In general I agree with other responders, in that it is best to let them explain their bigotry. Having said that, and for the record:

• a stealth trans woman will face misogynist discrimination at work
• a non-stealth trans woman will face transmisogynist discrimination at work
• a stealth trans man might be able to take advantage of passing privilege and male privilege combined ^[1]
• a non-stealth trans man will face transphobic and misogynist discrimination at work

If any of the above people are non heteronormative they will face homophobic discrimination either way.

Let alone that these legal transition procedures are wildly imperfect, and it would be unreasonable to assume that a person can as easily transition in law as they imply. In fact it might take years and $$ just to get just the most important paperwork done^[2]. And then what? Do they think that legal name change is like a Permanent Polyjuice Filter that allows you perfectly pass and live as the other gender?? P r e p o s t e r o u s

Besides, why would anyone transition in paper if they are not transgender? This is the most basic comeback. Ask them “Why don’t you switch genders then? Grass might be greener on the other side.^[3]” They will probably respond “But I am not trans”. “Neither am I”, continue, “I just want equality at work, trans rights included”.

(Source: Old social studies coursework on transgender issues, but some info might be outdated.)

This

These are chemicals found in every single human, how can you think they cause insanity? Also environmental stressors play a big role on mental health issues, but what you call “insanity” might be better defined as neurotransmitter imbalance, and it has not a lot to do with sex hormones, but a totally different set of chemicals.

They do not matter at all.

I beg to disagree. If “useless internet points” don’t matter, why is there a billion dollar marketing industry surrounding them? I mean all kinds of data mining conducted on all forms of internet reactions. People are paid good money to crunch these types of numbers, including who is casting the votes (man, woman, white, black, American, not-American, liberal, conservative, etc, etc). Then there is the troll/astroturfing angle. There are different types of campaigns that pay drones to upvote or downvote stuff, for marketing purpose or state-actor agendas.

Sure basing your self-esteem on internet points is harmful and useless, but seeing internet reactions as a narcissist fuel only is also naive and misleading. Given the OP wants to get genuine feedback to his opinions to use as a political or moral compass, the question of the feedback quality is not moot at all.

It should have no bearing on your life what so ever.

The feedback quality is also indeterminate. We can’t know the proportion of astroturf, spooks/trolls, and genuine users in any upvote/downvote score and/or reaction. This can lead to a situation where the feedback to your opinions is always muddy, and vague. Do my opinions suck or is this their problem? In real life you won’t get honest feedback to your opinions anyway, for reasons of politeness. I read once this is why conspiracy theories thrive in Facebook more than Twitter (old study), because a network of acquaintances will not challenge your BS, but a crowd of strangers will.

For all these reasons I think the OP’s question is a valid problem we don’t yet have good answers to. And it is relevant to any platform, Lemmy included.

Aah… Boomer bait, we get that a lot :s

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/twitter-suspends-elon-jet-account-that-tracked-elon-musk-plane-rcna61718

Musk tweeted that the accounts violated Twitter’s “doxxing” rules, meaning they revealed nonpublic personal information.

ban posts on other people’s live locations because of “increased risk of physical harm.”

1. Shall we expect he shows consistency in case of troll harassment campaigns, which feminists have been bringing up for a lot of time.
2. Also reinstate the API that made feminist anti-harassment apps possible?
3. How does this (obviously personally motivated) cater to personal safety generalizes to his free-speech absolutist views about yet other platforms: KiwiFarms for example.

Very good point indeed.

In a society that values money above everything else, his status as richest person for lots of people makes his views seem relevant, even if unconsciously so. Then there come the fanboys to idolize him. But let’s consider the obsession with wealth that creates this halo effect even in the “non-fan-boys”. Musk, Trump, Tate, should all be irrelevant, but they’re not, which is in fact a systemic problem.

As for your original question: Musk helps oppressive states enforce censorship on his platform .

His passion for free speech is only for white supremacists and conspiracy theorists now running rampant on his platform (there is a John Oliver segment about it).

He opposed an anti-hate-speech law in Ireland, although the law makes clear that it is still allowed to express unfavorable opinions and offend others, but forbids incitement to violence.

This shows he is not interested in defending “unfavorable reasoning” against the “woke” inquisitors, rather than advancing hate-speech and white supremacist causes in particular. This is not only a hypothesis, but a reported outcome of his actions with X/Twitter, which is now a nazi bar.

Don’t forget Russel’s tolerance paradox: If you tolerate nazis in order to defend freedom (of speech, political association, and the like), they will overtake the state apparatus and verbot freedoms for everyone, not only speech, but freedom of life as well.

He is doing exactly that, not only permitting, but promoting white supremacy, and at the same time treating the term “cisgender” for example as a slur.

This shows he is not all in for defending free-speech for all sides, but he is out to “destroy to woke mind virus” because it “stole his son from him”.

Musk is a nazi apologist, a big cry baby, and a media gatekeeper who enforces censorship both as a platform owner and as a service to totalitarian states.

He is a national security risk, according to Wired.

IA is a pillar of internet activism, and an exceptional instance of the spirit of the web pioneers. No real hacktivist would take them on. These guys are spooks, black hat, or corporate actors.

Archives work against information control. “Who controls the present now controls the past”. They wouldn’t like archived versions of things get in the way of their very, very expensive narratives they are pushing, now would they?

Certainly. I try to do the same, in fact I craft my comments so that they are immediately useful to others. Nonetheless, this might be not enough. Trolls are there for a reason, and you have to accept that our comment-section skirmishes do not add up to much, especially when you consider state-sponsored trolling and mega-corporate push of the far right agenda, across all media outlets, including social media.

