Over on the guardian the headline reads, “

Adult performers picket Instagram HQ over company’s nude photo rules

 

But then later in the article it reads:

“In the large majority of instances, there was no nudity shown in the pictures. However, it appears that the accounts were terminated merely because of their status as an adult performer,” James Felton, the Adult Performers Actors Guild legal counsel, told the Guardian. “Efforts to learn the reasons behind the termination have been futile,” he added.

That suggests that people are not just being banned from sites for what they do on the sites themselves but for who they are and what they do on other sites and even in their real lives. Now mind you, it is true that a lot of adult performers use Instagram for traffic and to make money. Some cam models charge their fans tokens before those fans are given access to their Instagram or Snapchat accounts. That is true. Some may have crossed lines and Instagram may have received complaints. Though I think that is doubtful in many cases given that the banning was done in mass. The banning of many of cam models seems to be part of something company driven and not user driven.

I am reminded of twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, in an article, calling the internet a separate country. That may seem like a harmless statement within the context of the internet being global and without boundaries. It may sound like a harmless comparative statement. But the statement is not correct. The internet is a global utility. It is not a country.

The internet isn’t just a utility in the US or UK or Mexico or whatever. It is global. But then when you consider the large internet corporations are basically trying to write their own laws, create their own currencies, and are deciding who they want to kick out of their own “country” it gets rather scary. Why? Because the internet is not a separate country. People don’t live on the internet. They live real lives in real places and in many cases are trying to make money on the internet from their own home. The internet is a very important utility that serves planet earth. It is not a separate fucking country.

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Now some people say the internet is “the Wild West. It has to be tamed.” First, again, the internet is not a geographic location. It is not a separate country. It is a utility and neither the government nor the Corporate Police State should dictate legal behavior when using that utility. If you are breaking laws there are already laws that can be enforced against you. Allowing the corporate police state trying to control the internet to write their own laws and use those laws to discriminate against people is NOT acceptable.

Imagine if AT&T  or Verizon were to put filter spyware AI on your phone.  Now imagine, if in conversation you are half drunk, get excited, and tell someone in a joking insult, “Yo, motherfucker, Georgia is going to beat Alabama hands down.  If you think otherwise, you can suck my cock.”  Now imagine if at that point the AI kills your phone and kills your account and the phone companies acting in collusion will never allow you to have a phone account again.  Now obviously AT&T and Verizon could get their asses sued off if they were to try such a thing.  Neither they nor their AI should be listening to your conversation or reading your texts anyway. But should Google or Facebook or Twitter or whoever be allowed to basically do exactly that and still be treated as a utility.

Some people will say that Instagram has the right to say what people can and can not do on their service. That is true to some degree, but if they police content on their system and say they have the ability to act as an editor and chief of the content on their system then they are a publisher. They aren’t a utility. If they are a publisher then all immunity from what users do on their system should vanish. They should be held to the same standards as any other publication.

Now you may not like cam models. You may thump your bible and point to the fact that there are local decency laws. Understand, Pinterest censored Christians by putting them in the same class as porn. (As I understand it, opinion.) So religious people should understand that when they are promoting censorship they may be promoting the censorship of themselves and silencing their own voices.

The point of the local laws is to protect the local streets and neighborhoods. The internet allows adult entertainers to make money, for the most part, invisible from the streets of your neighborhood. I would guess most people consider that a good thing and not a bad thing. Do cam models on Instagram intrude into your enjoyment of the system? Do preachers on Pinterest intrude into your enjoyment of the system? If the answer is yes in either case and real people are complaining (not hit brigades using bots or elite media ass wipes trying to gain control of the internet) then of course the given internet company has a right to try to protect the system for their users. No one is saying that don’t have right to remove hurtful, drunken post, from their systems that they have received legitimate user complaints about. But banning people from the site for things they aren’t even doing on the site and therefore can’t possibly be guilty of intrusive behavior as far as their offsite behavior, it is problematic. That level of policing people should raise the question to whether the internet company should lose their right to be treated as a utility and instead be treated as a publisher and subjected to more harsh laws.

The degree that internet companies act in collusion with their shared data to ban people raises very real antitrust issues. Especially when they are doing it to censor free speech and cause economic harm to small businesses with that censorship. It does not matter whether you are a cam model or a preacher or someone with a political opinion or yes, even someone overly excited about a football game, free speech is important. FREE SPEECH IS IMPORTANT.

One thing to always try to remember when reading the propaganda pieces of the oligarch run media (through advertisements and ownership) is that free speech is a constitutional right in the United States. Free speech is important: it does not matter whether you are NPR or Google or the New York Times or CNN or FOX or some lowly Citizens Journalist/Blogger sitting in your underwear and writing your heart out with your soul felt thoughts. Free speech is important: it doesn’t even matter if you are Russian, Chinese, a janitor or Prince Harry or Donald Trump using the internet. Free Speech is the most important of rights that is only constrained by common sense laws such as you don’t use fighting words, you don’t scream fire in a crowded theater, you don’t proposition an undercover officer for sex, you don’t harass someone, you don’t lie about someone, you don’t try to con people, you don’t try to blackmail people, and so on.

