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sunderedazem · 5 years

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Wow, I did not know that... I'm so sorry that you were made to feel that way, I hope things are getting better for you, Fandom can be your greatest friend and your worst enemy but for every 1 negative review their will be 5 positive ones to go with it

The problem isn’t reviews, honestly. I can tolerate people wanting to tell me shit I’ve ‘done wrong’ - the only one that looks like an asshole is them, and I’m not afraid to clap back and tell them to shove their shitty opinions and asshole attitude where the sun don’t shine. They don’t (usually) come for me twice.

(warning, vent beneath the cut. Its…emotional. I’ve tagged it for some shit. Read the TWs in the tags, and move on if you don’t want to see that shit)

The problem is how cruel people are to other people over stories. The problem is just how many people on the internet hide behind a screen and say AWFUL stuff to each other over fucking fiction. Over shit that isn’t real, never will be real, and can never excuse how they’re treating other human beings.

Like. I wrote Transition Period when I was a kid dabbling in queer and lgbt+ stuff for the first time. The main character is a genderbent Hitsugaya that’s gender-questioning and takes advantage of the genderbend. At the time of writing it, I was decidedly homophobic. I told my (one) gay friend that I “supported him but not his gayness.” (I have since sincerely apologized. He poked fun at me, as was his right, and forgave me, bless him)

Now, at the time I hid every mention of fanfic from my parents. But Transition Period I didn’t even save to my COMPUTER. I kept it on a google drive, under a gmail I never told them about, and only wrote it on school computers at lunch, or in my room with the door shut. Transition Period was the fanfic that my parents would have confiscated my laptop over, because it depicted a trans character, and that was (and still is!) sin to them.

Nowadays, Transition Period means a LOT to me, because it was baby’s first steps into ‘huh, maybe mom and dad are wrong about this’. As a queer person, it has a shit-ton of sentimental value to me, and honestly I still relate to the gender euphoria Hitsugaya experiences in a female body - because I experience gender euphoria in the same way, when I look at myself and see androgyny. It was the beginning of my journey to self-discovery.

And then I come into fandom proper - tumblr, twitter - two years ago and see people absolutely screaming over genderbends being transphobic. Doxxing, hatred, death threats, the WHOLE nine yards. Stuff that would have absolutely destroyed me as a kid. Even now, I read that shit and feel secondhand pain from it because- I wrote that fic for fun. To explore something I could never DARE think about exploring in real life at the time. It was NEVER meant to be ‘representation’ - that’s for mainstream media to provide.

And yet, here people were, willing to tell others to die over that shit.

I’ve seen people bullied off the internet in my two years here. I’ve seen people told to kill themselves. I’ve seen people treated as less than human. Called awful names. Falsely accused of shit they didn’t do, and then dogpiled for that thing.

There’s no kindness here. No empathy. Not even the decency to block and ignore. It’s all hate, all anger, all empty accusation.

And this place that was once my escape has become hell.

This place that taught me that it was okay to be queer, this place that taught me to accept myself, to stop viewing sex and intimacy as this sacrosanct thing that even thinking about (unless the purpose was childbearing) was evil - it’s gone. Fanfiction gave me a place to question Catholicism and its views on literally everything.

And now, I’ve wanted to kill myself over it. I’ve picked up a knife and hurt myself over this. I’ve nearly jumped off a roof over this. Because I’m so sick of being here, so sick of seeing everyone hate each other, hate things I love for not being woke enough, or whatever BULLSHIT reason people want to give for tearing other people down.

And yet, I can’t leave. It’s the one place I’m completely out of the closet. It’s the one place I can say “Trump sucks” and not be given a lecture in Real Life Hatred Propaganda. It’s my escape from my family’s homophobia and transphobia, my escape from being dragged to a Catholic Mass and having to pretend to pray to a god that would tell me to go to hell for existing how I am.

It was supposed to be fun. This was supposed to be the place I could do anything, be anything, explore anything - especially shit that I could never touch in real life.

And now, every day I see this shit, I feel a little closer to just ending it completely.

I know this is entirely the opposite of what you wanted, and I’m really sorry for responding like this, anon.

But fandom is hell. It takes so much energy to create, to write, to do things I used to love now.

I really appreciate everyone who loves what I write, what I draw, what I create. But for every one of you, there’s another who can’t even take the time to realize that words can hurt. Really hurt. And I’ve been at a breaking point for a long time.

#solavents #personal #solaanswers #anon bean #solaspeaks #suicide mention #suicide tw #self harm mention #self harm tw #vent post #long post #i'm really sorry for responding like this #today should have been a good day #and yet somehow i still feel like curling into a ball and letting the world spin on without me #fandom destroyed fanfiction for me #as ironic as it sounds

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secretgamergirl · 6 years

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The New McCarthyism

Today is International Trans Day of Visibility, which is as good a day as any for me to write about a very serious issue trans people are facing, which really needs more mainstream attention. Trans people are being actively erased from public visibility, in a surprisingly literal sense, and we have been for quite some time.

