Hey there. Just letting you know that in general trans people and their allies absolutely do not want to be the center of public attention like this. They didn’t ask for it.

You’re right, there’s no good reason everyone should be so completely focused on them as a group. But that wasn’t their choice. That was the choice Nazis made when the first books they burned were about gender and sexuality.

That was the choice Nazis made when they spent the last decade and the foreseeable future demonizing and discriminating against transgender people.

Not because they asked for it. Not because they deserve it. But because they are the easiest target. Small in numbers. Complex by nature. Difficult to understand for the uninformed and the disinformed. “Different.”

They don’t consider themselves the center of the universe. Bigots do. Bigots have decided that transgender issues should be the thing everyone cares about right now. If you want to blame anyone, blame them.

But where is the place where I can get a message like that and trust it as it is the norm in that social network? McLuhan said “The Medium is the Message”

I’m not sure this is possible on the internet in general. Even in the early days of facebook people were forced to grow suspicious of their old acquaintances reaching out to say hi only to be hit with some “be your own boss!” MLM schtick, and that was when you could be fairly confident the sender was a real person that you actually have known for some time. Not to mention how suspicious we all are of some of the “living my best life!” type of humble-brag posts that are really just sad people playing pretend.

Add a layer of anonymity and I’m just not sure genuine trust could ever be possible. Try to take away anonymity and you wander into the quagmire that is personal privacy and still can’t avoid the possibility of scams and compromised accounts.

I think that the Internet as a Medium simply cannot do what we have been trying to force it to do for years - serve as a good “third place” for socialization. Do people make friends here? Absolutely. But people make friends in the ICU, doesn’t mean we should install a bar there.

They want to use military planes because they can hide the cost of this program in the “whoops it’s too big to audit” defense budget. The cost of civilian contractors would be publically disclosed.

This person’s outright sadistic blindness or trolling aside, anyone reading this comment with good faith and not immediately having an aneurysm should remember that the once and current president once said, and I quote:

I like taking guns away early. Take the guns first, go through due process second.

If the user was going to message someone off platform they’d still be sending them an unencrypted message anyways if they have to switch apps to SMS.

It sounds like they don’t want to take responsibility for that user choice or be connected to anything that happens because of that choice.

It would still be an insecure choice, even with obvious UX distinctions. It would only be a matter of time before headlines muddy the waters with “intercepted Signal messages reveal…” or “Judge rules in favor of subpeona for unencrypted Signal messages…”