cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/765290

> Two years ago when I launched Exploding-Heads, Lemmy offered a way to let me play a small role in fighting back against: > - censorship > - deplatforming > - propaganda > - Big Tech tyranny, and > - to help spread suppressed stories. > > I knew Lemmy had its challenges, but I hoped it would evolve for the better. Sadly after 2 years, the culture of censorship through defederation has only grown stronger. > > Meanwhile a better alternative has sprung up in the form of Nostr: > - it lets you own your own profile - if you move to another Nostr app or site, you still keep your content and followers > - it makes censorship very difficult > - it is not perfect, but is evolving for the better very quickly. > > As a user you should not be at the mercy of instance operators who are > - petty tyrants, or > - benevolent dictators (who may turn tyrannical at any moment) > > I do not feel I can alter the tyrannical direction Lemmy is heading in and I want to dedicate my time and resources to a better alternative. > > So Exploding Heads is moving to Nostr. > > Exploding-Heads.com will go offline August 31st 2023. > > Please join us on Nostr. > > Exploding Heads address on Nostr is npub1qprptnnuwnqc6h6wxc2q07rfwcmj7cfc6g4r5dgnlkxaysmpr0mqc5365p > > Sounds complicated, but it is pretty easy. Here is what I recommend to get started > > Amethyst App > - Lets you follow people > - Lets you follow #hastags (I have been using communities as a substitute for #hashtags on Lemmy > - Has evolving support for communities > > Habla.news > - a Nostr alternative for Medium for long form content

> Damus app (Apple IOS)

> If you have any questions about getting up and running on Nostr, please ask them here https://exploding-heads.com/c/nostrblog > > In closing, I sincerely apologize to all of you who are going to lose their profiles and content (please get anything you want off by August 31st), but it proves my warning about the problem with relying on benevolent dictators. > > Please make sure to say hi to us on Nostr. > > I hope the majority of our wonderful Exploding Heads community will make the move to Nostr with us.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/739484

> Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop show that he made continuous efforts to airbrush his image and the Wikipedia articles associated with his Ukrainian benefactors. > > The outreach by high-priced consultants making stealth edits to Wikipedia, for a period, paid off.

During the summer of 2020, at the same time thousands of BLM protestors were taking to the streets of Washington, D.C. and covering public spaces with paint and chalk, two pro-life activists were arrested for chalking the words “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter”on a public sidewalk.

The Frederick Douglass Foundation and Students for Life of America, who organized the pro-life protest and filed the lawsuit over the arrests, “plausibly alleged” that the statute’s enforcement was viewpoint discrimination, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found.

• By the Government’s Own Definition, It’s Censoring

• Government Officials Treated Internet Monopolies Like Their Subordinates

• Judges Likened Government Behavior to Mobsters

• Censorship Is Election Interference

• Democrats Want Free Speech for Themselves While Banning It for Their Enemies

• Today’s Internet Is Still Massively Rigged

He faces absurd charges of spying, when he never spied. His crime was to embarrass the US government by selectively releasing information that Washington had tried and failed to keep secret.

I do not think this is a crime, here or there. Claims are made against him, by supporters of the extradition, which I do not think are true.

He took considerable care not to release material which would endanger or compromise individuals, and if he were an American citizen he would certainly be protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which safeguards journalists – as Mr Assange is – from the anger of the state.

Soros-funded Fani Willis’s indictment includes Trump asking his supporters to watch One America News.

The tech giant had been sued for secretly diminishing the devices’ functionality to persuade customers to purchase a new phone.

A new report out of the University of Chicago showing that almost 12 percent of the population, representing 30 million people, believe that violence is warranted to prevent Trump from assuming the presidency.

That is almost double the number who believe that violence is warranted to ensure that Trump does become president.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/726099

> Kennedy has made headlines for making statements that are contrary to many politicians in the Democratic Party, such as voicing concerns about vaccines, speaking out against online censorship and calling for a corruption investigation of President Joe Biden.

