government Archives - Leaf&Core

Is Twitter Protecting Trump from Scrutiny Ahead of Interview?

Reading Time: 4 minutes. Elon Musk wants...

Pornhub Leaves Texas: What You Can Do

Screenshot of text on Pornhub's website for Texan users. Text reads: " Dear user, As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk. Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving hundreds of thousands of websites open and accessible. As we've seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the hundreds of thousands of websites with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect minors and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content. Unfortunately, the Texas law for age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Not only will it not actually protect children, but it will also inevitably reduce content creators’ ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it. The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification. We call on all adult sites to comply with the law. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users. We encourage you to: Learn more about device-based age verification* solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy. Contact your representatives and demand device-based verification solutions that make the internet safer while also respecting your privacy. *Device-Based Age Verification refers to any approach to age verification where the personal information that is used to verify the user’s age is either shared in-person at an authorized retailer, inputted locally into the user’s device, or stored on a network controlled by the device manufacturer or the supplier of the device’s operating system. Whether through pre-installed content blocking and filtering software, the disabling of web-browsing permissions, or other means, the user will then be prevented from accessing age-restricted content over the internet unless they are age-verified. To come to fruition, such an approach requires the cooperation of manufacturers and operating-system providers."

Reading Time: 5 minutes. You’re not going...

Twitter Sold Verification to Terrorist Groups, Possibly in Violation of U.S. Sanctions, According to Report

Reading Time: 4 minutes. Sometimes, the United...

Data Leaks Will Keep Happening Because There’s No Repercussions

An iPhone with green text that looks like code. It's not.

Reading Time: 5 minutes. My parents were...

We Should Stop Using TikTok. But Should We Ban It?

Reading Time: 10 minutes. The only negative...

Joe Biden is Wrong: We Already Know AI is Dangerous

The robot emoji with the text, "Running mockSentience.exe."

Reading Time: 2 minutes. U.S. President Joe...

Florida Republicans Introduce Russia-Like Anti-Speech Law

The state of Florida on a map with emoji around it. Lips zipped, a shushing motion, crossed out keyboard, and a crossed out newspaper

Reading Time: 3 minutes. In 2014, Vladimir...

TikTok Can Manually Select Videos and Trends to go Viral. How do They Use It?

Reading Time: 5 minutes. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter,...

Safety and Privacy Post-Autonomy

Emblem of SCOTUS, along with "Supreme Court of the United States"

Reading Time: 3 minutes. I, like many...

IRS Planned on Using Third-Party Facial Recognition. They Reversed Course

Reading Time: 3 minutes. Somehow, the U.S....

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