#communications decency act

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

We're living through one of those moments when millions of people become suddenly and overwhelmingly interested in fair use, one of the subtlest and worst-understood aspects of copyright law. It's not a subject you can master by skimming a Wikipedia article!

I've been talking about fair use with laypeople for more than 20 years. I've met so many people who possess the unshakable, serene confidence of the truly wrong, like the people who think fair use means you can take x words from a book, or y seconds from a song and it will always be fair, while anything more will never be.

Or the people who think that if you violate any of the four factors, your use can't be fair – or the people who think that if you fail all of the four factors, you must be infringing (people, the Supreme Court is calling and they want to tell you about the Betamax!).

You might think that you can never quote a song lyric in a book without infringing copyright, or that you must clear every musical sample. You might be rock solid certain that scraping the web to train an AI is infringing. If you hold those beliefs, you do not understand the "fact intensive" nature of fair use.

But you can learn! It's actually a really cool and interesting and gnarly subject, and it's a favorite of copyright scholars, who have really fascinating disagreements and discussions about the subject. These discussions often key off of the controversies of the moment, but inevitably they implicate earlier fights about everything from the piano roll to 2 Live Crew to antiracist retellings of Gone With the Wind.

One of the most interesting discussions of fair use you can ask for took place in 2019, when the NYU Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy held a symposium called "Proving IP." One of the panels featured dueling musicologists debating the merits of the Blurred Lines case. That case marked a turning point in music copyright, with the Marvin Gaye estate successfully suing Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for copying the "vibe" of Gaye's "Got to Give it Up."

Naturally, this discussion featured clips from both songs as the experts – joined by some of America's top copyright scholars – delved into the legal reasoning and future consequences of the case. It would be literally impossible to discuss this case without those clips.

And that's where the problems start: as soon as the symposium was uploaded to Youtube, it was flagged and removed by Content ID, Google's $100,000,000 copyright enforcement system. This initial takedown was fully automated, which is how Content ID works: rightsholders upload audio to claim it, and then Content ID removes other videos where that audio appears (rightsholders can also specify that videos with matching clips be demonetized, or that the ad revenue from those videos be diverted to the rightsholders).

But Content ID has a safety valve: an uploader whose video has been incorrectly flagged can challenge the takedown. The case is then punted to the rightsholder, who has to manually renew or drop their claim. In the case of this symposium, the rightsholder was Universal Music Group, the largest record company in the world. UMG's personnel reviewed the video and did not drop the claim.

99.99% of the time, that's where the story would end, for many reasons. First of all, most people don't understand fair use well enough to contest the judgment of a cosmically vast, unimaginably rich monopolist who wants to censor their video. Just as importantly, though, is that Content ID is a Byzantine system that is nearly as complex as fair use, but it's an entirely private affair, created and adjudicated by another galactic-scale monopolist (Google).

Google's copyright enforcement system is a cod-legal regime with all the downsides of the law, and a few wrinkles of its own (for example, it's a system without lawyers – just corporate experts doing battle with laypeople). And a single mis-step can result in your video being deleted or your account being permanently deleted, along with every video you've ever posted. For people who make their living on audiovisual content, losing your Youtube account is an extinction-level event:

https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online

So for the average Youtuber, Content ID is a kind of Kafka-as-a-Service system that is always avoided and never investigated. But the Engelbert Center isn't your average Youtuber: they boast some of the country's top copyright experts, specializing in exactly the questions Youtube's Content ID is supposed to be adjudicating.

So naturally, they challenged the takedown – only to have UMG double down. This is par for the course with UMG: they are infamous for refusing to consider fair use in takedown requests. Their stance is so unreasonable that a court actually found them guilty of violating the DMCA's provision against fraudulent takedowns:

https://www.eff.org/cases/lenz-v-universal

But the DMCA's takedown system is part of the real law, while Content ID is a fake law, created and overseen by a tech monopolist, not a court. So the fate of the Blurred Lines discussion turned on the Engelberg Center's ability to navigate both the law and the n-dimensional topology of Content ID's takedown flowchart.

It took more than a year, but eventually, Engelberg prevailed.

Until they didn't.

If Content ID was a person, it would be baby, specifically, a baby under 18 months old – that is, before the development of "object permanence." Until our 18th month (or so), we lack the ability to reason about things we can't see – this the period when small babies find peek-a-boo amazing. Object permanence is the ability to understand things that aren't in your immediate field of vision.

Content ID has no object permanence. Despite the fact that the Engelberg Blurred Lines panel was the most involved fair use question the system was ever called upon to parse, it managed to repeatedly forget that it had decided that the panel could stay up. Over and over since that initial determination, Content ID has taken down the video of the panel, forcing Engelberg to go through the whole process again.

But that's just for starters, because Youtube isn't the only place where a copyright enforcement bot is making billions of unsupervised, unaccountable decisions about what audiovisual material you're allowed to access.

Spotify is yet another monopolist, with a justifiable reputation for being extremely hostile to artists' interests, thanks in large part to the role that UMG and the other major record labels played in designing its business rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Spotify has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to capture the podcasting market, in the hopes of converting one of the last truly open digital publishing systems into a product under its control:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein

Thankfully, that campaign has failed – but millions of people have (unwisely) ditched their open podcatchers in favor of Spotify's pre-enshittified app, so everyone with a podcast now must target Spotify for distribution if they hope to reach those captive users.

Guess who has a podcast? The Engelberg Center.

Naturally, Engelberg's podcast includes the audio of that Blurred Lines panel, and that audio includes samples from both "Blurred Lines" and "Got To Give It Up."

So – naturally – UMG keeps taking down the podcast.

Spotify has its own answer to Content ID, and incredibly, it's even worse and harder to navigate than Google's pretend legal system. As Engelberg describes in its latest post, UMG and Spotify have colluded to ensure that this now-classic discussion of fair use will never be able to take advantage of fair use itself:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/news/how-explaining-copyright-broke-the-spotify-copyright-system/

Remember, this is the best case scenario for arguing about fair use with a monopolist like UMG, Google, or Spotify. As Engelberg puts it:

The Engelberg Center had an extraordinarily high level of interest in pursuing this issue, and legal confidence in our position that would have cost an average podcaster tens of thousands of dollars to develop. That cannot be what is required to challenge the removal of a podcast episode.

Automated takedown systems are the tech industry's answer to the "notice-and-takedown" system that was invented to broker a peace between copyright law and the internet, starting with the US's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA implements (and exceeds) a pair of 1996 UN treaties, the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the Performances and Phonograms Treaty, and most countries in the world have some version of notice-and-takedown.

Big corporate rightsholders claim that notice-and-takedown is a gift to the tech sector, one that allows tech companies to get away with copyright infringement. They want a "strict liability" regime, where any platform that allows a user to post something infringing is liable for that infringement, to the tune of $150,000 in statutory damages.

Of course, there's no way for a platform to know a priori whether something a user posts infringes on someone's copyright. There is no registry of everything that is copyrighted, and of course, fair use means that there are lots of ways to legally reproduce someone's work without their permission (or even when they object). Even if every person who ever has trained or ever will train as a copyright lawyer worked 24/7 for just one online platform to evaluate every tweet, video, audio clip and image for copyright infringement, they wouldn't be able to touch even 1% of what gets posted to that platform.

The "compromise" that the entertainment industry wants is automated takedown – a system like Content ID, where rightsholders register their copyrights and platforms block anything that matches the registry. This "filternet" proposal became law in the EU in 2019 with Article 17 of the Digital Single Market Directive:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/today-europe-lost-internet-now-we-fight-back

This was the most controversial directive in EU history, and – as experts warned at the time – there is no way to implement it without violating the GDPR, Europe's privacy law, so now it's stuck in limbo:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/eus-copyright-directive-still-about-filters-eus-top-court-limits-its-use

As critics pointed out during the EU debate, there are so many problems with filternets. For one thing, these copyright filters are very expensive: remember that Google has spent $100m on Content ID alone, and that only does a fraction of what filternet advocates demand. Building the filternet would cost so much that only the biggest tech monopolists could afford it, which is to say, filternets are a legal requirement to keep the tech monopolists in business and prevent smaller, better platforms from ever coming into existence.

Filternets are also incapable of telling the difference between similar files. This is especially problematic for classical musicians, who routinely find their work blocked or demonetized by Sony Music, which claims performances of all the most important classical music compositions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music

Content ID can't tell the difference between your performance of "The Goldberg Variations" and Glenn Gould's. For classical musicians, the best case scenario is to have their online wages stolen by Sony, who fraudulently claim copyright to their recordings. The worst case scenario is that their video is blocked, their channel deleted, and their names blacklisted from ever opening another account on one of the monopoly platforms.