Perhaps peppering responses with links is counterproductive. Why not follow a more consistent strategy? Such an approach would for example summarize the opposition’s view in good faith, give a name to the fallacies in it, and respond not only by providing a link, but a short synopsis of what the link is and how it refutes those fallacies. This approach helps not only rebut the opponent, who may be unwilling to listen to reason, but everyone following the conversation in real time or in the future. For this reason it is also great to use archived versions of links, whenever you can.

Not to mention that people have jobs and use their credit cards, no way even to hide the most important personal identifying information.

Exactly, this is a lost cause. If you participate in society your essential data are simply out there. For most people the task is to minimize their footprint. If we are talking about evading mass surveillance, then we should take for granted that the person will be to one or another degree marginalized, or lead a fringe lifestyle.

Sure, I see where you are coming from. I used to be in favor of PGP as well, but I think I just was conditioned to it because it was everywhere, eg Linux repositories. The argument I found more convincing in this article is that PGP is a swiss-army knife. You might want to use it in an emergency, but professionals have special tools for each different task. In fact, the article suggests very nice alternatives for each task: Encrypt with age , sign with minisign. Two different tasks, two different tools, no need for a web of trust. Just for the arguments sake why do you think that PGP is worth it given the burden of entry?

People say this over and over “depends on your threat model” and yet people seem to have a hard time understanding that. Your threat model is “who is your adversary and what he is willing/able to do”. Your security goal is what do you want to keep from your adversary.

As others said, if you are an activist or sth important, perhaps you might want to build a working knowledge of cryptography yourself. If you just want META not being able to see your NSFW chat with your romantic partner Signal might be more than enough. In fact, people way more relevant than me also suggest that Signal is good even for bounty hunter vulnerability reporting.

Having said that, what bugs me most is that people think the instant messaging format as suitable for everything: activism, jobs, crimes, broadcasting 1970’s prog rock for extraterestrials , whatever lmao. Do you really want to use your phone for all that? Like, just carrying the phone around in the first place nullifies your other precautions, for all advanced threat models beyond privacy of non-critical social messaging.

Persistent/resourceful adversaries can eventually get to you, using a set of penetration and intelligence techniques, which means, if you are involved, the convenience of messaging your partners in crime from the phone in your pocket while waiting for a bus is a convenience you probably can’t afford.

protected by PGP

Someone here recently linked to this gem https://www.latacora.com/blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem/

The article warns PGP over Email is a safety concern. They suggest Signal instead. (And several other tools to replace PGP)

I can’t help wondering what is up with all those people fighting in comments about encryption. You make the point time and again that having encrypted media is somehow suspicious. I see where you are coming from.

• There are cases where people have gotten in trouble for using TOR/Signal, because it was presented to the court that “this is what criminals use”.
• There are those Wall Street companies that got in trouble for using encrypted messengers with trading partners.

We know about these, because it makes headlines when it happens.

Yet, there are people here, in any similar discussion, not just this one, that keep telling us that encryption is useless because authorities can more easily break your bones than brute force your private key, and you are going to be in trouble just for having encrypted media.

Is that so? Remember the fuss when federal regulators wanted Apple to install backdoors to encrypted i-Phones? Why so? No no, bear with me, if you people are correct, then every person with an encrypted i-Phone should be in a watchlist? What about all these Linux laptops all with LUKS on the main hard drive, flying around?

How come we don’t hear about those people being prosecuted and brutalized every other day in all of these alternative media we are following?

Regarding encryption, I have a right to my fucking privacy and if you want to know what is in my hard drive, then you are the weird one. Now let’s discuss criminal prosecution. If the authorities have something on you and they need whatever is in your encrypted drive to convict you, then they do not have anything on you unless they break the encryption. The more people practicing encryption the less fruitful their efforts will be. Your argument amounts to little more than the very authorities slogan “if you don’t have something to hide”. More people using encryption should make it sink that not only people with something to hide will use encryption, and indeed, all these everyday, non-criminal people are already using Encryption in i-Phones and Linux without having their bones broken.

Yet you keep repeating this rhetoric, which seems to have no other purpose than deter people from using encryption.

Now let’s discuss brutality. If you live in a police state that can kidnap you and rough you up to forgo your protected right to privacy, then you don’t have a problem with encryption, but a huge political problem. In that case encryption won’t liberate you, but at the same time you have much bigger problems, and an entirely different threat model.

So the only thing you people could, in good faith, add to the discussion is “If you live in a police state, don’t rely solely on encryption, and update your threat model”. The other things you keep going on and on about are essentially a rebranded “if you don’t have something to hide” and they only seem designed to discourage people from adopting encryption altogether, and the fact you don’t let go can only mean one fucking thing.

This is a story from August 2023, and was covered in many outlets (I quote here NYT for reference only)

Federal regulators continued their crackdown against employees of Wall Street firms using private messaging apps to communicate, with 11 brokerage firms and investment advisers agreeing Tuesday to pay $549 million in fines.

Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Bank of Montreal were hit with the biggest penalties by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Together, the brokerage and investment advisory arms of those four financial institutions accounted for nearly 90 percent of the fines, according to statements released by the regulators.

Original NYT

Archived version

You might have a different type of person in mind than other commenters. Most commenters had such people in mind who won’t install a password manager or an ad-blocker, or won’t hard reboot their Windows unless supervised. Having said that, I don’t think that even if you had technical people in mind this fits the question. They tend to take substantial more effort to learn and use effectively than the scope set by the original question. I thought this question was for little things that have a quick, lasting, and substantial effect. Learning awk and sed is a different thing entirely, I think of those more as productivity tools you can invest in mastering, and pay off in the long run.