2025-10-15 23:45:36
Oh FFS, if this turns out to be a legitimate report it’s going to be a nightmare in several different dimensions of stupidity, illiberality & regulatory posturing:
2025-10-15 20:43:32
Seems that the first amendment is being respected selectively: (thread)
The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk. Here are just a few examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the U.S.:
2025-10-15 18:56:41
This blog automatically propagates to several platforms, and the blogpost tags – where relevant – are converted into hashtags for those platforms. This morning I was debugging why one of my posts was failing to propagate to Bluesky, and manual testing revealed the message:
“unacceptable slur in record”
For a blogpost about digital identity and anonymity this made no sense; so I started deleting words one by one and found that the “slur” was the acronym for “Frequently Asked Questions”, confirmed by other people:
And someone else pointed at the relevant code where you can see tempting hints that someone wants to prevent the word “fag” being written in any p3rmutat10n of glyphs whatsoever, and it’s probably something to do with that.
Apparently it’s okay to use as a hashtag if you put it in uppercase, but that’s not how Mastodon does things, nor is it terribly obvious.
This is a deeply unfortunate case of excessive and unwise, misconceived overblocking.
Update: obligatory observation for nerds: by comparison Mastodon uses camelCase not CamelCase for hashtags, declaring that it could be uppercase / case-sensitive is massive exceptionalism for case independent hashtags.
Also, case-sensitive censorship historically has been deeply problematic.
2025-10-15 17:00:43
The proposals would mean that:
Lawful activism could be censored as it happens.
Political content about Palestine may auto-delete from your feeds.
The police can clampdown on protest online.
Open Rights Group is urging everyone who cares about democracy and our right to protest to respond to this consultation.
2025-10-15 16:06:07
Yes, pretty much.
This is how British exceptionalism has worked, to date.
2025-10-15 02:29:29
Why wear a mask when you can be an inflatable frog?
https://www.404media.co/the-surreal-practicality-of-protesting-as-an-inflatable-frog/