Back in the 1940s-50s, there was this nasty little thing called the Hollywood blacklist. In theory it was an effort to deal with dangerous spies, but in practice it lead to a massive witch hunt, where anyone who anyone had a big enough problem with would be painted as an enemy of the state, and any denial of such was presented as “proof” because “that’s just what a communist would say!” This was part of a general trend now referred to as McCarthyism to just arbitrarily paint people as “dangerous” and deny them any sort of career or platform to defend themselves. And of course various forms of prejudice piggybacked along on this, with LGBT people in Hollywood in particular being quite paranoid for the decade.

Those lists were backed up with fear of inquisition from specially created government committees, but mainly enforced by studio executives and others holding the reins of power passing around lists of people not to work with, making it nearly impossible for anyone targeted to find employment. The modern blacklist though is much more efficient, preventing those targeted (mostly trans people and those willing to stick up for us) from finding employment or even holding conversations, in a more or less entirely automated process. To explain just how that works though, first we need to have a brief discussion about Twitter.

Twitter represents a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Stand-Up comics use it as a quick way to test new material. Corporations use it as one of many vectors for for making announcements and PR statements (along with very bizarre one on one interactions with people mentioning their products). A lot of people use it as their primary vector for socialization, sending messages to friends, posting personal announcements, party invites, and so on. Some people use it as a news source, particularly those who have a particular special interest, as informal networks passing around story links make it impressively easy to stay up to date on every development of a certain type. Anyone doing any sort of creative work uses it for all their networking. And of course, radicalized bigots use it as a means of coordinating attacks against targets of whatever minority status they have a particular interest in that day. We’ll come back to that point, but allow me a moment to elaborate on the networking.

Personally, I wear a lot of different hats. I’m a game designer. I’m an artist. I’m a writer, of both news and fiction. I’m a professional critic. And I’m an activist for a number of causes. All of these fields depend on networking. And all of these fields have somehow decided that that networking is going to take place almost, or entirely, on twitter. I was hugely reluctant, personally, to ever register a Twitter account, and spent a few very confused years watching my carefully curated network of e-mail lists, message boards, and gossipy industry friends dry up completely. Having properly established a foothold in twitter however, I have lightning fast access to the ability to find work. Within an hour of anyone having the idle thought to ask if anyone out there has experience writing about a topic I have an interest in, that request will have flowed through whatever network is relevant in a string of reposts, landing right in front of me, along with a few quick tools for me to work out if the person making this request is someone I’d actually want to work with and vice versa. Literally every cent I have earned, job I have interviewed for, and update about a cause I’m concerned with has come to me this way, and only this way, since registering a Twitter account. Without one, I’d be completely unable to work in any of these fields.

Unfortunately, as anyone who relies on Twitter for their profession and lacks the luxury of being a white cis man, Twitter has a rather pronounced nazi problem. That is to say, neo-nazi organizations have come to the realization that they will face zero repercussions for using the site as a vector to launch absolutely vicious or even criminal attacks on their targets. As Twitter has made it abundantly clear that no real measures will be taken to address this under the current management, the only real tool available to the userbase is a block feature which prevents direct mentions from a blocked user to display to the user imposing the block (although these messages will still display for everyone else), and preventing the blocked user from viewing their posts (without first signing out or opening a private window).

Enter blocktogether.org, a site where any Twitter user can share a list of everyone they’ve ever blocked with subscribers, refreshing with each new block. If you were to subscribe to my Block Together list for instance, you would instantly block the several thousand malicious trolls I’ve blocked over the years for sending me harassing messages, plua a handful of people I happened to take personal offense to, and you would automatically block the next batch of 100 trolls I weed out of my twitter replies without any further input or notification. The appeal as a stopgap for an essentially unmoderated website is clear, as should be the mental image of a clique of bratty high school children lording The List as an instrument of social power. Note also the handy links to automatically block all newly registered accounts, or those with low post counts.

Originally, typical usage of Block Together involves picking a particular favored celebrity whose list to subscribe to, filtering from your view anyone that celebrity has taken issue with. In 2014 however, in the face of a massive neo-nazi uprising on twitter, a woman named Randi Harper hit upon the idea of writing a script to scan through twitter’s database of users, identify anyone following the majority of a list of known neo-nazi leaders, compiling them into a list which an automated twitter account would then block, updating daily, for a theoretical constantly updated list of every neo-nazi account, which combined with Block Together would preemptively keep them all out. A number of other lists followed suit, using similar logic to target members of other violent reactionary groups.