But when it comes to free expression, the role that notice-and-takedown and filternets play in the creative industries is really a sideshow. In creating a system of no-evidence-required takedowns, with no real consequences for fraudulent takedowns, these systems are huge gift to the world's worst criminals. For example, "reputation management" companies help convicted rapists, murderers, and even war criminals purge the internet of true accounts of their crimes by claiming copyright over them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

Remember how during the covid lockdowns, scumbags marketed junk devices by claiming that they'd protect you from the virus? Their products remained online, while the detailed scientific articles warning people about the fraud were speedily removed through false copyright claims:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#copyfraud

Copyfraud – making false copyright claims – is an extremely safe crime to commit, and it's not just quack covid remedy peddlers and war criminals who avail themselves of it. Tech giants like Adobe do not hesitate to abuse the takedown system, even when that means exposing millions of people to spyware:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/13/theres-an-app-for-that/#gnash

Dirty cops play loud, copyrighted music during confrontations with the public, in the hopes that this will trigger copyright filters on services like Youtube and Instagram and block videos of their misbehavior:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#bhpd

But even if you solved all these problems with filternets and takedown, this system would still choke on fair use and other copyright exceptions. These are "fact intensive" questions that the world's top experts struggle with (as anyone who watches the Blurred Lines panel can see). There's no way we can get software to accurately determine when a use is or isn't fair.

That's a question that the entertainment industry itself is increasingly conflicted about. The Blurred Lines judgment opened the floodgates to a new kind of copyright troll – grifters who sued the record labels and their biggest stars for taking the "vibe" of songs that no one ever heard of. Musicians like Ed Sheeran have been sued for millions of dollars over these alleged infringements. These suits caused the record industry to (ahem) change its tune on fair use, insisting that fair use should be broadly interpreted to protect people who made things that were similar to existing works. The labels understood that if "vibe rights" became accepted law, they'd end up in the kind of hell that the rest of us enter when we try to post things online – where anything they produce can trigger takedowns, long legal battles, and millions in liability:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/08/oh-why/#two-notes-and-running

But the music industry remains deeply conflicted over fair use. Take the curious case of Katy Perry's song "Dark Horse," which attracted a multimillion-dollar suit from an obscure Christian rapper who claimed that a brief phrase in "Dark Horse" was impermissibly similar to his song "A Joyful Noise."

Perry and her publisher, Warner Chappell, lost the suit and were ordered to pay $2.8m. While they subsequently won an appeal, this definitely put the cold grue up Warner Chappell's back. They could see a long future of similar suits launched by treasure hunters hoping for a quick settlement.

But here's where it gets unbelievably weird and darkly funny. A Youtuber named Adam Neely made a wildly successful viral video about the suit, taking Perry's side and defending her song. As part of that video, Neely included a few seconds' worth of "A Joyful Noise," the song that Perry was accused of copying.

In court, Warner Chappell had argued that "A Joyful Noise" was not similar to Perry's "Dark Horse." But when Warner had Google remove Neely's video, they claimed that the sample from "Joyful Noise" was actually taken from "Dark Horse." Incredibly, they maintained this position through multiple appeals through the Content ID system:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#warnerchappell

In other words, they maintained that the song that they'd told the court was totally dissimilar to their own was so indistinguishable from their own song that they couldn't tell the difference!

Now, this question of vibes, similarity and fair use has only gotten more intense since the takedown of Neely's video. Just this week, the RIAA sued several AI companies, claiming that the songs the AI shits out are infringingly similar to tracks in their catalog:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/record-labels-sue-music-generators-suno-and-udio-1235042056/

Even before "Blurred Lines," this was a difficult fair use question to answer, with lots of chewy nuances. Just ask George Harrison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord

But as the Engelberg panel's cohort of dueling musicologists and renowned copyright experts proved, this question only gets harder as time goes by. If you listen to that panel (if you can listen to that panel), you'll be hard pressed to come away with any certainty about the questions in this latest lawsuit.

The notice-and-takedown system is what's known as an "intermediary liability" rule. Platforms are "intermediaries" in that they connect end users with each other and with businesses. Ebay and Etsy and Amazon connect buyers and sellers; Facebook and Google and Tiktok connect performers, advertisers and publishers with audiences and so on.

For copyright, notice-and-takedown gives platforms a "safe harbor." A platform doesn't have to remove material after an allegation of infringement, but if they don't, they're jointly liable for any future judgment. In other words, Youtube isn't required to take down the Engelberg Blurred Lines panel, but if UMG sues Engelberg and wins a judgment, Google will also have to pay out.

During the adoption of the 1996 WIPO treaties and the 1998 US DMCA, this safe harbor rule was characterized as a balance between the rights of the public to publish online and the interest of rightsholders whose material might be infringed upon. The idea was that things that were likely to be infringing would be immediately removed once the platform received a notification, but that platforms would ignore spurious or obviously fraudulent takedowns.

That's not how it worked out. Whether it's Sony Music claiming to own your performance of "Fur Elise" or a war criminal claiming authorship over a newspaper story about his crimes, platforms nuke first and ask questions never. Why not? If they ignore a takedown and get it wrong, they suffer dire consequences ($150,000 per claim). But if they take action on a dodgy claim, there are no consequences. Of course they're just going to delete anything they're asked to delete.

This is how platforms always handle liability, and that's a lesson that we really should have internalized by now. After all, the DMCA is the second-most famous intermediary liability system for the internet – the most (in)famous is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

This is a 27-word law that says that platforms are not liable for civil damages arising from their users' speech. Now, this is a US law, and in the US, there aren't many civil damages from speech to begin with. The First Amendment makes it very hard to get a libel judgment, and even when these judgments are secured, damages are typically limited to "actual damages" – generally a low sum. Most of the worst online speech is actually not illegal: hate speech, misinformation and disinformation are all covered by the First Amendment.

Notwithstanding the First Amendment, there are categories of speech that US law criminalizes: actual threats of violence, criminal harassment, and committing certain kinds of legal, medical, election or financial fraud. These are all exempted from Section 230, which only provides immunity for civil suits, not criminal acts.

What Section 230 really protects platforms from is being named to unwinnable nuisance suits by unscrupulous parties who are betting that the platforms would rather remove legal speech that they object to than go to court. A generation of copyfraudsters have proved that this is a very safe bet:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

In other words, if you made a #MeToo accusation, or if you were a gig worker using an online forum to organize a union, or if you were blowing the whistle on your employer's toxic waste leaks, or if you were any other under-resourced person being bullied by a wealthy, powerful person or organization, that organization could shut you up by threatening to sue the platform that hosted your speech. The platform would immediately cave. But those same rich and powerful people would have access to the lawyers and back-channels that would prevent you from doing the same to them – that's why Sony can get your Brahms recital taken down, but you can't turn around and do the same to them.

This is true of every intermediary liability system, and it's been true since the earliest days of the internet, and it keeps getting proven to be true. Six years ago, Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that allowed platforms to be held civilly liable by survivors of sex trafficking. At the time, advocates claimed that this would only affect "sexual slavery" and would not impact consensual sex-work.

But from the start, and ever since, SESTA/FOSTA has primarily targeted consensual sex-work, to the immediate, lasting, and profound detriment of sex workers:

https://hackinghustling.org/what-is-sesta-fosta/

SESTA/FOSTA killed the "bad date" forums where sex workers circulated the details of violent and unstable clients, killed the online booking sites that allowed sex workers to screen their clients, and killed the payment processors that let sex workers avoid holding unsafe amounts of cash:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/09/fight-overturn-fosta-unconstitutional-internet-censorship-law-continues

SESTA/FOSTA made voluntary sex work more dangerous – and also made life harder for law enforcement efforts to target sex trafficking:

https://hackinghustling.org/erased-the-impact-of-fosta-sesta-2020/

Despite half a decade of SESTA/FOSTA, despite 15 years of filternets, despite a quarter century of notice-and-takedown, people continue to insist that getting rid of safe harbors will punish Big Tech and make life better for everyday internet users.

As of now, it seems likely that Section 230 will be dead by then end of 2025, even if there is nothing in place to replace it:

https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/bipartisan-energy-and-commerce-leaders-announce-legislative-hearing-on-sunsetting-section-230

This isn't the win that some people think it is. By making platforms responsible for screening the content their users post, we create a system that only the largest tech monopolies can survive, and only then by removing or blocking anything that threatens or displeases the wealthy and powerful.

