A very timely reminder that anonymity and open access are not only necessary for the internet, but for democracy

JFC. Nearly a third of people who have left their church have done so because of scandals involving clergy or other religious leaders. That’s not incidental, that’s endemic.

We need a Congressional oversight committee to find out who Bari Weiss spoke with in the White House before censoring the broadcast.

It's truly remarkable how there will be news organizations and journalists who correctly identify that RFK is a menace and that HHS can't e trusted when he pushes stuff about vaccines or Tylenol causing autism... but cover the anti-trans stuff like "Well, HHS says so, and we should trust HHS!"

holy shit look who’s in the Epstein files

If you run an arts fund, an lgbtq+ scholarship, or any benefit for minority groups, now is not the time for respectability progressivism (if there ever was). Don't center the middle, center the most radical. Center sx workers, felons, artists against the state. These are the real resistance leaders

Non MAGA Republicans are always like “oh yes well I of course hate cancer but why won’t people get off my back about smoking!”

I can’t.

A megachurch pastor is pressuring congregants sign petition for a series anti-trans ballot initiatives, arguing somehow that it's both not political and nonpartisan.

It's your birthday, Duane.

Everything generative I've seen AI spit out ends up being the least interesting take from your least interesting friend. The one who confuses conventional wisdom with great insight and really thinks you have to hand it to Bill Maher.

This is all so stupid and I hate it.

Gonna stop looking at the Epstein Files in a second because I'm frankly way too skeeved out to keep going but I will say this: the CSAM isn't blacked out nearly enough while the faces of guys in ties are obscured by vanta black rectangles the size of the sun.

As with Kavanaugh stops, the Supreme Court utterly discounted the profound chilling effect of having to show papers, this time on the internet. For most users, it's not a minor inconvenience or speed bump, it's a deal-breaker.

"Legal Nevada sex workers have experienced a massive and unprecedented wave of suspensions on X... When legal Nevada sex workers lose their accounts, their voices disappear from public debate. Nevada sex workers know what dangers their livelihood faces when they are kept out of the discussion."

Think about this. Did you hear trans panic headlines in the 2000s? No. Conservatives weren’t “worried” about trans people until the day they lost on Marriage Equality. Once they realized most of us are just fine with gay marriage, they needed a new wedge issue and started attacking trans people.

Reminding everyone for no particular reason that Section 230 is one of the last things standing between free speech online and Trump having control over everything you see and say on the internet

But how do they do at SPH

South Carolina has just prefiled a bill that requires your internet provider to block "material harmful to minors" by default. You would have to call your ISP, undergo age-verification and pay a fee to remove it. www.scstatehouse.gov/sess126_2025...

I keep coming back to this thread on the Nero Decree over and over again. Twitter. CBS. Columbia. The Fed. The Kennedy Center. They're not transforming them, they're burning them and salting the earth behind them so they can't be rebuilt. And the biggest target of all is the internet.

As both the House & Senate look to repeal Section 230, I'm curious who they think should be held liable for the comments they've left open on the Epstein photo dump...? Them? Dropbox? Do they have a trust & safety team watching the comments?

Traffic to UK porn sites has dropped 77% since age-verification went live. UK legislator celebrates, saying she's "very pleased" with the drop, calling it a "green shoot." I don't know how they can make it any clearer that they view AV as a tool to police adult sexuality. Organize accordingly.

A federal judge has blocked an age-verification mandate for social media in Louisiana, ruling that the same content can be accessed on unregulated sites, that it chills a huge amount of speech and that tools already exist for parents to block use. You know, the same arguments FSC made in Paxton.

"Not being able to access my Bluesky DMs during the holidays is annoying, but it’s not a serious threat to my wellbeing. I’m more concerned about is how this legislative patchwork of age verification laws benefits the rapidly growing authoritarianism in the White House..." — @kattenbarge.bsky.social

Yes, the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that Alliance Defending Freedom has been trying to revive and weaponize as a nationwide abortion ban since fall 2022 after the fall of Roe v. Wade More: www.jezebel.com/the-wtf-is-h... www.jezebel.com/the-telling-...

we’re all getting coal for Christmas and we better like it

"We…honor our dead not merely by weeping for them, but by fighting for the day when no more of us have to die for a sick and twisted fantasy of governmental control over the private choices of individuals." #December17 maggiemcneill.com/2025/12/17/d...