For a brief window, when Twitter’s neo-nazi insurgency was in its infancy, and individual hate groups and botnet owners were using the site to coordinate, and totally indiscriminate in choosing new targets, these lists were largely considered to be a necessity to make the site usable for anyone working in certain fields, particularly reporters, civil rights activists, game designers, and anyone working in the entertainment industry. As a result, Harper became a minor celebrity, whose personal Block Together list was subscribed to by much of Hollywood, the press, and those in activist circles, as neo-nazis worked out how to easily circumvent the automated list.

Unfortunately, Harper is not a conscientious, responsible, career activist, but a random computer programmer with a short temper and some serious personal biases and bigotries. In particular, her personal list of blocks contains hundreds of trans people, and vocal supporters thereof. Anyone subscribing to her Block Together list, advertised as “almost entirely” nazis, inadvertently blocks a significant trans population. Anyone raising this subject to Harper is also immediately placed on the list, and animosity over the subject once caused her to personally write a post on the reddit board of the very neo-nazis her list was created to thwart, encouraging those sending death threats to her and her son over the manufactured scandal of the day to instead target “Someone that goes on long unstable diatribes, thinks I'm a terf [a term for members of a particular dangerous hate group targeting trans women], yells a lot about Jesse [Singal, another notorious figure in trans circles, with a history of both fetishizing trans women and writing propaganda pieces designed to erode trans people’s rights, and repopularize conversion therapy for trans children].“

This post lead to immediate attacks against every trans person with any notable Twitter presence, along with our extended families, ranging from death threats, to abusive calls to elderly relatives, to coordinated efforts spread possible addresses, e-mail accounts, and phone numbers far and wide to aid in SWAT attacks and similarly dangerous behavior. There was, of course, absolutely no public outcry or acknowledgement of this, as both victims and those inclined to speak on their behalf had already been added to Harper’s Block Together list, which was subscribed to by exactly the sort of media voices who make it a point to raise awareness of such incidents.

Here lies the most obvious danger of this new form of McCarthyism. If a particular Block Together list is widely adopted within a given circle of people, the maintainer of that list can abuse their power, adding the names of those they’d like to see disappear for the pettiest of reasons, those so added effectively vanish from that circle completely, unable to explain what happened. The effectiveness of this is further strengthened by the sheer pervasiveness of these lists, making it unclear exactly which “anti-nazi” list one may have been added to, the intensity of the taboo Twitter users place on objecting to being blocked (bearing in mind that even those of us doing so by hand typically have thousands of trolls whining about having been blocked by us, and the impossibility of distinguishing the name of a complete stranger from the dozen people shouting slurs at us last week), and the fact that a subscriber to a list will not automatically block anyone they manually follow. So, hypothetically, if you were to be added to Harper’s list, and conferred with friends in an attempt to determine why you were suddenly cut off from interacting with the entertainment industry at large, those friends subscribed to that list would be just as in the dark as you.

Harper is far from alone in abusing Block Together in this fashion, and it is alarmingly common for trans people to suffer the most. Long lists of innocent trans people get discreetly added into lists advertised as filtering out misogynists, racists, homophobes, and the just recently, even a list explicitly created to shut out anti-trans bigots had one of its administrators load in a staggering number of trans people in an act of pure frustration and malice.

Often, these lists will note that a certain percentage of those blocked will be false positives, phrased in a way that makes them sound like acceptable casualties of war. A handful of strangers you’d never likely interact with to begin with losing access to you seems like a small price to pay for shutting 100,000 bigots out of your life, after all, but this is completely inexcusable when looked at from the other side of the equation.

As mentioned earlier, for people in many careers, unfettered Twitter access is a basic requirement in order to be able to work at all. As a freelance game designer, the entire industry inadvertently blacklisting you prevents you from ever responding to an open call. A struggling actor can’t learn about potential roles. A reporter can’t pitch story ideas to editors. A freelance artist can’t circulate a portfolio. This sort of thing is particularly devastating to the trans community at large, because we face intense discrimination in face to face interactions. As an unusually large and hairy woman, people find my presence uncomfortable, and routinely immediately reject me immediately as I sit down for any sort of interview. A man who comes across as slight and feminine has similar problems, and non-binary people unnerve potential employers in ways they can’t even put into words. This forces us into creative fields, the gig economy, and freelance work in general, where again, a single petty person throwing our names into a list can completely block off entire career paths along with our means to object.

