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml but roughly, §230 means no website is legally liable for user generated content.
- Removes end-to-end encryption protections for platforms suspected of possessing CSAM. Governments wants to have the right to surveillance your private digital messages if used on a platform that can create user generated content. I cannot begin to fathom how this will be abused.
Edit 1:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/its-back-senators-want-earn-it-bill-scan-all-online-messages <--better description than I could write up about EARN IT.
On the surface, this law might look fine; after all, child sexual abuse, and subsequently CSAM, is objectively bad. But this a
very dangerous law. To add some points:
- First, more likely than not, bigger websites would rather ban all adult content (unless it's their business) than actually target the outstanding material--see tumblr--and smaller websites will shrivel out of legal concerns--exactly what happened after SOSTA/FESTA. In particular, evangelical organizations tend to go after credit card companies to goad the entire internet to become more or less puritan.
- Moreover, it'll probably not help CSAM victims. There's a much bigger discussion to be had on how to stop child sexual abuse, including recording/publication thereof; however, most CSAM isn't made for profit, but abuse. Addressing how widely shared this material can be, i.e. through §230, does not address at all why the content is created in the first place nor is CSAM granted a blanket §230 allowance afaik.
- Third party encryption makes ending e2ee generally pointless for cases of CSAM. Stopping e2ee is likely something the FBI wants broadly, and not for this specific case, which is highly suspect.
Although tumblr,
given that this story is relatively new and not many people are paying attention, I do feel sharing social media posts have merits.
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To segue larger discussion, but I think it's *very* important to recognize §230 carveouts like EARN IT and SOSTA/FESTA are part of a broader project to turn the Internet into a puritan's wet-dream by,
to quote another article, "[lumping] porn, prostitution, and "sexual objectification in media" into the
exact same bucket as child abuse and sex trafficking, even though there's a massive difference there." The most prolific example is how Nicholas Kristoff's article "The Children of Pornhub," while highlighting a very real issue, succeeded in asking credit card companies to deny payment to Pornhub, which, as an aside, the request to credit card companies hurt many sex workers who used pornhub as a platform. Moreover,
the petition he cited, TraffickingHub,was from Exodus Cry, which outright says they want to see the commercial pornography industry gone with all the energy of a SWERF.
Point being, the reason for laws like EARN IT isn't to stop CSAM at all, it's to provide a tool to desexualize the Internet and society at large. Within a broader context, desexualizaiton is a particular nefarious tactic, because you get racists banning
Maus (Jewish-perspective fiction biography hybrid comic book that talks about holocaust frankly) because * checks notes * "it has nudity." But turns out "think of the children" is an effective rallying cry.
Anyway, this post has devolved into some sort of rambling, so I'll stop here.