It shows the dark side of this coin. It's killing a lot of genuine volunteer initiatives because complying with all the red tape.
I find that a huge loss because it drives us more and more in the arms of big tech who only have dollars as a goal, not helping people or establishing a community like these initiatives do.
This law is aimed at big tech but it actually hurts the smallest players which don't need this legislation because they're already ethical. The big players will just hire more lawyers to contest any fines and find as many loopholes as they can.
An 18 million pound fine is just a massive risk for a hobbyist. It would basically ruin their entire life.
We elect decision makers who are lazy to do their job so they put the difficult part on everyone's head, basically making everyone proactively proving that they are not criminals (including helping criminals by intent). Also the catching of the criminals are put on citizens too (those being directors or responible persons of an organization). I can collect perhaps dozens of such if I try apart from this example. First comes to mind is when you have to prove you are not money loundering when receiving a large sum or buying an expensive but essential to life thing (house). I lived in a country where re-registering your pre-paid SIM card is a yearly feat, otherwise it will be taken away, only because the officials did not notice criminals buying that by the 100's of thousands. No mistake, 200.000 suspicious purchase occurred. So, now everyone has one more small task to do, prove him/herself towards authorities because authorities are sooo incompetent and lazy. Fucking up the life for everyone bit by bit, slowly making it not worthwile to do anything meaningful, better just sit and exists silently.
The law is not aimed at big tech. It is aimed at any online forum that the government wants to shut down, and gives an lengthy, arbitrary, and vague list of pretenses that they can base a shutdown on. Big tech has shown itself to be eager to conform to government expectations at every turn. Big tech helps even to shape government expectations, and continually shares personnel with government itself.
> People in the UK will be better protected from illegal harms online
What are these 'illegal harms'? I'm online 10+ hours a day for 10 years straight and never seen one. (not assuming they don't exist, but their prevalence/impact might be inflated).
If you have to go looking for them, isn't this just 'whack a mole' (since 'online harms' will hard to 100% eradicate), but at the expense of destroying parts of the internet run by people who can't afford the time/cost of lawyers in order to comply with and refute claims of breach of this legislation?
Also 'online harms' pertaining to 'eating disorders'. What content promotes eating disorders?! Is there a single site that authors/proponents of this regulation can point to that literally 'promotes eating disorders'? How would a site admin determine what is acceptable and what is not? See: chilling effect [1]
There are numerous sites and social media pages on all the major platforms that literally promote anorexia. That you’ve never heard of them should perhaps encourage you to take a more curious and less combative approach to this topic.
is asking for a tiny bit of evidence (this is gentle curiousness; the antithesis of combative). Earnestly, are you able to provide one site that 'promotes eating disorders', so I can be educated?
If the answer is 'any site with charismatic too-slim people', isn't that extremely difficult to administer, and possibly become horribly discriminatory, for example if a site has a user profile of a beautiful but illegally[1] slender person, doesn't that 'promote eating disorders'? Would a site admin be legally compelled to block that user, or at least censor their profile pic?
I literally don't know what's legal vs illegal in this sphere, and suspect 99% of others are the same, and that probably includes the legislators themselves. Those claiming to know precisely what's il/legal in this context are probably overconfident.
If you search slang for anorexia and bulimia (ana and mia, respectively), it comes up. The slang helps remove the stigma and feels more friendly/cool. Thinspo/thinspiration is another term used by that community. "Help me love ana".
With that search, there are sites that come up [1]. These terms are also used on reddit, instagram, etc for people to share tips (to be better anorexics/bulimics).
> This website is for support for those with an eating disorder who feel alone and by themself with this issue.
Where are people with anorexia and bulimia supposed to get support/information if forums about the topics are untenable?
Many can't beat the condition, and there's potential benefit in learning to accept and live with it.
I'm not saying the site is unequivocally good, just that it's not unequivocally bad, therefore onerous regulation that has huge side-effects on information sharing to curb something that's arguably net-beneficial is dubious and shouldn't be pursued without strong evidence that 1. It will work as intended, and 2. It will actually be beneficial.
In general, the internet has shifted away from this "laissez-faire" line of thinking.
A site that helps people live with these disorders means more people dealing with negative effects of eating disorders like hair loss, ruined teeth, suicide/mental illness, and cardiovascular damage. These effects in turn increase healthcare costs for the government via the NHS.
Bombarding anyone with these disorders with information to get better is far better for society. If people can't change, then this strategy is better for the people who can, who would otherwise get stuck in a community supportive of unhealthy behavior.
You can't call it unequivocally good or bad, but the doctor's treating the disorder can. The government bean counters have. The studies that these groups produce do (simple search brings up dozens). The politicians fighting for these bills have and will call it good.
(I liked the more free internet, but it doesn't exist anymore and here we are.)
> Where are people with anorexia and bulimia supposed to get support/information if forums about the topics are untenable? Many can't beat the condition, and there's potential benefit in learning to accept and live with it.
Sending an anorexic to a pro-ana site is like sending someone with major depressive order to a pro-suicide site. These sites are not support groups for people struggling to cope with anorexia, they’re sites that tell you tips for overcoming your body’s defences to starving it to death
I don't believe in banning websites but that website is unequivocally bad.
It's a website that reinforces all the cognitive distortions of anorexia. It's the equivalent of a website for depression that says "You know how you feel like life isn't worth living, you're right it isn't, everyone who tells you that with treatment it will get better is lying to you. Here's a bunch of inspirational blog posts about how wonderful suicide is and 10 ways to kill yourself."
Anorexia is not a very stable condition, you can't really just accept it and live with it. Anorexia is built on a positive feedback loop. Obsession with thinness drives low body weight, and low body weight increases the obsession. Most anorexics get worse when not being treated. This is one of the reason it has such a staggeringly high mortality rate.
If you come from an angle of ‘I’ve never seen it therefor it’s just whack a mole’ don’t be surprised if people read it as simple rejection rather than curiosity. Using language like ‘Is there a single site?’ doubles down on it.
Young children being treated for eating disorders as inpatients in hospitals almost always have been in contact with some kind of eating disorder glorification.
But the article doesn't give a single site or name a single community; it provides zero evidence of its claims.
> Camille, a 20-year-old who has struggled with an eating disorder since middle school, described her community as initially intended to be a safe space but ultimately spiraling out of control due to algorithmic influence
If these claims are true, why not simply demonstrate it; at least state the name of the community so readers can cross reference (to ensure it's not 'boogyman' | typical alarmist-bait), or show us screenshots, or create a dummy twitter account and scroll down the feed as evidence of 'algorithmic influence'. That's 15 minutes work. Why doesn't the journalist do that? Is it possible these things aren't nearly as bad as they claim?
Algorithms will promote what the user clicks on and engages with. Simply: three dots -> Not interested in this post. That retrains the algorithm. And if people are seeking harmful content, they'll find it with or without algorithms, with or without twitter, with or without the internet! Are we banning books next? And conversation? What about reasoning in one's own mind, that too?
Perhaps it is because censoring the content is more important to the authors than citing the "dangerous" content.
>Is it possible these things aren't nearly as bad as they claim?
Under the premises of the censors, you shouldn't examine or question their claims. This is for your own safety. Instead, you should implicitly trust the authority figures to dole out trustworthy information.
Approaching the topic with the tools of rational inquiry is a form of wrong-think.
If trenchant dismissal of claims unsupported by evidence is perceived as combative, it’s a canary for that individual - to become better at handling trenchant dismissal of claims unsupported by evidence.. challenging dubious claims is the default, most rational approach. We should all do it, all the time. Sorry if it seems combative. Maybe it is, but it’s optimal and normal.
Do you do this with everything? Search down examples of child sexual abuse material and murders before you believe they exist?
I don’t think it a “dubious” claim at all - you’ve been on the internet there is a community for _everything_ it’s not surprising there is a community for this.
Traditionally the method is there are some things that people just assume exist and for things outside that circle they require some smidgen of evidence to believe in. It is a bit like me saying I believe there are people in the Arctic (never really seen evidence of it, but seems reasonable) vs. pixies (if I'm being asked to believe in pixies, I'd like to see some evidence).
The idea that there are sites promoting eating disorders does seem to me plausible by default, but nomilk does allude to a good point that without examples it is hard to talk about harms. These sites, if they exist, might be quite difficult to find without going and looking for them. I don't remember ever seeing a hint of such a site.
I suppose the difference for me is I've not seen any examples of Child sexual abuse online. Its obviously a bad thing, so steps taken to prevent that directly are a good thing. When you start restricting everyone, in order to stop that harm, then you need to start quantifying risks.
This isn't arresting murderers, this is restricting the sale of rope that murderers might use on their victims. or to get more specific. this isn't banning clubs where murderers can get together. this is imposing checks on all clubs to make sure there aren't any murderers in them.
If it reasonable for the boy scouts to do checks on their members to make sure that a few of them aren't planning a murder? should the boy scouts be responsible if a few boys do go and murder someone? a murder that was planned in the scout hut?
This is restricting the sale of "how to murder people" handbooks, even at garage sales. Therefore every garage sale proprietor is burdened to make sure they aren't selling a handbook explaining how to murder people, even if they got a load of miscellaneous items from an anonymous person.
> challenging dubious claims is the default, most rational approach
I would bet ignoring dubious claims is the default. Challenging and questioning any claims is a better default but I don’t think it is a common default reaction by many people.
I didn't read his questions nearly as combative as I read yours. And I say that as someone who's very aware of and very adverse to the idea and tactic of concern trolling.
I've spent enough time working with teams dedicated to combatting proana, and other S/SH issues, so I know pretty well how significant a problem it is. If I'd only read the above non-answers I'd probably be likely to take the side of the person you responded to.
If you think he's being combative, I'd hope you'd defuse it with redirection, instead of overt hostility. Especially if one of the issues you care about is how harmful proana, anorexia, S/SH and adjacent issues are, I'd assume you knew you need to start with compassion and understanding.
He’s not concern trolling he’s just being contrary with the inputs because he fundamentally disagrees with law that is the topic here. First, question the existence of EVERYTHING in a bad faith way.
I think you’ve misread that I have any stake at all in proana/anorexia promotion - I just know it exists and the “online 10 hours a day for 10 years” guy who hasn’t come across it went straight to ‘is there a single site’ rather than I dunno, googling it.
> There are numerous sites and social media pages on all the major platforms that literally promote anorexia.
Although probably a just cause I'd say that the western world does have an obesity problem though, not an anorexia one. So a better example would be all the sites encouraging people being lazy and fat and eating junk while labelling anything criticizing the unhealthiness of obesity as supposedly engaging in "fat shaming".
I mean: even using the term "fat shaming" is encouraging fat people to stay fat. And that's promoting eating disorders IMO.
So: fighting anorexia, sure. But we got bigger fishes (literally) to deal with if the (laudable) goal is to fight eating disorders.
>the western world does have an obesity problem though, not an anorexia one
It has both, and they are linked. It is a false ontology to place them in opposition, just because one is "too fat" and the other "too thin".
It's also very arguable that obesity is the "worse" problem. Yes it causes negative health outcomes, and is more widespread, but anorexia is more immediately and dramatically harmful, even fatal, and disproportionately affects teenagers during a critical growth phase, often causing irreversible disfigurement.
Also, it's become pretty clear that anorexia embodies a particular kind of dysfunctional dynamic between body perception and diet (one that is gaining recognition in other forms of dietary restriction, as sometimes seen in e.g. athletes and people obsessed with various categorizations of "natural" or "pure" foods). The vast majority of obese people aren't building an elaborate system of memes and rituals to force themselves to overeat because they look in the mirror and see themselves as thinner than they really are.
The anorexia problem is part of the obesity problem. Young girls (and increasingly, young boys) see all the pressure to be skinny and at the same time are surrounded by food designed to make them fat. They respond by swearing off food entirely. They are terrified of becoming fat, and literally see their bodies as fat even as they are about to die of starvation.
Fixing the numerous causes of obesity would definitely help. But it's not made easier by the existence of "pro-ana" social media which encourages young anorexics to reinforce each other's dangerous attitudes to food.
When I watch UK streaming services (ITVx) I get bombarded with adds for junkfood takaway services. The obesity promotions are just staggering. (Outside that I mostly watch YouTube with a premium sub, so maybe I'm just unaware as to how this compares to non UK media services)
> What are these 'illegal harms'? I'm online 10+ hours a day for 10 years straight and never seen one. (not assuming they don't exist, but their prevalence/impact might be inflated).
As I understand things, MPs who are on Twitter regularly get anonymous threats of rape, murder etc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63330885 - credible threats, with two MPs murdered in the last decade.
You and I have the luxury that we can just not be on Twitter - but when you're an MP, unless you're in a very safe seat you've got to meet voters where they are, not where you'd like them to be.
So from an MP's perspective? In one hand they've got a report about revenge porn, cyber-bullying, 4chan /pol/ and pro-anorexia facebook groups. In the other hand they've got their phone where someone's just told them to kill themselves.
They believe in these "illegal harms" because they've got a front row seat, and experience them on a daily basis.
> As I understand things, MPs who are on Twitter regularly get anonymous threats of rape, murder etc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63330885 - credible threats, with two MPs murdered in the last decade.
1. Aren’t such threats already covered by existing laws?
2. They weren’t murdered on Twitter, so I fail to see how the Online Safety Act would have helped prevent this.
> 1. Aren’t such threats already covered by existing laws?
The Online Safety Act isn't about making these things illegal. It's about making it more difficult to do the illegal things in the first place. To take an analogy: money laundering legislation exists to make it harder to use the proceeds of organised crime in legitimate life. Being a drug dealer is already illegal, yet we don't use that as an argument against such laws and regulations.
"The purpose of the system is what it does." 99% of people are not drug dealers, yet we still experience the deadweight loss of KYC and AML. Therefore AML exists because agents of the state like to screw with us, waste our time, and steal our cash.
So your position is that we should allow criminals to launder the proceeds of violent and organised crime (with all the victims it causes) into the legitimate economy because…
Your response is similar to someone who opposes privacy activists and their fight for E2E encryption saying "so your position is that children should be sexually exploited online". It's an absurd caricaturization of a nuanced set of arguments with deeper ramifications.
