Oh yeah, certainly. The US Government isn’t openly censoring the Internet and most of the ‘censorship’ is done by private individuals (who, I would argue, have even more power over the average person’s life).

I’m not making a false equivalence, just pointing out that even if the government isn’t doing it the people in the US shouldn’t be so smug because they are also getting viewpoint-filtered Internet, except their viewpoint dictator is some tech bro billionaire of questionable morality.

I will say, to the passive readers, it’s very possible to live without a site that recommends you content. Avoiding those sites avoids a huge amount of propaganda and emotional priming (which affects you even if you know it is misleading, very important!). Get your news from reputable polls, primary sources (like court documents and case filings) and trusted news organizations (which absolutely exist, despite the drumbeat of ‘don’t trust the media(trust Elon instead!)’ propaganda over the past decade).

Delete Meta, TikTok and X as if your sanity depends on it. Stay away from Reddit, stay away from Lemmy communities that primarily pedal in content that makes you angry, outraged or afraid. If you see a piece of media that makes you outraged, angry, afraid or to think conspiratorially stay far away. Those emotions can be primed into your subconsciousness through content that you rationally know is misleading, knowing that something is misleading does not protect you from being conditioned by it.

Read psychological textbooks about how this works. Look for terms like respondent conditioning, semantic/context/social priming. The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack are excellent documentaries that show the technology involved(The Social Dilemma) and how it can be used to affect political outcomes like Brexit and Trump’s first campaign (The Great Hack, and also any journalism covering Cambridge Analytica).

These are techniques that have been used for advertising purposes for a long time. Now instead of promoting body shame to make you buy makeup, they’re selling conspiratorial thinking so that you doubt the reality that you see with your own eyes or fear of government agents so you avoid the polls and fear of social/career/legal retribution so that you don’t speak your mind on social media.

Get rid of that garbage and protect yourself from this kind of attack, anyone who is paying attention can see the damage being caused in the world… this is how it is being done. Delete it.

I don’t think promoting population growth through cutting off porn, there’s no data to suggest a correlation between those two things.

Population growth is more influenced by providing the population with enough income and secure housing so that they’re not stressed and scared all of the time. This would hurt earnings and that would upset the handful of people who control most of the private/public equity in the country, so obviously this will not stand a chance of happening until they can’t buy politicians.

Banning porn is mostly a ‘I’m going to do this thing for this niche group in order to get votes to get/stay in power’. It’s to give the social conservatives/Sunday preachers an excuse to talk politics and to do campaign rallies for the people voting for the bills.

You’re welcome. It is way easier than you’re expecting I promise.

Not that you won’t run into problems, every OS including Windows has problems that require reading, troubleshooting and jumping through hoops. An example I love is that trying to create a local user account on Windows 11 has more steps than the entire Linux Mint install.

The problems in Linux often come with logs, error messages and debug information which can make it a lot easier to diagnose correctly (instead of just changing random shit as dictated by assorted Googled Reddit posts from 5 years ago). It may look like heiroglyphics at first, but you’ll be able to see the matrix soon enough.

If my account still exists, you can reach out if you have problems and I’ll point you in the right direction at least. Enjoy :)

They’ll probably still get pornhub though, right?

Exactly, China filters their Internet. Just like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of being at the whims of two rich individuals it’s at the whim of the government.

Not that one is better than the other, but US users experience the same (from a technical standpoint, not ideologically) kind of filtering but they’re not told that it is the great Zuck firewall or the great Elon firewall even though it is used in the same way to filter topics and ideas that the owner doesn’t like.

I think you replied to the wrong comment.

I agree with you, but it looks like you intended to respond to Sierk directly :P

I’d be happy to help (and if you run into problems going forward, just message me directly).

Linux Mint is probably the most often recommended for new people coming from Windows. But EndeavourOS will let you tell everyone that you use Arch without having to install your system via the terminal (EOS uses a graphical installer also).

For Mint, Choose the Cinnamon version (this can be changed later but this is a good default choice). KDE Plasma is the most popular DE and you can change to different DEs just by logging out and changing a dropdown menu.

I linked the install guide above. TLDR - copy iso to usb stick, reboot, click through the graphical install process. If you’ve ever installed Windows, this will be very familiar (where do you want to install it, what username, where in the world are you, and login to wifi)

It is much less complicated if you can have a Linux-only machine. But if you want to keep Windows around for a bit, you can dual boot: Mint

All of the software is installed with the package manager from the official repos. Everyone is familiar with this method of installing software because smartphones use them but call them App Stores/Play Store. You don’t download executables from the Internet and just run them 😒

There’s a lot of new terms and concepts so it’ll be overwhelming. Lean on the official Mint communitues, they’re generally helpful (there are assholes, like everywhere else of course), be prepared to read documentation and don’t be afraid to ask an LLM to explain concepts if you can’t get a community answer fast enough but don’t trust the commands that it gives you yet (you’ll learn how to do this safely but not at the start).

