#freedom of use

[political-us]

[emilianadarling]

- Timothy Snyder. The first and perhaps most important lesson from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017)

Snyder's new book, On Freedom, was published in 2024.

[luckystarchild]

I've been keeping it off my face as much as I can on video, but I'm livid about the TikTok ban.

I have about 100,000 followers on that app. I joined during the pandemic. I was lucky to find a community full of incredible people, many of whom I now consider lifelong friends. Because of the community I found on that app, I found space to experiment with my gender presentation. I was able to come out as nonbinary (to feel SAFE ENOUGH to come out as nonbinary) because of that app.

I've seen a few Tumblr posts in which people gloat they never got into TikTok. Good for you. You won't suffer emotionally, and that makes you feel superior. But if you have no concept of what that app has meant for more than 170,000,000 Americans (that's half of all Americans!), many of whom do not have access to community in physical spaces, kindly sit down.

The ban constitutes the largest mass layoff in American history. We will lose billions of dollars in our domestic economy. Over 7 million small businesses are impacted because of the ban. You will feel the effect of that whether or not you were on the app. If you can't grasp the significance of that, again: kindly sit down.

The language of the TikTok ban has set a dangerous precedent for the American government to shutter any tech platforms they deem "dangerous" for arbitrary, undisclosed, nebulous reasons. This will affect Americans' ability to organize, spread information, and protest. They have effectively banned our right to assembly in digital spaces. This is the greatest infringement of free speech that has ever occurred in the United States. If you can't grasp the significance of that, either: kindly sit down.

This is bigger than "never falling for the TikTok craze." This is an enormous governmental overreach sanctioned by our own Supreme Court. It's bigger than teens doing silly dances you can sneer at from your smug high horse.

And if you can't grasp that: Kindly. Sit. Down.

[onlytiktoks]

[victusinveritas]

[eugenedebs1920]

If one were to count to a million, one number per second, it would take, 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds, that is if you continuously count all 11 and half days without rest.

If one were to count to a billion, one number per second, it would take 31.7 years, if you were to count 24 hours a day. Yet if you were undertaking this you’d need to sleep occasionally. If you were to count 16 hours a day, leaving room to sleep, it would take you roughly 48 years.

There’s a thousand millions in a billion, a million millions in a trillion, a thousand billions in a trillion.

There was a point in time where both Bezzos and musk net worth was nearly a trillion dollars. If they wanted to count just one billion of those dollars by hand it would take them 48 years to accomplish.

Elon musk makes $8 million a day from government subsidies, this is prior to him eliminating any competitors from the inside with doge. The average senior, who busted their butts for 50 years paying into their social security, Medicare, state and federal taxes, makes $65 a day.

The absurdity of it all is staggering. That these men who found their niche in business, bezzos with an online bookstore, right as the internet was taking off, and musk who’s father exploited black South Africans in his jewel mines, gave Elon the capital to invest in PayPal, to which he sold, bought an existing electric car company, used the carbon credits, and federal incentives, to make hundreds of billions of dollars, both pay the bare minimum in taxes, with Tesla paying nothing 3 out of the last 5 years. You and I, people who sometimes have to scrounge change to put gas in the tank, who struggle to pay for housing, groceries, insurance, try to enjoy life, we pay almost 40% of our income to taxes, social security and Medicare/medicaid.

How the f*ck is that acceptable!? Let alone celebrated?! You think these ultra rich know what it’s like to have to make decisions on whether hey can afford lunch or if that needs to go into the gas tank to get to work to pay to live?! WTF?!

Greed, selfishness, arrogance, these are the fuel that feeds the fire that leaves the middle class stuck, struggling and frustrated. But they have convinced so many that it’s the political opposition that is the cause of their inability to get ahead, or immigrants, of people of color, or trans people, gay people, stoking division to continue hoarding wealth like some sick addiction.

There’s not an infinite amount of capital in the U.S. economy. There’s only X amount. If these greedy robber barons stockpile the majority of it, that leaves a minuscule amount for the rest.

24 hours a day counting one number per second, it would take 32 years to count 1/200 of Bezzos and musk’s fortune.

TAX THE RICH!!!!

[ellipsus-writes]

The words they're afraid of.

(Read on our blog.)