No, a person who opposes heavy-handed, invasive KYC and AML laws does not argue that genuine organized crime figures and terrorists should do however they please with their money. The argument is instead that fighting these figures and their transactions shouldn't be designed in such a way that it also penalizes the vast majority of people who are doing nothing more illegal than tripping up some bullshit lazy, rote paranoid financial legal framework.
Also, like many other kinds of privacy, financial privacy should be a right that isn't exclusive to government black budgets and well-connected elites.
>> So your position is that we should allow criminals to launder the proceeds of violent and organised crime
> Your response is similar to someone who opposes privacy activists and their fight for E2E encryption saying "so your position is that children should be sexually exploited online".
Re-read my accusation. I never stated that you support committing crimes, I stated that you believe that, once the crime is committed, the money can be entered into the legitimate system.
With that said, let's look at your clarification:
> No, a person who opposes heavy-handed, invasive KYC and AML laws
> their transactions shouldn't be designed in such a way that it also penalizes the vast majority of people
I need to see evidence that the "vast majority" of people are being "penalized" by this system. The most "inconvenience" I ever faced was having to provide bank statements when applying for a mortgage to prove the deposit was legitimately my money. There was a post just last week from patio11 that makes me doubt your claim that the "vast majority" of people are inconvenienced by AML. In addition, I watched this video by a former financial services advisor [1] that also suggests to me that your claims are wildly overblown.
> Also, like many other kinds of privacy, financial privacy should be a right that isn't exclusive to government black budgets and well-connected elites.
Weirdly "well-connected elites" are the people most inconvenienced by AML, KYC and PEP regulations (see above references), so I think your grasp of the issue is not aligned with reality.
>Re-read my accusation. I never stated that you support committing crimes
No, you said essentially exactly that, that a person opposing AML and KYC is automatically supporting "scary" crime:
"So your position is that we should allow criminals to launder the proceeds of violent and organised crime"
The evidence of many, many people being penalized by AML and KYC is abundant. Either you're deliberately being obtuse or just haven't paid attention. On this site alone, posts and attending comments very, very regularly appear describing the numerous ways in which ordinary people and small businesses face financial difficulties and account freezes explicitly because of AML rules, sometimes in their worst, entirely algorithmic forms. This has applied with bank accounts, payment processing firms and perhaps most infamous of all, Paypal, which is almost universally famous for its bullshittery on freeing "suspicious" funds and transactions.
You saying that because you've had no problems, then there probably is no problem is like someone who's never personally been harassed by the police while driving saying that reports of police brutality against marginalized individuals are probably absurd. Good for you for turning anecdote into evidence.
Patio11's post, which I've seen, also does no favors to your argument. Using a mountain of verbiage, it elaborates how and why the crap I describe happens. The post also seems to justify the banks that do it as poor victims of something that they're obviously complicit in for the sake of their profitable bottom lines (since it's easier to just freeze someone out with no explanation than actually devote resources to better, more transparent support for customers who find themselves shafted by some mandated financial suspicion process)
If you really think that well connected elites are especially hamstrung by AML, KYC and PEP regulations, you should really take a closer look at several major financial leaks such as the Panama Papers and others.
> The evidence of many, many people being penalized by AML and KYC is abundant.
Then provide evidence that it's affecting 99% or even just "the vast majority" of people.
> You saying that because you've had no problems, then there probably is no problem is like someone who's never personally been harassed by the police while driving saying that reports of police brutality against marginalized individuals are probably absurd. Good for you for turning anecdote into evidence.
No, I'm saying "I had no problems, therefore the claim that the 'vast majority' or '99%' of people have this problem will need to be substantiated."
> Patio11's post, which I've seen, also does no favors to your argument. Using a mountain of verbiage, it elaborates how and why the crap I describe happens.
I never said it doesn't happen. I specifically said it doesn't happen to "the vast majority" or "99%" of people. Patio11's post is very clear that, by definition, this does not happen to "the vast majority" of people.
> If you really think that well connected elites are especially hamstrung by AML, KYC and PEP regulations
I posted a link from a financial advisor that explains clearly that this is exactly what happens. In response, you have yet to provide evidence that these regulations affect the vast majority of people in any meaningful way.
> They weren’t murdered on Twitter, so I fail to see how the Online Safety Act would have helped prevent this.
I mention that because in some online communities threats of rape and murder are bandied about jokingly. That 12 year old on Fortnite voice chat isn't really going to fuck your mom! That twitter joke trial where someone threatened to blow up an airport was ridiculous. Some might wonder - why can't these twitter-using politicians ignore a few murder threats from neo-nazis and islamists, like the rest of us?
The reason is the real, non-joke murders by neo-nazis and islamists.
Wouldn't it be easier to get the jump on them by not threatening them in the first place? How does stopping the verbal threat also stop the real life attack?
Not to say that I wish harm on anyone or think anyone deserves to be threatened. The point is more that if the reasoning for this is as you say, then the laws they're putting in place don't really make sense. It's like if someone was going around poisoning the water supply and they outlawed talking about it instead of just protecting the water supply.
> As I understand things, MPs who are on Twitter regularly get anonymous threats of rape, murder etc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63330885 - credible threats,
I am sure threats of violence are already illegal. If those people are in the UK, they should be prosecuted. If they are not in the UK they is not threat. I don't believe any if these online threats BTW are credible.
What these MPs do is frequently make outlandish statements, which then gets them a bunch of hate (Jess Phillips has done this her entire political career) and useful idiots will shout their mouth off online. These MPs then point to all the "hate" they are getting. There is even a meme demonstrating this very effect:
I believe the individual was deemed at risk of radicalisation.
> You and I have the luxury that we can just not be on Twitter - but when you're an MP, unless you're in a very safe seat you've got to meet voters where they are, not where you'd like them to be.
They don't need to be on Twitter. Twitter isn't their local constituents. They have surgeries for this very reason. Very few people on Twitter are relevant to what happens on election day in their constituency.
> So from an MP's perspective? In one hand they've got a report about revenge porn, cyber-bullying, 4chan /pol/ and pro-anorexia facebook groups. In the other hand they've got their phone where someone's just told them to kill themselves.
Even if that is true that doesn't mean we restrict everyone's rights because a minority are engaging in illegal/immoral acts.
> They believe in these "illegal harms" because they've got a front row seat, and experience them on a daily basis.
That is what they say to sell the narrative that they need to censor social media. If you look over the last 20 years. It is as if nobody has learned anything from the early 2000s and the war on terror. They will exploit (or create) any crisis.
You can disagree with the position, whilst accepting that MPs have been murdered, and MPs do get threatened online.
What specific level of power hunger makes a threat to life acceptable?
Further, I wasn't in favour of these proposals, but if you have people on HN of all places thinking its acceptable to threaten people, maybe we do need this law.
Every law that the MPs create is itself a threat against the people. A prescriptive law can only be described as "Do what I say, or I will hurt you." Agents of the state create laws, and then take your money and pay that money to men with guns to come after you if you fail to comply.
Murder is already illegal, and threatening to murder someone is already illegal. Any further legislation, the burden of proof is on them not on me or the parent poster. Otherwise one day they might claim that me taking a shit will lead to their murder and have my toilets removed.
Im not saying the burden of proof is on you. I'm not saying murder is legal.
I'm saying that making sarcastic comments suggesting that MPs deserve to be murdered or threatened isn't acceptable.
Its a completely separate issue from the law theyve introduced, which as I said, I'm not in favour of, and I agree they need to make the case before they remove your toilets, I've already made such a comment elsewhere in this thread.
They’re talking about thinspo. Was pretty popular and survived search bans on many platforms. To save you a search, it’s mostly about getting thing legs that do not touch and overall ~40kg body type.
How's thinspo different to fat-acceptance communities? (I have nothing against either, I think people ought to be free to pursue information on their body-type)
As with everything it depends on the communities you run with. The core tenet of fat acceptance is that your weight doesn't define your value as a human. Proana which is short for pro-anorexia, also known as thinspo (thin inspiration) has the core tenet of advocating and encouraging an eating disorder as how you'd obtain value. The point of thinspo is to provide people inspiration and motivation to starve themselves, which is otherwise unnatural for humans to do. if you found a community that advocate overeating as the aesthetic ideal that would be as toxic. with the caveat being that being underweight is more dangerous from a health standpoint than overweight is. again, it all depends on the community and exactly what they're advocating for.
you'd be more attractive if you were thiner that is healthy, is a lot more toxic of an idea than being fat doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.
Depending on the level of fat being accepted, that is also encouraging an eating disorder, is I believe GP's point.
Like don't shame someone a bit 'overweight' they're just thicc and body positive sure fine whatever, but so what they're 'obese' they're an obese human is as unhelpful as encouraging anorexia. ('overweight' & 'obese' being well-defined terms of BMI range)
I guess one is acceptance and another is driving oneself into starvation. If fat communities encourage becoming fat by eating more/worse, they are as delusional. The key idea of thinspo and other look-related movements is to become someone who you biologically aren’t by extreme measures. Some people are naturally thin-built, for them it’s sort of normal. For others it’s basically a destructive body modification which is only temporary. Thinspo is not pursuing information, they are pursuing the body type itself. I liked thinspo type before it had a name, but only when it’s natural and stays within reasonable effort. What’s the point of preferring someone who is constantly on the edge and will snap out of it eventually. This movement should not exist basically, cause it does no good.
Anorexics aren't happy with their body. If they go to a site where they find acceptance and understanding, thats good?
And on the other hand, it used to be the case that Models were stick thin. If the fat acceptance crowd succeeds, and fat becomes the standard of beauty and people try and emulate that, thats bad.
The difference is that Anorexics don't accept themselves, and try to achieve an unhealthy weight. Obese people are trying to gain acceptance for the unhealthy weight they are.
The danger is that acceptance is an overloaded term. It isn't just accepting one individual who is already fat. Its shifting culture to the point where it becomes a standard for beauty, which is where people start emulating it.
> he 15 different kinds of illegal harms set out in Ofcom’s draft risk assessment guidance are: Terrorism offences; Child
Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA), including Grooming and Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM); Encouraging or
assisting suicide (or attempted suicide) or serious Self Harm; Hate offences; Harassment, stalking, threats and abuse;
Controlling or coercive behaviour (CCB); Drugs and psychoactive substances offences; Firearms and other weapons
offences; Unlawful immigration and human trafficking; Sexual exploitation of adults; Extreme pornography offence;
Intimate Image Abuse; Proceeds of crime offences; Fraud and financial services offences; and the Foreign interference
offence (FIO).
——-
Online harms are always going to be impossible. Same as crime.
Parts of the internet are already being destroyed, and will continue to be destroyed.
Further in the past, we can look to the “Adpocalyse” on YouTube caused by a glut of terrorist content on social media and it being monetised by ads from major brands.
To your last question: that’s why they’re submitting their plans to Ofcom, so they can get into compliance. The link even highlights that regulation is based on risk. Have a larger platform or want to operate in a greyer area? You need to show how you’ll comply in more detail.
I hadn't seen this site but will check it out. Thank you for providing some evidence! (really dislike the idea of boogymen! - so seeing a real site is refreshing).
> Would you want your children or young adults spending time there?
Suicide is a difficult topic. I'd never want anyone (related or otherwise) to be in a position where ending their life is their best option, but then I support euthanasia (a subset of suicide), so I certainly support people obtaining information that could help their situation, even if their situation is difficult, dire and worthy of enormous compassion.
The problem is it’s become an entire of subculture of people, almost cult like, who are not only accepting of euthanasia but are actively pro-suicide. I think a lot of people would still be alive if this community didn’t exist. Most of them seem to have mental issues rather than being terminally ill. Also young people are especially vulnerable to being brainwashed by these sorts of things.
I'm assuming this is the site mentioned in this video? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C3y6SsGAWks it might be best to remove the actual link so people in a bad mental state don't end up there. Cc @dang
Have only watched 2 minutes, but this looks like actual evidence that a) harmful sites may exist, and b) people may use them and be worse of from their access to them. I'm not sure it will convince me banning access to information is a good idea, but really appreciate you sharing it, as it's the most promising evidence provided yet.
> Is there a single site that authors/proponents of this regulation can point to that literally 'promotes eating disorders'
Yes, Tumblr has quite a bit of this content. You're looking for terms like proana, thinspo, meanspo, mia, b/p, various misspellings of anorexic to avoid filters, and ironically "not pro just using tags."
If you want to see the content just create a Tumblr account, search proana, click past the eating disorder hotline message, and scroll through. It goes on forever. Fair warning, it's depressing.
>How would a site admin determine what is acceptable and what is not?
I remember there were stories about GDPR at the time that some site simply decide to block all IPs from EUR, and some sadly because they believe they dont comply, simply shut down the site.
In a world ( well US at least ) where the trend is moving to deregulate things. UK decided to quite literally regulate everything. This is sad.
I dont think Banks and Finance should get less regulations ( May be in certain areas ). But there are certainly industry and sectors that needs less regulation.
To put it in a software development terms, a lot of laws and regulations need a major refactor.
How would this special court work? Can anyone including amateur scientists access it freely? Are the arguments public?
What's nice about free speech is it's a simple rule, "any citizen can speak about and promote any opinion they have." The fact that it's clear makes it difficult for the government to shut down opposition political speech.
I also think scientific inquiry should be an open process.
Similar to how you regulate any mass media channels (TV, Radio, etc). You have a regulator in place, for example, anyone with +10.000 followers, or who gets +10.000 views should be considered a person of influence and be liable for their claims.
I agree with you, I think everything should be made public, including influencers' income statements.
> What's nice about free speech is it's a simple rule, "any citizen can speak about and promote any opinion they have."
Thankfully there are laws in place, and the point is more laws should be in place to make people liable for disinformation.
Yes, I'd rather be where opposing views are allowed.
Remember when Covid vax was promoted as it'd prevent you from spreading the disease, or that they were "safe" (no heart related side effects).