Filternets are not precision-guided takedown machines; they're indiscriminate cluster-bombs that destroy anything in the vicinity of illegal speech – including (and especially) the best-informed, most informative discussions of how these systems go wrong, and how that blocks the complaints of the powerless, the marginalized, and the abused.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/files/banner_library/yt-fu-1b.png

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[nationallawreview]

Social Media’s Legal Dilemma: Curated Harmful Content

Walking the Line Between Immunity and Liability: How Social Media Platforms May Be Liable for Harmful Content Specifically Curated for Users As proliferation of harmful content online has increasingly become easier and more accessible through social media, review websites and other online public forums, businesses and politicians have pushed to reform and limit the sweeping protections afforded…

[vaguely-problematic]

a u.s. supreme court case for 2023 may change the internet. legal eagle (above video) explains.

Gonzalez v. Google LLC is about whether youtube can be held liable for the content that its algorithm recommends to viewers. it involves a terrorist attack by isis and the fact that youtube was recommending isis videos to its users.

[nari-writes]

Lines in my own fic I still think are funny:

"You call me Drake because you're a transphobic little shit!"

"I do not!" Damian says, appalled despite himself.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Inkjump Linkdump

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

It's the start of a long weekend and I've found myself with a backlog of links, so it's time for another linkdump – the eighteenth in the (occasional) series. Here's the previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Kicking off this week's backlog is a piece of epic lawyer-snark, which is something I always love, but what makes this snark total catnip for me is that it's snark about copyfraud: false copyright claims made to censor online speech. Yes please and a second portion, thank you very much!

This starts with the Cola Corporation, a radical LA-based design store that makes lefty t-shirts, stickers and the like. Cola made a t-shirt that remixed the LA Lakers logo to read "Fuck the LAPD." In response, the LAPD's private foundation sent a nonsense copyright takedown letter. Cola's lawyer, Mike Dunford, sent them a chef's-kiss-perfect reply, just two words long: "LOL, no":

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/19/apparel-company-gives-perfect-response-to-lapds-nonsense-ip-threat-letter-over-fuck-the-lapd-shirt/

But that's not the lawyer snark I'm writing about today. Dunford also sent a letter to IMG Worldwide, whose lawyers sent the initial threat, demanding an explanation for this outrageous threat, which was – as the physicists say – "not even wrong":

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2024/05/lol-no-explained.html

Every part of the legal threat is dissected here, with lavish, caustic footnotes, mercilessly picking apart the legal defects, including legally actionable copyfraud under DMCA 512(f), which provides for penalties for wrongful copyright threats. To my delight, Dunford cited Lenz here, which is the infamous "Dancing Baby" case that EFF successfully litigated on behalf of Stephanie Lenz, whose video of her adorable (then-)toddler dancing to a few seconds of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" was censored by Universal Music Group:

https://www.eff.org/cases/lenz-v-universal

Dunford's towering rage is leavened with incredulous demands for explanations: how on Earth could a lawyer knowingly send such a defective, illegal threat? Why shouldn't Dunford seek recovery of his costs from IMG and its client, the LA Police Foundation, for such lawless bullying? It is a sparkling – incandescent, even! – piece of lawyerly writing. If only all legal correspondence was this entertaining! Every 1L should study this.

Meanwhile, Cola has sold out of everything, thanks to that viral "LOL, no." initial response letter. They're taking orders for their next resupply, shipping on June 1. Gotta love that Streisand Effect!

https://www.thecolacorporation.com/

I'm generally skeptical of political activism that takes the form of buying things or refusing to do so. "Voting with your wallet" is a pretty difficult trick to pull off. After all, the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and generally, the monopoly party wins. But as the Cola Company's example shows, there's times when shopping can be a political act.

But that's because it's a collective act. Lots of us went and bought stuff from Cola, to send a message to the LAPD about legal bullying. That kind of collective action is hard to pull off, especially when it comes to purchase-decisions. Often, this kind of thing descends into a kind of parody of political action, where you substitute shopping for ideology. This is where Matt Bors's Mr Gotcha comes in: "ooh, you want to make things better, but you bought a product from a tainted company, I guess you're not really sincere, gotcha!"

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

There's a great example of this in Zephyr Teachout's brilliant 2020 book Break 'Em Up: if you miss the pro-union demonstration at the Amazon warehouse because you spent two hours driving around looking for an indie stationer to buy the cardboard to make your protest sign rather than buying it from Amazon, Amazon wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

So yeah, I'm pretty skeptical of consumerism as a framework for political activism. It's very hard to pull off an effective boycott, especially of a monopolist. But if you can pull it off, well…

Canada is one of the most monopoly-friendly countries in the world. Hell, the Competition Act doesn't even have an "abuse of dominance" standard! That's like a criminal code that doesn't have a section prohibiting "murder." (The Trudeau government has promised to fix this.)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-an-overhauled-competition-act-will-light-a-fire-in-the-stolid-world-of/

There's stiff competition for Most Guillotineable Canadian Billionaire. There's the entire Irving family, who basically own the province of New Bruinswick:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/dynasties-2-the-irvings/

There's Ted Rogers, the trumpy billionaire telecoms monopolist, whose serial acquire-and-loot approach to media has devastated Canadian TV and publishing:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/canadaland-725-the-rogers-family-compact/

But then there's Galen Fucking Weston, the nepobaby who inherited the family grocery business (including Loblaw), bought out all his competitors (including Shopper's Drug Mart), and then engaged in a criminal price-fixing conspiracy to rig the price of bread, the most Les-Miz-ass crime imaginable:

https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2023/06/what-should-happened-galen-weston-price-fixing/

Weston has made himself the face of the family business, appearing in TV ads in a cardigan to deliver dead-eyed avuncular paeans to his sprawling empire, even as he colludes with competitors to rig the price of his workers' wages:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-12/a-supermarket-billionaire-steps-into-trouble-over-pandemic-wages

For Canadians, Weston is the face of greedflation, the man whose nickle-and-diming knows no shame. This is the man who decided that the discount on nearly-spoiled produce would be slashed from 50% to 30%, who racked up record profits even as his prices skyrocketed.

It's impossible to overstate how loathed Galen Weston is at this moment. There's a very good episode of the excellent new podcast Lately, hosted by Canadian competition expert Vass Bednar and Katrina Onstad that gives you a sense of the national outrage:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-boycotting-the-loblawpoly/

All of this has led to a national boycott of Loblaw, kicked off by members of the r/loblawsisoutofcontrol, and it's working. Writing for Jacobin, Jeremy Appel gives us a snapshot of a nation in revolt:

https://jacobin.com/2024/05/loblaw-grocery-price-gouge-boycott/

Appel points out the boycott's problems – there's lots of places, particularly in the north, where Loblaw's is the only game in town, or where the sole competitor is the equally odious Walmart. But he also talks about the beneficial effect the boycott is having for independent grocers and co-ops who deal more fairly with their suppliers and their customers.

He also platforms the boycott's call for a national system of price controls on certain staples. This is something that neoliberal economists despise, and it's always fun to watch them lose their minds when the subject is raised. Meanwhile, economists like Isabella M Weber continue to publish careful research explaining how and why price controls can work, and represent our best weapon against "seller's inflation":

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/343/

Antimonopoly sentiment is having a minute, obviously, and the news comes at you fast. This week, the DoJ filed a lawsuit to break up Ticketmaster/Live Nation, one of the country's most notorious monopolists, who have aroused the ire of every kind of fan, but especially the Swifties (don't fuck with Swifties). In announcing the suit, DoJ Antitrust Division boss Jonathan Kanter coined the term "Ticketmaster tax" to describe the junk fees that Ticketmaster uses to pick all our pockets.

In response, Ticketmaster has mobilized its own Loblaw-like shill army, who insist that all the anti-monopoly activism is misguided populism, and "anti-business." In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tears these claims apart, and provides one of the clearest explanations of how Ticketmaster rips us all off that I've ever seen, leaning heavily on Ticketmaster's own statements to their investors and the business-press:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-break-up-ticketmaster

Ticketmaster has a complicated "flywheel" that it uses to corner the market on live events, mixing low-margin businesses that are deliberately kept unprofitable (to prevent competitors from gaining a foothold) in order to capture the high-margin businesses that are its real prize. All this complexity can make your eyes glaze over, and that's to Ticketmaster's benefit, keeping normies from looking too closely at how this bizarre self-licking ice-cream cone really works.

