My 50c on Craiglist self-censorship and the EFF's How Congress Censored the Internet
Apparently for the party of Individual Freedoms, guns don't kill. But free speech, and yes, this includes disturbing, disgusting and either legally or ethically condemn-able "speech" and "information" needs to be "controlled" for the "common good"... this particularly if you insert trigger words like "sex" or even better, "think of the children" /s
Instead of addressing the root causes of some of these issues, among other, criminalizing sex work and turning it into a bigger problem involving drug abuse and organized crime, or basic internet education failure for parents regarding the dangers of the open world as seen through the internet, "small gov unless it's defense, religion or your sexuality" GOP decided to go frontally against one of the sanest laws in one of the sanest constitutions on this planet: the US First Amendment.
With legislations like FOSTA, US's internet laws are changing fast and in a very bad way. And this comes after net neutrality was shot down by a deeply biased FCC...
What is even more disturbing than the blatant hypocrisy and double-standard, especially facing the real threat of gun violence (as opposed to the virtual information) and as the whole world saw, the extremely disturbing resistance to do anything to save american children lives, is that these laws are gradually laying the ground for a more controlled internet, under the supervision of the very party who overtly and actively can't care less about human life, children (school shootings), middle class citizens (Darwinian capitalism circus) and patients (healthcare). If these legislation are not reverted and upgraded with a saner approach (train and hire more/better people against cyber-enabled crimes, the internet makes it much easier to track real life criminals), other, more random, more politically charged and more restrictive legislation will start to pop-up. Anti-porn laws to protect failed and crooked politicians, anti-crypto laws to protect whole chunks of too big to fail anti-free market financial system , anti-open source to protect random content monopolies DRMs and killing the very innovative industry that still guarantees american leadership.
The pervert side effect will be a much more prominent darknet, with a thriving politicizing of people involved in it, including hackers and traffickers, who can be instrumented by US opponents much easier. With not so virtual side effects this time. The question here is, why is the american leadership so keen on shooting the US where it hurts the most?
[Edit:typos]