People don't win when government officials are guardians of "the truth".
You want to give the power to the people that make the laws to also decree what is true or not? This is going to turn out well.
I don’t think that having institutions that can legislate the truth is compatible with free and just societies. Political power and democratic majorities do not decide the truth. if you think otherwise I don’t believe there is common ground to be found.
They don't, no billionaire can put you in jail for believing/saying something different that they want you to believe.
And let me get this straight, you think that having an institution that legislates the truth is protection against billionaires usurping that power? Who has the money to lobby those institutions to do their bidding? Me and you or the billionaire?
> They don't, no billionaire can put you in jail for believing/saying something different that they want you to believe.
They can make your living unsustainable, some can de-platform you, and let's not kid ourselves they can make your life miserable with this new billionaire cult following. We know they can get away from a lot of things, and they can stay out of jail. We're yet to see what will happen when they capture the government.
I don't get this worshipping of tech billionaires and the Market. Is it under the illusion that the market will serve us, and some will be fortunate to get the scraps of value?
> And let me get this straight, you think that having an institution that legislates the truth is protection against billionaires usurping that power? Who has the money to lobby those institutions to do their bidding? Me and you or the billionaire?
For the US, that boat has already sailed. You already have tech billionaires who legislate the truth—look at Twitter, and what happened once Elon set Twitter to push MAGA propaganda[0]—that became the truth. He was successful at it and now is seeking to influence other elections[1].
This could be used to direct policing resources sensibly ("lots of incidents recorded at such-and-such a place, maybe we should patrol there a bit more") or to build a dystopian database, or to waste police time. There's certainly a push by some of the media to stop the police spending time on this and focus on solving crimes instead.
Similarly, this regulation could be used to prosecute child abusers, or it could be used to suppress free speech, or it could mean that people start using properly secure messaging apps.
How long should police hold on to reports that they don't do anything with? If I make a complaint to the police about you, should an unrelated interaction you have with the police 5 years later bring up that report? Do you have a right to be forgotten if you haven't been convicted of a crime? Do I have a right to be forgotten if I've filed a report (or reports) that the police determine is/are frivolous?
I can think of plenty scenarios where these records should be destroyed permanently after some amount of time - namely, if the police decide not to refer to a prosecutor, or if the prosecutor decides not to press charges, or if the defendant is found not guilty.
I would hope that this along with any other disclosure where the police decided on no action would be treated appropriately and only disclosed/acted upon if the incident was really worrying. On the other hand, I can't help but feel if the incident is worrying enough would it not also meet the bar for a criminal incident?
I'm not really comfortable with the naming and the lack of due process to be honest.
On the other hand, being careful what you say on social media is a requisite in many careers as companies can and do perform private background checks.
It's not. It's a bunch of nonconstructive old-man-yells-at-cloud complaints. While it identifies a somewhat deep problem with crime metrics (what should you do when a reported crime was a real incident, but not something that warrants actually bringing charges or otherwise following up - something where "a policeman had a word with the guy" is actually the right solution that all parties are happy with) it contributes nothing to solving that problem (and, as the follow-up more or less acknowledged if you read it carefully enough, in fact made it worse).
Made it worse if you consider that the book prompted authorities to bury the problem further. They went from claiming administrative detections didnt exist, to admitting they exist, to obfuscating the system so they can claim administrative detections no longer exist.
>it contributes nothing to solving that problem
His solution was to remove administrative detections, so that beat cops dont:
1. Get rewarded for "detecting" 30 crimes, where the 30 crimes was 10 people being harmless in public
2. Spend all their time writing reports about their administrative detections instead of being a visible presence.
"a policeman had a word with the guy" is I believe the authors wish. He seems to make a case for removing police powers to the point where they are little more than private citizens.
I quite liked the old man yells at cloud format. But I didnt like his obsession with the yank sherrif.
> His solution was to remove administrative detections
And replace them with what? There is no easy way to handle that scenario that doesn't create perverse incentives if you're managing police by statistics (and getting away from that is not something you simply do). If you treat them as permanently unsolved crimes, you'll turn them into pointless counterproductive arrests/charges. If you allow the police to just write them off without recording any details, they'll slip serious crimes through the same process. Frankly, administrative detections do "solve" the "crime" in every meaningful sense - the problem is treating "percentage of crimes solved" as a meaningful statistic in the first place, and shocked-pikachu-facing when you tell the police to solve a higher percentage of crimes and they respond by allocating more resources to crimes that are easier to solve.
The other issues compounding this is that to make all this work, as the police grow they grow asymmetrically on the administrative side. So every dollar spent is slowly but surely less effective at performing basic police functions.
>Managing police by statistics
Thats the crux of the whole problem isnt it? The cops in the UK face the same issue as any tech business that cant scale. They are spending more effort measuring statistics and less effort on the business. To the point that, they gamified policing to ensure statistics are collected.
>If you treat them as permanently unsolved crimes, you'll turn them into pointless counterproductive arrests/charges.
Ok but the administrative detections skewed things away from serious crimes. Why detect 1 murder when you can detect 42 drug crimes across 3 people? And then the administrative overhead of recording the 42 drug crimes takes that guy off the beat for the rest of the day. And because they spent all their money on the people who will process and analyze that paperwork, they don't have another guy to replace him.
Like the general thought the guy presents is that, 42 drug infractions letting you bust some kids balls and shake him down, but then removing you from the act of physical deterrence for the rest of the day is the fail state. If he wasnt incentivised to shake those kids down, he could have deterred some incalculable other crime. Perhaps those kids seeing the cop would have moderated their behavior, but now they are up on charges and the next group of kids on the same street corner are able to act without the cops watching (And this is when we leave the book and start talking about how many damn cameras the UK installs)
I disagree with him but I understand the impulse to admire something constructed like a Sheriffs department in the US thats fairly divorced from a huge hierarchy.
I wonder if he has similar complaints about policing in canada.
Right. So changing the details of the mechanism won't fix anything. And while I suspect the author would like to return to "let the police do what they like, and trust their judgement", that also has problems.
> Ok but the administrative detections skewed things away from serious crimes. Why detect 1 murder when you can detect 42 drug crimes across 3 people? And then the administrative overhead of recording the 42 drug crimes takes that guy off the beat for the rest of the day.
But it's not the administrative detection that's the issue there. If you make those arrests/charges you have exactly the same problem. The problem is deciding it's more important to solve 42/43 crimes than solve the murder, and that decision is happening outside of the police power structure.
(It's also not entirely clear that it's wrong - reasonable people from all around the political spectrum have argued that preventing small crimes ultimately has a high long-term impact, in the same way that doctors save more lives by telling patients to lose weight than by everything else they do put together)
> Right. So changing the details of the mechanism won't fix anything. And while I suspect the author would like to return to "let the police do what they like, and trust their judgement", that also has problems.
Yes but I feel this is largely resolved with his desire to remove police powers. If police, or at least the majority of, have no powers to abuse, then the potential for abuse is significantly lower.
>But it's not the administrative detection that's the issue there. If you make those arrests/charges you have exactly the same problem. The problem is deciding it's more important to solve 42/43 crimes than solve the murder, and that decision is happening outside of the police power structure.
You miss
>And then the administrative overhead of recording the 42 drug crimes takes that guy off the beat for the rest of the day.
The issue isnt with the goal, like you suggest people want these crimes solved. I dont want to pretend laws on the book exactly match community expectations but that is the idea. The issue is that the scheme as described doesnt just require the high manpower option but incentivises it.
His whole shtick is that you lose the intangibles. The parts of policing that cannot be measured. The crimes that are deterred by that beat cop not spending 4 hours after every interaction writing paperwork that needs to be analysed and reviewed by other people.
You take that guy off the street, and then a new crime occurs, another cop has to be dispatched, he needs to follow those leads, file more paperwork etc etc ad nauseum.
Its like, taking vaccines off the shelf because you need statistics about diseases.
Heck your own analogy "doctors save more lives by telling patients to lose weight than by everything else they do put together" is much like the authors assertion that cops preventing more crime just by being a visible presence than all their other work put together.
About banning ads for “certain types of porridge”:
> …the majority of porridge, muesli and granola products will not be affected by the advertising restrictions but some less healthy versions (with added sugar, chocolate, syrup) could be affected.
> Sometimes products may be marketed as, or perceived by consumers to be, healthy but in fact contain surprisingly high levels of saturated fat, salt or sugar.
Pure fruit juice is insanely unhealthy. This is because it circumvents the normal mechanisms that regulate fruit intake, while containing even more sugar.
If you press orange juice yourself, and see the mountain of fruits that are needed for just a liter of the stuff, it becomes quite obvious why drinking fruit juice regularly is not a good idea.
Pure fruit juice is not good for you. It has a super high concentration of sugar. The benefits of fruit are primarily the fiber contents, which is completely missing in juice.
This is comparing cola to oranges; like others said, fruit juices are generally not recommended in amounts greater than 150ml per day according to UK’s healthy eating guidelines.
> Pure fruit or vegetable juices and smoothies should be limited to a combined total of 150ml a day. This is because crushing fruit and vegetables releases the sugars they contain to produce free sugars. Free sugars also include the sugars added to food or drinks, and sugars found naturally in honey and syrups. These free sugars are linked to excess weight and tooth decay.
I know you think this is a gotcha but you're seriously advocating for the banning of advertisements of certain kinds of food? Based on the fact that what, some people aren't smart enough to read an ingredient label?
It is already quite popular to regulate ads about certain edible substances. Nicotine, alcohol and drugs are some examples. Looks like certain ratios of sugar, sodium and saturated fats will qualify too, at least in the UK.
It's not really an "argument" at all. Although it is proof that government policy around advertising bans (like all policy) is not for the good of society, but for the good of the government and their owners.
It’s worth noting that the UK provides free healthcare via the NHS. A healthier nation is in everyone’s interests, as it reduces the long-term costs of treating preventable ailments and diseases caused by poor diet.
Nations without universal healthcare are presumably less likely to concern themselves with the health of their citizens.
Yes. I'm radically anti-advertising so literally any ad whatsoever being removed is a net positive to me. But regardless:
Ads and marketing that paint extremely unhealthy foods as healthy are deceptive, to put it simple. I'm against deception, because then you're not making rational choices. Be that greenwashing, or predatory loans with misleading terms in big letters and hidden small print. I think this is not a bad principle to have.
Btw: we already made laws so that packs of tobacco went from having a cool cowboy on a horse to a picture of diseased gums on plain packaging. I think most people agree that has been a net positive.
No, it’s based on the fact kids are watching the adverts. This isn’t the US, advertising isn’t a free for all and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s not particularly controversial.
Given that such porridges are only “unhealthy” to the extent that they increase risk factors for various diseases, perhaps eating them should be considered a form of gambling. Then government could tax it too.
The biggest issue is that legislation seems to be drafted by people who have little or no expertise in their area. We've seen other examples of poorly drafted legislation in the UK - eg Computer Misuse Act 1990, which is intended to address hacking but can be read in such a way as to outlaw firewalls, and so on. Parliament as a whole is in desperate need of reform, it's based on archaic principles that just don't work anymore, but those in a position to enact reform seem to prefer the status quo.
I’m not sure if it’s similar in the UK, but here they don’t even seem to care. We have public consultation periods for most bills here in Australia, and it’s basically only ever a box-ticking exercise. You can have literally hundreds of experts carefully articulate all the obvious problems with a bill in a detailed submission, then some will be invited to give testimony and answer questions of Senators with concerned looks on their faces, and then those senators (of both parties) will happily vote the flawed legislation through with no amendments. The only changes that do happen are arrived at through secretly negotiated political horse-trading between the parties, with literally none of the expert, industry and public consultation taken into account.
The only way to win is to lobby hard (with a lot of political donations) so your views get put forward in the secret negotiations. Literally none of the feedback from experts or voters matters. Because it’s always going to be one or the other major party (although there is some encouraging movement towards possible minority government, which in our current political landscape is the only way I can see any positive change possibly happening - but it depends massively on the quality of those who end up with the balance of power).
Parliament is fine. Or at least the reforms people have in mind are usually insane slop that would only mean ramming more, worse, shit through the pipe.
The Online Safety Act provides for Ofcom to develop its own codes of practice and guidelines based on the provisions of the act and public consultation (including with the platforms). It has an enormous amount of leeway in deciding how to implement the Act.
Ofcom has operational independence. Neither its investigations nor its enforcement actions are directly controlled by the Government. The Government does approve Codes of Practice but if it doesn't approve, it can only request modifications. It's still up to Ofcom to decide how to interpret and implement. Secretary of State interventions are, by convention, rare and subject to Parliamentary scrutiny.
This is a press release, though. Whether or not Ofcom is independent, their press release writers are not independent, they are part of Ofcom's PR team, a team that absolutely exists.
Well, that links to EFF's own "propaganda" - perpetuating privacy at all costs. Inevitably the place law and regulation should is somewhere in between, balancing risk and striving for an acceptable position all things considered within a democratic framework.
It is never "inevitable" that the correct place for law and regulation is somewhere in the middle on every issue. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's never inevitable.
Assuming that it is makes it far too easy to move the Overton window: regulation proposes something stricter than the status quo, "compromise" moves in that direction, repeat.
> all things considered within a democratic framework
The UK has a very funny (literally ha-ha funny) notion of "democracy" -- with people just voting against the status quo most of the time and with "first past the post" resulting in leadership that doesn't have, and cannot even credibly claim, genuine popular support. It's a totally broken system.
If there is one political change I could make to the UK it'd be the adoption of the single transferable vote. There's massive amounts of political alienation in the UK which have complicated causes (often related to the 'managed decline' policies of governments past) but a big contributing factor in my opinion is how many votes are completely wasted under first past the post, if you're in a safe seat voting often feels completely futile. FPTP means there's a lot of seats where a donkey with the appropriate rosette would win easily and there's not a lot of competition to win these seats, and so these seats get taken for granted by politicians.