The recently appointed Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth (formerly Fox News pundit, perpetually soused creepy uncle, and current group chat leaker of classified intel) banned images of the Enola Gay from the Pentagon’s website for the offense of “DEI” language. In keeping with the far right’s stated war on anything vaguely resembling diversity, equity and inclusion, even historical photos are up for cancellation. When a literal weapon of mass destruction is censored for being a bit fruity under the Trump administration’s war against inconvenient truths, what exactly is left untouched?

This is clown show stuff, but the stakes are far from funny. While some might be hesitant to compare the current administration to the very worst history has to offer, we can at least all agree that they are dyed-in-the-wool grammar Nazis. Policing language has been the objective of the MAGA culture war long before Project 2025’s debut—the wave of book bans orchestrated by astroturf movements like Moms for Liberty, and Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay bill have already had a profound effect in the arena of free speech and freedom of expression (despite the far right’s long tradition of doublespeak performative free-speech martyrdom to the contrary). Don’t Say Gay ostensibly targeted K-3 education, but LGBT+ content at all levels of education (and beyond) was either quietly censored or entirely preempted in practice. The results were not just a war on so-called ideology, or words alone—but on reality and essential freedoms.

Now, words as innocuous and important as racism, climate change, hate speech, prejudice, mental health, and inequality are targeted as subversive. Entire concepts are being vanished from government institutions, scrubbed not only from descriptions but from metadata, search indexes, and archival frameworks.

If you don’t name a thing, does it exist?

These words are as numerous as they are generic: women, race, Black, immigrants, multicultural, gender, injustice. But what is painfully unserious is also particularly dangerous in its real-world consequences. The process of controlling words is a well-worn authoritarian tendency. Fifty-two universities are now under investigation as part of the President's effort to curb “woke” research and thought crimes. Institutions are being coerced to comply with a nebulous set of ideological demands, or face budgetary annihilation. That means cutting funding for entire departments, slashing financial aid, defunding scientific grants, and pressuring faculty to self-censor.

The possibilities for censorship extend far and wide—interfering, by extension, in everything from reproductive healthcare programs, to libraries and museums. The Trump administration’s proposed budget slashing all federal funding for libraries, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will effectively gut an infrastructure that supports over 100,000 libraries and museums across the country—community centers, educational lifelines, internet access points, and archives of marginalized histories (starting with the Smithsonian Institution).

When you erase access, you erase participation. And when you erase participation, you erase people, and the means by which future generations might even learn they existed. A culture that cannot remember is a culture that cannot resist.

The erasure is, yet again, unsurprisingly targeted at minorities and LGBT+ people. The National Parks Service quietly revised the Stonewall Monument’s website to remove references to transgender people—a fundamental part of the original protests. Not an oversight, not a mistake, but a deliberate excision—one point in a wider plan of erasure depicted in stark detail in Project 2025, a blueprint to dismantle civil rights, defund LGBT+-related healthcare, and rewrite history from the ground up.

Dehumanization by deletion—welcome to the reactionary resurgence of doubleplusungood governance. In Trumpland, words are weapons—but not in the way they intend. Their fear of language betrays its power; that’s why they’re trying so hard to police it.

Words hurt them.

Hurt them back.

- the Ellipsus Team

[gilamasan]

KOSA'S BACK

I'm not going to leave this unmentioned as the news isn't doing enough to warn people. The short of it is, the bill which disguises itself as a means to make the web safer was written by The Heritage Foundation to give the FTC full authority on what's deemed safe on the web. Under the new administration, it will be used to censor LGBT content. We know this was the point, as its proponents have shared this exact plan. It can still be beaten if called and emailed their senators, making it clear what harm the bill will do I'll link pages that can give you a line to your lawmakers, a way to write to them, and also a petition to sign.. The former only takes two minutes, and the latter has a pre-written script if you need it. This is more than important enough for your time. Even if you're in a red state, some conservatives oppose this bill beleive it will silence conservative voices too, so if you think that line of reasoning would work better on them, go for it!

[sunnywalnut]

Important thing to remember: the only reason the number of deaths in Palestine are going down is because there isn't enough people to kill.

Read that again.

The only reason the number of deaths in Palestine are going down is because there isn't enough people to kill.

The genocide is still happening. The cruelty and inhumanity is still happening.

People are not numbers.

It is time we stop treating them as such.

Free Palestine.