Additionally, Block Together lists don’t actually have any real impact on combating the sort of mass harassment they’re touted as a cure for. Practically none of those hundred thousand accounts a given list might claim to block are actually active. As there are no real limits to a single person setting up an absurd number of Twitter accounts, those inclined to use the site as a vector of abuse have thousands if not millions of spare, disposable accounts, set up years ago as “sleeper agents,” destined to be used in a one-off flyby attack, and then never used again, at least against the same target, and if they ever run out, registering new ones isn’t a particular barrier.

Even after establishing that the abuse of these blacklists is something to take seriously, dealing with them is a seriously daunting task. The first barrier of course is raising awareness. This very article is bound to have a hard time making inroads with those who need to be made aware of the issue because they’re cut off from so many of those affected. Even once one is aware though, unsubscribing from one of these lists does nothing to undo the damage to those added to it.

Consider for instance the somewhat high profile case of Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stand by Me, The Big Bang Theory, Tabletop). Wheaton is a genuinely well-meaning celebrity, concerned with mass-abuse campaigns, and an avid supporter of Block Together, having circulated his own blocks for some time, and being one of the first to subscribe to Harper’s aforementioned list. Due to the nature of Block Together, subscribing to Harper’s list caused all of her personal petty blocks and odd grudge against trans people in general to propagate to Wheaton, and from there, anyone subscribing to his list, or a list belonging to one of his subscribers.

Having over three million followers and a very good reputation, Wheaton’s list being infected in this manner was absolutely devastating to those spitefully added by Harper, becoming an incredibly far reaching blacklist. Upon being made aware of this situation thanks to a friend sharing an earlier piece on this subject, Wheaton promptly unsubscribed from Harper’s list, and manually unblocked those he was directly made aware had been affected. Unfortunately, Block Together’s functionality has no real “undo” button. Every block Wheaton acquired from Harper remains after unsubscribing from her list, and remains for everyone unsubscribing from Wheaton’s.

The only way for those placed on the blacklist to regain a normal level of access to the site would be to compile a list of those affected by blacklists of this nature (this Twitter account incidentally explicitly follows the best such list its creator is aware of), and for every individual to have subscribed to, really, any Block Together list at any point, to personally run threw these false positives, by hand, unblocking each one. Again, it’s difficult enough to spread awareness of the situation to everyone who would need to take action to remedy it, and said necessary action is frankly a fairly involving task, which for any individual is going to feel like a lot of work for no real benefit, either for themselves, or for the random strangers whose lives they are impacting in a very abstract, single drop in a vast ocean sort of way.

The practical upshot of all of this is that any given person with the ability to market a Block Together list is capable of doing massive, life-ruining damage to anyone who relies on Twitter for their livelihood, instantaneously, at any time, with virtually no chance of it ever coming to light, and even less chance of that damage ever being undone. And this is routinely used by people whose positions make them seemingly the last sort to ever do so to completely destroy the livelihoods of trans people en masse, while also making it nearly impossible for us to even beg for support in the aftermath.

I have no real solution for this problem. The best I can do is plead that you never subscribe to a Block Together list, and raise awareness of this issue, possibly by linking out this article. A lot of people I know, myself included are facing homelessness thanks to the brutal efficiency of this discrimination tactic, and even those devastating results are rendered invisible.

#tdov #trans awareness #discrimination

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phooll123 · 4 years

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New top story from Time: #PolishStonewall: LGBTQ Activists Are Rallying Together After Police Violence at Protests in Warsaw

As LGBTQ activist Malgorzata Szutowicz, sits in solitary confinement for a fourth day in the city of Plock, central Poland, hundreds of people across the country are protesting in her name. On Friday, Margo, as she is more commonly known, was placed in pre-trial detention for two months, on charges of assaulting a driver of a truck that displayed an anti-LGBT banner.

The same day, hundreds of people gathered in the capital, Warsaw, to defend her freedom. In doing so, they were risking their own: 48 protestors were detained and many more injured in what experts say was an unprecedented level of police aggression against an LGBTQ demonstration, particularly in a European Union member state.

By Saturday, thousands had gathered in Warsaw to denounce Margo’s arrest and police aggression against LGBTQ people. And although Poland is experiencing a rise in new cases of COVID-19, at least 15 solidarity protests, both big and small, took place on Monday in towns and cities across the Poland, as well as in Budapest and London, New York, Paris and Berlin, with more planned.

While not all activists may agree with Margo’s methods, her prosecution and imprisonment has been widely condemned. “These radical actions are a part of history that has happened in many other countries before,” says Julia Maciocha, chairwoman at the Warsaw-based LGBTQ organization Volunteers of Equality Foundation. In a nod to the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 in New York City, several users on Twitter started posting #PolishStonewall in tweets about the weekend’s events and subsequent solidarity protests.

What’s the state of LGBTQ rights under Polish President Andrzej Duda?

