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The National Sheep Association (NSA) has opened applications for young sheep farmers to apply to be a part of the Sheep Breeders Round Table (SBRT) that takes place from November 11-13.

The farmers will have the opportunity to join key names and other representatives from the UK sheep industry at the biennial event.

The cross-industry three-day event conference is a technical event involving sheep farmers, breeders, researchers and vets from across the UK and beyond.

To show its support for the future of the industry, the NSA Next Generation programme is offering to fund one young sheep farmer's attendance at the conference which, the NSA said, would lead to "expanding their knowledge and appetite for the latest thinking on sheep genetics".

NSA South East and NSA South West regions are also offering to fund 50% of two places each at the conference giving two more young farmers the chance to attend.

NSA communications manager, Katie James, said: "Attendance at SBRT can provide young farmers who have an interest in developing their sheep flock or career as a shepherd with the perfect opportunity to hear from some of the country's leading experts on a range of research topics."

"It is also an excellent networking event with chance to speak informally with some well-known names from the world for sheep breeding research and fellow pedigree enthusiasts."

Both the fully-funded and part-funded places offered include the full three days at the conference as well as accommodation and meals.

The event is held from Friday, November 11, to Sunday, November 13, at the Raddison Blu hotel, Pegasus Business Park, East Midlands Airport.

"This event is well suited to young sheep producers with a keen interest in pedigree breeding and research," James said.

"We look forward to receiving applications from sheep farmers aged 18 to 35 who believe attendance at the conference could truly benefit them at this time."

Young sheep farmers who wish to apply for the opportunity to attend the conference should visit the NSA website.

Applications close for this opportunity on Friday, October 21, at 5pm.

The rest is here:
NSA offers opportunities to young sheep farmers - Agriland.co.uk

Like a lot of twenty-somethings Dane Noonan wants to find love, but he is tired of online dating.

The experiences that I've had! A lot of the menthat I noticed on some of the apps are either in open relationships, (and I'm completely monogamous), or they're looking for NSA (no strings attached)".

While continuing to scroll diligently through Scruff and Grindr;, the 26-year-old has decided to absorb the exhaustion of dating to focus on his work as an actor and model; going to therapy and self-care.

I've been on all the apps! I'm sort of taking the time for myself and working on myself. If that man comes along, so be it, he said.

I just want it to happen naturally, at the end of the day so as far as dating, that's where I'm at, he concedes.

Noonan admits finding love in a disposable online dating culture that privileges hook-ups and unrealistic body ideals can be emotionally draining.

Society today, I feel like it paints this perfect picture of what a person is supposed to look like. There's a standard as well, you've got to be over six foot tall with, a masculine build which is not me, it's never going to be me.

Noonan who has MPS type 6, says this is compounded by ableism and discrimination he has experienced when online dating, which at times sees him the recipient of some cutting messages.

"I think from looking at me, they think I'm a child, I can't speak for myself or do they have to look after me?" Noonan says.

I have fully accepted myself as a person with a disability and a gay man so I don't really have any issues around that.

(But) when I go on a date it's, it's almost like the person, they don't know how to interact with me or how to take me, if that makes sense. They obviously see a four-foot-tall person (and) they dont how to interact, and the thing is I'm quite confident. I am quite extroverted.

Noonans dream man is respectful, kind-hearted and treats him and his loved ones well.

I love going to drag shows. (I want) someone that's quite fun, likes to dance and loves to travel. I also like the small things like going on a picnic, walking my pups, going to the theatre or going for a walk."

Despite the frustrations Noonan has not lost hope he will find Mr. Right soon, either online or the old fashioned one through social connections.

"I think everyone wants to feel loved," he said.

"I don't ask for much just someone to share memories with, my life with, and to love me for me, all of me.

Watch season four of the Swiping Game on SBS airing in January.

Go here to read the rest:
Dating in a world of NSA: 'I want someone to love me for me' - SBS

The First Amendment and the freedom of speech and expression it provides has helped make the internet what it is today: a place for diverse communities, support networks, and forums of all stripes to share information and connect people. Individuals and groups exercise their constitutional right to host and moderate sites that offer a common place for people who share a hobby, a religious belief, a political opinion, or a love for a particular kind of music.

Online platforms, from Facebook to your blog, have the right to decide what speech they publish and how they publish it. In that way, online platforms are no different from newspapers or parade organizers.

A federal appeals court in Louisiana, ruling last month in the case Netchoice v. Paxton, dealt a staggering blow to this bedrock principle of free speech online. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld an unconstitutional and disastrous Texas law that creates liability for social media platforms moderation decisions, essentially requiring that they distribute speech they do not want to host. Texas HB 20 restricts large platforms from removing or moderating content based on the viewpoint of the user. The law was created and passed to retaliate against social platforms that allegedly silence conservative viewpoints and ideas, despite there being no evidence that large platforms moderation decisions are biased against conservative viewpoints.

Tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) challenged the law in court. EFF filed amicus briefs in the district, federal appeals, and Supreme Court arguing that while internet users are sometimes justifiably frustrated by social media platforms content moderation decisions, they nevertheless are best served when the First Amendment protects those decisions. That First Amendment right helps the internet grow and provide diverse forums for speech.

After a district court preliminarily blocked the law, Texas appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which found that HB 20 doesnt violate platforms First Amendment rights. The court ruled that services do not have a constitutional right to engage in content moderationinstead, the court called platforms moderation and curation of content on their sites censorship. Large platforms that want to moderate user speech in violation of HB 20 have an armada of attorneys to defend them in court, the Fifth Circuit said. The law allows individuals and the state attorney general to sue platforms over content moderation and get reimbursed for their attorneys fees if they win.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous turn for internet freedom, and the right of people with diverse opinionsthat may be unpopular or aggravating to othersto speak freely online. The Fifth Circuits ruling is deeply problematic on many levels, including its failure to recognize how Congress, in enacting 47 U.S.C. 230, has already preempted state censorship laws like HB 20. This post, however, focuses on the terrible implications that the ruling has for online speech.

The logic of the Fifth Circuits ruling has damaging implications for every service hosting user-generated speech, not just the largest platforms like Facebook and YouTube. While HB 20 only applies to platforms with more than 50 million users, the courts holding that the First Amendment does not protect online content moderation can easily be applied beyond them. In the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, this unprecedented scaling back of free speech endangers smaller, less powerful, and less wealthy services. Many small and medium sized online services, described in our amicus briefs against HB 20, moderate content to serve particular communities, topics, or viewpoints.

The effects cannot be overstatedHB 20 and laws like it will destroy many online communities that rely on moderation and curation and cannot afford to fight the onslaught of lawsuits that the Fifth Circuit invites. Platforms and users may not want to see certain kinds of content and speech that is legal but still offensive or irrelevant to them. Rejecting such content or even deprioritizing it in a feed would come with a ruinously high price tag.

For example, the Fifth Circuits holding could allow laws that require sites supporting people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome to post comments from people who dont believe this ailment is a real disease. Sites promoting open carry gun rights that disallow comments critical of gun rights would violate such laws. A site dedicated to remembering locals whose families were affected by the Holocaust could be forced to allow comments by Holocaust deniers. Platforms unable to withstand an attack of harassing comments from trolls could be forced offline altogether.

The Fifth Circuits decision allows concerns about private censorship to serve as the basis for government control of speech. Whatever your political views, we hope you recognize the danger of the Fifth Circuits decision, because it fundamentally alters our ability to decide for ourselves the types of speech and views we want to see and associate with, including our right to exclude others or ourselves from speech we dont like. Community-led and diverse forums dedicated to particular topics and for particular people with specific viewswhich is nearly all forumsare now potentially under the thumb of the state, which could force them to serve its interests by calling the removal of opposing views censorship.

Theres something for everyone on the internet, and thats how it should be. Of course, its true that moderation decisions by large platforms can silence legitimate speech and stifle debate online. But as EFF has repeatedly argued, the way to address the concentration of a handful of large services is by reducing their power and giving consumers more choices. This includes renewed antitrust reforms, allowing interoperability, and taking other steps to increase competition between services.

These efforts would allow people who dont like the viewpoints expressed on one site to move to another and keep their social networks, while increasing the number of platforms that host speech that reflects their views and interests.

Unfortunately, the Fifth Circuits decision is likely to result in fewer sites for users to choose from and will likely do very little to alter or diminish the dominance of the platforms. This is because, as the Fifth Circuit observes, the largest services have immense legal resources to fight the lawsuits permitted by HB 20. They will survive, while other smaller sites targeted by new laws similar to HB 20 will not.

Government should not have the power to tell websites what opinions they must host, and we hope to that the Supreme Court will strike down this disastrous law and reject the Fifth Circuits dangerous logic that undermines the First Amendment rights of online services and their users.

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Court's Decision Upholding Disastrous Texas Social Media Law Puts The State, Rather Than Internet Users, in Control of Everyone's Speech Online - EFF

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A differentiated digital intervention to improve antiretroviral therapy adherence among men who have sex with men living with HIV in China: a...

Most of the complaints about Musk are meritless and tell us more about the cluelessness or hypocrisy of his critics than his alleged perfidy. At the end of the day, the case against him boils down to the criticism that he will allow too much unfettered speech on his social media platform, a plaint that would have made little sense to anyone a decade or so ago when the balance of center-left opinion was still robustly free speech.

As it is, a libertarian-ish business leader is saying he wants an important platform for political and social advocacy and argument to provide the widest possible latitude for varied, clashing views, and the reaction of a large segment of commentators is, This man must be stopped.

Musk cant catch a break. Bill Clintons former Labor Secretary Robert Reich tweeted, When multi-billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, its not a win for free speech. Its a win for oligarchy.