2025 was the year millions of Americans awoke to the danger of state surveillance, violent policing, rights erasure, online censorship, ideological funding cancellations and retaliatory doxxing. None of this was new to sex workers. If there's not rights for everyone, there's rights for no one.

Oh wait so can the FTC now sue the FCC for deceptive trade practices

Officials in Tennessee aren't just banning books, they're now demanding information on who checked out contested (largely LGBTQ+) books, including names, addresses, and "household composition." A librarian who was given the directive has come forward asking for whistleblower protections.

Indiana created an age-verification law that would never work. It was warned it wouldn't work. And now that it hasn't worked, it's suing adult companies for failing to make it work. "It essentially bases liability on the failure to accomplish impossibilities." In other words, AV was a set up.

Bari Weiss's Free Press has been age-gated by the UK using the Online Safety Act (evidently for racist depictions of Somalis in a "witty" Sunday column) The "Free Press" reaction? To say that they're FINE with censoring for other forms of speech (porn, self-harm), just not theirs! Ah, principles.

"The Internet was never meant to serve a single type of user. Its power came from universality — from its ability to give voice to the otherwise voiceless: shy kids, marginalized youth, LGBTQ+ children, rural teenagers, creative outsiders, identity seekers, those who feel alone."

#D17 events:

Even though we work on KOSA everyday, we didn’t know what bills would be in last weeks’ markup until 48 hours before the hearing. This is the strategy- ram bills through before the public has had time to know what’s going on. But you can always count on us to sound the alarm 🚨

so wild that the richest guy in the world is also the biggest loser in the world

According to a new report, TikTok videos that implicitly sexualize minors — but may stop short of something that might get detected as such by an algorithm — are being used to direct people via the comments to Telegram groups where CSAM is sold.

John Green's award-winning coming of age novel, "Looking for Alaska" is now the most banned book in America, pulled from an astounding 147 schools. www.indystar.com/story/news/l...

I see this argument made all the time and it's embarrassing for CCDH to keep making it, because it's a lie. Section 230, what they're talking about, does not give anyone a "get out of jail free" card. It simply puts the liability on the party who actually engaged in the violative behavior.

Heritage Foundation, backers of Project 2025, have issued a call to criminalize porn by detailing specific types of imagery that should be illegal, including "deviate sexual intercourse," "female genitals," and "nudity." Only "civilizing" images that point to "marital sex" should be allowed.

"I know that it's crazy to think that a dominatrix is now a founder of a tech company, but it took someone who has been through it to know the loopholes and the changes that needed to happen... I can give a level of experience and knowledge of this kind of world that [tech experts] would never have"

Not surprised that the Center for Christian Virtue, now one of Ohio's most powerful lobbies and proponents of the state's AV laws, abortion bans and anti-trans bills, got its start by famously shutting down a Mapplethorpe exhibition in '90. Censorship is about erasure and repression.

84 children out of 894 in a country of 70 million. Again, this debate has taken up the attention of every publication in the UK for years over at most a few hundred trans youth that medically transition. The disproportionate coverage is absurd. It's a moral panic.

there's an evil twisted version of you that lives in Australia

Indiana just sued Pornhub under the state’s AV law, claiming it fails to block Indianans from using VPNs to access the site. Indiana wrote a bad law that they were warned was grossly ineffective, and rather than admit it or fix it, they’re blaming porn sites.

The latest patch for the disastrous Online Safety Act? A "nudity blocker" installed on all UK devices. The OSA was supposed to protect kids online, but was so vaguely defined and unenforceable that the UK keeps inventing new, ever more invasive tools, like "nudity filters" and VPN bans as cover.

“And finally, the assault on Section 230. This is the endgame for independent speech. If you repeal 230, you don’t hurt Google or Meta—they have the lawyers to survive. You destroy the small forums, the independent blogs, the dissenters. You make the cost of speaking the truth too high to bear.”

TIL the original lyrics to Deck the Halls are awesome and “don we now our gay apparel” is temperance movement bullshit

Guys you can't ban VPN for kids without ALSO severely restricting the ability of adults to use VPNs without surveillance. If this were proposed in Saudi Arabia or Myanmar or Hungary or Belarus, the British government would rightly call this what it is: a mandate for censorship.