Jim Burton wrote: Sun Sep 07, 2025 12:03 pmThe Center for Online Safety and Liberty (c4osl.org) was opened a few months ago to support "digital rights".
I checked out the site... and I don’t know, I expect something different when someone talks about "digital rights". I mean, to me there’s a clear contradiction between a safe online space and a free one. Freedom also includes things like cyberbullying and illegality, so either you take one philosophical approach or the opposite one—but not both at the same time.
For example, they offer a hosting service and talk about legality: but legality according to which country? Every European country has its own laws, Japan has others, Russia others still, and the way they present themselves makes me think more of someone quick to press charges if they don’t like the content, precisely because of their focus on safety. And to me it feels more focused on safety than on freedom.
Am I just being too skeptical?
To say also... I appreciate the transparency, but I don’t see much “privacy” in having the IP logged, I don’t see much freedom in having AI-generated content watermarked (and this seems to me more of an ideological stance than one required to keep a service running), and then there’s also the issue of defamation, insults, or encouragement of self-harm—where so much comes down to interpretation. Is it really that serious if someone vents in a post and insults someone?
Works produced by generative AI systems that have been trained on unlawful images of actual minors are not permitted, even if the resulting works do not depict an identifiable, actual minor.
And in fact, regarding the AI part: all of them have been trained on images of minors. So what now?
Then there’s the request to have warnings for a whole range of fetishes... like asking for a sign saying “warning: homosexual content” when dealing with yaoi. Honestly... meh. Oh, it seems that they forbid polygamy. At this point, Twitter is better. (Or Tumblr in its golden age.)
https://liberato.io/index.php?m=TermsOfService
And since I don’t see anything of real security (which is something different from simply having respectful comments online) or real freedom, the price becomes steep, as it seems more like a way to fund the group rather than actually receiving something concrete—except for a sense of belonging.
But I repeat: Maybe I’m exaggerating, perhaps I approached it too negatively as soon as I saw their addon projects.
https://c4osl.org/safer-hosting/
We advocate for ensuring that communications are encrypted and protected while also combating criminal activities.
Sorry for continuing the wall of text, but I keep reading things—for example, this part I don’t understand. Either one or the other. You can’t have both. What do you do? Encrypted communications and then spy on the output on your phone with an AI in a chat-control style? Seriously, it gives me such a strong impression that their problem is that things aren’t done their way, rather than genuinely talking about real freedom. (Besides fearing that “protected” means: nothing offensive.)
https://c4osl.org/project/protect-secur ... nications/