A move to STV wouldn't be a silver bullet but at the very least it'd eliminate the phenomenon of wasted votes and make safe seats less safe, forcing politicians to care about all the seats rather than just currently competitive ones. The problem is there's no incentive for either major party to end their duopoly in the national interest, it's the same sort of problem the 'rotten boroughs' of old faced in that the people who benefitted from them were the only people with the power to deal with them. Labour in particular are notorious on this subject, they'll promise electoral reform in opposition and change their tune instantly once in power.
No, term limits aren't really a thing in the UK for elected officials in general and the longest-serving MPs today have been there since the early '80s. Even Prime Ministers can stay in their position for as long as they have the support of their party and can command the confidence of the House of Commons which in some cases will be for over a decade, although it's normal practice in the UK for a governing party to change their leader and therefore the Prime Minister mid term.
Some appointed positions have term limits (some 'machinery of government' kind of functions, some quangos and public bodies etc) but a few are for life or retirement such as members of the House of Lords.
how is it not popular support? or your point is that plurality is not enough? or that in a different voting system (alternate voting, ranked choice, etc..) the winner would be completely different?
Conservatives + Reform got more votes than Labour. More people voted against Labour than for them. In any other system they wouldn't have won, and at the very least wouldn't have a majority.
The other thing to consider is that the electorate basically moved to the right in 2024 (Tory voters moved to Reform), but parliament shifted hard to the left.
Yes, but: the winning party having less than 50% of the votes still feels incredibly undemocratic, as you get a situation where a majority of the voters picked a different choice.
Proportional systems give an outcome where a majority of voters voted for at least one of the parties in the winning coalition. Coalitions become explicit rather than internal to parties. The internationalist/isolationist split in the Conservative party that they were desperately trying to put off would have happened much earlier.
The referendum failed because only the LDs really supported it. I note that all sorts of devolved assemblies, councils, and (former) Euro elections used different systems.
Why does it feel undemocratic? I have always felt that party politics are undemocratic since my voting system (Sweden) translate to voting persons into seats in parliament. Political parties and coalitions are just systems added on top of that system that get translated into people in seats. Votes in parliament are counted per person, not per party or block, and people can vote against party line.
I would support a move to a more proportional system, but I think it's an exaggeration to describe the present system as 'incredibly undemocratic' (especially given that a clear majority of the voting population chose to keep this system in a democratic referendum not very long ago). There's plenty to criticise about the UK at present, but HN sometimes goes off the rails on this topic. I suspect that a post describing the USA as 'incredibly undemocratic' would get shorter shrift – even though the electoral college is arguably an order of magnitude more bonkers than the UK system.
Edit: I'd also add that the UK is astonishingly democratic in some respects. It is remarkable that Brexit was implemented merely because a majority voted for it. There are few countries where such important decisions of national policy would be put to a popular referendum in this way and then implemented faithfully. (I was very firmly opposed to Brexit, FWIW.)
It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?
It's a series of (balanced) regional votes for elected representatives from equal-sized constituencies who are supposed to be responsive to that region.
Suddenly this is a massive problem for tories because it's red-faced angry right-wingers on the losing side. Whenever it contributed significantly to a tory win, it has not been a problem.
If you look at what actually happened you will see that, repeatedly, right-wing candidates lost out on a constituency-by-constituency level because the Conservatives were largely incumbents who had built up enough very personal bad reputation to be booted out, or inexperienced first-time candidates who are very rarely elected anyway and were parachuted at the last minute into seats where grandees were retiring, and the Reform candidates were a gaggle of weirdos, randoms, odd-bods, extremists and idiots who were lining up to stand for election for a party that had such a thin platform it ultimately resolves to "oooh we don'
t like them", where "them" varied a little region by region but usually meant foreigners.
(And, of course, they split part of the vote between them.)
> It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?
You're talking with someone who thinks that it is egregious that a party that gets the minority of the vote runs the government, and the grandfather of your own comment points out that in 2024 it was with the lowest percentage vote in 30 years, which is particular.
The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.
The party that has got a plurality of the vote runs the government, in fact. Same as in the USA this time, eh?
But again, in case it is not clangingly obvious yet: we don't vote for parties to control government. We don't vote for party leaders. We vote for constituency MPs, and if there are enough of them who can agree to form a government, that is what they do. Political parties are not, particularly, even essential to the process. They just speed it up.
A big chunk of why we have a Labour government this time round is Tory constituencies deciding to tactically vote Lib Dem because a Labour candidate would be less likely to gain a majority, after all. One has to assume that the people who did that meant to do it.
> The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.
I dispute this concept; it's a convenient hopeful fiction being sold by hucksters and grifters. You only have to look, for example, at polls saying a majority of Leave voters would now support closer ties with Europe to resolve problems caused by Brexit. What happened is simple: people chose to have a functional government, which neither the Tories of 2024 or Reform could possibly offer. Reform is probably a generation or more away from being able to do that, and who knows if the Tories can reassemble around something mainstream before then.
What happens in practice is, parties do control the government. There are these things called "whips". Also, voters watch national media and mostly vote based on the leadership, stated manifesto etc of each party at the national level.
> What happens in practice is, parties do control the government. There are these things called "whips". Also, voters watch national media and mostly vote based on the leadership, stated manifesto etc of each party at the national level.
Don't patronise me. I'm fully aware of all of these things.
But it doesn't actually change who we vote for. If you want Reform to have more MPs, they have to have locally electable MPs. Because we vote for MPs.
If you change the system in any way that means people get candidates that parties choose on some proportional basis, you break this crucial link with the local area. We vote, locally, and we choose a person who is best for us. Time and time again this has proved to be valuable and to have generally selected quite good candidates and very good parliamentarians.
As soon as you have any other system than, locally, "I choose this person to be my representative", important things break, IMO.
But, again, this only upsets right-wingers now because they are on the losing side of it. Hasn't bothered them in the slightest before.
The idea that parliament has shifted "hard to the left", as you said earlier, is absolutely delusional, given the Centrist Dad government we now have.
Interesting to even concede that Labour and Conservatives are basically the same, but no desire for third parties being able to enter. I'm definitely not a fan of Reform in particular, it's just highlighted the issue with new parties having no chance in the UK unless they are strongly local like the DUP or SNP. Geographic distribution seems to be the biggest factor in whether a person's vote is counted or not.
> Interesting to even concede that Labour and Conservatives are basically the same, but no desire for third parties being able to enter.
Did I? You're projecting.
I voted for a third party. And that third party candidate got elected. In one of the formerly safest Tory seats in the country. Because we wanted change and we are aware of the trends of our own local politics.
New parties have no chance because first time MPs -- of all parties -- have no chance. It's rare to get selected on your first try, or to get a winnable seat on your first try. Across all parties. Because it's a process that requires practice and proper infrastructure -- competent agents, competent support, competent canvassing.
So a new party will have to find exceptional candidates, or media-addicted fame chasers, or defectors who rarely get elected because defection is frowned upon, to get anywhere in its first general election campaign. By that measure, Reform did exceptionally well.
Everyone's vote gets counted. Everyone's vote has equal weight. The system, again, elects local representatives as its method of operation. If you want a local representative of your chosen party, find someone who is locally electable to run for that party. Or run yourself.
Okay, but what kind of voting system can capture this well (and what does it mean)?
We don't know how people would have voted in this hypothetical. (Likely there would be a lot more parties, which generally is good.)
Also C+R could have formed a coalition. (Or merge into a new party ... or - I haven't looked up how R came to be, but I assume it's a spin-off of/from C - R could have merged back into C, right?)
Reform is a spinoff, yes, in the same way that UKIP is a spinoff: it's a party consisting of people who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't get selected as conservative MPs, plus on the odd occasion one or two who left (Lee Anderson, who is terrible, awful, self-serving and alarming, and before him for UKIP Douglas Carswell, who was largely better characterised as a nice enough bloke who was completely wrong)
The Scottish and Welsh assemblies use AMS. The NI assembly uses STV. You can see how this produces completely different results from the Westminster elections held in those areas.
Reform are, like UKIP and the Referendum party, Trumpist parties organized around a popular figure and external funding (Richard Tice). They're not really spin offs although a few MPs may cross over.
99.999% of the population of Earth will never be directly affected by either of those two things, so at the very least you're going to have to expand on how eroding the privacy of those 8 billion people will make their life better.
No we can't have nice things because of fascist lackies who use any excuse. If terrorists and pedophiles somehow didn't exist it would be spying or organized crime.
I have a question about that. I'm currently developing a platform with strong end-to-end encryption. My servers only store the public keys of individual accounts, the platform doesn't allow me to see what content people post or transmit without actively eavesdropping, and there are no means for me to moderate the content. However, there will be means for paying end-consumers to moderate the content of people they have invited. It's mostly intended as a collaborative tool for small business. However, other than steering it with marketing, I see no easy way for me to control who buys a subscription.
From what I can gather, my tools will fall under the Online Safety Act and are incompatible with it. So how do I properly exclude all UK customers from purchasing subscriptions? Will it suffice to geo-block the website where you buy subscriptions?
Any decent payment provider and bank will include the country code with the payment. Have a ToS preventing them from buying, warn UK users (geoip?) and then reject any payments from the UK.
Yeah that's what I was thinking. I'm using Fastspring so that wouldn't be a problem. However, a paying subscriber will still be able to invite someone from the UK and I don't have any mechanism to prevent that.
I tell my kids to not share any personal information online, never use their real name or birth date, and don't trust random people on the internet. And they wouln't even think about posting images of themselves.
My problem with all of these sorts of things is the idea of who determines “harmful.” Because that’s a term of such ambiguity that it could literally mean anything.
“Covid came from a Chinese lab” — “harmful because it causes ‘racism’”
“Pakistani grooming gangs in Rotherham are targeting young British girls” — harmful because it could promote social unrest.
“Eating meat can improve metabolic health” — harmful because it promotes behaviors that contribute heavily to climate change.
“Young motorcycle racers should be allowed to train on big tracks before the age of 16” — harmful because it promotes a ‘dangerous’ sport to kids.
I could go on and you could replace whatever I said to whatever you want to say and depending on who is the arbiter of “harmful,” that speech could be regulated in a way that creates criminals out of simply stating facts or opinions.
If the lead up to WW2 were today, if these regulations existed, then suggesting that a Germans in the U.K. were a national security risk could get you in trouble for “promoting harmful stereotypes about German people.”
In my mind, if we are to regulate speech at all, it should have a very very strict standard as to what speech is demonstrably harmful rather than politically uncomfortable. I’m not an Alex Jones fan at all, but for example, nobody died from anything he said, people have been offended and perhaps disgusted, but the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist aren’t causing anyone actual harm. In the US, we have libel and slander laws, we also have laws against speech that cause an imminent threat of danger — but we should never have laws that protect people from being offended, or even misinformed. We have websites supporting Chinese Traditional Medicine despite some practices in that field being demonstrably harmful and contrary to modern medical science — should those be banned? I would think most people would say not.
This online “safety” regulation is really a regulation to regulate political speech under the guise of “protecting the children.”
Side note. But if they're banning TikTok, they totally need to ban Youtube and Instagram as both of them have what TikTok has. I.e. The never-ending slot-machine of dopamine known as Shorts and Reels.
This is a little difficult to prove. From the Parkland libels, sure. From the rest of the culture he promotes? Are you so sure?
Whenever Americans lecture us on our culture of preferring safety we tend to just count back the number of days to your last school shooting. Be aware you're on ZERO right now. A teenage girl! At a Christian school. And consider that there are other perspectives on how bad that is. Because you collectively don't seem that bothered.
There's a lot not to like about this legislation, but you're way off the mark here. The legislation doesn't impose a generic ban on anything that someone or other considers 'harmful'. It's a raft of quite specific regulatory requirements relating to specific kinds of content. There are certainly arguments to be made against it, but your examples are quite irrelevant.
What's your point? There's no examples of psychological harm under the new legislation because it's new. We can however infer from how the old legislation has been enforced.
It’s not a very specific point of comparison to serve as a response to scott_w’s question. You can infer that legislation is sometimes badly interpreted and badly enforced. I’m sure this new legislation will be badly interpreted and badly enforced in some instances. That doesn't lead us to the sort of over-the-top scenario that briandear was painting.
I’m not sure you’re going to find a lot of sympathy for SoMe platforms in many European countries. Maybe you would have before Twitter was bought and a lot of the “media elite” used it. Today I think you’d mostly find a lot of happy parents applauding you if you were the first politician to manage to ban something like Tik-Tok, Facebook or similar. Not that I’m trying to justify it. I both think the way that it’s being done is wrong and that a lot of people will miss the open web more than they think.
Not holding big tech companies responsible for the content which is housed on their platforms was always a one way street into heavy regulation here in the EU. As with everything EU it takes decades, but I fully expect us to eventually ban many social media products. Or get left by them because it will not be possible for them to make money if they actually have to be custodians of their content.
We can support projects like Autonomi [1] (the rebranded MaidSafe [2]). It should create what (I feel) the internet was always ment to be. Peer to peer communications.
I think the only solution to this is to stop the centralised mess the internet has become.
I and a lot of high earners are thinking about leaving the UK because it's simply a punishing country where you have high taxes like others in Europe but nothing to show for them. It's also by far the most authoritarian western country, as exemplified by measures like this one.
The way to overwhelm them is to sink the UK by having most of the people it relies on to function (high earners) leave and let the country collapse.
I left the UK earlier this year and went to the USA for exactly this reason. Sick of giving half my paycheque to not receive anything in return except more boot on my neck. Mother freedom etc etc
If you had caught cancer, lost your job, had a baby then you would have got help.
You drove to work on roads didn't you? Or perhaps it was subsidised public transport. Your wealth, and the wealth of the company you worked for was protected from a mob with pitch forks. Were you protected from foreign armies invading?
What about education? Or education for your children?
I run a large payroll, I don't see anyone that pays half of their pay in tax?
This is for TREATMENT, not diagnosis, which you have to add on top.
And anecdotically, I had to wait for a year to get an appointment to discuss a benign procedure that I got done in 2 days in another EU country.