The weekend protests come amid intensifying anti-LGBTQ rhetoric by government officials and state media after the recent re-election of President Andrzej Duda. On Aug. 6, the anti-E.U. populist leader was sworn in for a second five-year term as president on a strong anti-LGBTQ platform, branding LGBTQ rights an “ideology” worse than communism and proposing a “Family Charter,” including a vow to block legislation allowing gay couples to get married or adopt children. The charter also included a ban on “the propogation of LGBTQ ideology in schools and public institutions,” reminiscent of Russia’s notorious ‘gay propaganda law’ in 2013. Such moves pave the way for “verbal and physical attacks against” the LGBTQ community, says Hanna-Gill Piatek, a lawmaker from a pro-E.U. political party, Spring. Adam Bodnar, the Polish Human Rights Commissioner, agrees, saying that “to a great extent, LGBT persons are becoming victims of political life.”

For over a year, the government and religious leaders have used LGBTQ people as a “scapegoat,” says Mirosława Makuchowska, head of the Warsaw-based Stop Homophobia Campaign. The Duda-allied Law and Justice party (PiS), which has led Poland since 2015, has consistently railed against the LGBTQ community, presenting its members as a threat to family values. (Anti-LGBTQ attacks are not considered a hate crime by law in Poland.)

The church in Poland also wields enormous influence over education, law and politics, and about 86% of the population identify as Roman Catholic. Marek Jedraszewski, an archbishop, warned last year that a “rainbow plague” seeks to “control” the population. Since 2019, authorities in one-third of cities across Poland have adopted resolutions declaring themselves “LGBTQ ideology free zones.” In late July, the European Union announced it would not provide funding to six Polish towns that made this declaration.

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosProtestors sit in front of police on in Warsaw, Poland Aug. 7, 2020.

What sparked the protests?

On July 14, Margo, who is a member of the LBTQ activist group Stop Bzdurom (Stop Bullshit), was arrested in Warsaw and accused of assaulting the driver of a truck promoting anti-LGBT propaganda and blaring slurs from loudspeakers, as well as of damaging the vehicle on June 27. She was detained overnight and released.

On Aug. 3, police again arrested Margo, along with other activists, for taking part in a campaign that covered monuments in Warsaw with rainbow flags. Authorities accused them of “insulting religious feelings and insulting Warsaw monuments.”

Four days later, on Friday, a court ordered Margo to be placed in pre-trial detention for two months. When the court order came through, she was seeking legal counsel at the headquarters of a local organization, Campaign Against Homophobia. Although Margo gave herself up to the police, they did not arrest her. From the campaign headquarters, Margo and other activists and protesters then headed to Krakowskie Przedmieście, one of the central streets in Warsaw, where the Monument of Christ had been covered with a rainbow flag a week earlier, in response to the E.U.’s announcement that it was blocking funds to the six Polish towns that declared themselves “LGBT-free zones.”

Witnesses say that police officers in an unmarked police car then detained Margo with excessive use of force. “This was the last straw,” says LGBTQ rights activist Zośka Marcinek, who tried to prevent the car from leaving the scene. “Not only the charges and arrest were farcical, not only it was obvious Margot is being targeted as a nonbinary/transgender person, it was also cowardly and brutal,” she says.

What happened at the protests?

Hundreds of protesters were gathered at Krakowskie Przedmieście when Margo was detained at the scene. What started as a peaceful, spontaneous protest soon escalated into violence, as police started removing people violently from the site. Protesters—some just walking by or standing on the side-walk—were pushed against walls and thrown to the ground by police, activists say. Police made a lot of “mistakes” says Bodnar, whose team was able to access the 33 out of the 48 detained protestors on Saturday when all other visitors were barred. Bodnar says some people were wrongly detained—“one person was just observing the protests, another was on a shopping trip.”

Marcinek tells TIME that a uniformed policeman tripped her over, causing her to hit the back of her head on the pavement, before an officer then held her in a chokehold. She was arrested and taken into custody, and says police taunted her with homophobic slurs. Despite suffering from a concussion, she says she was denied medical assistance for around eight hours. Makuchowska, the head of the Warsaw-based Stop Homophobia Campaign, says police pushed her to the ground, leaving her with a bruised back.

On Twitter, Warsaw’s police force said 48 people were detained in connection with insulting a policeman and damage to a police car, and that the police had called for “legal behavior” during the protests. A report by the Polish Commissioner found that many people were interrogated at night with no access to legal aid, food or drink and that several detainees had visible body injuries as a result of police brutality. Piatek says that police blocked lawyers from contacting some detainees for hours. Several left-wing politicians, who intervened at the police stations, were also denied the right to information, she says.