As they say on Twitter, Whos going to tell him?

Successful social media companies arent typically owned and run by low-income individuals (at least not by the time they are out of their garages). The co-founder and former CEO of Twitter who was in place when Reich was much less alarmed by the direction of the platform, Jack Dorsey, is worth $7 billion by some estimates.

Although hes taken a beating lately, Mark Zuckerberg still has a net worth of something like $50 billion.

Suffice it to say that Musk is not single-handedly bringing income inequality to Americas social-media companies.

At the end of the day, the biggest problem that Musks critics have with him is that he is a threat to their de facto control of Twitter. Ben Collins of NBC tweeted that Twitter will change dramatically if Musk owns it, and if the takeover gets done early enough, based on the people hes aligned with, yes, it would actually affect [the] midterms.

The worry that Twitters policies under Musk might affect the upcoming election is an implicit acknowledgment that its current policies have political consequences, and they clearly do otherwise, it wouldnt be that so many Democrats and progressives happen to be absolutely desperate to protect the Twitter status quo.

Collins warned that if Musk takes Twitter private the rule-making could become capricious. Indeed, Musk can elevate any idea or person he wants through recommendations and UX [user experience] choices and there will be no oversight on this as a private company.

One wonders what has supposedly happened prior to this point? Was there accountability when Twitter tried to squelch a totally legitimate news story about Hunter Bidens laptop prior to the 2020 election? Has anyone blown the whistle as the platform forbids one side of the debate on trans issues from using its preferred terms and expressing its deeply held, sincere beliefs? Is anyone keeping it from suspending the account of a conservative satirical publication, or cracking down on an account devoted simply to reposting already public videos?

The worst case is that these decisions are made explicitly to disadvantage conservatives. The best case is that decisions about what constitutes harassment and misinformation and the like inevitably involve subjective value judgments and politics naturally enters into them.

It would be easier to believe that neutral criteria were used, say, to kick Marjorie Taylor Greene off the platform, if a member of the Squad were getting dinged, too. Itd be easier to take the flagging of conservatives for spreading misinformation or alleged misinformation, if, for instance, Stacey Abrams and her supporters were whistled for running down the Georgia election system with various provable distortions.

Twitter is run as if a workforce of hyper-online progressive employees overwhelmingly living and working in a deeply blue jurisdiction is calling the shots, and, of course, so it is.

Another count against Musk is that these employees hate him. But so what? If we all agree that Twitter is an important public forum, its rules shouldnt be set by a group of people who have a vested interest in vindicating their own ideological beliefs and fashionable obsessions.

The underlying belief of those who think Musk is about to ruin Twitter and blight the American political conversation is that Donald Trump wouldnt have won the 2016 presidential election if it werent for Russian bots and right-wing purveyors of misinformation running riot on social media. If these were all repressed, the electoral system would be restored to its senses meaning back to Democratic control.

The effect of the 2016 Russian information operation was always exaggerated, though, and the attempt to squash misinformation on social media has veered into misbegotten campaigns against entirely reasonable points of view that baffle or outrage progressive America (the idea that Covid might have leaked from a lab got this treatment for a while).

Musks classical-liberal view that false or unwelcome speech is best combated by more speech once was a matter of consensus. That it feels radical now and is so bitterly contested is a symptom of how the Overton window has shifted toward speech suppression in the name of content moderation.

By the way, allowing Trump back on Twitter, as Musk is expected to do, wouldnt be a partisan power play. First of all, its significance would probably be exaggerated. Trump getting kicked off Twitter diminished his influence over the hour-by-hour political and media conversation, but its not as though hes been bereft without it hes retained his hold on the GOP, the real measure of his power, just fine.

Also, his Twitter return would hardly be an unalloyed benefit to him or the GOP. There are a lot of people in the Republican Party who would prefer to look past his poisonous musings and its a little harder to do that if hes back Twitter. (His own platform, Truth Social, doesnt have nearly the sway.) And Democrats, who want Trump to be as prominent as possible as a foil for Biden and others, should welcome a steady diet of Trump tweets again.

There is no doubt that Musk will encounter significant challenges to implementing his vision. Lines have to be drawn somewhere and hell have to guard against being as arbitrary as the prior regime just in a different way. But no one should doubt that he is deeply anti-bot (hes complained bitterly about their prevalence and tried to use them as a way out of the deal), and hopefully he will find more ways to allow people to choose for themselves what they want to see or not, without Sanhedrin-like rulings on deeply contentious political and moral questions.

Obviously, not all of this will be to everyones liking, especially to progressives who have gotten used to working their will with Twitter. But the social media platform is, ultimately, a private business that can set any rules it wants. If a more free-speech-oriented Twitter is hateful to them, they can take the advice they threw at conservatives disenchanted with the platform in recent years and go out and, build their own Twitter.

Excerpt from:
Opinion | Liberals Currently Control Twitter. That Needs to Change. - POLITICO