> lost your job
Unemployment benefits are a literal spit in the face in the UK. It is BETTER in the US if you can believe it. Jobseeker Allowance is £90.50 per week, or £392 per month (and you get it only if you're literally broke, I think less than 2 grand in savings).
Note that TFL is also the most expensive public transportation in the whole world, to the point where it is more than twice as expensive as the number 2 (Tokyo).
> Your wealth, and the wealth of the company you worked for was protected from a mob with pitch forks.
Clearly demonstrated otherwise by the riots a few months ago where many properties were burnt by mobs, and companies' buildings defaced by protestors.
> Were you protected from foreign armies invading?
I let you search for "uk military unprepared" on Google News, I'm not sure which of the thousands of news articles you'll prefer.
> What about education? Or education for your children?
Even without that, many students get their loans forgiven after 30 years because they don't earn enough to reimburse them.
Besides universities, public schools are bad and private schools are extortionately expensive.
> I run a large payroll, I don't see anyone that pays half of their pay in tax?
You're right on this, it's not possible to pay 50% __income tax__ on your pay in the UK. That said if you take into account student loans repayments and other similar things, you can very well receive less than 50% of your gross income as net income.
I left and came back because I was homesick. I deeply regret it. Thinking of moving away again but I miss my family enough as it is living in another part of the country. I was hoping for some positive change (even though unlikely), but that isn’t going to happen.
The country doesn't need high earners per se, it needs people that contribute effectively. There are plenty of "high earners" that are parasites, contributing little and extracting much. It all makes much more sense once you realise that governments spend before they tax and so what really matters is real resources.
> There are plenty of "high earners" that are parasites, contributing little and extracting much.
No, not at all.
There may be a few (0.01%) rich people that don't contribute much, but high __earners__ are paying extremely high amounts of taxes with nothing in return.
The "parasites", as you call them, are low-income workers that get the extreme majority of benefits while essentially contributing nothing.
The middle-class is being drained. The downfall of the UK will be inevitable once the top 10% realizes that they're better of in literally any other country.
You misunderstand. For a sovereign country, tax money is not what a country (in general) or the state (in particular) needs. This is apparent when you note that tax is destroyed on collection (that is, it reduces the balance sheet measure of issued money). A monetarily sovereign state can create whatever money it needs on demand, which any 10 year old will point out when asking why the gov can't just buy whatever it wants.
The purpose of tax in this context is to reduce the propensity to consume by the payer (allowing the state to purchase it). Since the wealthy have a lower marginal propensity to consume, tax from them is worth less per unit.
Moreover, the value of someone is their contribution. As I said, there are plenty of people with lots of money that contribute little in real terms and still live lavish lifestyles. The best that can be said of tax in that context is that they might be living slightly less lavish lifestyles than otherwise, but it certainly doesn't make them more useful.
The point of what I'm saying is that you have very little power with your wallet. You do have power when you leave to remove your skills, which should doubtless be of concern, but people in general have an out-of-date understanding of their financial use to a country (which includes the politicians, so your rhetoric still carries some weight).
Assuming the country wants to import goods and services, then they are going to need to be able to sell goods and services. The desirability of the goods and services the country is selling can be roughly indicated by the population's purchasing power.
If more and more people are earning less, then that is not a good sign for the desirability of the country's goods and services.
No, the import ability of a country is indicated by the ability of the country to balance it's imports with exports, which are either real exports or are financial assets.
There most certainly is not a one to one correspondence of stuff to money.
Where do you want to go, I’m curious?! I wonder what panacea you see out there that’s less authoritarian and where you could keep your “high earner” social status.
It’s a shame that Britain gave one of its “high earner” jobs to someone who’d enjoy seeing it collapse.
> I wonder what panacea you see out there that’s less authoritarian and where you could keep your “high earner” social status.
Throw a dart on a world map and chances are you'll land somewhere suitable. Any other first world country would be better for example.
> It’s a shame that Britain gave one of its “high earner” jobs to someone who’d enjoy seeing it collapse.
Britain didn't give me anything. They were unable to supply qualified individuals for a role that requires them, so they had to import a skilled worker on a visa that makes me ineligible to any public money, forces me to leave the country within 2 months should I lose my job, yet forces me to give the equivalent of 5 minimum wages of salary to taxes all the while having no benefits compared to said minimum wage workers and "enjoying" the same public services, such as a one year waiting list for a procedure that I got done for free in a day in the country where I used to live.
I also didn't say I would enjoy to see it collapse, I said that the solution to push back against those authoritarian measures, and other anti-middle-class policies is to vote with the only vote we are given: our wallet.
The problem for you is that the majority of the public support this.
Because there is plenty of scientific evidence that social media is bad for children with many parents having first hand experiences with grooming, deep fakes, bullying etc.
And I think almost everyone can agree that companies like Meta, TikTok, X have major problems with their algorithms pushing people into ideological extremes, allowing rogue actors to manipulate at scale and not taking privacy or security seriously enough.
So finding people who want to defend them will be hard.
You are absolutely right, and you have indavertebtly hit the nail on the head. This legilsation is supported by parents who would like their children to be able to use the internet, all of it, without any effort on their part to police their children's online habits. There are many parents who give their kids smartphones at 10 years old, or younger, and create Google and Facebook/Insta accounts with fake ages for their kids to use, and let them at it. No supervision, no discussion, no parental controls. This renders any action on the part of the tech companies moot, as parents are proving that their pre-teen kids are adults by providing false information. Kids then go online, go into Snapchat or whatever, cue torrent of DPs and grooming. Quelle surprise!
Schools in the UK spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with this, and in almost every case it turns out parents have no idea what their kids are sending/seeing online.
So the result is that bad parents demand bad legislation so that they can, in their minds, transfer responsibility for parenting their kids to the state. The state, well meaning rather than malicious, massively overreaches in its attempt to provide an answer. As a result everyone else suffers. And the 'majority of the public' think parents should parent, rather than making it the government's problem, and butt out of their internet.
Welcome to life in a society. We pick winners which by extension creates losers.
So you would be arguing that we shouldn't protect children from social media which is causing significant harm to them because it might inconvenience a minority of adults.
People say as a pithy answer and it is very frustrating. Unfortunately it is utterly unrealistic that voting will solve this situation.
1) The majority of the UK's populace are onboard with the vast majority of these laws. Even if all the people that opposed this voted for another party, due to how the constituencies work, your vote will be effectively made moot.
2) Both major UK parties essentially agree that these laws should be implemented. The only solution to any problem that UK government can envisage is banning something. You can look into the Lotus Carlton ram raids of 40RR, they were singing the same tune back in the late 80s/early 90s.
3) There is no realistic pro-liberty / anti-censorship movement at all in the UK
This has been going for longer than I have been alive in the UK (I am now in my early 40s). I am not an anarchist, but I've heard the phrase repeated by anarchists of "You cannot vote yourself free". The only way to resist such laws is to subvert them via technology.
Crazy stuff. This feels very Soviet and dystopian. This looks like something that would come from a Watchtower cult magazine. Anonymous experiences that can't be checked and conveniently and unanimously support the agenda, extended control over people's private life with severe punishment for even the slightest disagreement or god forbid an alternative opinion.
As a software engineer in the UK (and former schoolteacher) I'm supportive of the Online Safety Act. People prefer to interact with people who are similar to them, so they end up with a belief that most people are like them, but as a teacher, I had to grapple with the full distribution of human intelligence. It's wider than I'm comfortable with. Most people struggle to deal with the complexity of everyday life in the twenty-first century.
My grandparents used to fall for every scam phone call or email they received. It wasn't until I showed them a compilation[0] of the George Agdgdgwngo character from Fonejacker - and the rest of my extended family sat around laughing at the ridiculous scenarios - that my grandparents realised that giving their bank details to anyone claiming to be calling from Microsoft and then expecting the bank to refund them their money wasn't an acceptable way to handle their financial affairs. In the end, they disabled their Internet banking and now have to catch a bus to their nearest bank branch to do anything.
I'm sure there will be flurry of Americans along shortly to monotonously repeat that quote about not trading freedom for security. That's their political tradition, not ours. The people of Thetford in Norfolk don't give a flying fuck about the gold statue of Thomas Paine that the Federalist Society (or some other group, I'm not terribly interested in which it was) put up in their town, but they love the fact that a sitcom about the Second World War was filmed there.
Someone else will make a joke about police officers investigating tweets. That practice - which was put to an end a couple of years ago - stemmed from a particular interpretation of a law that required police forces to investigate all threats of violence made by post, that was enacted in the 1980s during a period of increased religiously-motivated terrorism. The following decade brought the negotiations that put an end to that terrorism; negotiations that were the culmination of nearly five centuries of religious conflict. It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.
I shall leave it to others to make the usual accusations about who funded the aforementioned terrorism.
The Online Safety Act is vague and non-specific. Social media platforms differentiate themselves in the market on the bases of: with whom users can interact (people they know personally or the user base at large); and the ways in which they can interact (photos, videos, comments, likes, &c.). Each platform therefore poses its own unique set of risks to its user base, and so needs to have its own unique regulations. The Act acknowledges by empowering Ofcom to negotiate the specific policies that platforms will need to follow on a platform-by-platform basis. And if those policies should turn out to be too strict, and a few social media companies should find it no longer profitable to operate in the United Kingdom, that is not all that much of an issue for His Majesty's Government. They're not British companies, after all.
You can't talk about the Forbidden Meatballs[1] on Reddit or HN. In the 90s, AOL users from Scunthorpe and Penistone were banned from user forums for telling the community where they lived to help diagnose their connectivity issues. Americans have enforced - and continue to enforce - their cultural norms on the entire Anglophone web, and now the rest of the world has started to do the same. I have much greater faith in my government to protect my freedom of speech (no matter how much I may object to their policies) than some foreign company.
For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is? 'Maximum effect for minimum effort and cost' has been the guiding principle of all government in Britain for decades - it's how Britain ruled its Empire, it's what drove the Thirteen Colonies to rebel, it's why the East India Company was allowed to rule a subcontinent, it's why many of the former colonies were given independence despite not wanting it, it's why the roads are so consistently bad, it's why the water companies are dumping sewage into rivers, it's why there aren't enough police officers.
To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state, I suggest you watch Britons at a traffic-light-controlled pedestrian crossing. This isn't the end of the world; it's not going to lead to any social changes of any sort at all. The Act requires protections for free speech, after all. When it's all finally implemented, it'll just be enforcement of social norms that no one finds controversial.
NB: I read through the Act to see whether an idea for a social media platform was still a viable business idea, and apart from sending policy documents to Ofcom, it wouldn't require the business to do anything that wasn't already in that idea. If you want to argue about what the Act requires, I will expect you to have read the Act[2].
I am a software engineer in the UK. One of the reasons I want to move from the UK is because so many of our populace has attitudes such as yours. The online safety act won't solve the problems you think it will and will create a whole new host of issues.
What is amusing is that you even admit that you solved the problem of online scammers with your grandparents through education (I've seen the videos you mentioned as well). This is how people stay "safe" is to be educated on the dangers, not for overbearing regulation.
> To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state, I suggest you watch Britons at a traffic-light-controlled pedestrian crossing.
The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related offences (I guarantee it is more now). I've seen videos of the police arresting disabled pensioners over spicy tweets, journalists have their homes raided in the UK regularly if they criticise UK foreign policy over Israel (doesn't get reported on btw). We are already in a form of a soft totalitarianism. You just haven't noticed because you haven't been looking.
I clearly didn't mean that (and I think you know that btw).
I said "found out about it via social media". I then did my own research to find the original post by the person that had their home raided. I have been duped before by social media and I like to find the actual source (if possible).
> The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related offences (I guarantee it is more now).
So the claim is that the UK is prosecuting a minimum of some 2,555 speech offenses a year (or as few as 1,820 if it's 7 a day each day of a five day working week in a year with 52 working weeks).
Yes. I remember seeing the statistic a number of years ago. I cannot find the source easily. The last time I checked was ~2018. I never claimed "daily raids on journalists". I did say "regularly", which is incorrect, I should have said "an alarming number of". But that if people are going to hold me up on that they are nitpicking.
In the UK there were 11,767 prosecutions (referred by police, whether or not a conviction was found) in the past year flagged as "Hate Crime" (the category that a speech prosecution would fall under?)
Of those many were robbery, homicide, assault, etc .. not simply "speech".
Here is a link to an online sevice to mount by URL those spreadsheets onine (showing the UK Prosecution Crime Type Data Tables Q4 23-24)
"an alarming number of" is entirely relative to the population size and general referral levels, at seems unlikely that just pure "speech" alone and no other action forms 20% of the Hate Crime flagged prosecutions - that would take some legwork to verify I suspect.
When I said “alarming number of” I was specifically referring to journalists being harassed by the UK state. I am aware of at least 3 or 4 this year.
Non-speech related offences I don’t care about in relation to this topic. I believe the 3000 a year number was banded about for speech offences. I do think it is likely that this number is roughly correct as it matches up with what I previously heard.
I btw believe one person being prosecuted for speech related offences is too many. IMO it shouldn’t happen at all.
Moreover I am quite tired of people telling me it isn’t happening after I can distinctly remember a large number of cases over the years where this does happen.
I'm not telling you it isn't happening - I linked to the current UK summaries of all the cases referred by police to the CPS for prosocution.
The 7 cases a day to which you referred to above will be in there and quite likly flagged as Hate Crime related.
> I believe the 3000 a year number was banded about for speech offences.
( Bandied ? ) Sure, I dare say it was, the real question was that a reliable bit of infomation or something spread about?
If you're interested in pursuing the matter then I dare say you can contact the civil servents that maintain the UK CPS stats pages and ask them for speech prosecution numbers.
My stance on such things is that almost all figures "bandied about" with respect to contraversial subjects ( crime, immigration, free speech, climate, et al ) are forms of iterative improv by vested parties. *
I'm genuinely interested in actual figures from authorative sources for all manner of things in the world.
I appreciate you wasn’t but a lot of the discussion about these issues follows the same pattern of people pretending there isn’t an issue, then pretending that it isn’t as bad and then arguing over the minutia.