If you game, Steam can be installed from the repo, via and Heroic Games Launcher for GoG, Epic Games Store and(???, there are more but you get the idea) make the process as simple as pressing Play.

You’ll probably use different software to do the same tasks so don’t try to find ms-paint or notepad, but Krita and Kate do the same thing and there are many alternatives to those. If you can’t figure it out, dm me.

Good luck. It’s a lot at first but it is 1000% a better experience once you become comfortable with the software.

If the President chooses to sanction them, yes. A judge cannot impose that kind of sanction because they have limited jurisdiction.

The court can order you to pay, and it can order US banks to seize your money. But a US court cannot order France to seize your money.

Basically, judgements are a judicial function with a more limited scope and sanctions are akin to foreign policy but can extend as far as we are able to force/negotiate.

OK, so if I set up a lawsuit against OCLC in my country where they don’t reside, and they fail to show up to contest the charges, I get to claim they admitted guilt by default?

Assuming your country’s laws are roughly based on British common law, yes.

Winning a case is easy. How you enforce the judgement is much harder.

This is why the speculation is that they will not comply. If the servers are not in reach of the US, the owners are not in a country that will extradite them, they don’t store money in US banks and the US doesn’t stupidly commit war crimes in order to capture them… then ignoring the court order is about as hard as you ignoring North Korean law.

I can’t fault them, their heart is in the right place even if they don’t actually know what to do.

Give 'em tips as you can and wait a few years, we were all idiots at one point

If you want to make Microsoft’s CEO cry then you install Linux and convince all of your friends to do the same.

Using their OS, feeding them telemetry, being opted into their cloud storage but swapping some letters in your browser content is about as useless as mopping a sewer pipe.

Those things are not mutually exclusive

and, hypocrisy is kind of in right now

That is exactly why I self host and avoid Microsoft products like the plague

Those simple and easy devices are not simple and easy inherently.

That is a result the company paying a lot of developers and designers to anticipate your needs and fix your problems before you have them. Those companies want a return on that investment and they get it in the form of your privacy and platform-enforced dependence on their services.

Who was solving your problems before then?

Every tech company in existence, in exchange for all of your privacy and now subscription fee.

For the low low price of all of your money and privacy you can avoid having to figure out how to backup your own files and have a team of developers ensuring that any kind of difficulty that you have will be fixed before you even realize it was a problem.

Once it is ensured that you will never develop those skills you are completely dependent on their services and they can keep jacking up the price.

Hate Netflix’s price increase, or password sharing restrictions? Too bad you spent 8 years not learning how to setup streaming media that you control. Hate listening to ads in order to listen to music? Well, it looks like Spotify doing everything for you has paid off for them.

Everyone has traded their privacy for convenience, if you want your privacy back then you have to give back the convenience and learn to do things for yourselves.

Prior to that they were able to function just fine by using non-classified data brokers which have access to every bit of data that can be extracted from every smart phone that has a single app that’s compromised by their spyware.

Having access to even greater surveillance data (like the data that is gathered at TITANPOINTE and other oversea cable collection locations) just lets whoever is in charge more accurately target their political opponents.

Like Snowden said in citizenfour, the collection capabilities of the NSA create a situation which would allow ‘turnkey totalitarianism’. Well, they’ve turned the key.

The Palantir tools were used to analyze the data trove that Microsoft was hosting for Israel. It contained all of the cellular data (metadata and call recording/MMS contents/data traffic) for the entirety of Palestine.

That tool’s detection of ‘terrorists’ was used to justify a massive portion of the air strikes on Palestine. Their beta test resulted in a genocide.

Palantir is complicit in war crimes and genocide, never forget that.

Now the fascists are using the terrorist language to target their political opponents in the US and using the same tools of genocide.

Seems like a standard that isn’t possible to meet. If there was a reliable way to detect bots we wouldn’t be in this situation where bots dominate social media.

I can tell you that the bot tactic of promoting outrage and vitriol is well known and the topic of AI has some of the most toxic people participating. Always bringing insults, fallacy laden ‘arguments’ and downvote spamming.

That doesn’t happen on other topics where people disagree, even in this community.

We know bots are a big problem on social media. We know the tactics that they use, they infiltrate both extremes and use those positions to sow division and anger and, in my experience, this is the topic that receives the most comments fitting that tactic.

There is no topic more botted than the AI discussion and I see Lemmy isn’t immune.