But if you know the truth you have the right to speak that truth even if that truth was potentially obtained illegally. You have the right to theorize. You have the right to ponder ideas even if other people think those ideas are stupid. It does not matter if you think the earth is flat or that vaccinations violate some religious thought or do more harm than good or are the primary reason that you are no longer feeling horny. You have the right to express your thoughts and make your case. It does not matter whether you are as brilliant as Einstein or as dumb as a stump, you have the right to free speech.

You have the right to express your dislikes. It does not matter whether your hates are founded in logic or are just your stupid attempt to make yourself feel better about yourself by putting other people down. You don’t have the right to lie but you have the right to dislike whoever you choose to dislike just like you have the right to express your love for whoever or whatever you love so long as you are not attempting to incite criminal acts. Hate is a normal and natural emotion. Every trial in the US is based to some degree on the government’s own institutionalized hatred of criminals. People have the right to misuse the word hate and conflate it with bullying or worse, but just understand when the oligarch run media does something such as redefining the word hate, there almost always is an agenda behind their propaganda. Usually that agenda is the agenda of power and control. They would like for you to believe that they have the right to hate you through identity politics but you don’t have the right to hate them and their identity politics. They would like for you to believe that, but you have the right to hate them and everyone who serves them. Just be careful and do not follow their lead and confuse the word hate with the word hurt. You don’t have the right to hurt them any more than they have the right to hurt you by getting you fired for your beliefs. You don’t have the right to vandalize their memorials any more than they have the right to vandalize your memorials or tear down your statues.

Right now there are all kinds of attempts by the oligarch run media to limit online free speech. The argument is made that the social media companies are private companies and have the right to do whatever they want. The oligarchs would like for us to ignore that the pressure for censorship is coming from the political parties, the government, the oligarch run media, the oligarch run banks and so on. The internet is not private any more than the roads you drive on. It is public. Facebook is using public resources. Twitter is using public resources. Google is using public resources. And so on. These public resources do not just originate from the infrastructure built both publicly and privately but with the money you spend to access the internet. Verizon does not own the internet. AT&T does not own the internet. The US government does not own the internet. Red China does not own the internet. The United Nations does not own the internet. Russia does not own the internet. And so on.

YOU, the collective you, OWN THE INTERNET!!! It operates with your money and your time. It can not function/exist without you.

And make no mistake about it, the oligarchs want to steal the internet from you. They want to steal your voice from you. They want you to be silenced while they attempt to brainwash you with a bunch of bullshit propaganda. They have the right to spew that propaganda but by God you have the right to try to explain to people that it is bullshit propaganda.

Support the indie writers, musicians, artists, and movie producers. Support citizen journalists. Support small business. Support video creators.

Support free speech and tell those who oppose free speech that you are not their slave and you are not their puppet. Within reason and the bounds of the law, you will say and think what you want to say and think. That is your right!!!

The Supreme Court seemed willing Tuesday to let the Trump administration add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census form that goes to every U.S. household, despite claims from populous states that it would actually make the count less accurate. To whether illegals will not send the census form back or lie on it or be honest is an open question. The information is protected from law enforcement / not shared with law enforcement and so there is no reason for illegals to lie but it is understandable that it is in their nature to not trust government.

The Supreme Court will decide the case by late June.

In 2010 Census Workers went to around 48 million homes either because the census form was not returned or as a follow up to the form. As I learned the hard way one year, it is best to fill the form out and send it back. Yes. It. Is.

Be aware there are scam artists who pretend to be census workers so always make sure you are dealing with someone who actually is a census worker.

Trump officials told the newspaper they are evaluating whether to require foreign nationals who visit the U.S. to divulge cell phone contacts and passwords for social networking websites.

Opinion:
Not everyone has an internet profile. Some people hate the internet. So the government can’t just assume because a person does not have an internet footprint means they are lying. On the other hand, the bad guys will use phones that reveal nothing. They might even dummy their phones so as to put innocent people on their phone/internet list and then if they do anything, those people might end up on a watch list who do not belong there.

In a way it is good that Trump wants to ask for the information rather than just use bio-metrics and some clandestine way to come up with the information. But either way the information is not likely to be full proof in revealing anything. People can use radios for communication. The more sophisticated hack through satellites to relay information. The less sophisticated may use carrier pigeons or smoke signals or just pass notes in a crowded bar.

Is the potential evolution of our cellphone number becoming our identity a good or bad thing? I don’t know.

I started out loving technology and I was usually ahead of the game in understanding various tech. Sayata actually started out to be a tech company and I may still go back to writing programs. But there is a part of me that totally hates tech right now. And these kind of conversations that attempt to rationalize the total invasion of privacy does not make me grow any fonder of technology.

I grew up in a world where the United States was defined as the good guy and the USSR was defined as the bad guy. And now seeing the USA doing things that we were taught are WRONG when the USSR was doing similar just makes me feel sad.