i can't stress enough how frustrating it is to see people go "bold of americans to assume everyone on the internet is american" without realizing that the internet is pretty much an american colony
the EU and its privacy laws are the first time i've seen a non-american organization being able to influence how the entire internet behaved. but aside from that, every single social media if not website i use is american or has to follow american rules else you're cut off from being able to offer services on the internet.
there's this famous stereotype that america is perfectly fine with violence and europe is perfectly fine with nudity, which does have some roots in reality - hell, porn artist milo manara (and what he does is porn, "elevated erotica" is just a fig leaf to pretend you're too cultured to like porn) is celebrated as a national hero here every time there's a comic convention. but on the internet, a hint of nips in one of my drawings and i am persona non grata because the united states of america uses global capitalism to impose its own set of moral restrictions.
the EU and its privacy laws are the first time i've seen a non-american organization being able to influence how the entire internet behaved.
And boy do Americans love that and never at all respond to EU decisions with haughty declarations about something-something-nanny-state, something-something-the-internet-interprets-censorship-as-damage XD
Anyway. I would not otherwise have mentioned it but I was, today, witness to a discussion in which someone brought up “falsehoods programmers believe about names” and it was argued that, well, you have to have standards for names and some people just want to be offended by anything.
As if the only reason one might remind you that “patronymic” and “surname” are not the same thing was because they were some Tumblr-refugee social justice warrior, instead of just a normal person whose appellations were not designed to fit the expectations of a Chase Manhattan Bank punchcard from 1964.
