đ¤ˇđťââď¸ Dox Yourself
Meta verified unsafe for sex workers | Pretend child safety | Substack Notes
Hello screen addicts, how are you?
This week was like a free stale donut đ¤ˇ. Look, itâs free, okay? But itâs also stale. I didnât have as much time this week as I wanted, so this one will be a little shorter â try and get over it.
Something something new social media just dropped
Meta would like you to pay to dox yourself
The phrase âchild safetyâ is just a lawmakers dog whistle for âsurveillance projectâ.
đď¸ Here is a âSubstack Noteâ
One of my least favourite things is using language prescribed to me by a piece of SaaS, which is still too new to have entered mainstream internet vocabulary, so actually letâs just call this an âElitist Tweetâ.
Yes, this is Substackâs new Twitter rival, which everyone seems to love (probably because itâs new; probably because weâre all sad little writers trying to promote our newsletters so we have to be nice to each other). Of course, Elon Muskâs tirade against Substack deffo helped quite a lot â god that guy is a genius.
đŚ Meta are coming for sex work
You may have heard about Metaâs new verification scheme â I wrote about it in February when it was first drop-kicked into our shiny, cracked viewports. Basically: it costs more than a Netflix subscription but fails to even try to entertain you.
Getting verified on Meta means providing them with your government ID (yikes), and then your username has to become your legal name. This is obviously no good for sex workers, other performers, trans people, and anyone who does not want to use their IRL name for any reason (including âbecause I donât feel like itâ which to me is perfectly valid). Those negatively affected by this have this week described it as paying to dox yourself.
This strange, desperate new money-sucking trend seeping out of Silicon Valley right now is very telling: it feels like the people who run the internet are the ones who understand it the least, and that apparently, no one in the world hates creators more than the platforms that facilitate them.
Of course, Mark Zuckerberg has never understood why the sheen of anonymity that the internet/social media provides is important for many people in many contexts. Of course he doesnât; he literally invented Facebook, an online repository of up-to-date biographical information about ârealâ people (and a place to become radicalised into a flat-earther, but that came later). Example: In 2014, Facebookâs shitty âreal name policyâ saw people from many ethnic groups being locked out of their accounts because they had surnames like âCreepingbearâ or âYodaâ or any name that was not recognised by Facebookâs shoddy natural language engine which was probably only trained on the guest list for Prince Williamâs wedding. And we wonder why white supremacists thrive on this platform.
I have friends who work at schools or as civil servants who also perform in burlesque shows and host podcasts about sex â their online personas are wholly different from their IRL ones for obvious reasons. Theyâre just trying to promote their work while maintaining their privacy, which are two key things that Meta continually insists are easily done on their platforms, but that they seem to make harder and harder with every passing month.
If youâre a sex worker, Meta Verified will not do anything to make your account safer or more secure â it will literally do the opposite. Having someoneâs real name is often enough to track them down in the real world, which kind of defeats the purpose of keeping your work online. Meta have no idea what their users consider to be valuable features of their platforms â they pretty much exoticise creators into power users, but refuse to give them any power, and instead force them into being items on an unofficial online ledger of US citizens.
𤥠When child safety isnât child safety at all
I didnât actually have time to properly flesh-out this part, but I did summarise my annoyance into yet another Elite Tweet:
So, lawmakers in Utah are demanding that anyone under the age of 18 needs permission from parents to use social media. What weâre seeing here is:
âChild safetyâ being used as a blanket excuse to control people and increase digital surveillance (how exactly is this law going to be enforced? Surely you need to use age verificationâŚ)
This is exactly why the US also wants to ban TikTok â itâs for the children, donât you get it?
Thereâs something to be said here for authoritarian parenting styles filtering into lawmaking and vice versa
Here me out: those who donât know how to govern scramble until the last minute, at which point they do something stupid because they feel itâs the only option they have. If lawmakers, perhaps, invested in educating children and young people about online safety, and made sensible regulatory decisions earlier on, they wouldnât have to start implementing silly bans and limiting the use of something that people generally find quite fun and useful.
These dynamics are seen in traditional parenting, where the parents adopt a kind of âwhat I say goesâ style of parenting, because for some reason they canât imagine talking to their children like actual people, and would rather outright control every aspect of their lives. The lawmakers who implement âsocial media screen time curfewsâ are definitely these kinds of parents, and mostly likely believe that anything that could potentially harm their children only exist outside of the parental unit â because yes, there has never been a case of a parent abusing their child, not once!
Thatâs all for this week, donât blame me for all the typos, Iâm tired okay?
Also, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the recent Verge interview with the Substack CEO, specifically his inability to give a good line on hate speech.
https://www.theverge.com/23681875/substack-notes-twitter-elon-musk-content-moderation-free-speech
I swear that Zuckerberg and Musk have no idea what makes their platforms popular. The keep trying to make social network premium services, which is the exact opposite of why people use them in the first place.