But for industry insiders, those workings are all too clear. When Rebecca Giblin and I were working on our book Chokepoint Capitalism, we talked to insiders from every corner of the entertainment-industrial complex, and there was always at least one expert who'd go on record about the scams inside everything from news monopolies to streaming video to publishing and the record industry:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The sole exception was Ticketmaster/Live Nation. When we talked to club owners, promoters and other victims of TM's scam, they universally refused to go on the record. They were palpably terrified of retaliation from Ticketmaster's enforcers. They acted like mafia informants seeking witness protection. Not without reason, mind you: back when the TM monopoly was just getting started, Pearl Jam – then one of the most powerful acts in American music – took a stand against them. Ticketmaster destroyed them. That was when TM was a mere hatchling, with a bare fraction of the terrifying power it wields today.

TM is a great example of the problem with boycotts. If a club or an act refuses to work with TM/LN, they're destroyed. If a fan refuses to buy tickets from TM or see a Live Nation show, they basically can't go to any shows. The TM monopoly isn't a problem of bad individual choices – it's a systemic problem that needs a systemic response.

That's what makes antitrust responses so timely. Federal enforcers have wide-ranging powers, and can seek remedies that consumerism can never attain – there's no way a boycott could result in a breakup of Ticketmaster/Live Nation, but a DoJ lawsuit can absolutely get there.

Every federal agency has wide-ranging antimonopoly powers at its disposal. These are laid out very well in Tim Wu's 2020 White House Executive Order on competition, which identifies 72 ways the agencies can act against monopoly without having to wait for Congress:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

But of course, the majority of antimonopoly power is vested in the FTC, the agency created to police corporate power. Section 5 of the FTC Act grants the agency the power to act to prevent "unfair and deceptive methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

This clause has lain largely dormant since the Reagan era, but FTC chair Lina Khan has revived it, using it to create muscular privacy rights for Americans, and to ban noncompete agreements that bind American workers to dead-end jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

The FTC's power to ban activity because it's "unfair and deceptive" is exciting, because it promises American internet users a way to solve their problems beyond copyright law. Copyright law is basically the only law that survived the digital transition, even as privacy, labor and consumer protection rights went into hibernation. The last time Congress gave us a federal consumer privacy law was 1988, and it's a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

That's left internet users desperately trying to contort copyright to solve every problem they have – like someone trying to build a house using nothing but chainsaw. For example, I once found someone impersonating me on a dating site, luring strangers into private spaces. Alarmed, I contacted the dating site, who told me that their only fix for this was for me to file a copyright claim against the impersonator to make them remove the profile photo. Now, that photo was Creative Commons licensed, so any takedown notice would have been a "LOL, no." grade act of copyfraud:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

The unsuitability of copyright for solving complex labor and privacy problems hasn't stopped people who experience these problems from trying to use copyright to solve them. They've got nothing else, after all.

That's why everyone who's worried about the absolutely legitimate and urgent concerns over AI and labor and privacy has latched onto copyright as the best tool for resolving these questions, despite copyright's total unsuitability for this purpose, and the strong likelihood that this will make these problems worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Enter FTC Chair Lina Khan, who has just announced that her agency will be reviewing AI model training as an "unfair and deceptive method of competition":

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4682461-ftc-chair-ai-models-could-violate-antitrust-laws/

If the agency can establish this fact, they will have sweeping powers to craft rules prohibiting the destructive and unfair uses of AI, without endangering beneficial activities like scraping, mathematical analysis, and the creation of automated systems that help with everything from adding archival metadata to exonerating wrongly convicted people rotting in prison:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

I love this so much. Khan's announcement accomplishes the seemingly impossible: affirming that there are real problems and insisting that we employ tactics that can actually fix those problems, rather than just doing something because inaction is so frustrating.

That's something we could use a lot more of, especially in platform regulation. The other big tech news about Big Tech last week was the progress of a bill that would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act at the end of 2025, without any plans to replace it with something else.

Section 230 is the most maligned, least understood internet law, and that's saying something:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

Its critics wrongly accuse the law – which makes internet users liable for bad speech acts, not the platforms that carry that speech – of being a gift to Big Tech. That's totally wrong. Without Section 230, platforms could be named to lawsuits arising from their users' actions. We know how that would play out.

Back in 2018, Congress took a big chunk out of 230 when they passed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that makes platforms liable for any sex trafficking that is facilitated by their platforms. Now, this may sound like a narrowly targeted, beneficial law that aims at a deplorable, unconscionable crime. But here's how it played out: the platforms decided that it was too much trouble to distinguish sex trafficking from any sex-work, including consensual sex work and adjacent activities. The result? Consensual sex-work became infinitely more dangerous and precarious, while trafficking was largely unaffected:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-385.pdf

Eliminating 230 would be incredibly reckless under any circumstances, but after the SESTA/FOSTA experience, it's unforgivable. The Big Tech platforms will greet this development by indiscriminately wiping out any kind of controversial speech from marginalized groups (think #MeToo or Black Lives Matter). Meanwhile, the rich and powerful will get a new tool – far more powerful than copyfraud – to make inconvenient speech disappear. The war-criminals, rapists, murderers and rip-off artists who currently make do with bogus copyright claims to "manage their reputations" will be able to use pretextual legal threats to make their critics just disappear:

https://www.qurium.org/forensics/dark-ops-undercovered-episode-i-eliminalia/

In a post-230 world, Cola Corporation's lawyers wouldn't get a chance to reply to the LAPD's bullying lawyers – those lawyers would send their letter to Cola's hosting provider, who would weigh the possibility of being named in a lawsuit against the small-dollar monthly payment they get from Cola, and poof, no more Cola. The legal bullies could do the same for Cola's email provider, their payment processor, their anti-DoS provider.

This week on EFF's Deeplinks blog, I published a piece making the connection between abolishing Section 230 and reinforcing Big Tech monopolies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/wanna-make-big-tech-monopolies-even-worse-kill-section-230

The Big Tech platforms really do suck, and the solution to their systemic, persistent moderation failures won't come from making them liable for users' speech. The platforms have correctly assessed that they alone have the legal and moderation staff to do the kinds of mass-deletions of controversial speech that could survive a post-230 world. That's why tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg love the idea of getting rid of 230:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/facebooks-pitch-congress-section-230-me-not-thee

But for small tech providers – individuals, co-ops, nonprofits and startups that host fediverse servers, standalone group chats and BBSes – a post-230 world is a mass-extinction event. Ever had a friend demand that you take sides in an interpersonal dispute ("if you invite her to the party, I'm not coming!").

Imagine if your refusal to take sides in a dispute among your friends – and their friends, and their friends – could result in you being named to a suit that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle:

https://www.engine.is/news/primer/section230costs

It's one thing to hope for a more humane internet run by people who want to make hospitable forums for online communities to form. It's another to ask them to take on an uninsurable risk that could result in the loss of their home, their retirement account, and their life's savings.

A post-230 world is one in which Big Tech must delete first and ask questions later. Yes, Big Tech platforms have many sins to answer for, but making them jointly liable for their users' speech will flush out treasure-hunters seeking a quick settlement and a quick buck.

Again, this isn't speculative – it's inevitable. Consider FTX: yes, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange was a festering hive of fraud – but there's no way that fraud added up to the 23.6 quintillion dollars in claims that have been laid against it:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/US-v-SBF-Alameda-Research-Victim-Impact-Statement-3-20-2024.pdf

Without 230, Big Tech will shut down anything controversial – and small tech will disappear. It's the worst of all possible worlds, a gift to tech monopolists and the bullies and crooks who have turned our online communities into shooting galleries.

One of the reasons I love working for EFF is our ability to propose technologically informed, sound policy solutions to the very real problems that tech creates, such as our work on interoperability as a way to make it easier for users to escape Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Every year, EFF recognizes the best, bravest and brightest contributors to a better internet and a better technological future, with our annual EFF Awards. Nominations just opened for this year's awards – if you know someone who fits the bill, here's the form:

https://www.eff.org/nominations-open-2024-eff-awards

It's nearly time for me to sign off on this weekend's linkdump. For one thing, I have to vacate my backyard hammock, because we've got contractors who need to access the side of the house to install our brand new heat-pump (one of two things I'm purchasing with my last lump-sum book advance – the other is corrective cataract surgery that will give me lifelong, perfect vision).

I've been lusting after a heat-pump for years, and they just keep getting better – though you might not know it, thanks to the fossil-fuel industry disinfo campaign that insists that these unbelievably cool gadgets don't work. This week in Wired, Matt Simon offers a comprehensive debunking of this nonsense, and on the way, explains the nearly magical technology that allows a heat pump to heat a midwestern home in the dead of winter:

https://www.wired.com/story/myth-heat-pumps-cold-weather-freezing-subzero/

As heat pumps become more common, their applications will continue to proliferate. On Bloomberg, Feargus O'Sullivan describes one such application: the Japanese yokushitsu kansouki – a sealed bathroom with its own heat-pump that can perfectly dry all your clothes while you're out at work:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/laundry-lessons-from-japanese-bathroom-technology

This is amazing stuff – it uses less energy than a clothes-dryer, leaves your clothes wrinkle-free, prevents the rapid deterioration caused by high heat and mechanical agitation, and prevents the microfiber pollution that lowers our air-quality.