This convo thread the same route of someone disputing the fact the journalists were having their homes raided, I couldn’t remember the name of the journalist or the exact time, so when someone does find it, we then have a discussion on the exact language and numbers. Ignoring the fact that what I said was largely correct.
The number seems reasonable considering the data we have. TBH, It doesn’t matter if it is 1000 or 3000. It is too much either way IMO.
This isn’t a right or left "team sports" issue either. I deliberately avoid talking in those terms yet people seem to assign a team to you.
You were vindicated in this thread. It's insane that the U.K. is throwing thousands in people a year in jail for speech "crimes". I remember ten years ago when free speech was a sacred value in the West; as soon as non-institutionally-connected people got a platform with social media elites changed their mind though.
They're estimates but I've seen some numbers that suggest the U.K. is imprisoning more people (per capita and absolute) for speech crimes than Russia.
The whole above thread is litigating the number of people in the U.K. arrested for speech crimes. It's hard to put an exact number on it but it seems like low single digit thousands (1k-5k).
Both by equating the number "imprisoned" (which suggests an actual conviction and jail term) with the number simply "arrested". The distinction is important, because when I did check a source, it suggested that the vast majority of convictions under existing statutes resulted in fines rather than jail sentences.
And then by conflating the UK's legislation (which, whatever you make of it, is essential non-political, and covers forms of communication that most people would agree are basically "harmful" even though they would be opposed to a ban on them) with the restrictions in Russia, which are of course highly political (as indicated by the article you linked to), and not related to protecting anyone from harm in any meaningful sense.
That is: the UK's idea of harmful speech is that which promotes "terror, hate, fraud, child sexual abuse and assisting or encouraging suicide". Whereas in Russia, per one of your articles, it's stuff like this:
Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: “Squeeze Russia out of yourself!” For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.
Do you not see a major, categorical distinction here?
The point is that Russia is supposed to be a "totalitarian state". The UK is supposed to be a modern Western democracy with "freedom of expression" (which isn't freedom of speech). The whole point is that there really shouldn't be any speech related offences at all. These arrests should not happen in the first place. Many of these arrests do end up with prosecutions as well.
> And then by conflating the UK's legislation (which, whatever you make of it, is essential non-political, and covers forms of communication that most people would agree are basically "harmful" even though they would be opposed to a ban on them) with the restrictions in Russia, which are of course highly political (as indicated by the article you linked to), and not related to protecting anyone from harm in any meaningful sense.
They specifically say that certain forms of speech are prohibited, that includes political speech that you and I might find detestable. That speech you may find offence but it is still political speech. Some of it includes opposition against Israel's military campaigns in Palestine.
What most people agree is "harmful" isn't objective measure.
> That is: the UK's idea of harmful speech is that which promotes "terror, hate, fraud, child sexual abuse and assisting or encouraging suicide"
Terror and hate are nebulous terms that are entirely subjective. Pretending that they are somehow objective is what everyone does when they side with the UK government on this issue and they use the same nebulous terminology as the UK government such as "harmful". Speech cannot be harmful in itself. The vast majority of adults outside of mentally disabled have their own agency. People choose how to react to speech.
Also notice you also groped speech related offences with things that should be banned like CSAM material and things that are already illegal (fraud).
> Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: “Squeeze Russia out of yourself!” For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.
That isn't actually fundamentally different to what happens in the UK. So no I don't see the difference. It so funny that you think it is a gotcha and it really isn't.
Some of it includes opposition against Israel's military campaigns in Palestine.
First off, this is in regard to an entirely different piece of legislation (the Terrorism Act of 2000). But more importantly, you are making a very significant distortion here.
No, people do not get arrested under this Act for holding up signs saying "IDF bad". Or otherwise for "opposing Israel's military campaigns" like you are describing.
Instead they get arrested for things like making statements which seem to indicate support for groups like Hamas, or for "Palestinian resistance" generally. Per the actual language of the act, "expressing a belief in support of a proscribed organistion."
You can be opposed to the Terrorism Act if you want to, and I would happen to agree with you - it is a horrible piece of legislation.
But the bigger point (for now) is -- the actual situation, in terms of what the Act prohibits, is very different from what you're describing.
I'm not saying you're lying. More likely you've ingested some news articles which either intentionally omitted (or never bothered to investigate) key aspects of these cases. It actually takes some digging to find the various people arrested under this Act (folks like Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst) were actually charged for.
But invariably (at least in the cases I've looked at) it turns out that, lo and behold, these people actually did make statements online that were clearly "in support of proscribed organisations". In the Medhurst's case, for example:
”Hamas are fighting the same war of national liberation against an occupying power. It is their moral and legal right.”
Which is rather different from simply indicating "opposition against Israel's military campaigns in Palestine".
Your response is chock full of weird distortions like this -- way too many to unpack and patiently analyze.
Point being: if this is how the truth gets mangled and distorted inside your own head; or you simply choose not to vet and fact-check your sources, at least once in a while -- then that's a situation which you've created for yourself. Not the doing of some totalitarian government, or any other kind of external bully.
> For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is?
The problem is that it's very easy to selectively enforce this sort of thing. Most people will never have an issue, but whoever manages to sufficiently annoy someone who has the ability to trigger an enforcement action could be screwed. That leads many of the people who might find themselves in that situation to stop annoying the government or stop running websites entirely.
That's called a chilling effect.
People would probably not be as concerned if the law only applied to large platforms.
The Online Safety Act is about content moderation. If Ofcom taps you on the shoulder, they're asking for your moderation policies, and proof you're enforcing them. Platforms can no longer wash their hands of responsibility by saying that some random user uploaded the content and an opaque algorithm showed it to hundreds of thousands of people: the platform allowed the content to remain, and it was the platform's algorithm that showed the content to hundreds of thousands of people.
The Web isn't the information superhighway in cyberspace that it was in the '90s. The muggles are here, and they're treating social media like another part of the physical world, and we just have to live with the consequences of that. Mandatory content moderation is just one of those consequences.
You're not entitled to run any business, let alone a social media platform. Every right has attendant responsibilities. Fulfil your obligations to society.
This comment talks about large platforms with opaque algorithms showing some content to hundreds of thousands of people. I will not debate the merits of this law in that context here. My objection addresses your example of a "small Mastodon instance", which I'll extend to include a hobbyist forum, a blog with a comment section, or any similar website that can be run by a single person or informal, noncommercial group of people.
By not exempting the latter, this legislation makes it unreasonably risky for an individual with sufficient connection to the UK to operate such a website. The moderation policy is "I run some open source spam filter software and if I happen to see anything heinous, I delete it". Such websites are usually not businesses and often represent a net cost to their operators. A universal duty to moderate will accelerate the disappearance of hobbyist websites and further entrench corporate social media. I think that's a bad thing.
Blog and news website comment sections are explicitly exempted from the Act.
> A universal duty to moderate will accelerate the disappearance of hobbyist websites and further entrench corporate social media. I think that's a bad thing.
I also mourn the loss of the lawless Internet, but it's spilling out into the real world, and that's where I happen to live. We have to make compromises.
When the English people decided that our flirtation with being a republic was a failure, the some of the puritans who supported that republic refused to compromise, and left to start a new country across the Atlantic Ocean. They called themselves... Pilgrims.
Do you think harmful behavior from anywhere online other than large platforms is spilling out into the real world in a way that the Online Safety Act will prevent? If so, can you offer examples?
> Do you think harmful behavior from anywhere online other than large platforms is spilling out into the real world in a way that the Online Safety Act will prevent?
I have no idea.
If you're thinking of how to protect the fediverse, my solution (which I intend to use if I am kicked off mainstream social media because of this or other regulations in the UK) is to run my own server, only allowing people I know personally to have accounts on that server, and federating with other servers. Federation may be a grey area in this law - it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, if it ever goes to court.
Blogs are only not covered if the author of the Blog is the website owner. If the owner allows other people to post blogs - or in a forum start new threads then they have to take note of the law.
> They can't even speak freely about the horrible crimes being committed in their nation by grooming gangs.
Unsure what exactly you're referring to, which might be ironic, but there's lots of news reports about grooming gangs, as well as the surrounding controversy and debate around ethnicity and political correctness see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=grooming+gang&d=NEWS_PS
That would land you in jail in the UK no matter what forum you said it in. No we have no right to incite people to riot in the UK. That is something I'm rather proud of.
Do you have a citation for that? People may have said words to that effect in addition to inciting rioting, but no one has been send to jail for saying that.
It is very difficult to see what your argument is here.
Initially you state that people are defrauded - indeed they are, very effectively and commonly, via phone calls. Ofcom has regulated the telephone system since their inception, and can charitably be said to have achieved zero percent operational effectiveness in that time.
The Act unquestionably causes harm - it makes it effectively impossible for open, anonymous APIs because of the age verification requirements. It requires the vast majority of operators (because the UK's definition of pornography is so impossibly wide it will catch almost anything) to collect a huge tranch of information for age verification, which will cost an astonishing amount of money and prevent many community initiatives from ever getting off the ground. It will lead to many sites simply blocking adult communities entirely for economic reasons, a part of society that is already subject to substantial discrimination from UK authorities.
The Act does not include meaningful provisions for free speech. The Ofcom guidance simply says that people should be mindful of it, with no enforcement whatsoever. It is still the case that, given the penalties for not taking down illegal speech, platforms are much safer taking down much more speech than previously. Ofcom's consultation responses on their "proportionality" show they have taken a view that the actions are proportional because Ofcom say they are proportional, and no actual work has been done to demonstrate that.
You say that the UK is not a totalitarian state because it's half assed. And it's certainly true that enforcement will be capricious and arbitrary. But that is hardly a defence of the act - it will still have a remarkable chilling effect because you never know if it's you that will be targeted. Meanwhile, it will probably have very little effect on any of the things it is supposed to prohibit.
You talk in your first paragraph about how HN posters are in a bubble, but remain remarkably unaware of your own. Many communities are already discriminated against by payment providers, banks and online services, and this legislation will make those effects significantly worse, but at the same time, achieve none of it's goals.
> It is very difficult to see what your argument is here.
My arguments are:
* free speech is not a cornerstone of our national identity (despite John Milton's attempts to make it one);
* social media causes genuine harm (but does not do so inherently);
* the Act imposes a legal responsibility on social media platforms to limit harm caused by those platforms; and
* while members of the HN community may have a personal capacity to use social media in such a way that minimises harm to them, the majority of people do not.
> The Act unquestionably causes harm - it makes it effectively impossible for open, anonymous APIs because of the age verification requirements. It requires the vast majority of operators (because the UK's definition of pornography is so impossibly wide it will catch almost anything) to collect a huge tranch of information for age verification, which will cost an astonishing amount of money and prevent many community initiatives from ever getting off the ground. It will lead to many sites simply blocking adult communities entirely for economic reasons, a part of society that is already subject to substantial discrimination from UK authorities.
Alternatively, social media platforms can ban pornography. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok (amongst others) already do this; the problem is they don't enforce these bans. My perspective on this is that if you can't effectively moderate your social media platform in accordance with the social norms of your users' surrounding social context, then you shouldn't be operating a social media platform, and if you strongly disagree with your users' social context (e.g., users in, say, Iran), then you shouldn't offer your platform to them.
Also, commercial social media platforms are increasingly disinterested in providing open APIs, anyway.
> You say that the UK is not a totalitarian state because it's half assed. And it's certainly true that enforcement will be capricious and arbitrary. But that is hardly a defence of the act - it will still have a remarkable chilling effect because you never know if it's you that will be targeted.
This is how offensive speech is policed in meatspace. On a more general note, having the right to say something doesn't mean that saying that thing doesn't make you an arsehole.
> Meanwhile, it will probably have very little effect on any of the things it is supposed to prohibit.
Maybe. Let's wait and see, shall we?
> Many communities are already discriminated against by payment providers, banks and online services, and this legislation will make those effects significantly worse, but at the same time, achieve none of it's goals.
I don't recall the Online Safety Act regulating the financial industry - could you point out which parts of the legislation relate to that? I do, however, agree that we do have excessive restrictions on access to certain financial services.
> Alternatively, social media platforms can ban pornography. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok (amongst others) already do this; the problem is they don't enforce these bans. My perspective on this is that if you can't effectively moderate your social media platform in accordance with the social norms of your users' surrounding social context, then you shouldn't be operating a social media platform, and if you strongly disagree with your users' social context (e.g., users in, say, Iran), then you shouldn't offer your platform to them.
Regular pornography isn't bad. The problem is that sites like fetlife full of consensual adult content would be hugely undermined by all their users having to identify themselves. A lot of users are new to the community and very iffy about being exposed due to e.g. a hack. With good reason, not every place is as open-minded. But it gives people a way to truly express themselves. These sites are really important.
Banning pornography on mainstream social media is a very heavy-handed move too imo. I'm glad reddit still allows it.
Social media does not cause harm in of itself. People can use social media in a way that can be harmful, but you can say that about absolutely anything. Plenty of people that are not tech people manage to use social media to promote themselves, their business etc. People use it as a place of business. It is a mixed bag, like most things are.
You are (like the government) pre-supposing that is the case and basing your whole argument upon that.
As for Offense speech/Free speech. What constitutes what is and isn't offensive is subjective. That is why people argue for a free speech standard. Pretending that it is right to restrict unpopular speech (this is what is really meant by offensive) because the majority agree is completely asinine, as things that were offensive in the past may not be offensive in the future and vice versa.
The reason we don't have a decent tech industry in the UK (the tech industry here sucks) is because we don't have things like a Section 230 protections. Imposing legal responsibility will make it more difficult for anyone to make anything interesting in the UK.
> I don't recall the Online Safety Act regulating the financial industry - could you point out which parts of the legislation relate to that? I do, however, agree that we do have excessive restrictions on access to certain financial services.
You completely misunderstood the point. The point is that we can predict from similar laws in another industry (somewhat related industry) what the effect maybe.
The best cultural difference analogy I’ve heard — two ends of “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument. One side genuinely believes that statement, the other thinks without guns there would be less death.
