Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous comment about the dangerous protect the children" ballot initiative in California:

That is not a protect the children law, that is an I hate social media and it must be destroyed law.

In second place, it's Blake Stacey passing on the comment they filed about said initiative:

I commented as well. Text of comment as follows:

This initiative is founded upon a moral panic that is the modern version of being upset that children are listening to rock and roll, reading comic books, or playing Dungeons and Dragons. Instead of making the Internet a better place, it would be a blank check to ambulance-chasing lawyers.

I have little love for social-media megacorporations and personally avoid them as much as I can. But even I will admit that they do have Trust and Safety teams and do not implement features out of sheer malice. Language like The biggest social media platforms invent and deploy features they know harm large numbers of children" is sensationalist claptrap that does not belong in or near the law. The initiative's definition of child" as anyone under age 18 places everyone under 18 in the same legal category, which in this context is absurd. A 17-year-old does not use the Internet in the same way as a 7-year-old. Moreover, requiring implicitly or explicitly that social media companies treat their users differently on the basis of age forces them to learn everyone's age, which one way or another means ubiquitous surveillance and a privacy nightmare. I thought we were supposed to make the Internet better for kids, not train them to show their papers whenever a commissar demands. The initiative's definition of social media platform" in terms of gross revenue, while no doubt intended to safeguard innovation by small business, implies that an organization's ethical obligations change dramatically once one measure of size, chosen arbitrarily out of many possible measures, crosses a threshold set at some nice round number. This is spitballing, not careful legislating. Finally, the clause stating that the people's elected representatives can only modify the initiative to make it more severe is truly immodest in its zeal. The only way in which we might be wrong," it confesses, is that we might not be fervent enough in controlling how the parents of California raise their children."

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we've got Diogenes with a simple response to questions about the legal difference between facts and opinions:

A fact can be proven or disproven.
An opinion cannot be proven or disproven.

Next, it's Cat_Daddy with a comment about Senator Blumenthal's attempts to fix" KOSA:

No, Bluthmenthal. This is not better.

I actually think I know why Bluthmenthal has been so skittish about changing KOSA: he needs Republican votes for this bill to work. If he actually does make an amendment that explicitly states that it can't be used against the LGBT, then it will be DOA on the senate floor. House Floor if we're being optimistic.

Even if this little amendment is marginally better, that doesn't mean that KOSA is automatically now salvageable. All it does is just delay the possible abuses for another, ideologically different administration to use further down the line.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is thecleric with a comment about ExTwitter banning journalists, ostensibly as part of a spam sweep:

If only we had a solution

If only they could put in a system that verifies these notable accounts so they could be excluded from spam sweeps along with a nice indicator to other users that they've checked these accounts.

Probably a bad idea though.

In second place, it's an anonymous reply to a comment ignoring context in an attempt to downplay the dogwhistle significance of the okay" hand sign:

Akshully the Swastika is a Hindu peace sign!

For editor's choice on the funny side, we've got a one-two punch of comments about a Florida state senator's attempt to make accusations of racism and transphobia de facto defamation. First, blakestacey (logged in this time I guess) had a quick reaction:

(begins reading headline) Florida Senator..."

Uh-oh.

And then an anonymous commenter chimed in to agree:

Yup. Florida Man", but with a defined set of super powers.

That's all for this week, folks!