This is the most solarpunk thing I've read all week, and it makes me insanely jealous of Japanese people. The second-most solarpunk thing I've read this week came from The New Republic, where Aaron Regunberg and Donald Braman discuss the possibility of using civil asset forfeiture laws – lately expanded to farcical levels by the Supreme Court in Culley – to force the fossil fuel industry to pay for the energy transition:

https://newrepublic.com/article/181721/fossil-fuels-civil-forefeiture-pipeline-climate

They point out that the fossil fuel industry has committed a string of undisputed crimes, including fraud, and that the Supremes' new standard for asset forfeiture could comfortably accommodate state AGs and other enforcers who seek billions from Big Oil on this basis. Of course, Big Oil has more resources to fight civil asset forfeiture than the median disputant in these cases ("a low- or moderate-income person of color [with] a suspected connection to drugs"). But it's an exciting idea!

All right, the heat-pump guys really need me to vacate the hammock, so here's one last quickie for you: Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier's new paper, "Seeing Like a Data Structure":

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structure

This is a masterful riff on James C Scott's classic Seeing Like a State, and it describes how digitalization forces us into computable categories, and counts the real costs of doing so. It's a gnarly and thoughtful piece, and it's been on my mind continuously since Schneier sent it to me yesterday. Something suitably chewy for you to masticate over the long weekend!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/25/anthology/#lol-no

[christiandomme]

Huh, Rep Curtis (Utah) is raising an interesting point about the difference between a publisher and a distributer. 

Section 230 protects media distributers (distributing content owned by others, basically hosting) but a publisher apparently uses active interference to diminish or amplify voices and sway consumer behavior. 

It’s more legally complex than that but using manipulation as the standard to differentiate whether someone is protected by 203 is a fascinating can of worms. 

[phosphorusab]

A grown ass man lured a 14 year old girl out to a park at night, abused her, killed her, dismembered her and scattered her remains in public parks and rivers. Now if that girl was a cisgender girl, the general public would rightfully put the blame on the perpetrator for taking advantage of and murdering a minor.

But because Pauly Likens Jr was a transgender girl, the general public is going full trans panic defense, even though the perpetrator said they met on Grindr, if that was even true. Grindr doesn’t verify the age of its users and legally doesn’t have to due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which means half of sexually active queer adolescents will use this app and fall into the hands of predators.

https://www.wgbh.org/news/national/2021-07-12/unseen-part-3-popular-gay-dating-app-grindr-poses-exploitation-risk-to-minors

Grindr has been known to have a sexual exploitation of minors issue, and I just know that people are going to see that Pauly Likens Jr and her killer may have used this app to blame Pauly for her own demise.

It’s just like they did with Gwen Araujo in 2002 (a 17 year old trans girl killed by 4 grown ass men), Mercedes Williamson in 2015 (a 17 year old trans girl killed by a grown ass man) and Nikki Kuhnhausen in 2019 (a 17 year old trans girl killed by a grown ass man). You stop being an innocent kid who is capable of being victimized when you’re trans. You’re a threat to other kids your age or younger, and you’re a precocious sexual provocateur towards adults. This applies especially to transgender girls - complete dehumanization and transmisogyny.

This pattern of transgender teenage girls being taken advantage of by adults and killed is completely unacceptable, and society should start acting like it.

[garudabluffs]

WHAT IS SECTION 230?

"Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, _ _ states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

“The primary thing we do on the internet is we talk to each other. It might be email, it might be social media, might be message boards, but we talk to each other. And a lot of those conversations are enabled by Section 230, which says that whoever’s allowing us to talk to each other isn’t liable for our conversations,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University specializing in internet law. “The Supreme Court could easily disturb or eliminate that basic proposition and say that the people allowing us to talk to each other are liable for those conversations. At which point they won’t allow us to talk to each other anymore.”

There are two possible outcomes."

“The rest of the world is cracking down on the internet even faster than the U.S.,” Goldman said. “So we’re a step behind the rest of the world in terms of censoring the internet. And the question is whether we can even hold out on our own.”

READ MORE https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/section-230-rule-made-modern-internet-97350905

The story of Section 230 goes back to an AOL troll. Now the law may be undone

February 22, 2023

"Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School who has written extensively about the Zeran case, has a hard time believing that Zeran was not intentionally targeted, but he admits that the real culprit may forever be a mystery.

"I just cannot accept the idea that he was a random drive-by victim. That just doesn't pass the smell test," Goldman said. "It is one of the great whodunits of our time."

3-Minute Listen READ MORE https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/994395889/how-one-mans-fight-against-an-aol-troll-sealed-the-tech-industrys-power

[tradgedyinwaves]

First Choice - Part 4

Part Four of this Poly141! x fat!reader tw: social anxiety, self-doubt, drinking, more touchy-touchy, reader thinks about sexual acts

In celebration of 200 followers, this part has way more than 650 words. More like 1600. :)

Conversation flowed easily with them despite their sole focus being on you. At some point, Kyle’s hand had drifted onto your thigh, fingers pressing into the flesh gently. John’s arm had slipped from the back of the booth and now rested around your shoulders. You couldn’t be sure, but it seemed Johnny couldn’t keep his feet still and kept tapping yours under the table. The only one who couldn’t seem to relax was Ghost, sitting almost across from you. 

His eyes never left you and he mainly seemed to communicate in grunts. At least, he was drinking this time, his glass now empty of his own whiskey. You were careful not to drink too much, not wanting to embarrass yourself in front of these beautiful men. But it didn’t keep you from relaxing and feeling the warmth of the two next to you. 

Pulling out your phone, you checked the time and groaned. “I really should be going. It’s been great,” you announce, looking to Kyle to move so you could slide out from the booth. “Aw come on. We’re having so much fun. Just a wee longer?” Johnny asks and you turn to him, finding yourself giving in almost immediately. Damn the puppy dog eyes. 

“Only a bit longer,” you concede and relax back into the seat. This time when Kyle’s hand lands on your thigh, it’s higher and the heat is searing through your jeans. You let out a soft sound, biting your lip as his hand starts slowly caressing your thigh up and down. He’s not even looking at you when you look up, already deep in conversation with Johnny about some sports game you had no clue about. 

John’s arm settled back over your shoulders, pulling you slightly closer so his hand hovers over your breast and you can feel the hair of his arm on your bare collarbone. Your breasts jiggle slightly with your laugh when Johnny makes a joke and you don’t miss the way his pupils dilate ever so slightly before darting back up to your face. He, at least, has the decency to blush, the faint pink color tinging his cheeks. 

When the crowd in the bar starts to thin out and you realize even your friends have left for the night, you’re yawning in your seat and now leaned completely against John with his thick arm draped over your shoulders. Kyle’s hand is now tucked between your thick thighs, the side pressed as tightly to your core as he can get it and you hope to whatever higher powers that be that he couldn’t feel the radiating heat or the damp spot that had soaked into your panties. 

“Okay, okay. I really do need to go now. My friends aren’t even here anymore and that’s saying something,” you chirp, suddenly very awake and aware that you’re in an almost empty bar with four men you’d only met that night. They all look at you like they’d rather eat sawdust than let you go and you feel a warmth creep over you. 

“Ahw, bonnie, we couldn’t let you go home on your own. Let us take you home,” Johnny chimes in, soft smile and kind eyes that hold a hint of something else in them. You swallow, looking between each of them. Your gaze lingers on Ghost for a while, noticing the man’s eyes had almost never left you.

“Yeah, alright. Let’s go. It’s not a far walk,” you reply, biting your lip at the reckless decision. These men could be serial killers and you were just inviting them to know exactly where you live. “Why don’t you let Johnny and Ghost take you home? Kyle and I can follow in our truck so they’re not stuck walking back here,” John offers, a warm smile curling up the thick mustache. 

At this point, you’re ready for bed and just want to get home. “Sounds good to me,” you reply though the words are manipulated by a yawn. All of you shuffle out of the round booth, both Kyle and John kissing the top of your head like they’d known you for years before disappearing out the door. You wrap your jacket around you again, pulling the zipper together over your belly and getting a little frustrated when it gets caught up on your shirt. 

“Lemme,” Ghost grumbled, stepping up to you and taking hold of the jammed zipper. It’s the first time he’s spoken all night and it almost stuns you how deep and growly it is. Your breath hitches as he grabs the zipper, yanking on it and subsequently making your breasts bounce as he accidentally pushes against them. He gets it undone and you mutter a bashful ‘thanks’ before turning on your heel as you finish zipping it up to your throat.