Same applies to social media and web as well. Yes, it is people ruining each other’s lives, but using an intermediary tool. Whether you think that way will depend on your preexisting conceptions and beliefs. I don’t think there is a wrong way of thinking of this, and every government will handle it differently depended on their goals and needs.
I had an issue with alcohol for many years. That doesn't mean that drinking is inherently bad. There are plenty of people that can enjoy a few drinks responsibly. I am not one of those people. Therefore I abstain from alcohol as a result. I don't ask that alcohol to be banned.
Alcohol sales and laws are fairly draconian in North America, compared to equivalents in Europe and Asia. Once again, I don't think there is right or wrong approach to it, and all the discussions will stem from cultural beliefs and predispositions. Your "freedom" and my "freedom" will always be conceptually different as well, the interpretation of the idea and making policies around it is the job of the government. By the way, I'm actually on your side when it comes to this specific topic, but growing up in different continents, I can understand why different policy makers approach it through different lenses.
‘No section 230’ might be the reason why there’s no social media tech scene. I’d like to think that HN cares about things other than social media too - maybe Brits could do something that actually adds some value.
But in any case, original point also brings up the question: why is the UK allowing foreign companies to violate laws that it would prosecute British businesses for violating?
If you allow a foreign domiciled business to break laws in your country, then how the heck do you expect to ever have domestic industry? It’s strictly less risky to always be foreign domiciled.
This bill aims to stop that regulatory arbitrage and as such is hopefully a leveling of the playing field for the UK tech scene.
I don't really understand how many people on here (I've been lurking for a while), essentially pretend everything is backwards. You don't level the playing field by making it more difficult to do business, you make it easier.
BTW, I get btw a threat letter from another UK quango (I forget the name), which basically says "if you have any user data you need to pay us £60 a year". Yes you need to pay a levy for a database in the UK. It is basically a TV license for a database. I did work as a freelancer in the UK (made impossible now because of IR-35 regulation) and have a dormant company because freelance/contract is dead, so I have to inform them I don't have user data. It is just another thing to worry about when creating an online app.
> But in any case, original point also brings up the question: why is the UK allowing foreign companies to violate laws that it would prosecute British businesses for violating?
Because then we don't have any alternatives and people already use it. I also don't think the laws should exist in the first place, so I don't care if a US company is violating them.
I would love the UK to actually require IP blocks of twitter/Facebook etc, because it might actually force people to think about the issues.
> If you allow a foreign domiciled business to break laws in your country, then how the heck do you expect to ever have domestic industry? It’s strictly less risky to always be foreign domiciled.
You don't make it more difficult to do business. Many of the US tech successes were people starting up in a garage. The UK micro business did extremely well (until PC/Macs came on the scene) and that had almost no regulation or gov interference (other than standard stuff for electronics).
> This bill aims to stop that regulatory arbitrage and as such is hopefully a leveling of the playing field for the UK tech scene.
No. It is to try to censor the internet. It been going in this direction for ages. I am quite honestly fed up of people telling me that it is nothing to worry about. The UK politicians complained about replies to their tweets, after one of their colleagues had been stabbed to death. I found it honestly sickening. There is no crisis they won't use as an opportunity.
>I get btw a threat letter from another UK quango (I forget the name), which basically says "if you have any user data you need to pay us £60 a year".
The Information Commissioners Office. Just tell them you are not storing any data and they will go away.
> I did work as a freelancer in the UK (made impossible now because of IR-35 regulation)
Freelancers were never covered by IR35. IR35 covers employees masquerading as contractors. If you work for multiple companies on specific projects that won't cover you
My comment around IR-35 is that it has caused a lot of confusion and thus made contracting a lot more difficult as a result. A lot of freelancers and contractors have been affected by this.
Contracting made a bit more difficult, freelancing totally unaffected. It was always pretty easy to check at below. Every contractor I have ever met seems to know about umbrella companies...
It was not a great regulation, and seemed to affect government contractors the most, which was a bit of an own goal. But it never affected Freelancers
> Contracting made a bit more difficult, freelancing totally unaffected.
That isn't true. It has made contracting a lot more difficult. I am in a number of freelancer groups and it has affected them. I have heard the same from recruiters, from freelancers, from people that run job boards.
> Every contractor I have ever met seems to know about umbrella companies
Most contractors run their own private LTD (like I did). They don't use umbrella companies because you are put on PAYE and you end up paying through the nose in tax.
Typically you get a third party to check a contract for you to see whether it falls under IR-35. I could do it myself, but I would rather pay someone to check it for me.
Many contracts will require you to have IR-35 "insurance" which feels like a scam, but it is required a lot of the time by the contract. This is in addition to PL and PI insurances.
I'm trying to give this comment a gracious reading. You can find videos on YouTube from the last couple months of police talking to people about comments they left online, and tweets, and FB posts, etc. So saying that practice "was put to an end a couple of years ago" is a complete fiction.
The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American? Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on them what does it matter whether or not a particular government acknowledges it? It's still an infringement and should be fought.
> It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.
Or maybe that's exactly the time you should make those assertions all the more loudly. Principles don't mean anything if you only hold them when it's easy, and we should all stop treating people who drop their principles at the slightest road bump as some kind of warrior for safety or whatever they'd like to frame it as, and treat them as they are - cowards and authoritarians.
This is the first I've heard about the Forbidden Meatballs, thank you for the chuckle.
> For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is?
Oh so the hope is just that the government is too ineffectual to prosecute something they're completely within their rights to prosecute? How is that not absolute madness?
Why in the world would you trust a government to enforce this fairly? What's to say your Conservative Party doesn't use this to target prominent supporters of Labour, or vice versa?
> The Act requires protections for free speech
As an American (the horror, I know, that I deign to comment on something British), I'd love to know where your freedom of speech is codified and what a government would have to do if they wanted to change what counts as speech, what doesn't, and what's protected and what isn't. I suspect that you and I have very different definitions of what qualifies as free speech.
At the end this seems like the same thing we see in the US a lot - this is something my side of the political divide supports, so I should support it, so I'm going to twist myself into a mental pretzel to support it, even if it solves no real problem, opens up a huge door for future government abuse, and further erodes the rights of everyone.
>As an American (the horror, I know, that I deign to comment on something British), I'd love to know where your freedom of speech is codified and what a government would have to do if they wanted to change what counts as speech, what doesn't, and what's protected and what isn't. I suspect that you and I have very different definitions of what qualifies as free speech.
There is nothing easy to point to, like the first amendment to the US constitution, but it probably wouldn't matter anyway.
The key differences between the UK and US, particularly in this area are that:
1) Governments in the UK tend to have large parliamentary majorities - the current government has a majority in excess of 150 seats. So if there was some sort of written constitution guaranteeing Free Speech, and it required a supermajority to change, it's likely that many UK governments would easily be able to do that.
2) Politicians and the public at large in the UK have very different attitudes to Free Speech (or rather, they take a more pragmatic approach to things and can see the need to compromise). Polling has shown that the Online Safety Act has over 70% of the public supporting it. Parts of the act see even higher support than that. Consequently, most of the major political parties support the act or even think it should go further.
This is in deep contrast to the US, where imagining a scenario in which you could amend the constitution would be virtually impossible in the current climate.
I like this comment a lot. I can understand the argument to amend the Constitution for things like the Second Amendment (I disagree but I can at least see how you would believe we should do that).
Maybe I'm just too cloistered in my Americanism but I can't even comprehend the thought process that leads someone to believe in good faith that restricting someone's speech which doesn't incite violence and doesn't constitute fighting words to be a Good Thing.
The example I come back to is that saying "the holocaust never happened" will get you jailed in some European countries (and maybe Israel too? IDK). To me and my suburban American sensibilities going to jail for saying that is worse than saying it in the first place. Saying that is objectively wrong and it points to some related beliefs that I find abhorrent. Saying it does not incite any violence. Saying it does not harm anyone - in the real, physical way not the pseudo-"speech can be violence" nonsense way.
I think companies should be able to fire you for abhorrent speech. Platforms should be able to de-platform you. Business should refuse to serve you. I have no problem with any of that. But a government should be restricted in what it can do to people based on their speech.
The parliamentary note is particularly interesting. It was posted elsewhere that Labour got something like 1/3 of the vote this time around but due to the parliamentary system is basically running the government? The US is obviously very different where even having a majority doesn't allow you do whatever you want (by design, and IMO a good thing).
> The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American?
It's a quote from one of the American founding fathers. I don't remember which, and I don't remember the exact quote.
> Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on them what does it matter whether or not a particular government acknowledges it?
In British law, most of what we now call 'human rights' were granted as settlements following rebellions or civil wars, the most notable example being those in the Bill of Rights 1689[0]. It was the Americans who copied that piece of legislation and wrote God's name at the top. The Parliamentarians who first wrote that bill remembered the Second English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I on charges of Tyranny - he wanted to levy taxes that Parliament opposed. (Sound familiar?)
> It's still an infringement and should be fought.
We don't have absolute freedom of speech in this country and that's fine. Freedom in this country is about doing not speaking.
> Or maybe that's exactly the time you should make those assertions all the more loudly. Principles don't mean anything if you only hold them when it's easy, and we should all stop treating people who drop their principles at the slightest road bump as some kind of warrior for safety or whatever they'd like to frame it as, and treat them as they are - cowards and authoritarians.
We don't do abstract principles in Britain, we're all about 100% organic realpolitik. Our system of government has been slowly evolving for nearly one thousand years, and continues to evolve. One of our kings was a tyrant, so we killed him. The republic that replaced him was worse, so we restored the monarchy. We solve the problem in front of us - there's no need to solve every problem ever right now.
> Oh so the hope is just that the government is too ineffectual to prosecute something they're completely within their rights to prosecute? How is that not absolute madness?
This is how Britain has always been governed - with minimal effort. Yes, it's mad. With specific reference to prosecutions, the Crown Prosecution Service only prosecutes if it think it will get a guilty verdict.
> Why in the world would you trust a government to enforce this fairly? What's to say your Conservative Party doesn't use this to target prominent supporters of Labour, or vice versa?
The government (i.e., the Cabinet and other Ministers of the Crown) have no direct control over the implementation of this legislation; that is delegated to Ofcom, a regulatory body that answers to Parliament as a whole. Any attempt to seize control of Ofcom would require legislation, which would be heavily scrutinised by the House of Lords (which is not elected, and therefore is only weakly influenced by party whips) and would also have to gain Royal Assent, which would probably be refused if the legislation were seen to weaken British democracy.
> As an American (the horror, I know, that I deign to comment on something British), I'd love to know where your freedom of speech is codified and what a government would have to do if they wanted to change what counts as speech, what doesn't, and what's protected and what isn't. I suspect that you and I have very different definitions of what qualifies as free speech.
Absolute freedom of speech is only granted to parliamentarians when speaking in Parliament. The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law; Article 10 of the Convention provides for a general right to freedom of expression, but permits certain restrictions. Prior to the Human Rights Act, there was no general freedom of speech; instead everything that was not specifically prohibited was allowed.
Seems like its not really possible to run an indie web site with a forum any more in the UK if you don't want to accept the risk of an 18 million pound fine -
>To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state
Ha-ha-ha. Writing from Russia.
No, seriously, it started with completely reasonable law mandating that internet providers block pages encouraging suicide or providing information on ways to do it.
Well, I remember that case[0], the guy had written that there are no good cops and was calling for burning policemen alive on the city square in a crematorium "like in Auschwitz" and got one year of suspended sentence for that. I can't say that I disagree with the court, but that's the problem.
> And if those policies should turn out to be too strict, and a few social media companies should find it no longer profitable to operate in the United Kingdom, that is not all that much of an issue for His Majesty's Government. They're not British companies, after all.
His Majesty’s government is struggling to keep its people warm and fed, let alone show any economic growth.[0][1]
The UK needs more foreign investment than ever before.
I wonder what happens with these sorts of regulations if an entirely decentralized social media platform becomes popular. Who do the authorities go after if there's no owner or server?
> Who do the authorities go after if there's no owner or server?
A "decentralized social media platform" implies the exact opposite of "there's no owner or server": there are many owners (in the extreme, each user is the owner of their own slice of the platform) and many servers (in the extreme, each user runs a separate server).
Ok, "think of the children" again. If it were about the children, they'd simply forbid phones and unsupervised Internet for anyone under 16. Problem solved.
The issue of course is that the Internet is too valuable of a propaganda instrument. Children need propaganda, but they need our propaganda.
The offense list is in classic CoC style. Vague terms like terrorism have been abused in the U.K. for a long time and applied against journalists like the husband of Glenn Greenwald, who had been arrested in London for communicating with Laura Poitras.
Many journalists have been stopped and digitally stripped searched in the U.K. while traveling.
So what are websites to do to escape that? Perhaps put up permanent banners like "NATO must be prepared for a great patriotic land war with Russia" and "We need more immigration" in order to be safe.
Brought to you by the people who read Orwells 1984 and thought it was a handbook rather than a warning.
I really have zero respect for this law. Watch the BBC interview with Elon Musk over twitter to see how moronic the people behind it are.
When you mix in all the war mongering they do vv Russia and the massive crack downs they have been engaging in to cover up how fast living standards have been falling, and the whole thing is a sad joke.
The UK is building their own digital gulag. Most social media companies are not going to institute these authoritarian measures for one small nation that wants to regulate the world. You are going to see yourselves cut off.
The future this (and similar legislature from other countries) points toward is extremely concerning.
I run a small site with some user interaction; though it doesn't seem the intended target of this particular legislature, it seems inevitable that there will be a law enacted somewhere that leaves the site vulnerable unless I'm constantly staying on top of the increasingly varied and specific requirements across the world. I don't see how anyone but big corporations can expect to deal with that, frankly.
I wish there was an international standard of reasonable moderation and data handling specifically for small sites. A static checklist of requirements like manual screening of user-generated content within a certain time period, gdpr-esque transparency of user data - things that any responsible webmaster should be doing anyway.
I suppose there are potential problems with that too, but either way that ship has already sailed. Instead we're all on the Titanic, ignoring alarm bells as we careen towards the iceberg of siloed corporatocracy.