Bodnar says that he wouldn’t compare this situation with previous LGBTQ demonstrations, which were planned Pride events and marches. But he notes an “unequal approach by the police,” referring to the lack of police response to marches led by nationalist groups—even when such marches could be seen as promoting aggression, like burning an LGBTQ flag. In his view, the police’s reaction to demonstrations depends on whether a certain group is “liked by the authorities or not.”

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosThe Nicolaus Copernicus monument is decorated with a rainbow flag.

What happens next?

Now, Poland’s LGBTQ community is bracing itself for what’s next. While those detained over the weekend have now been released from custody, activists say many of them will likely end up in court on charges of illegal gathering. In Polish law, this is defined as a riot in which participants jointly commit a violent assault on a person or property — a provision “only used when a crowd is calling for violent actions,” says Bodnar. But the weekend’s events “were not like this,” he says.

Nevertheless, he—like many others—is finding hope in the solidarity the LGBTQ community has received after the weekend’s protests. What made these protests “different” and “impressive,” he says, was the way politicians and lawyers rallied in support. At least eight politicians were present at police stations where protestors were detained, he says, while lawyers volunteered to defend them. “Polish authorities didn’t predict that putting Margo in detention would cause such powerful protests by the LGBTQ community and that those protests would be supported by opposition politicians and pro bono lawyers,” Bodnar says.

As well as solidarity protests, Poland’s LGBTQ community is rallying together to provide legal help and psychological support for the 48 people who have been detained. The Campaign Against Homophobia has been recruiting pro bono legal help for people who have been detained, and an LGBTQ-organized fund for psychological help has raised 20,000 Polish złoty ($5,345).

But what happens next for Margo remains uncertain and she is still waiting to access a lawyer while in solitary confinement. On the outside, Marcinek, the protester, tells TIME that policemen are randomly visiting and searching the homes of others who had been detained during the protests without warning or justification. And the broader future for LGBTQ rights in Poland is unclear. “Living in Poland, you can’t predict the future,” says Maciocha, head of the Volunteers of Equality Foundation.

What activists want now is stronger international solidarity, particularly from European governments. Remy Bonny, a Brussels-based LGBTQ rights activist and researcher who focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, says “we have seen this kind of violence in Russia and Belarus, for example, but not in an E.U. country.” The European Commission should condemn police violence in Poland in the same way it recently denounced the repression of protests in Belarus, he says. Makuchowska says she and other activists are calling on the international community to “help us to immediately release Margo.”

Despite the recent political campaign against LGBTQ people, activists say they feel that support for this community is growing and that more people who were once silent on LGBTQ rights issues are now compelled to speak out on social media or attend solidarity protests. “The community feels stronger in the end,” Makuchowska says. “We are determined to protect ourselves. The feeling is that we are strong.”

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polskiebagno · 7 years

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But what makes Poland attract so many neo Nazis? It's good you protest against it, but maybe campaign to stop these things from happening in the first place; hit it at its root. Why are your people so bigoted? Imo you need to change the education system, get rid of that victim complex Poles love to teach, have sex ed and classes about LGBT sexualities, teach about non-European history (the good and bad), criminalise racism, call out racists, actually imprison racists for several years etc. etc.

As for this i agree but also keep in mind that it’s not something that can be done easily. Those are changes that the government has to make, and rn we’re being run by a very conservative, far right party. They straight up said that racism isn’t an issue here (when it obviously is). And since they won the last election there have been protest against them almost every day. Small ones going on all the time, but also huge ones that gather so many people that the whole city sort of stops, cars can’t drive because people are blocking so many streets, police peeling us off the ground and the buildings, ambulances trying desperately to get in-between to help those who’ve been hurt. We’re fighting, trust me. We’re trying so fucking hard. But what you have to be aware of is that our media is lying about this. The censorship in this country is slowly growing and it’s fucking terryfing. (The other day one politician made a post on fb about a recent suicide of 14 years old kid who had been bullied by his peers so badly that he killed himself. And she basically said that well, he shouldn’t have been gay, it’s all just propaganda and if we stop pushing it on children then they won’t be dying. My friend commented on this status and got blocked. They will block a 17 year old kid on fb if he says sth they don’t like. Just think about this.)

What I’m saying is i get why you’re angry about this because I’m angry too but it’s not a simple issue, a matter of me going to a protest and saying “hey guys nazism is bad maybe you should stop?”. It’s a complicated issue, one that we are fighting against, but it’s not gonna be over soon and it’s not gonna be over easily. Not to mention lots of these people are educated it just doesn’t matter. There are people who will read about slavery or Holocaust and say “this is horrible and we must never let it happen again” and then there’s people who presented with the same horrific knowledge will still claim that it’s not a problem. And i dont think there’s a way to make them understand that they should care for others.

#mary talks #anon

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

Link

What’s the state of LGBTQ rights under Polish President Andrzej Duda?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosProtestors sit in front of police on in Warsaw, Poland Aug. 7, 2020.