Maybe I’ll put the book in Chinese and ask the Chinese regime to post it, in which case Zuckerberg would dare not block it.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/725536

> The charges appeared on a document posted to the Fulton County court website, but it was later taken down. > > Other charges listed were violation of the state's RICO act, and solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/722518

> The report found that girls report that exposure to both topics is prevalent across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and even messaging apps, with more than one in three girls reporting that they “hear or see things about suicide or self-harm that is upsetting to [them]” at least monthly on all platforms, with 15 percent of girls who use TikTok and Instagram saying they come across this type of content on the platforms on a daily basis. > > The figures are even higher for those with depressive symptoms. > > Some 75 percent of the girls who reported moderate to severe depressive symptoms who use Instagram said they come across harmful suicide-related content on the platform at least once a month. This is nearly three times the likelihood of the girls without depressive symptoms who come across the content at the same frequency (26 percent). According to the report, a similar pattern emerges for TikTok users (69 percent of girls with moderate to severe depressive symptoms see the harmful content versus 27 percent of girls without depressive symptoms) as well as for the other platforms

The slump in computers and handheld devices comes as the world's biggest market for smartphones, China, is sliding into a deflationary environment that might worsen.

The technocrats love nothing more than killing two (or three) birds with one stone. In this case, said birds are:

• getting rid of gas-powered cars,
• inventing for themselves a brand-new revenue generation scheme, and
• instituting even more tracking power to make sure the peasants behave themselves.

the unnamed minor was only 10 years old when she was contacted by a first predator on Instagram and coerced into sending explicit photos of herself. He kept demanding more, leading to the child attempting suicide “in the hopes of finding some escape,”

When the family found out what was going on they reported “the exploitation to police, who informed them that Meta’s Instagram product was designed in such a way that they could not identify who was behind the Instagram account that was used to abuse her, and a case was never opened,”

In 2019, when she was 13, the child was contacted on Snapchat by a second convicted sex offender — Reginald Sharp — who knew her real age. He convinced her to send nude photos and blackmailed her, saying that he would post them online unless she met him in person.

The girl snuck out and met him and was repeatedly raped.

In October 2021, the girl was still allowed on social media apps, and the situation repeated itself with another registered sex offender, Edward “Eddie” Rodriguez, a former New Haven police officer. He was on probation for assaulting another teenage girl.

The girl met with Rodriguez and he sexually assaulted her in his car before driving her to school.

Subjected to 13 hours of police interrogation, authorities dug into her past, charging her with three counts of “agitation against a minority group” for the tweet, in addition to a 2004 church pamphlet and 2019 radio appearance.

Without free speech, there can be no freedom, and the enormous implications of this case for fundamental freedoms have triggered international outrage. Finland, regularly ranked as the “happiest” country on Earth, is known as a stable bastion of European democracy. If this can happen there, then we must all beware.

There are three main components of the machinery of loneliness:

• identity politics,
• political correctness, and
• mob agitation.

Identity politics strips us of our individuality, and divides us into camps sorted by various identities of “oppressor” or “victim.”

Political correctness controls our speech by inducing us to self-censor under threat of ostracism.

Mobs take different forms, but they serve to enforce all of the above while cultivating conformity, compliance, and social distrust.

The machinery is further fueled in other ways to threaten people with isolation if they don’t conform. These include propaganda, censorship, the criminalization of comedy, and snitch culture. New technologies play a role too.

If we can’t speak openly to one another, we cannot organically develop bonds of trust. And if we can’t develop trusting relationships—whether as family, as children of God, or as friends and cheerful neighbors—then we’ve gone a long way towards a Stockholm Syndrome-like dependence upon our government captors.

The Biden Administration is deeply upset that they are losing one of the key tools they have to impose a false consensus. They already functionally control most of the MSM and social media is one of the few places that alternative viewpoints can be propagated. With the 2024 election right around the corner, the government is concerned that not everybody will be forced to hail Joe Biden as a loving father and savior of American democracy.

One of the keys to the strength of the case against the government is that there is a treasure trove of actual communications in a paper trail, making clear that there weren’t abstract discussions about what is true or false, what should be amplified or not, or anything high level like that.

Rather the government demanded specific claims, specific accounts, and even specific true statements be de-amplified or outright banned in order to further their narrative. Democratic governance runs on debate, and that was exactly what the government did not want.

The lack of ambiguity is powerful, proving that the government’s claim that they had a public interest in ensuring that citizens were given only the best information during a crisis was false. While even that government interest seems weak sauce compared to the First Amendment, it is also demonstrably not what the government was interested in.

They simply wanted a particular narrative put forward as a consensus position, and lashed out at any dissent. Threatening a company if they didn’t shut somebody up is hardly the act of a purely public-spirited civil servant.