The U.K. is jailing people for mean tweets, and has been for a while:
- "More than 30 people found themselves arrested over social media posts. From what I’ve found, at least 17 of those have been charged." -- the BBC, this is specifically for the Southport riots. They have been doing this for years, of course.[1]
- "First people jailed over social media posts during unrest 9 August
Today's live coverage has mainly come from the courts, with jail sentences handed down for those involved in the violent disorder since the fatal stabbings in Southport last Monday.
Here's a quick summary of key events today:
In the first case of a person going to jail for posting on social media during the disorder, Jordan Parlour, 28, of Seacroft, Leeds, received a 20 month sentence for inciting others to target a Leeds building which housed asylum seekers
At least two others also received jail sentences for social media posts that stirred up racial hatred
Suspended Labour councillor Ricky Jones appeared in court charged with encouraging violent disorder after he was filmed apparently telling a crowd that far-right demonstrators should have their throats cut
6000 officers with specialist training in public order are "prepared and ready" to deal with any potential unrest over the weekend
About 600 people have been arrested this week with hundreds more expected in the coming days and weeks, police say, with the use of facial recognition technology fast tracking the process "[2]
- This woman merely livestreamed other people doing naughty things, and called some people "tramps". "Much of the TikTok stream had been rather amateurish, Mr Rudge argued, giving a view of the cobblestones in Tamworth but showing no acts of violence." LOL. 9 months in prison. [3]
- More: [4]
- More: [5]
- "This is in relation to some comments you made on Facebook (police arrest old man in his home, good video): [6]
- "We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media to look for this material, and then follow up with arrests." - Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales. Video worth a watch. [7]
-
Punishment is often also extremely swift. Facebook video --> court --> prison in a matter of a week and a half. Of course, if you stand accused of e.g. raping children, it will take a year and a half.
-
This country has gone right off a cliff and is currently in free-fall.
> Hash-matching tools link known images of CSAM from police databases to encrypted digital fingerprints known as “hashes” for each piece of content to help social media sites’ automated filtering systems recognize and remove them.
I know this is a little bit of a nitpick, but I really feel like it hurts the credibility of a news organization to make a mistake this obvious that also shows they completely misunderstand the entire concept they're explaining.
That's fundamentally a wrong definition and implies that that these social media sites could simply decrypt the hash to access the source material. The entire purpose of hashing as a cryptographic tool is that it isn't encryption.
One of the predictions was that some websites would just geoblock people connecting from Europe. That happened with a lot of small news sites. And some retail sites. For example, I can't access www.homedepot.com right now.
I’d like to see all social media sites require proper age verification, much like any gambling sites in the UK have to. No under 18 needs social media. Feel, especially for children, they are a net negative.
Which kills any sort of online anonymity as all social media posts will be directly linked to your ID. This will make it much easier to go after anyone that is a dissident in the UK.
Many these awful laws such as one being discussed are sold to us under the guise of protecting the children. The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related crimes in the UK (and I checked a while ago).
Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's social media usage.
I think laws and regulations can be put in place that, while imperfect, would highly discourage the use of social media by minors.
I wouldn't want every user to validate their age with government ID.
But we can say schools should ban kids from using phones. We can say that large social media platforms need to whitelist content/creators that children are allowed to access. We can insist that social media companies throttle the ability for minors to scroll through videos at a dopamine addiction pace.
More generally and more applicable to the discussion, I think regulations for social media need to be applied proportional to the userbase and centralization of a platform, and target viral algorithms.
Old school message boards should be safe from government interference, broadly.
It may be time to research simpleX chat and Briar if we will maintain the ability to communicate without government filtering.
> I wouldn't want every user to validate their age with government ID.
Well that is what will be required or a credit card.
> But we can say schools should ban kids from using phones. We can say that large social media platforms need to whitelist content/creators that children are allowed to access. We can insist that social media companies throttle the ability for minors to scroll through videos at a dopamine addiction pace.
Every argument around regulation around social media to protect children ignores that fact that parents are the ones closest to their children and their children is their responsibility. Some parents inability to control their children shouldn't infringe my rights as an adult.
> More generally and more applicable to the discussion, I think regulations for social media need to be applied proportional to the userbase and centralization of a platform, and target viral algorithms.
If I don't like how particular algorithms act on social media, I can simply opt out of using it. As an adult I have agency. I found that I was spending a disproportionate of my time using Twitter/X and as a result I deleted my account. I had problem with alcohol years ago, I stopped drinking after I accepted I had a problem. I have my own agency.
> It may be time to research simpleX chat and Briar if we will maintain the ability to communicate without government filtering.
The issue is that the vast majority of people I wish to talk to aren't tech savvy and are unwilling to use anything other than mainstream platforms. So you end up essentially walling yourself from everyone else. That isn't ideal.
>Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's social media usage.
I guess we should stop checking age when buying alcohol in pubs (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's alcohol purchases_)
And stop checking age when buying cigarettes (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's tobacco purchases_)
etc.
It's illuminating that your post is both "tech can't solve it" and so brazenly pro-tech with manifestations of its laziest arguments each way.
Of course tech can solve the ID problem. It could solve it in a way that doesn't need to give ground to your slippery slope argument too. It just doesn't have the incentive model to do so. Any "control" in this space would reduce the marketable headcount and so it's not in tech's interests to solve - without government intervention.
The card you might have paid with is though. I can’t remember any instances of a card hack revealing transactions of customers though (I might be wrong, just doesn’t ring a bell).
It’s not a given that digital record must lead to compromise.
> I guess we should stop checking age when buying alcohol in pubs (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's alcohol purchases_)
> And stop checking age when buying cigarettes (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's tobacco purchases_)
Yes and yes. These measures are completely ineffective anyway. Who hasn't been drinking / watching porn underage? Smoking is less prevalent where I'm from but it's not for lack of availability of elf sticks etc.
Underage people have been exposed to (normal adult) porn for decades. And it hasn't caused any issues with our society. If anything it makes sexual morale more free and lets people discover themselves without moral judgement.
If I choose to buy alcohol or cigarettes and I look over 25 in the UK I do not have to show any ID. If I do need to show ID, it doesn't get tracked by the government. It is only seen by the whoever is serving me at the checkout. I don't honestly believe that you don't understand how this is different.
> It's illuminating that your post is both "tech can't solve it" and so brazenly pro-tech with manifestations of its laziest arguments each way.
I believe that the only way to stop enforcement is to make it impossible to enforce. This would require new software that is easy to use by the majority of people. I don't see this happening in the near term.
> Of course tech can solve the ID problem. It could solve it in a way that doesn't need to give ground to your slippery slope argument too. It just doesn't have the incentive model to do so. Any "control" in this space would reduce the marketable headcount and so it's not in tech's interests to solve - without government intervention.
I am not sure what you are trying to say here. The fact is that some sort of government ID will be required or a credit card and that would be directly linked to any accounts you may have. Simply this is a bad idea for my own security, I don't want to be giving my government ID to some social media company in the first place or a third party that I maybe unfamiliar with. That before we get into any other wider reaching concerns.
The problem is you’re simultaneously arguing two points and relying on whichever point gives you the most leverage at each juncture.
If .gov == bad guy then you’re screwed whether or not you leave a digital trail on social media because you’re already leaving one anyway (unless you’re a marginal outlier that isn’t worth considering for this “problem”). If that’s your threat model then you’re either super-important or I worry you’ve been sold a scary story by social media algorithms.
On the other hand, the idea that this is an impossible tech problem to solve is also disingenuous. My point is that it could be solved. And quickly and easily too. If the incentive model were there. And whilst I’ve not given the solution a huge amount of thought (I’m not actually that interested in solving it) I’m certain that an authenticated assertion could be made that wasn’t directly attributable to an individual - i.e., a mechanism could be developed that would solve for both problems.
Which brings us back to the fundamental point here: the people who would need to implement the solution have no incentive model in place to motivate them to do so.
> The problem is you’re simultaneously arguing two points and relying on whichever point gives you the most leverage at each juncture.
No I am not.
> If .gov == bad guy then you’re screwed whether or not you leave a digital trail on social media because you’re already leaving one anyway (unless you’re a marginal outlier that isn’t worth considering for this “problem”). If that’s your threat model then you’re either super-important or I worry you’ve been sold a scary story by social media algorithms.
You are pretending as if one would need perfect op-sec (which is impossible). If you have a throwaway email, a sim paid for via cash and a VPN/Tor will make you much more difficult to track down and most of this can be learned via watching a few YouTube videos. You don't even have to do the more crazy stuff like running Tails.
Having an ID requirement will make it much more difficult as I suspect other regions will soon follow suite in implementing something similar.
There are also benefits to pseudo-anonymity. I want to keep my online life and my real life separate. This will mean that they can never be separate.
> On the other hand, the idea that this is an impossible tech problem to solve is also disingenuous. My point is that it could be solved. And quickly and easily too. If the incentive model were there. And whilst I’ve not given the solution a huge amount of thought (I’m not actually that interested in solving it) I’m certain that an authenticated assertion could be made that wasn’t directly attributable to an individual - i.e., a mechanism could be developed that would solve for both problems.
I never said that the tech problem was impossible to resolve. Again that is your assertion. I simply stated what I believe is most likely to happen in the near to medium term.
Ok but UK is not an oppresive regime, so that we talk about "dissidents" in UK. As anywhere, the freedom of speech is regulated. But even if you spout racist or other nonsense, you are not a dissident, you are just breaking the law, to which I agree, hate speech, racism should not be openly promoted.
The definition of hate speech used to be centered around terrorism and was initially sold to the UK public as stopping "Islamic hate preachers and stopping terrorism". This has now expanded far past that and people are being investigated and arrested for simply opposing immigration (which is often conflated with racism disingenuously), or criticising the actions of Israel, teenagers posting rap lyrics on facebook, and numerous others that I have forgotten about.
If you are not bothered by the expansion of these powers because some people have said things you disapprove of there is nothing I can say to convince you.
It's not that hard to create privacy friendly age verification. Have a system like Sign in with Apple vouch that you're over 18. Go to Apple store to flash your ID and they just set a flag on your account. Apple doesn't give the site any personal info when you use Sign in with Apple. Apple isn't giving the government any of your details without a warrant. No Apple store nearby? It doesn't have to be Apple, licence it out to a few companies.
I don't want to use Apple anything, or Google anything anymore. I want to be able to make an account with my email and not give my ID to any third party. I've spent the last 8 years removing my dependence on big-tech (I self host, run a Linux desktop and use Graphene OS).
At least in the US, legislation for age verification already exists and it actually far predates social media: COPPA[1].
It is, however, seldom actually enforced due largely to the impracticality and inconvenience of the matter. The law also doesn't regulate the presentation of content to children, rather the collection of information from children.
I think the most recent enforcement of COPPA that had actual tangible effect was when Youtube was ordered to stop collecting information (eg: comments) from videos marked as for kids.
COPPA does not appear to require age verification. It actually appears to have the opposite effect, only coming into effect when the service provider has actual knowledge of the user's age. Actively avoiding collecting the user's age or clues to it is safer for the service provider.
Agree with you. I’m not sure why people believe that only the physical world and not the virtual one should have some amount of regulation. I think a good portion of HN has drunk the kool aid of their employers/industry and is almost religiously unwilling to consider an alternative viewpoint without resorting to shouting ‘fascist’ and ‘1984’. Maybe someone needs to write a book called 2024 about the hellscape we currently live in and folks could circle jerk around this new shibboleth.
Why would it be the "kool aid of their employers"? My employers would surely love to track every single click I make on the work and even personal PC. If the government tracks it that's also fine. Still less risk for them if I'm a nutter and the checks get outsourced to the government. Once the data leaks they can check what I was doing anyway.
Social media companies don’t want any kind of regulation because it adds cost to them. Their PR bangs the drum of free speech and people economically tied to the industry gobble it up while trying to ignore the self serving nature of their new beliefs.
>Social media companies don’t want any kind of regulation because it adds cost to them. Their PR bangs the drum of free speech and people economically tied to the industry gobble it up while trying to ignore the self serving nature of their new beliefs.
Disagree here. If it is legally onerous for me to start a forum, I am more inclined to use a large social media site like Facebook, since they will handle the legal part for me. They are fine with that, they already have legal teams.
But I guess the tax avoidance lawyers that he keeps hiring keep on tricking him. Gotta feel bad for the guy, but take everything he says, like “there should be more regulation” seriously and ignore the blatantly self serving nature of his statements.
Sure, I don't take him at his word as to WHY he would support this legislation. And I think there's likely a reason why he might suggest legislation at all: something more "broadly accepted" like paying more taxes suggests "we are a good company," while supporting legislation normalizes the idea of legislation that doesn't yet broadly exist.
Regardless, I think that it's likely that any legislation will be influenced by big players who act as "experts" so that the resulting laws are more easily followed by them than their (presumably smaller) competitors. And the evidence is in the results. If I were starting an online community in the UK, I'd feel much safer legally using Facebook (or Reddit or Discord) than I would starting my own forum.
The online communities don't exist within the borders of a nation state. They have their own social norms and rules. You can see this on forums, message boards, online games etc. Therefore a nation state trying to enforce its will on those communities is completely asinine.
I don't like that it that American companies enforces it language policing on UK residents, I also don't like that fact that the UK wants to force it language policing world wide (the UK state acts as if it has an empire).
The reason people are unwilling to consider an alternative viewpoint, is that in the past they have been more moderate and what has happened has been a complete erosion of civil liberties under the guise of "stopping the terrorists". I was arguing the same thing I am arguing essentially over 20 years ago.
Ironically many of those groups that we went to war to stop (Al-queda/ISIS) are now being presented as moderate because foreign policy has shifted again.
Age Assurance Methods:
Effective methods: Open banking, photo-ID matching, facial age estimation, credit card checks, and digital identity wallets.
Ineffective methods: Self-declaration, general disclaimers, or payment methods without age restrictions.
So basically, ID verification will be required for any platform that may have adult/harmful materials.