[political-us]

Previous NFL player Chris Kluwe

[politijohn]

Source

Source

[bellaciao-ciao-ciao]

[onlytiktoks]

[victusinveritas]

"Freedom seeds"?

These weirdos have the mental and emotional age of 12. These are little boys playing war and pretending to be cool, powerful men - with zero idea what it actually means to be that.

[eugenedebs1920]

Electing a person who openly and willingly lied about the election results, then incited a rebellion against the democratic process of certification….. Not patriotic.

Supporting a president who pardoned the very people who engaged in insurrection, even the violent cop beaters..:.. Not patriotic.

Supporting the brazen acts of financial corruption through the executive branch, whether through crypto, through “gifts” of private jets, through dismantling agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), who’s only objective was to protect American consumers, by selling access to the presidency, or through making deals for real estate projects as president….. Not patriotic.

Supporting clear 1st amendment infringement (not just getting your false post taken down from social media) like telling universities what they can teach under the guise of antisemitism ordered by the most antisemitic and racism administration in generations, like suing news outlets, like putting the “ten commandments” in public schools, like instituting Christian public schools, or like how with unbelievable gaslighting and hypocrisy claiming that NBC, CBS, ABC, are political operatives while aligning with Fox News and saying NOTHING about them…. Not patriotic.

By selling your country out in some immature “own the libs” mentality, then acting like nothing is wrong as our republic crumbles beneath us…. Not patriotic.

There’s a huge difference between patriotic and nationalistic. There’s a huge difference between loyalty and allegiance. There’s a huge difference between the truth and a lie. There’s a huge difference between maga and true Americans.

Real Americans stand for, and with the Constitution.

While maga stands with a traitor….

[ellipsus-writes]

(Read on our blog)

Beginning in 1933, the Nazis burned books to erase the ideas they feared—works of literature, politics, philosophy, criticism; works by Jewish and leftist authors, and research from the Institute for Sexual Science, which documented and affirmed queer and trans identities.

(Nazis collect "anti-German" books to be destroyed at a Berlin book-burning on May 10, 1933 (Source)

Stories tell truths.

These weren’t just books; they were lifelines.

Writing by, for, and about marginalized people isn’t just about representation, but survival. Writing has always been an incredibly powerful tool—perhaps the most resilient form of resistance, as fascism seeks to disconnect people from knowledge, empathy, history, and finally each other. Empathy is one of the most valuable resources we have, and in the darkest times writers armed with nothing but words have exposed injustice, changed culture, and kept their communities connected.

(A Nazi student and a member of the SA raid the Institute for Sexual Science's library in Berlin, May 6, 1933. Source)

Less than two weeks after the US presidential inauguration, the nightmare of Project 2025 is starting to unfold. What these proposals will mean for creative freedom and freedom of expression is uncertain, but the intent is clear. A chilling effect on subjects that writers engage with every day—queer narratives, racial justice, and critiques of power—is already manifest. The places where these works are published and shared may soon face increased pressure, censorship, and legal jeopardy.

And with speed-run fascism comes a rising tide of misinformation and hostility. The tech giants that facilitate writing, sharing, publishing, and communication—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the-hellscape-formerly-known-as-Twitter, Facebook, TikTok—have folded like paper in a light breeze. OpenAI, embroiled in lawsuits for training its models on stolen works, is now positioned as the AI of choice for the administration, bolstered by a $500 billion investment. And privacy-focused companies are showing a newfound willingness to align with a polarizing administration, chilling news for writers who rely on digital privacy to protect their work and sources; even their personal safety.

Where does that leave writers?

Writing communities have always been a creative refuge, but they’re more than that now—they are a means of continuity. The information landscape is shifting rapidly, so staying informed on legal and political developments will be essential for protecting creative freedom and pushing back against censorship wherever possible. Direct your energy to the communities that need it, stay connected, check in on each other—and keep backup spaces in case platforms become unsafe.

We can’t stress this enough—support tools and platforms that prioritize creative freedom. The systems we rely on are being rewritten in real time, and the future of writing spaces depends on what we build now. We at Ellipsus will continue working to provide space for our community—one that protects and facilitates creative expression, not undermines it.

Above all—keep writing.

Keep imagining, keep documenting, keep sharing—keep connecting. Suppression thrives on silence, but words have survived every attempt at erasure.

- The Ellipsus team