You know they’re meant to be escorting you home, but you’re out the door so fast the two men have to jog to catch up. Johnny’s arm wraps around your waist, fingers pressing into the pudge of your stomach in a way that makes you want to shrivel up. You don’t like anyone touching your stomach, but you’re warring with yourself on whether or not to move his hand, to show that kind of discomfort in front of these men. 

You choose to do so anyway, wrapping your fingers around his and lifting his arm up over your head and ducking under it, dropping it at his side. Johnny looks down at you with a furrowed brow. “Don’ like it when people touch you, do you?” he asks as he shoves his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t look bothered that you’d removed his arm, but your anxiety rears its ugly head and makes you worried you’d offended him. 

“It’s not that I don’t like being touched. It-It’s…complicated. I-I don’t want to talk about it,” you manage to stammer out before picking up your speed. It’s not like you’re going to shake off your two guard dogs whose legs are easily longer than yours by several inches, but you take off anyways. 

When your building finally comes into view, you slow your pace and breathe a soft sigh of relief. Your bed was so close, just a few more yards and you could get rid of the guard dogs and curl up in bed. “Well, this is me. Thanks for bringing me home. I really appreciate it.” You were grateful that they’d walked you home. It wasn’t safe this time of night to be wandering around in this part of town. 

“We’re walking you to your door, bonnie. Wouldn’t want someone to snatch you up between here and there,” Johnny stated, wrapping his arm around your shoulders. You wanted nothing more than to sink into the scent of him, warm and tingly to the nose like oranges and nutmeg, but you shook your head and backed up to the door of your building. “There’s really no need. My neighbors are great.” Lie. Absolute fucking lie. Nestor at the end of the hall on the first floor would, no questions asked, rip you from the hallway if he saw you alone. A chill went down your spine and you conceded the moment you looked into Ghost’s eyes. You didn’t have a choice if they were escorting you all the way up. 

You turned and opened the door to the building, looking down the hall to make sure Nestor was in his apartment before slipping in and letting the boys in behind you. You headed to the elevator and punched the up arrow, biting your lip as you tried not to wither under the intense stare of the man in the mask. The elevator had been the selling point for you. It was the only place within your budget that had an elevator and you weren’t about to walk up five flights of stairs multiple times a day. 

The lift dinged and you stepped inside, Ghost and Johnny slipping in behind you just to stand with their bodies pressed against your back. Unintentionally, you leaned into them before your eyes widened at your own movement and you straightened so your body pulled away slightly.

The doors dinged and opened allowing you to step out onto your floor. You headed to your unit, digging for your keys in your purse. With a ‘aha!’, you pulled them out and shoved the key into the doorknob, unlocking it. “Would you guys like to come in? I might have some whiskey left?” you offer, turning to look at them. You didn’t know why you were inviting them in, but the sense of safety you had around them had you desperate for them to stay. 

“Sure, lemme text Price and Kyle where to come. Go on in, Si-Ghost. I’ll come in in a minute,” Johnny stated, already pulling his phone out and going to stand next to the window at the end of the hall. You opened the door and allowed Ghost in, leaving it unlocked so the others could join once they arrived. 

Heading into your kitchen, you stood up on your tippy toes, reaching up so you could pull out five of your good glasses. You were looking for the last one, but it was just out of your reach. Suddenly, you felt what could only be Ghost against your back, pressing you against the counter as he leaned over you to grab the glass. 

The heat of him against your back has your thighs clenching together while you watch his thick digits wrap around the glass and you wonder briefly what they’d feel like inside you. He takes a step back once he has the cup and holds it out to you. 

You turn back to him while trying to fight off the blush coloring your cheeks. You murmur a thanks and wrap your own fingers around the glass. 

Of course, that would be when the other three burst loudly through the door.

I wasn't intending for this to become a whole story, but it's really stuck with me over the last week or so.

<- Part Three Part Five ->

[crumb]

It’s shit like this that makes me want to stop making gifsets. People love taking the gifs we spent hours sourcing the best footage for, editing, color correcting, and any other numerous types of altering or adding graphics and text—and then they just rip them off, don’t credit, and they act like we’re insane for asking that you at the bare minimum credit us. “You have nothing to gain and you didn’t create saw” do any of you understand how art works? Understand what fan works are? Most art is created with no intention of gaining anything except enjoyment and community. What do YOU gain from ripping off people’s gifs? Why even post on tumblr at all? Because it’s fun and you get to be apart of a community? Wow, what a concept. It’s almost like people make gifs to express their creativity and love for something and want to share it with others. Wanting credit for that work, which is honestly just basic decency, shouldn’t be that difficult to wrap your head around. And the hilarious part is they have one of my other gifsets pinned to their main blog.

Also, if I could get rich and famous from making gifsets do you think I’d be gif’ing some of the stuff I do? Yeah, my gifset of Cougars Inc is really gonna take me places!

[trans-axolotl]

"Much ink has already been spilled on Harris’s prosecutorial background. What is significant about the topic of sex work is how recently the vice president–elect’s actions contradicted her alleged views. During her tenure as AG, she led a campaign to shut down Backpage, a classified advertising website frequently used by sex workers, calling it “the world’s top online brothel” in 2016 and claiming that the site made “millions of dollars from trafficking.” While Backpage did make millions off of sex work ads, its “adult services” listings offered a safer and more transparent platform for sex workers and their clients to conduct consensual transactions than had historically been available. Harris’s grandiose mischaracterization led to a Senate investigation, and the shuttering of the site by the FBI in 2018.

“Backpage being gone has devastated our community,” said Andrews. The platform allowed sex workers to work more safely: They were able to vet clients and promote their services online. “It’s very heartbreaking to see the fallout,” said dominatrix Yevgeniya Ivanyutenko. “A lot of people lost their ability to safely make a living. A lot of people were forced to go on the street or do other things that they wouldn’t have otherwise considered.” M.F. Akynos, the founder and executive director of the Black Sex Worker Collective, thinks Harris should “apologize to the community. She needs to admit that she really fucked up with Backpage, and really ruined a lot of people’s lives.”

After Harris became a senator, she cosponsored the now-infamous Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which—along with the House’s Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)—was signed into law by President Trump in 2018. FOSTA-SESTA created a loophole in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the so-called “safe harbor” provision that allows websites to be free from liability for user-generated content (e.g., Amazon reviews, Craigslist ads). The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that Section 230 is the backbone of the Internet, calling it “the most important law protecting internet free speech.” Now, website publishers are liable if third parties post sex-work ads on their platforms.

That spelled the end of any number of platforms—mostly famously Craigslist’s “personal encounters” section—that sex workers used to vet prospective clients, leaving an already vulnerable workforce even more exposed. (The Woodhull Freedom Foundation has filed a lawsuit challenging FOSTA on First Amendment grounds; in January 2020, it won an appeal in D.C.’s district court).

“I sent a bunch of stats [to Harris and Senator Diane Feinstein] about decriminalization and how much SESTA-FOSTA would hurt American sex workers and open them up to violence,” said Cara (a pseudonym), who was working as a sex worker in the San Francisco and a member of SWOP when the bill passed. Both senators ignored her.

The bill both demonstrably harmed sex workers and failed to drop sex trafficking. “Within one month of FOSTA’s enactment, 13 sex workers were reported missing, and two were dead from suicide,” wrote Lura Chamberlain in her Fordham Law Review article “FOSTA: A Hostile Law with a Human Cost.” “Sex workers operating independently faced a tremendous and immediate uptick in unwanted solicitation from individuals offering or demanding to traffic them. Numerous others were raped, assaulted, and rendered homeless or unable to feed their children.” A 2020 survey of the effects of FOSTA-SESTA found that “99% of online respondents reported that this law does not make them feel safer” and 80.61 percent “say they are now facing difficulties advertising their services.” "

-What Sex Workers Want Kamala Harris to Know by Hallie Liberman

[anantaru]

"gimme a kiss here,"

wriothesley points at his cheek, index finger catching the flustered flesh and wriggling for more, "and here," he adds promptly, a crystal clear image portrayed in front of your eyes as to what the duke sought after before eagerly pointing at his forehead next, "and here," lastly, he finishes his deepest sentencing, pointing at his mouth.

