Facebook whistleblower to appear before UK Parliament
The committee cited here is going to be drafting the UK Online safety bill
This got me thinking, should we, as the fediverse (or creators of) try to submit evidence or try and be involved with this. After all, this bill is going to affect everyone but, while mostly aimed at big tech, we may have ideas.
A lot of the ‘experts’ involved with this are going to be from bigger tech companies (probably including Microsoft) so unless we have some input it will be all about them, and less about us as people who care about freedoms, open source / free software, privacy and platforms that give users more control.
Other experts who have never heard of the fediverse, or may have a inaccurate idea as to who / what we are could end up causing more problems.
I am sure between the people here, and elsewhere on fedi, we could come up with some ideas to submit, and perhaps at least have some say in what goes on here.
There are more regulatory developments that would be worthwhile to put some more attention on, like the EU Digital Markets + Digital Services Acts. We created the @policy group and #meeting:fediverse-policy category to address these topics and had some vague plans to start organizing lobbying activities and the like. The only issue is that in general there seems to be too little time and interest for people to volunteer and be active for this. You might join the group and try to get something going, of course
Thanks for this, I’ll look in to it, I will also have a chat with some of the older young people who come to code club, see if we can get their input (after all the internet belongs to everyone)
The nice thing about the https://joinmastodon.org/ page is that it focuses on what Mastodon does, rather than having an essay on what the big tech does not do, I have made a printed copy of that page to give to people, try and get people on the fediverse so perhaps we can work out a good way forward, based on evidence as to what people would like, and concerns about the current situation.
I know from one TV programme children are worried about the amount of sexual material is out there easily findable.