What sparked the protests?

What happened at the protests?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosThe Nicolaus Copernicus monument is decorated with a rainbow flag.

What happens next?

#IFTTT #Blogger

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hellofastestnewsfan · 4 years

Link

What’s the state of LGBTQ rights under Polish President Andrzej Duda?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosProtestors sit in front of police on in Warsaw, Poland Aug. 7, 2020.

What sparked the protests?

What happened at the protests?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosThe Nicolaus Copernicus monument is decorated with a rainbow flag.

What happens next?

#Blogger

0 notes

pinktheoristcollector · 4 years

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What’s the state of LGBTQ rights under Polish President Andrzej Duda?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosProtestors sit in front of police on in Warsaw, Poland Aug. 7, 2020.

What sparked the protests?

What happened at the protests?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosThe Nicolaus Copernicus monument is decorated with a rainbow flag.

What happens next?

#Blogger

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newstechreviews · 4 years

Link

What’s the state of LGBTQ rights under Polish President Andrzej Duda?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosProtestors sit in front of police on in Warsaw, Poland Aug. 7, 2020.

What sparked the protests?

What happened at the protests?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosThe Nicolaus Copernicus monument is decorated with a rainbow flag.

What happens next?

#Blogger

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viralnewstime · 4 years

Link

What’s the state of LGBTQ rights under Polish President Andrzej Duda?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosProtestors sit in front of police on in Warsaw, Poland Aug. 7, 2020.

What sparked the protests?

What happened at the protests?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosThe Nicolaus Copernicus monument is decorated with a rainbow flag.

What happens next?

#Blogger

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thetrumpdebacle · 6 years

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When Young Mie Kim began studying political ads on Facebook in August of 2016—while Hillary Clinton was still leading the polls— few people had ever heard of the Russian propaganda group, Internet Research Agency. Not even Facebook itself understood how the group was manipulating the platform’s users to influence the election. For Kim, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the goal was to document the way the usual dark money groups target divisive election ads online, the kind that would be more strictly regulated if they appeared on TV. She never knew then she was walking into a crime scene.

Over the last year and a half, mounting revelations about Russian trolls’ influence campaign on Facebook have dramatically altered the scope and focus of Kim’s work. In the course of her six-week study in 2016, Kim collected mounds of evidence about how the IRA and other suspicious groups sought to divide and target the US electorate in the days leading up to the election. Now, Kim is detailing those findings in a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Political Communication. The researchers couldn’t find any trace, in federal records or online, of half of the 228 groups it tracked that purchased Facebook ads about controversial political issues in that six-week stretch. Of those so-called “suspicious” advertisers, one in six turned out to be associated with the Internet Research Agency, according to the list of accounts Facebook eventually provided to Congress. What’s more, it shows these suspicious advertisers predominantly targeted voters in swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“I was shocked,” says Kim, now a scholar in residence at the Campaign Legal Center, of the findings. “I sort of expected these dark money groups and other unknown actors would be on digital platforms, but the extent to which these unknown actors were running campaigns was a lot worse than I thought.”

Suspicious Groups

To conduct her research, Kim solicited volunteers to install a custom-built ad-tracking app on their computers. Kim describes the software as similar to an ad-blocker, except it would send the ad to the research team’s servers rather than block it. Kim whittled the pool of volunteers to mirror the demographic, ideological, and geographic makeup of the United States voting population at large. She ended up with 9,519 individuals altogether, who saw a total of 5 million paid ads on Facebook between September 28 and November 8, 2016.

‘The extent to which these unknown actors were running campaigns was a lot worse than I thought.’

Young Mie Kim, University of Wisconsin-Madison

From that massive pool, Kim took a random sample of 50,000 ads, and conducted searches for any that touched on one of eight politically sensitive topics: abortion, LGBT issues, guns, immigration, nationalism, race, terrorism, and candidate scandals (for example, Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape or Hillary Clinton’s private email server). After throwing out ads placed by the candidates or super PACs, the researchers were left with 228 individual groups. Kim then returned to the larger pool of 5 million issue-based ads to find all of the ones associated with those groups.

In total, groups that had never filed a report with the Federal Election Commission placed four times as many ads as groups that had. Until now, the FEC has failed to enforce rules about political ad disclosures online, and only recently voted to expand those disclosure requirements. That has allowed digital political ads—including the ones affiliated with the Internet Research Agency—to proliferate with no regulatory oversight.

Kim’s research showed that in fact, these unregulated ads made up the majority of issue-based ads on Facebook during the course of her study. Facebook did not provide a comment before publication.