"point taken," you retort back, adding in a pet name just to see how flustered wriothesley could get from it, his throat working around a deep swallow as he sucks in a breath when you call him baby, the warm breeze fanning against your slightly parted lips.

with the last word lingering in the air, you remember that wriothesley liked to play the tough one and he certainly enjoyed the feeling of other people being reluctant to approach him, given that he was of influential power, although currently, he was not in such a position. 

he's swift when he melts against your lips, humming in a pleased timbre when you gave him what he longed for all day long— and wriothesley whines next, such a rare noise, as if that was an effective way of communicating with you, a silent more muffled by your hungry lips devouring each other— but the sound of the small sobs and heavy breathes coming from your person were a heavenly melody to him, his mouth curling into a cheeky smile when he pinches your hips as to pull you on his lap.

with that sudden act, you're straddling the duke, your arms wrapped around his neck as you continue with your sweet ministrations, bringing your lips together in another heated kiss and lapping your tongue against his wet muscle while the rough material of your panties and his tight pants clash together— the small tingles you could gather on your core slither around you, almost like a gentle sloping cloud in the sky manifesting a curl of pleasure, the sheer impact of it all trailing down the expanse of your spine.

and when wriothesley notices your sudden weakness— compelled how your hips have gone rogue and stutter from lack of control, he figures there wasn't necessarily a point in stopping those additional movements, in fact, he'd love to help you out, the rhythm of your clothed cunt rolling across his length let lose between a heart-beat as your boyfriend decides to harshly drag you against him instead.

together you're breathing deeply before he presses you into his stiffened groin— the movement of it so sudden that you weren't able to voice anything at all and were forced out a crumbling whine, catching you off guard as you part your mouth ever so slightly which allowed wriothesley to demand entrance again— immediately taking the candied chance to let his tongue slide inside your mouth with ease, pressing and mingling the two together. 

he gives your hips a few more tugs, focusing that you're nudging your wet panties over his length and that his thick cock-head could poke at your concealed entrance, shoving back an impatient growl all the while rubbing circles on your thighs with his index fingers to soothe you.

soft lips tease you through the thin skin on your neck and you wet the pale grey fabric of his pants beyond decency, placing an insufferable quiver of need through his throbbing shaft followed by a sharp grin leaving you gasping and squirming— both of you distracted against drenched clothes, swollen lips soaked with saliva and your unravelling bodies working ethusiastically with quick, lascivious grinds of your hips and wriothesley bottoming out ever so often, dragging you rapidly to the utter brink of release.

©2023 anantaru do not repost, copy, translate, modify

[grecoromanyaoi]

i think the whole "~bad people~ deserve ~bad things~" mentality has lead to a lot of misinformation, dehumanization, infantilization n straight up historical revisionism in progressive spaces. bc they then feel the need to treat marginalized individuals and communities as perfect, harmless *things*, in order to explain why they dont "deserve" oppression. it cant be because oppression isnt something you can "deserve". its not a punishment. so they act like most lesbians actually loveeeee trans women (and ignore how that hasnt been the case, neither historically or in the present), how people from the southern us arent *actually* racist, its just misconceptions, how religious jews and muslims actually respect and uplift women, how every colonized culture on earth actually respects gay and trans people, its all just colonialist propaganda, how (culture/group) re actually not at all antisemitic, its just what They want you to think. theyre trying to help by spreading around idealized, almost orientalist notions about marginalized communities. but when has that ever helped anyone? marginalized individuals and groups can never "deserve" oppression, colonialism, genocide, because they are human. your desire to punish "the bad guys" has come before your human decency. you dont work towards equal, peaceful, and full lives for everyone on earth, youre just searching for a group you can "justifiably" enact violence against. youre not even acting against oppression, youre just erasing the experiences and making it harder for marginalized people from these communities.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dirty words are politically potent

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

Making up words is a perfectly cromulent passtime, and while most of the words we coin disappear as soon as they fall from our lips, every now and again, you find a word that fits so nice and kentucky in the public discourse that it acquires a life of its own:

http://meaningofliff.free.fr/definition.php3?word=Kentucky

I've been trying to increase the salience of digital human rights in the public imagination for a quarter of a century, starting with the campaign to get people to appreciate that the internet matters, and that tech policy isn't just the delusion that the governance of spaces where sad nerds argue about Star Trek is somehow relevant to human thriving:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

Now, eventually people figured out that a) the internet mattered and, b) it was going dreadfully wrong. So my job changed again, from "how the internet is governed matters" to "you can't fix the internet with wishful thinking," for example, when people said we could solve its problems by banning general purpose computers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

Or by banning working cryptography:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/04/oh-for-fucks-sake-not-this-fucking-bullshit-again-cryptography-edition/

Or by redesigning web browsers to treat their owners as threats:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

Or by using bots to filter every public utterance to ensure that they don't infringe copyright:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/today-europe-lost-internet-now-we-fight-back

Or by forcing platforms to surveil and police their users' speech (aka "getting rid of Section 230"):

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

Along the way, many of us have coined words in a bid to encapsulate the abstract, technical ideas at the core of these arguments. This isn't a vanity project! Creating a common vocabulary is a necessary precondition for having the substantive, vital debates we'll need to tackle the real, thorny issues raised by digital systems. So there's "free software," "open source," "filternet," "chat control," "back doors," and my own contributions, like "adversarial interoperability":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Or "Competitive Compatibility" ("comcom"), a less-intimidatingly technical term for the same thing:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/competitive-compatibility-year-review

These have all found their own niches, but nearly all of them are just that: niche. Some don't even rise to "niche": they're shibboleths, insider terms that confuse and intimidate normies and distract from the real fights with semantic ones, like whether it's "FOSS" or "FLOSS" or something else entirely:

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/262/what-is-the-difference-between-foss-and-floss

But every now and again, you get a word that just kills. That brings me to "enshittification," a word I coined in 2022:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

"Enshittification" took root in my hindbrain, rolling around and around, agglomerating lots of different thoughts and critiques I'd been making for years, crystallizing them into a coherent thesis:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

This kind of spontaneous crystallization is the dividend of doing lots of work in public, trying to take every half-formed thought and pin it down in public writing, something I've been doing for decades:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

After those first couple articles, "enshittification" raced around the internet. There's two reasons for this: first, "enshittification" is a naughty word that's fun to say. Journalists love getting to put "shit" in their copy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/crosswords/linguistics-word-of-the-year.html

Radio journalists love to tweak the FCC with cheekily bleeped syllables in slightly dirty compound words:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/enshitification

And nothing enlivens an academic's day like getting to use a word like "enshittification" in a journal article (doubtless this also amuses the editors, peer-reviewers, copyeditors, typesetters, etc):

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=enshittification&btnG=&oq=ensh

That was where I started, too! The first time I used "enshittification" was in a throwaway bad-tempered rant about the decay of Tripadvisor into utter uselessness, which drew a small chorus of appreciative chuckles about the word:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1550457808222552065

The word rattled around my mind for five months before attaching itself to my detailed theory of platform decay. But it was that detailed critique, coupled with a minor license to swear, that gave "enshittification" a life of its own. How do I know that the theory was as important as the swearing? Because the small wave of amusement that followed my first use of "enshittification" petered out in less than a day. It was only when I added the theory that the word took hold.

Likewise: how do I know that the theory needed to be blended with swearing to break out of the esoteric realm of tech policy debates (which the public had roundly ignored for more than two decades)? Well, because I spent two decades writing about this stuff without making anything like the dents that appeared once I added an Anglo-Saxon monosyllable to that critique.

Adding "enshittification" to the critique got me more column inches, a longer hearing, a more vibrant debate, than anything else I'd tried. First, Wired availed itself of the Creative Commons license on my second long-form article on the subject and reprinted it as a 4,200-word feature. I've been writing for Wired for more than thirty years and this is by far the longest thing I've published with them – a big, roomy, discursive piece that was run verbatim, with every one of my cherished darlings unmurdered.

That gave the word – and the whole critique, with all its spiky corners – a global airing, leading to more pickup and discussion. Eventually, the American Dialect Society named it their "Word of the Year" (and their "Tech Word of the Year"):

https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/

"Enshittification" turns out to be catnip for language nerds:

https://becauselanguage.com/90-enpoopification/#transcript-60

I've been dragged into (good natured) fights over the German, Spanish, French and Italian translations for the term. When I taped an NPR show before a live audience with ASL interpretation, I got to watch a Deaf fan politely inform the interpreter that she didn't need to finger-spell "enshittification," because it had already been given an ASL sign by the US Deaf community:

https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/

I gave a speech about enshittification in Berlin and published the transcript:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

Which prompted the rock-ribbed Financial Times to get in touch with me and publish the speech – again, nearly verbatim – as a whopping 6,400 word feature in their weekend magazine:

https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5

Though they could have had it for free (just as Wired had), they insisted on paying me (very well, as it happens!), as did De Zeit:

https://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2024-03/plattformen-facebook-google-internet-cory-doctorow

This was the start of the rise of enshittification. The word is spreading farther than ever, in ways that I have nothing to do with, along with the critique I hung on it. In other words, the bit of string that tech policy wonks have been pushing on for a quarter of a century is actually starting to move, and it's actually accelerating.

