Fixing the internet
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Thursday, December 11, 2025 20:16
VIEWED: 1732
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A Terms of Service agreement is a legal document that helps you set out the rules and guidelines that your users or visitors must agree to in order to use your website or app. It helps to limit your legal liability while maintaining control over your platform. May 12, 2024
A legitimate terms of service agreement is legally binding and may be subject to change. Companies can enforce the terms by refusing service. Customers can enforce by filing a lawsuit or arbitration case if they can show they were actually harmed by a breach of the terms.
Terms of service should include user rights and responsibilities. The ToS should also be transparent about all activities of the service that have significance for users, such as details of what the service does with user data as well as how the service maintains user privacy and security.
There you have it. We, our government, will sue them.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
A Terms of Service agreement is a legal document that helps you set out the rules and guidelines that your users or visitors must agree to in order to use your website or app. It helps to limit your legal liability while maintaining control over your platform. May 12, 2024
A legitimate terms of service agreement is legally binding and may be subject to change. Companies can enforce the terms by refusing service. Customers can enforce by filing a lawsuit or arbitration case if they can show they were actually harmed by a breach of the terms.
Terms of service should include user rights and responsibilities. The ToS should also be transparent about all activities of the service that have significance for users, such as details of what the service does with user data as well as how the service maintains user privacy and security.
There you have it. We, our government, will sue them.
In particular, who are you referring to?
I believe yesterday I heard a statistic that if every human adult were to have taken the time to read and understand every contract they've signed by clicking on "I Agree", it would take nearly 2 years out of their lives.
That shit needs to stop. We don't need to be signing 80 page documents to sign up for an email account or set up our bank accounts online.
On top of that, no company should ever be given the ability to "upgrade" those terms whenever they feel like it and force you to abide them when it's not what you originally agreed to.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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Apples and Oranges. An agreement was made. For lack of a more enlightened way of saying it, it was agreed that those with platforms, like YouTube, X, would police what they allowed to be on their platforms. A reference point would be, you cannot burn a cross on your property because it is considered hate speech. They have not honored their agreement, so it is time to take em to court.
T 
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Apples and Oranges. An agreement was made. For lack of a more enlightened way of saying it, it was agreed that those with platforms, like YouTube, X, would police what they allowed to be on their platforms. A reference point would be, you cannot burn a cross on your property because it is considered hate speech. They have not honored their agreement, so it is time to take em to court.
T
Oh. I see. You were coming at this issue from a pro-censorship Democrat angle. You weren't worried about people signing their lives away to Chinese corporations to watch TikTok videos or buy cheap shit on TEMU.
My mistake.
Section 230 protects YouTube and X. The US Government can't do anything about it.
The only time they aren't protected is when they make themselves publishers, rather than platforms. This is behavior that outfits that are run by Left Wing people with an agenda engage in constantly. Silencing opinions from anybody who doesn't agree with the current Establishment narrative makes you a Publisher, and revokes your Section 230 shield. This is the behavior that Twitter engaged in every day on behalf of Democrats while Trump was President and at the behest of the Biden* administration after 2020.
Out of the two companies now. Google would have the most to worry about since they still currently do actively engage in censorship for the Left, but it is nowhere near as heavy-handed as it was at Twitter before Musk bought it.
In the meantime, I keep hearing about how dangerous people who vote for Trump are going to be, yet all of these recent school shootings have been committed by transgendered left-wingers, you've tried to kill Trump not once, but twice before an election, and unchecked immigration has made every major metropolitan area in the country dangerous.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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Also...
The ONLY things that companies who are shielded by Section 230 protections are required to dump resources into keeping off their platforms, because children engage on those platforms, is sex stuff... and obviously CP. Also, unless the site is not intended for children, there shall be no videos showing excessive violence or actual murders/executions. I'm sure people try uploading these things to these sites all the time, but at least from my experience, I don't ever see any content in these two categories on either site. Occasionally I have seen uncensored videos of guys shooting somebody who was trying to rob their store or restaurant, but if you ever want to see that again you'd better download it fast because the bots will find it and remove it.
Secondary to that would be reporting anyone to the authorities who were actively recruiting people and setting up meetings to get together with the intent to physically harm anybody.
That is IT. Period.
Anybody who is arguing that speech they don't agree with gets censored is one of the bad guys. It doesn't matter what the reason is.
There is no justification for censorship. You don't get to say you live in a free society when every adult in that society has their beliefs silenced, or even worse... they get punished for even trying to express them.
We can NEVER allow either "side" to criminalize speech in any form.
That's what China does, Ted. It's what Russia does.