Among the groups that were not associated with any FEC records, Kim went on to differentiate between run-of-the mill dark money groups (think: non-profits and astroturf groups) and what she called “suspicious” groups. The latter had Facebook Pages or other landing pages that had been taken down or hadn’t been active since election day. These suspicious groups also had no IRS record or online footprint to speak of at all. “Some groups, we were never able to track who they were,” Kim says.

Of the 228 groups running divisive political ads, Kim classified 122 as suspicious. Then, in November of 2017, the House Intelligence Committee threw Kim a clue, releasing some of the Internet Research Agency ads Facebook had turned over. Kim ran the House’s list against her own, and found that one out of every six suspicious advertisers she had tracked was linked to the IRA.

Over the last few months, Kim says she’s spent lots of weekends poring over these ads. “It was pretty depressing,” she says. One ad shared by multiple suspicious groups read: “Veterans before illegals. 300,000 Veterans died waiting to be seen by the VA. Cost of healthcare for illegals 1.1 billion per year.”

Swing States

The second part of Kim’s research focused on who exactly these unregulated ads—including both standard dark money ads and Russian ads—targeted. She found that voters in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, all states with tight races, were the most targeted. Specifically, voters in Wisconsin were targeted with gun ads about 72 percent more often than the national average. She also found that white voters received 87 percent of all immigration ads.

It makes sense that swing states would be more heavily targeted overall leading up to an election. And Kim didn’t analyze the Russians trolls’ targets independently from the other unregulated ads, given the small sample size of 19 groups.

Kim’s work suggests a sort of inevitability about the Internet Research Agency’s actions.

The aspect of her research that bothered Kim the most is that some of these groups could have been stopped—or at least discouraged—by stricter campaign finance laws. For instance, 25 percent of all the ads contained a message that mentioned Trump or Clinton by name. If those ads had appeared on television during that same time, they’d be considered “electioneering communications,” meaning they’d have to include a disclaimer about who paid for the ad and disclose to the FEC the source of their funding. Online, anything goes.

“I think the biggest issue here are the loopholes,” Kim says. “There is no adequate law that addresses social media platforms.”

Kim called Facebook’s recently announced plans to begin requiring disclosures and disclaimers on all political ads, including issue-based ads, a “step in the right direction.” She does, however, sees some flaws in Facebook’s plans. The company has said it will begin requiring both political advertisers and the people running large Facebook Pages to authenticate their identities by providing a mailing address and a government-issued form of identification. But Kim notes that many of the Pages in her research were not large at all. Instead, they appeared to be small Pages, linked to other small Pages, all of which ran identical ads.

In one case, four separate “suspicious” pro-Trump pages all ran the same ad that read, “Support 2nd Amendment? Click LIKE to tell Hillary to Keep Her Hands Off Your Guns.” The next phase of Kim’s research will focus on analyzing those networks.

Ultimately, though, Kim’s work suggests a sort of inevitability about the Internet Research Agency’s actions, given the United States’ lax campaign finance laws. It also shows that while the Agency’s ads were divisive and at times despicable, there were other dark money groups on Facebook spreading similar messages, and far more of them. And they were doing it in way that, for now at least, is totally legal. It raises a crucial question about political divisiveness in America: Who’s the bigger threat? Russian trolls or ourselves?

Troll Patrol

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of the IRA reads like a sweeping novel of intrigue

The ads that Russian trolls placed on Facebook knew exactly which buttons to push

Facebook has imposed new restrictions on political advertising, but enforcing them will still be tricky

via The Trump Debacle

#IFTTT #The Trump Debacle

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phooll123 · 4 years

Link

What’s the state of LGBTQ rights under Polish President Andrzej Duda?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosProtestors sit in front of police on in Warsaw, Poland Aug. 7, 2020.

What sparked the protests?

What happened at the protests?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosThe Nicolaus Copernicus monument is decorated with a rainbow flag.

What happens next?

#News Updates #New top story from Time: PolishStonewall: LGBTQ Activists Are Rallying Together After

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hellofastestnewsfan · 4 years

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What’s the state of LGBTQ rights under Polish President Andrzej Duda?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosProtestors sit in front of police on in Warsaw, Poland Aug. 7, 2020.

What sparked the protests?

What happened at the protests?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosThe Nicolaus Copernicus monument is decorated with a rainbow flag.

What happens next?

from TIME https://ift.tt/33PaFWX

#Blogger

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newstechreviews · 4 years

Link

What’s the state of LGBTQ rights under Polish President Andrzej Duda?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosProtestors sit in front of police on in Warsaw, Poland Aug. 7, 2020.

What sparked the protests?

What happened at the protests?

Rafal Milach—Magnum PhotosThe Nicolaus Copernicus monument is decorated with a rainbow flag.

What happens next?

#Blogger

0 notes