Despite this (or more likely because of it), there's a growing chorus of "concerned" people who say they like the critique but fret that it is being held back because you can't use it "at church or when talking to K-12 students" (my favorite variant: "I couldn't say this at a NATO conference"). I leave it up to you whether you use the word with your K-12 students, NATO generals, or fellow parishoners (though I assure you that all three groups are conversant with the dirty little word at the root of my coinage). If you don't want to use "enshittification," you can coin your own word – or just use one of the dozens of words that failed to gain public attention over the past 25 years (might I suggest "platform decay?").

What's so funny about all this pearl-clutching is that it comes from people who universally profess to have the intestinal fortitude to hear the word "enshittification" without experiencing psychological trauma, but worry that other people might not be so strong-minded. They continue to say this even as the most conservative officials in the most staid of exalted forums use the word without a hint of embarrassment, much less apology:

https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/chairman-of-irish-social-media-regulator-says-europe-should-not-be-seduced-by-mario-draghis-claims/a526530600.html

I mean, I'm giving a speech on enshittification next month at a conference where I'm opening for the Secretary General of the United Nations:

https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme

After spending half my life trying to get stuff like this into the discourse, I've developed some hard-won, informed views on how ideas succeed:

First: the minor obscenity is a feature, not a bug. The marriage of something long and serious to something short and funny is a happy one that makes both the word and the ideas better off than they'd be on their own. As Lenny Bruce wrote in his canonical work in the subject, the aptly named How to Talk Dirty and Influence People:

I want to help you if you have a dirty-word problem. There are none, and I'll spell it out logically to you.

Here is a toilet. Specifically-that's all we're concerned with, specifics-if I can tell you a dirty toilet joke, we must have a dirty toilet. That's what we're all talking about, a toilet. If we take this toilet and boil it and it's clean, I can never tell you specifically a dirty toilet joke about this toilet. I can tell you a dirty toilet joke in the Milner Hotel, or something like that, but this toilet is a clean toilet now. Obscenity is a human manifestation. This toilet has no central nervous system, no level of consciousness. It is not aware; it is a dumb toilet; it cannot be obscene; it's impossible. If it could be obscene, it could be cranky, it could be a Communist toilet, a traitorous toilet. It can do none of these things. This is a dirty toilet here.

Nobody can offend you by telling a dirty toilet story. They can offend you because it's trite; you've heard it many, many times.

https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/lenny-bruce/how-to-talk-dirty-and-influence-people/9780306825309/

Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound. As I said in that Berlin speech:

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

Finally: "coinage" is both more – and less – than thinking of the word. After the American Dialect Society gave honors to "enshittification," a few people slid into my mentions with citations to "enshittification" that preceded my usage. I find this completely unsurprising, because English is such a slippery and playful tongue, because English speakers love to swear, and because infixing is such a fun way to swear (e.g. "unfuckingbelievable"). But of course, I hadn't encountered any of those other usages before I came up with the word independently, nor had any of those other usages spread appreciably beyond the speaker (it appears that each of the handful of predecessors to my usage represents an act of independent coinage).

If "coinage" was just a matter of thinking up the word, you could write a small python script that infixed the word "shit" into every syllable of every word in the OED, publish the resulting text file, and declare priority over all subsequent inventive swearers.

On the one hand, coinage takes place when the coiner a) independently invents a word; and b) creates the context for that word that causes it to escape from the coiner's immediate milieu and into the wider world.

But on the other hand – and far more importantly – the fact that a successful coinage requires popular uptake by people unknown to the coiner means that the coiner only ever plays a small role in the coinage. Yes, there would be no popularization without the coinage – but there would also be no coinage without the popularization. Words belong to groups of speakers, not individuals. Language is a cultural phenomenon, not an individual one.

Which is rather the point, isn't it? After a quarter of a century of being part of a community that fought tirelessly to get a serious and widespread consideration of tech policy underway, we're closer than ever, thanks, in part, to "enshittification." If someone else independently used that word before me, if some people use the word loosely, if the word makes some people uncomfortable, that's fine, provided that the word is doing what I want it to do, what I've devoted my life to doing.

The point of coining words isn't the pilkunnussija's obsession with precise usage, nor the petty glory of being known as a coiner, nor ensuring that NATO generals' virgin ears are protected from the word "shit" – a word that, incidentally, is also the root of "science":

https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2019/01/24/science-and-shit/

Isn't language fun?

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

[luceafarul-de-dimineata]

Whb nobles reacting to their ship coming true

When Paimon finds out that you're in a relationship with Satan, he squeels. He's not one to rub salt on the wounds of others (not often at least), but he would make a few posts goating about being right all along. Starts making plans for the wedding since that's the only reasonable step forward. Whenever you're not with Satan, you're with Paimon on a self-care/gossip day. He's very happy that his wingman act wasn't in vaine.

Eligos throws a party and he invites the entirety of Hell over. He has no decency, he would spam all the shipping forums with photos of you and Mammon. Don't bother reporting it for spam, he has 500 alt accounts. He personally sews you and Mammon's clothes for the party. The costumes look like that of people getting married, but Eligos doesn't see what the problem is. He gets into a fist fight with everyone that disaggred with him on the forums. Bimet is in the back betting on who wins the fist fight.

Foras' squeel is so high pichted that Hades will get noise complaints from Naberius about it. He is very happy to say the least. He will turn invisible and spy on you and Leviathan being cute together like a proud father. The relationship between you and his king is like his personal child, and he can't wait to watch it grow further. Finally mod Jjok has a free day without any complaints of doxxing.

When Amon gets the news, he's not even surprised. He always was under the impression that you and Beelzebub were dating (that's why he didn't persue you himself) so this is old news to him. Would invite himself to all your dates with Beelzebub so he can protect the two of you... as in get free food and be near his king. He'll be a lot more energetic after the fact, so much so that he might make a few visits to the people that still ship you with anyone else. After all, they are going against Avisos' one law, they must be punished in some way.

Gamigin gets so excited that he starts screaming and crying. Might even puke from excitement. He is the happiest out of all of the shippers. Finally, his brother Lucifer found someone that loves him as much as he loves them. This is the happiest day of his life and he can't stop crying while hugging the two of you. Would start calling you sibling MC and invite you to all the communal dinners in Paradise Lost. Would insist you call him and everyone in the country brother or sister. You're now part of the Paradise Lost familly and you'll be treated as such.

[tarotwithavi]

Plagiarism Alert

A user named carmelcoco has been copying my post on “sun in house.” Her post is eerily similar to mine because she literally copied almost everything. The lines have the same meaning, and even the same structure, with just a few small edits here and there to make it look different.

What’s even more frustrating is that she blocked me, so I can’t even see her posts to report them myself. I found out about this from a friend, and it honestly left me feeling really disheartened. I’ve put so much effort and care into creating my content, and seeing someone else just take it and pass it off as their own is incredibly unfair.

Imagine spending hours working hard on a post, putting your heart and soul into every word, only to have someone else copy it without giving any credit and act like it’s their original work. It’s not only frustrating; it feels like a huge betrayal. I try to write posts that are helpful and meaningful, and it’s upsetting to see someone else take advantage of that effort.

I know some people might think I’m just trying to get sympathy, but that’s not what this is about. I’ve been going through a lot lately. It’s not easy to balance everything, but I still try my best to create genuine and valuable content. When someone copies that hard work, it feels like all of my efforts are being dismissed.

Here is the side by side comparison

Girl, please learn to give others credit for their work. It’s not fair or respectful to copy someone’s hard work and then pretend it’s your own. If you’re going to draw inspiration from someone, the least you can do is acknowledge them. It’s about basic decency and respect for the effort and creativity someone else has put in.

When you take someone else’s work without giving credit, it’s not just lazy, it’s dishonest. It undermines the trust in our community and discourages others from sharing their ideas openly. Remember, there’s enough room for everyone’s voice, but not if we don’t respect each other’s contributions.

So please, next time, give credit where it’s due. It’s not just about following the rules; it’s about supporting each other and building a community where everyone feels safe and valued for their original work.

EDIT

She has deleted the post and apologized. My only intention was to call out the issue, nothing more.

I kindly ask everyone to refrain from sending her any hurtful messages. That's not what our community stands for. Let’s focus on spreading kindness and keeping things positive.