And when I first signed up to this site and started ripping GWB and his administrations asses to shreds, it was the Republican Party that was trying to gain that power. I don't trust Republicans at all. But it's not their "side" that's blatantly trying to take that power in 2024. They're very happy to let the Democrats hold the football for a while on this one while they take a break. They're all getting in line to vote for Kamala as we speak.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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Gavin Newsom signs election ‘deepfake’ ban in rebuke to Elon Musk
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the country’s toughest law banning digitally altered political “deepfakes” on Tuesday, following through on a vow to act after rebuking Elon Musk for sharing a doctored video of Vice President Kamala Harris.
The new California law — which will take effect before the November election — channels rising alarm about artificial intelligence’s capacity to disrupt elections by sowing misinformation, with voters increasingly confronted with deepfake images and audio impersonating candidates. Musk, who owns X, stoked that debate when he shared the AI-altered video of Harris in July, drawing Newsom’s public promise to prohibit similar practices.
T
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You’re probably seeing more social media propaganda, but don’t blame the bots
Bots commonly shoulder the blame for social media propaganda, but a recent study out of the U.K. suggests not only that organized political misinformation campaigns have more than doubled in the last two years, but that bots take second place to human-run manipulation.
The Global Disinformation Order study, conducted by the University of Oxford, found evidence of social media manipulation by a government agency or political party in 70 countries, an increase from 48 in 2018 and 28 in 2017. The study has been collecting data annually since 2017, but suggests political propaganda has leveraged social media for the last decade.
The study, co-authored by Samantha Bradshaw and Phillip N. Howard, tallies up reports from around the world on cyber troops, defined as “government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online.” While the report focuses on propaganda that can be traced back to a government agency, politician, or political parties, the researchers found formal coordination with private communication firms, and in more than 40% of the countries, civic organizations and citizens.
Much of propaganda is created by actual people: 87% of the countries use human accounts compared to the 80% of countries using bots. In some cases, the study even identified countries hiring student or youth groups for computational propaganda, including Russia and Israel.
The increase in countries with organized misinformation is likely partially an increase in activity but is also inflated by the increasing ability to detect such activity. “The number of cases we identified was the most surprising thing about this year’s study. Partially, the growth has to do with more state actors seeing social media as a tool of geopolitical power,” Bradshaw, study co-author and researcher at the Computational Propaganda Project, told Digital Trends. “But not all of the cases were new, per se. Many were older examples that were uncovered by journalists and other independent researchers, who are now equipped with better tools and a better vocabulary for identifying instances of computational propaganda in their own country context.”
This year, the researchers also identified a new category of accounts used for manipulation — in addition to human accounts, bot accounts, and “cyborg” accounts that use both, 7% of the countries hacked or stole real accounts to use in their campaigns. Guatemala, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Uzbekistan were among the countries using hacked or stolen accounts.
More than half of the countries with evidence of political propaganda — 45 out of 70 — used the tactics during the elections. Among those examples, the study suggests, are politicians with fake followers, targeted ads using manipulated media, and micro-targeting.
So what type of information are the campaigns using? Attacking political opposition was the most widespread, in 89% of the countries, followed by spreading pro-government or pro-party propaganda and 34% spreading information designed to create division.
While nearly 75% used tactics like memes, fake news, and videos, the tactics also fell under more covert types of manipulation beyond the media that’s shared. About 68% used state-sponsored trolls to attack opponents, such as journalists and activists. Many also used the reporting tools to censor speech, hoping the automated process will remove the content that doesn’t violate any platform rules. Another 73% percent of the countries flood hashtags in order to make a message more widespread.
Most of the cyber troop activity remains on the biggest social network, Facebook, but the researchers saw an increase in campaigns on platforms focused on photos and video, including Instagram and YouTube. The researchers also saw increased activity on WhatsApp.
The United States ranked among the “high cyber troop capacity” group, which indicates a full-time operation with a big budget focusing on both domestic and foreign propaganda. The re
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Section 230’s protections are not absolute.
It does not protect companies that violate federal criminal law. It does not protect companies that create illegal or harmful content. Nor does Section 230 protect companies from intellectual property claims.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Section 230’s protections are not absolute.
It does not protect companies that violate federal criminal law. It does not protect companies that create illegal or harmful content. Nor does Section 230 protect companies from intellectual property claims.
T
They're not absolute.
But they are a LOT stronger than your legacy media would like them to be.
They should have all stayed the fuck off of YouTube and stopped trying to ruin it for everyone else. The internet was so much better in the 2000's than it is today.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
If you can read this, and yes understand it, and still believe we should do nothing to protect ourselves from this, then there is no hope for you.
You post clickbait and propaganda every day, Ted.
I don't call for anybody to ban any of it. I just shame you for it.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME