I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law.
Also:
Step 1: Build mass surveillance to prevent the 'bad guys' from coming into political power (its ok, we're the good guys).
Step 2: Your political opponents capitalize on your genuinely horrific overreach, and legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public as fighting against tyranny (unfortunately for you they do have a point). They promise to dismantle the system if coming to power.
Step 3: They get elected.
Step 4: They don't dismantle the system, now the people you planned to use the system against are using it against you.
Simple. The UK is not a pro democracy, pro human rights state.
It might be uncomfortable to admit this, but if your government is a police state that's pretty much mutually exclusive with being a pro human rights state.
Yeah this applies to nearly all of Europe IMO. Recent events show that the American Bill of Rights is definitely not a panacea, but at least there's some legal standing to push back against Orwellian measure like those put in place by the UK or the EU.
Given the current situation in the US, it's a huge cautionary tale for how not to do democracy. To non-ironically hold it up as an example at this point of time is truly amazing. No, the rest of us don't want current US style dictatorship in our countries.
While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world. Democracy is something we need to keep working towards. There is not one simple set of rules that will keep it healthy, at least as far as recently history shows.
> While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world.
Don’t let defensiveness lead you to say nonsensical things. Nearly every single country in the EU has a worse-than-trumpian party waiting in the wings, or even in power, see Hungary. Ascribing some sort of special property to the EU, a region with absolutely terrible standards for personal liberty, because at the moment there is more respect for liberal democracy there than elsewhere.. well it’s just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Yes, but many places in the EU use proportional representation or something close to it, so even if those parties gain significant traction, there is still protection as they are forced to work together with the rest of the parties.
In contrast, my own country Canada is far more at risk of the rise of an authoritarian adjacent party. A party with majority control has too much power here, and lack of proportional representation also means that majority control can be achieved with less than 50% of the voting population supporting you.
This is why I say the EU has better protections. The existence of parties that want more authoritarian control shouldn't be a measure of the health of a democratic system. In fact, somehow forcing these parties out would be pretty against the principles of democracy and free speech.
I do suppose its worth asking the question of whether democracy should allow the voting down of democracy itself, but I don't think the EU is at risk of that as a whole, even if a few member states are.
It's an executive order that contravenes existing legislative and judicial precedent, sets penalties, and is expected to be unchallenged. It limits free speech by fiat because a single man wants it to be so.
It's clearly dictatorial, you'll have to demonstrate why it's not an act of a single person dictating policy.
Burning American flags is free speech? It's definitely an interpretation... and one that many legal scholars disagree with, similar to Roe v Wade. Not that repealing Roe v Wade was a good thing, but it didn't have a solid legal foundation.
It's not all about getting your way... well maybe the better way to say it is that the left got their way, for sixty years. And some of those wins from that period for the left were built on shaky ground. There has to be give and take in any healthy political system.
Yes. The Supreme Court affirmed this in Texas v Johnson. It is an act that expresses a political view through a symbolic act. It might be offensive to you, but "I find it offensive" is not sufficient defense to stop political speech.
And the left did not get their way for sixty years. The left is predominantly socialist, communist, anarchist. Democrats are not a leftist party. The left hasn't held many political positions in the US. But we on the left hate the democrats as much (or more) than folks on the right. We also tend to be broadly supportive of individual freedoms (most of my leftist colleagues are anti gun control, for instance.)
But it's obvious when people say "dictatorship" or "fascism" today in the USA it is just a dog whistle for not liking Trump. Nobody called Obama a fascist for how Chelsea Manning was treated.
It's absolutely not the case. The US is an empire with increasingly dictatorial power centralized in the executive. Clinton increased prison populations and increased police power. Bush increased executive power during his post 9-11 presidency. Obama regularly enforced U.S. policy at the end of a drone strike and shut down U.S. domestic agitation. Biden increased police funding and continued to sell surplus military equipment to cops. He also shut down a workers strike. Trump is a symptom of a general slide towards dictatorial policy. If it wasn't him this time it would have been one of the next 5 presidents from either policy.
Trump is doing some fucked up shit, but he doesn't get to be able to do that without decades of groundwork from both sides of the aisle.
Okay here's a secret that you probably won't hear other than in some books that are hard to find.
The youth desire a strong executive. They don't yet understand why it can be a bad thing, because they have little experience with people having power over them that aren't their parents or teachers.
The middle aged desire a strong legislative branch, the most fair branch of government. They have enough life experience to understand why. They are not quite old enough to be set in their ways just yet.
The elderly desire a strong judicial branch. Judges are almost always old, and biased towards the opinions of the elderly, left or right.
There is nothing wrong with a strong executive. It is just completely at odds with those who still control the vast majority of the money and power, and of course, mainstream media: the Boomers. JFK, Great Society, these are marked by a desire for a strong executive. Ironic, of course.
A strong executive can stop them, and the Boomers have never been told 'no' in their entire lives. Really truly, everybody was young in the 1960's. They warped society to their will, just like the people in every baby boom in history. You misinterpret their tantrum as something substantive.
I'm old (50s), I don't want a strong any of those. I especially, however, don't want a strong executive because I don't think decision making should be strongly centralized.
I'm a syndicalist anarchist, who believes communities should be primarily bottoms up driven, democratic, and cooperative. I argue we don't need any of those branches to be strong.
1. Degrees / magnitude. How many cases of dictatorial behavior were there with Obama vs Trump? Every president signs executive orders, but trump signs a lot more of them.
2. Defiance to checks in power. The current administration seems uniquely defiant of both the legislative and the judicial branches, both in rhetoric and act.
You have to stop thinking it's us or them. You have to stop imagining that somehow any of this is ok because my team or your team did or didn't do something.
I certainly hope I've been clear that this isn't some D vs R conflict. Both parties are at fault, both parties own some blame, but the situation today is not ok. It was also not ok under Biden, Trump 1, or Obama. We should be looking at ways to get the working class to look past our differences and securing more of the pie for ourselves. We should be reducing the power of the executive, no matter who is sitting in the seat. We should be focusing on the wellbeing of all.
Stop making a team sport, or at least correctly identify that you have way more in common with me (a working class anarchist) than you do with the people in power.
I'm not a tankie, and if you think all leftists are tankies you definitely need to refresh some definitions.
Unless you are saying, "I have nothing in common with the narrow subset of leftists that are tankies" rather than implying I'm a tankie then, sure. I guess you could make that case.
yea right.
Privacy is a fundamental right in the EU (GDPR, Charter of Fundamental Rights), while the U.S. legal system offers almost no general privacy protection. On top of that, the NSA has a long history of warrantless surveillance and backdoors (Snowden, PRISM), with very limited oversight. In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.
> Privacy is a fundamental right in the EU (GDPR, Charter of Fundamental Rights)
A fundamental right that is being challenged every 6 month or so for the last 3 years with the push for Chat Control.
> In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.
Absolutely false. With the way the EU commissions work, all you need is to buy or lobby your way in single one place and then you can push for any agenda that you want.
It does seem culturally popular in UK to have rules and government hoop jumping for every small thing, to the point it's become a tired meme on the internet. The backlash on this one was likely because it happened very quickly and very broadly across the internet at once. They should have slowly expanded the scope as most governments do and maybe the backlash would have been lower.
You seem to be describing the same "boiling frog" idea that Gramsci had of the "Long March through the Institutions", the takeover of a society without need to resort to violence, slowly occupying institutions (government departments, universities, arts, media, schools, corporations, etc) to decide the direction.
The frog has been slowly boiled on online privacy and censorship for decades now. Make no mistake, this is not a swift move - it's a meticulous progression.
I mean, you tell someone 20 years ago that you have to use your real name on websites or provide a phone number and they would look at your like you're crazy. Now, we're demanding people upload real pictures of their real life ID to fuck around on the internet.
I think most of the EU is like this but the UK seems to be either much more so or just much further along the path. Cultures around the world seem to have a kind of familiarity with some "default" type of governance and, in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".
> in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".
This varies a lot by country. The French are still known for their protests, certainly not nearly as violent or disruptive in the modern day as their famous 18th-century revolution but very much quite impactful even so. And German trade unions use strikes very effectively to have a fair outcome in contract negotiations with employers.
Countries in the English-speaking world, certainly including the UK but also the US and Canada, seem a lot more deferential to elites in many ways than most of continental Europe.
It's not uncomfortable everyone knows it. The problem is with self righteous political activists masquerading as judges and civil servants who are so convinced of the justice of their cause that they feel no need to justify themselves to anyone and trample on dissent . And a class of elitist politicians with contempt for the people who voted them in.
The UK has never been a free speech state. Remember the extremely weird era when Gerry Adams MP could not be heard on TV and had to have his voice dubbed?
Few European countries have free speech in the way the US does because their legal frameworks explicitly recognise potential harms from speech and freedoms speech can inhibit and attempt to balance these competing freedoms.
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
> Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
You can find clips of their spokespeople all over the news. There are no restrictions on accessing or viewing it here.
It’s weird to read people from other countries whose views of free speech have shifted so much that they can’t imagine a country where news outlets are allowed to broadcast things like this if they want.
That is a good definition of not having free speech. If it can be whittled away every year at the stroke of a pen by a single parliamentary body (without judicial oversight) it's not really a right, it was just a temporary policy like taxing some new product.
Well the original US system is (so far) the best designed system for protecting from that sort of thing. It has multiple layers of checks via separation of powers, which is the greatest contrast to UK system where courts can't overrule parliament. The courts in the US closely protect the constitutional rights like free speech and are always shutting down new laws.
Constitutional amendments are also an extremely high bar (2/3rds in congress + 2/3rds of state legislators), so much so that they never even try them anymore. So adding a hate speech amendment or "sending offensive messages" law, like the UK did via parliament, would basically be DOA in the US.
But of course all rights can hypothetically be taken away in any human system, if there's enough public support or obedience.
Currently speaking in the US will get you deported, or thrown in jail, or attacked by the government. The supposed checks and balances in the US system have all failed completely, either being overruled or simply ignored. You are at the point where your government is actively censoring your museums to tell a story that fits their propaganda.
It's genuinely hard to see a way out of complete degradation to a failed democracy at this point. None of this is hypothetical either. Sometimes I wonder if people on this site read the news at all, or are just willfully ignoring the reality of the situation.
American museums should not be telling stories to our people that we should be ashamed of ourselves. It's become too much, the pendulum is swinging back. Sorry
We are all Americans. I however don't want to be constantly re-told why our great, if flawed, history makes WASP Americans out to be the bad guys at every turn.
Slavery and segregation are as much a blight on US history as the holocaust on Germany’s. It’s important that the US is not proud of its entire history. I’d rather not have obvious political hacks making decisions about what is on display and for that decision to be at least nominally in the hands of those with most knowledge of the historical details.
So it wasn't political hacks that tried to add their left spin to every piece of American history that they could get their hands on? Not trying to be offensive, but the tone of how American history is re-told today is not what I would consider moderate.
Also see i.e. the bundies who used guns to prevent the government from taking away the private ranching rights that had been homesteaded and passed down prior to the them being nationalized by the BLM.
The 'pen' says they are not allowed to keep grazing their cattle there in Clark county, yet they still are to this day.
The past decade kinda proves this to not be the case though. I think you're conflating constitutional amendments with laws as well to make a point when it's simply a bad comparison. It's like comparing the UK prime minister to a mayor.
> Also, nearly every enemy of the US is on Twitter under their official names.
I'm not sure how fair argument that is. When you're literally the owner of the platform, of course you'd use your real name and the names of the companies you own, on the platform you just bought. Doing anything else would be weird :)
|Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media.
I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.
I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.
The IRA were literally blowing up shopping centres around the time their speech was restricted (not banned) on national TV. Sinn Fein mps were elected because of our weird fptp system and the extreme concentration of nationalist voting blocks.
I didn’t agree with banning Gerry Adam’s voice and had sympathy with the nationalist cause, but let’s not make out like these were mainstream figures. Adam’s and McGuinness were apologists for people waging war against the British state. I strongly suspect a communist group with similar aims would get short shrift in the US.
Free speech is never absolute. Europe and the US have different mechanisms to protect free expression, but net they don’t end up in very different places.
If social media existed then, no doubt Sinn Fein would be on there.
The restrictions were only on the voice— not the words— of people like Adams on national TV channels.
I really don’t think the UK treatment 40 years ago is that unusual and definitely doesn’t speak to the relative freedom of speech in US vs UK
War correspondent Jeremy Scahill of Blackwater and Dirty Wars fame has been doing interviews with and reporting on communiqués from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for quite some time now. I wouldn't be surprised if being able to do this was part of the reason he and Ryan Grim bailed from the Intercept.
Free speech in the US is not absolute. You cannot make true threats or incite violence. For example, calling for the extermination of Democrats or Republicans would cross the line.
Not exactly. The Supreme Court has ruled that general hateful statements can be protected, but if a politician says "Democrats/Republicans should be exterminated" in a way that sounds like a real threat or call to action, it can become incitement or a true threat. So the line isn't about the words alone, it's about context and intent.
The standard as decided in Brandenburg v. Ohio is "imminent lawless action". You're correct that context matters; the speech must be tied to an imminent violation of law. This is a very high bar and in practice is very hard to reach.
Yes the US laws aren't prosecuting speech in isolation, it's always involves some sort of IRL plan to do something illegal. Just like criminal conspiracy laws, they aren't just about telling someone you plan to commit a crime but actually taking earnest steps towards a crime with another party.
If police have QI to stop your speech with impunity, and actually do so, that is just regulating that speech with extra steps.
>The case you cite doesn't appear to make your point.
It does if you go on and read the judgement, which cites that that it is reasonable to initiate a stop for obscenity, which was part of the reasoning used to grant QI.
I think this is beside their point. Police are practically given qualified immunity by default; the case isn't strictly "lost" at this stage, it's lost if that decision is appealed and upheld until the victim is out of appeal options.
To your point, the summary judgement is still a clear injustice and it does practically give police the ability to stop speech whenever they want. But there's an element of random punishment if the person they stop has the resources to appeal the first decision. I'd be surprised if that appeal would be lost in this case given the main problem was the content of the expression; that's a pretty cut-and-dry 1a violation.
(It's a separate issue but there's another problem with the cases in which the officer loses qualified immunity in that the city they work in (tax payers) will pay the damages to shield them from consequences. I forget the legal mechanism but it pretty much always happens.)
The original intent was supposed to be that Adams and others would not be on TV at all. The TV broadcasters relatively quickly realised that there was a loophole which meant that as long as his voice wasn't broadcast they were within the rules. But what was weird was that the UK government didn't immediately close this loophole (especially given that the same loophole was not available in the Republic of Ireland where the same broadcast ban existed at the time).
Small nitpick: I don't think it's right to refer to him as "Gerry Adams MP", due to the policy he followed of refusing to swear the oath of allegiance and thus not taking up the seat.
The problem with the nitpick is it inevitably runs into the issue of who the authority is here, and, by the very nature of the beast, said authority is disputed here. It seems small, but in reality it’s the whole thing.
IIRC, Gerry Adams was always performed by Stephen Rea, a moderately successful actor and heart-throb in certain circles. Adams said that SR “did me better than I do”.
Can't have the populace heating the voice of the guy who was never proven to be a member of the ra, better they listen to the sexy husband of convicted provo bomber Dolours Price instead.
Dolours being the sister of Marian Price who is currently suiting Disney over being depicted shooting Jean McConville in the back of the head in Say Nothing.
For what it’s worth, despite the legal situation, it is virtually unanimously accepted by historians, journalists, academics, and the wider Irish and British public, that Gerry Adams was a member of the IRA. Nobody seriously disputes this.
I mean, I have no opinion on this, but I know that if someone asks me “Are you a member of an organisation it’s a criminal offence to be a member of?” I’m gonna say no.
> A political establishment that builds a "total surveillance police state" is not going to allow itself to be displaced by "elections".
Kier Starmer may be a wildly unpopular leader, even within his own party, and may have declared inconvenient protest groups to be terrorists so they can be banned, and may support a porn ban and an encryption ban, and an expansion of police facial recognition, and may back jailing people for misinformation posted on twitter that lead to riots, and may happily play lapdog to the wildly unpopular Trump government for little benefit.
But he will not call off the next elections, or refuse to step down. He is nowhere near popular enough to succeed at that, even if he tried. He can't even get his own party to pass his government's flagship spending reductions.
It's the direction the state is taking, not the political establishment. Elections are fine because they won't change anything in the way the state is run. If you want proof look at Israel. The moment the right wing, which has been continuously elected into power for the last 20 years or so, and have a clear and undeniable mandate tried to bring the institutions more in line with the people they suddenly found themselves innundated with protests and outright rebellion. Democracy has its limits apparently. I hate to see the UK sliding in that direction.
Yes of course. Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society. It's an old, tired narrative and most of the country can see through it which is why he keeps getting elected.
>Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society.
Well yes this, but unironically.
Of course, add commission of genocide to that list.
It's genocide to defend your country these days. It's amazing how good pr and a concerted media campaign can shift a narrative so far that it's taken for granted, even by pro Israel people that they have to defend against charges of genocide. It's the sort of thing put out by people who want zero accountability and are looking to deflect blame (the UN, Qatar and every other Arab state who helped create this crisis). Yeah I know you're going to say that's netanyahu, but it's obviously not because he would deal in good faith with anyone who would reciprocate. On the very rare occasions that happens he does. He's so far honoured the ceasfires and politically he's offered many concessions to which are usually rejected, because most of the time people are dealing with him and his government in bad faith.
It's quite simple: European states require serious restrictions on liberty in order to do the incredibly unpopular but morally good things they feel they're doing.
One of the weirder ones was up until ~2021 it was illegal in Germany to display the YPG flag (that is you would get stopped by police but not necessarily prosecuted) but not to engage in YPG activities.
The notion that states are the perfect reflection of the democratic will is quite silly.
Suppose a party in Europe is elected on the premise that they will provide free ice cream for all. This is an important issue for people, so they vote for the party. When they get into power, they ban ice cream to promote "healthier living".
Most citizens do not support this policy but they did support the government being elected due to various leveraged mechanisms, such as political polarization, identity politics, laws, outright lies & manipulation, etc.
Ironically, these states keep turning over their leadership because it's incredibly unpopular and the new leadership just continues to do incredibly unpopular things.
>This reluctance extends to different types of platforms. Only around a third would be likely to provide age proof for messaging apps (38%) or social media sites (37%). For user-generated encyclopaedias like Wikipedia, half (51%) say they would be unlikely to submit any proof of age. Just 19% say they would be willing to submit proof of age for dating apps, lowering to 14% for pornography websites.
I think we were moving in that direction. But when Newsom starting posting snark on social media they all fell back in line. People want to be on the winning side. Given the enforcement of the dichotomy they pick one.
Both tories and labour are doing the same kind of politics and are not different at all. From their POV us, people, are the bad guys who has to be restricted.
I'm not a fan of the OSA but proponents of it will *keep winning* if you *keep misrepresenting it*.
You can, and should, argue about the effects but the core of the OSA and how it can be sold is this, at several different levels:
One, most detailed.
Sites that provide user to user services have some level of duty of care to their users, like physical sites and events.
They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
They should implement mitigations based on those risk assessments. Not to completely remove all possibility of harm, but to lower it.
For example, sites where kids can talk to each other in private chats should have ways of kids reporting adults and moderators to review those reports. Sites where you can share pictures should check for people sharing child porn (if you have a way of a userbase sharing encrypted images with each other anonymously, you're going to get child porn on there). Sites aimed at adults with public conversations like some hobby site with no history of issues and someone checking for spam/etc doesn't need to do much.
You should re-check things once a year.
That's the selling point - and as much as we can argue about second order effects (like having a list of IDs and what you've watched, overhead etc), those statements don't on the face of it seem objectionable.
Two, shorter.
Sites should be responsible about what they do just like shops and other spaces, with risk assessments and more focus when there are kids involved.
Three, shortest.
Facebook should make sure people aren't grooming your kids.
Now, the problem with talking about " a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored," is where does that fit into the explanations above? How do you explain that to even me, a highly technical, terminally online nerd who has read at least a decent chunk of the actual OFCOM guidelines?
This isn't a new issue, and it predates the internet. There were publishers of magazines containing pornography (or anything else unsuitable for children). These were sold in shops. A publisher had to ensure that the material in the magazines was legal to print, but it wasn't their responsibility to prevent children from looking at their magazines, and it's difficult to see how that would even be possible. That was the responsibility of the people working in the shops: they had to put the magazines on the top shelf, and weren't allowed to sell them to children.
On the internet, people don't get porn videos directly from pornographic web sites, just as in the past they didn't buy porn directly from the publishers. The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops. So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs. And British ISPs are within the UK's jurisdiction.
And before anyone points out that there are workarounds that children could use to bypass controls, this was also the case with printed magazines.
I don't have a problem with holding companies responsible for the products they sell. But your analogy breaks down because the shop owner chooses the products to sell in his shop. The porn mags aren't in the shop unless he specifically arranges to sell them, so it's easy to say he's responsible for keeping kids away from them.
An ISP doesn't do that. A better match for an ISP would be the trucking company that hauls magazines (porn and otherwise) from publishers to shops, or the company that maintains the shop's cash register.
> I don't have a problem with holding companies responsible for the products they sell.
That's why I wrote, "A publisher had to ensure that the material in the magazines was legal to print." Web sites should also follow the laws of the countries where they are based, but not be required to follow other countries' laws. In the specific case here, a UK body is trying to collect daily fines from a US based web site (4chan.org) with no physical UK presence.
> An ISP doesn't do that.
For over a decade, they have been blocking traffic to/from web sites deemed unsuitable for children, by default. Which should make people wonder what this adult verification is actually for.
> but it wasn't their responsibility to prevent children from looking at their magazines
They weren't made to guarantee no child could peek at them, no, but they do have age restrictions that are followed (a child who picks one up couldn't buy it) and they were often on the top shelf. The kind of thing a basic risk assessment would flag "hey we keep the hardcore porn in front of the pokemon magazines...".
> The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops
The pictures emit photons which fly through the air to the child. The air is the shop.
Or for websites your computer is the shop.
The ISP is not the shop. Nor in the OSA is it viewed as such. The company who makes the service has some responsibility.
> So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs.
This fundamentally cannot work for what is in the OSA, and if you cannot see why almost immediately then you do not know what is in the OSA and cannot effectively argue against it. It is not a requirement to add age checks to porno sites.
This seems like a misrepresentation of OSA more so than the parent post. It prevents people accessing content they may well need. Look at some of the subreddits being blocked if you want to see how far they go. Subs about periods, sex education, stopping smoking, suicide prevention, lgbtq. Not sure how you justify that nobody under 18 would ever have a need to access these things.
When you have to prove you're a child you have to prove you're and adult. The privacy implications of that are why it's a police state problem. It eliminates the anonymity and allows for perfect personal tracking of any wrongthink you may do.
It's also not the only thing the UK government has done to become a police state by a long shot. UK is 1984 adjacent in quite a few ways.
This is mostly true. It fails to mention "is the user a kid" is unverifiable without imposing identify verification, which implies that all speech (which is already monitored) is now self-censored, effectively turning the state in a surveillance state. You don't need to be throwing people in jail for that, having a credible means of identifying anyone online is enough.
Age checks are not fundamentally required by the OSA. It's really, really important that if you want to argue against it you argue against what's actually in it.
I was not arguing against OSA, I was arguing about your point that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with "if there are kids involved, care should be taken". Yes there is, because we can't know if there are kids involved without turning into a surveillance state.
> They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
The problem is when one group wants to impose their definition of harm on everyone else, saying that everyone else shouldn't be allowed to be 'harmed' even if they don't consider it as such. In the UK this is not unique to the OSA discussion(see the UK's anti-trans turn), and but it is very relevant.
This is a very valid point and importantly one of the more detailed issues.
So it's a good one to start with when arguing against the OSA - you say harm but what does that mean? What must sites assume it could mean? And examples of helpful kinds of things that would fall under at least the risk of getting caught out.
> allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government
The UK isn't any of that, it's always be an authoritarian country. The fact that British are amongst the most apathetic people on Earth fuels that, they just accept everything.
You're right - it's disgusting that their government told them that Nazism is bad and that they should fight to defend their own country. Fucking appalling, really.
Just to clarify, what you're saying is that the nazis weren't actually all that bad, the British history books have just deliberately written them as bad people?
I don't think that's what the parent was saying. They are saying the Nazis are truly evil, but the Brits are also truly evil. A different truly evil, of course, I'm not going to weigh tragedies against one another.
And they're not wrong. The British empire killed millions through policy -- read up on the Bengali famine to understand one example where Britain killed millions. Britain was one of the earliest users of concentration camps, deploying them during the Boer War.
This feels very broad strokes. It's like saying Germany is bad because of Nazi Germany. That's not to excuse terrible actions but that these histories are long with a variety of leaders and popular beliefs. So viewing a country as a monolith in line with all its past crimes seems very nationalistic.
Using more current context, leadership and events seems like a more realistic view of things. Which doesn't mean the UK is a shining beacon of freedom or democracy, but just to better explain why things happen instead of blaming events of leaders who are not in office or even alive.
They're not saying the Nazis are truly evil at all, they're just saying that the British people shouldn't have fought the Nazis or were hoodwinked by the govt.
The British were evil, the Chinese were evil, the Japanese were evil, the Belgians were evil, the Spanish were evil, the Incas were evil, the Mongols were evil, the French were evil, the Iroquois were evil, the ancient Egyptians were evil, etc etc etc.
> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored
It’s not like this is new or unique to the UK, the US has been busted indiscriminately spying on all of its citizens multiple times - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Mass surveillance doesn’t seem very difficult to build if you have power. If you don’t build it, it seems like step 4 hit becomes “they build it and use it against you.” That’s not to say it’s a good idea to build such a thing, but the “your enemies will use it against you” argument doesn’t make much sense to me. The only real solution to bad guys gaining power is to either prevent them from gaining power or remove them if they already have.
But that is astonishingly idealistic in the best case.
What happens is generational shifts over longer periods of time mean that draconian law or feature has more and more chances to be used by someone with bad intentions. It's the law of large numbers or murphy's law in full effect, it's not just 1 or 2 people.
I think we should distinguish between someone with bad intentions in a position of power, and the entire power of the state being taken over by people with bad intentions. The possibility of the former does indeed seem like a good argument for not building total surveillance systems. But I read the comment as talking about the latter.
The West aren't good guys and have never been the good guys. We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to, but without that to contrast with, we look increasingly like the managed democracies you see out East.
What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.
- It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
- It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
- It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
- It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
- It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
Places like China are finding out why you need these things, and are building these systems so their society can succeed.
Democracy's just an (Western) artifact of enforcing and maintaining rule of law.
> What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.
The trouble with this is that it isn't compatible with prosecutorial discretion. It requires that if someone is breaking the law, they get prosecuted for it. Otherwise unenforced laws accumulate until everyone is breaking a hundred laws at any given time and then only the disfavored get prosecuted.
But if you want laws to be consistently enforced then they need to be few and simple enough for people to understand and comply with them, and that was historically the magic formula, which we've increasingly abandoned, much to our detriment.
And those exceptions largely prove the rule - the default expectation (not just desire) is that those things not happen. They still do, but it's not something that occurs to most off the tops of their heads. When you educate people on civil forfeiture you get a lot of shocked Pikachu; somewhat fewer with severe water quality issues, but I think that's mostly due to broad publication of Flint's situation in particular raising general awareness.
FWIW… that you can only point to one specific place in the USA with bad water, and some non-specific generalized place is a fairly good point against your argument.
> It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
> It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
Yeah the comment you're replying to feels very insulated from the real world. It's the kind of thing you'd hear in a middle school social studies class about how great America is.
I mean, I'm not one of those "America/West Bad" people either, it's just "rule of law" is not it. We are well into our Kleptocracy era. Still prefer what we have to alternatives though.
All of these examples serve to prove their point, being that "advanced societies" use rule of law to deal with such problems. It is consistent in that view that they occur due to a lack of enforcement of the laws/regulations that prevent them.
This is a bit complicated. Law can absolutely be used to persecute people.
For example, there once was so-called Bill of Attainder, which basically meant that a certain person was labeled as an outlaw, traitor, and handled as such.
It was an actual law, voted on by the Parliament, but even though usage of Bills of Attainder was perfectly consistent with rule of law, it was not that different from a classical Stalinist show trial in effect.
This is also why Bills of Attainder are banned by the US Constitution.
While the West aren't really the good guy, I think there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy. Because while government outreach like those discussed are a scary possibility in the West nowadays, in the 'East' (more like Russia & China), it is a given and there are no recourse.
> there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy
The problem is you don't know how you are actually behaving towards the global south, so your perception is very skewed and people outside the west will have a vastly different perception than you, that you will never understand. Like some people in the west are waking up on Israels behavior now, but the rest of the world was aware of their genocidal terror for over half a century while you lived in innocent bliss. They see your support for Obama and Dove emojis in your profile picture while their entire extended families are getting systematically murdered by your bombs to this day.
Meanwhile in your made up fantasy land, its China that is this great threat to world peace.
Yeah, its amazing how good the isralies are at everything (tech, intelligence, manufacturing) but its taking them years to commit genocide. Despite their massive force advantage.
Genocide is a process and intent, not an outcome. Are you saying it's not genocide because everyone's not dead or forced off their land yet?
