Long story short: tell Iran to free Toomaj Salehi, tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality protections for internet content, tell our CFPB to end forced arbitration clauses in banking consumer contracts, and tell our FEC to prevent AI-generated falsehoods in political campaigns. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to stop detaining hip-hop artist Toomaj Salehi, because that’s what snowflake governments do when people use art to criticize them. Seriously, imagine Richard Nixon putting Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in jail after “Ohio.” Bet he thought of it! Bet today’s right-wing politicians would say it out loud a lot more easily! (About whom, though? Taylor Swift? Todd Snider?) But I digress: criticizing a government (for killing a woman for wearing a hijab “wrong,” no less) is no reason to put a guy in solitary and beat the stuffing out of him. I’m sorry that even needs explaining.
Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality protections for internet content post-haste. Our FCC finally has five Commissioners now, so they have no excuse anymore. Probably no issue has united liberals and conservatives like net neutrality – virtually everyone who’s not a big telecom PR hack wants you, not some corporation, to decide where you go on the internet, without big corporations blocking or throttling your favorite websites or forcing websites to pay for faster delivery. Naturally, confronted with this unanimity of public opinion, the Trump FCC told the American people to fuck off and repealed net neutrality. But the battle has been joined again.
Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to end forced arbitration in banking industry consumer contracts. Arbitration used to be for big corporations so they could fight each other outside of the court system, but now big corporations routinely force arbitration clauses on you just to buy or use their products, and banks are no different. Don’t believe the BS that the “average” arbitration award is much higher than what you’d get out of a class action suit, because if you lose, averages won’t matter – and your opponent may be able to extract a large award out of you. So yeah, you’re much better off relying on your right to a day in court, even if it doesn’t make you rich.
Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to clamp down on AI-generated lies in campaigns. People want to unleash AI all over everything these days, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it! And “fraudulent misrepresentation” of a candidate’s words is already illegal, so it shouldn’t be any different if AI enables it. I guess AI’s creators would say if AI did it, and AI isn’t really sentient, then nobody’s to blame! But you see the problem with that argument in the phrase “AI’s creators,” I trust. Yikes, this shouldn’t be that hard.
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