Considerably fewer civilians died in say, Srebrenica. Bosnian Muslims still live there. There are still Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda. The original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia still live there.
I'd also note -- as someone who's lived there -- that what Israel as a nation really excels at isn't tech, intelligence or manufacturing. Plenty of other countries are equal and above. I'd say it's marketing and comms.
If anyone is trying to "gaslight" anyone, it's going to be in the direction of justifying the actions of Israel (or the West's support of or complicity in it).
The West is the least bad if you live in an area where Western forces aren't currently bombing you or directly supporting the people starving you to death. Then China probably seems a lot better.
From the perspective of the Gazan parents watching their children starve to death, yes, China probably seems a lot better than the UK, which is directly responsible for their situation.
The Ukrainian parent suffering Russian bombing is likely has a much better opinion of the UK for their support, but that doesn't make the UK the good guys. Just less bad in that particular situation.
From the perspective of the Gazan parents, the worst of all should be Hamas (who is actually directly responsible for their situation) since they insist on poking the bear and getting Gaza into military conflicts they can't win.
Sometimes I wonder what contemporary Hacker News would say about my country freedom fighters back in the day. If they lost, I'm pretty sure we would call them terrorists or bandits instead.
Pretty callous. I doubt dying Ukrainians care that you dismiss their war as "proxy". The unprovoked invasion and resulting deaths are a fact. And Russia absolutely wants to destroy the Ukrainian identity, so that actually is a genocide.
Forced deportation of Ukrainian children, the rhetoric denying Ukrainian nationhood and massacres in places like Bucha definitely put the Ukrainian war into genocide territory.
But if you want to talk about "real" genocides, China is backing Myanmar.
How is it a genocide? It's pretty clearly a war in an urban environment where there will be a lot of civilian casualties. Was the battle of Stalingrad a "genocide" too?
Did you ever expect to be making this kind of argument when you were growing up and learning about 20th century horrors? Or did you imagine yourself the kind of person who would have resisted in 1930s germany?
Russians of any gender or minority could vote for their representative in 1917. Women in the States only got full suffrage in 1920, African Americans in 1965. So no real pedigree there.
But a whole state-level legislative architecture meant that suffrage wasn't accessible nationwide till the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Modern voter registration laws, which are gathering pace today, are largely targeted at keeping minority voters from exercising their democratic rights.
No, it's not naive at all. The UK in particular are not the good guys.
Apart from their appalling behaviour during their recent expeditionary wars, their current support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, their sexual and physical abuse of locals near British Overseas bases, they also have an incredibly poor record with their own citizens.
British behaviour in Northern Ireland was itself genocidal, and involved the regular murder of civilians from decades. Even today they are continuing the legal protection of the perpetrators.
Well, all countries are complex collections of people and ideas, so like people, there are no pure good guys.
But we have all been subjected to particularly US propaganda portraying the West as the global good guys, and specproc challenged that worldview in the comment to which you replied. Ironically, you criticised him for being naive as he was challenging the concept of the West as the good guys, something you now call naive yourself.
From what I witnessed over years is, European countries loved to point fingers to other countries to educate them about how their democracies shall look like.
Now they are doing the very same things they pointed fingers about and, now there's no structured information flow to hide this.
As I sometimes tend to say: "God has an interesting sense of humor".
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia all have fairly robust democracies. Yes, some of them probably look and feel different than those of NATO, but they are a great improvement over previous colonial administrations, monarchies, theocracies, and "single party democratic states" (Korea and Taiwan before late 1980s/early 1990s break-throughs).
I was thinking largely of Russia, but when it comes to internet freedoms we're absolutely heading in a China direction.
Coming at it here from a broadly UK perspective. We have:
- Very little difference between ruling parties on core issues since the seventies, I'm thinking largely on the economic and foreign policy front here.
- Prison under terrorism offenses for peaceful protest.
- Arrests for (checks notes) complaining about the management of your local school in a WhatsApp group.[1]
People who argue we're somehow better than the people we happen to be fighting need to take a long hard look around. And maybe also remember that when we're not fighting folks (e.g., Saudi, Israel) abhorrent behaviour is tolerated and supported.
Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years. If the ruling party was not friendly to the West, then I bet you it would be called something else than democracy.
> We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to
You can't think yourself a free thinker to realize the west is a force for evil in the world and simultaneously believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism is it makes for a very incoherent world view. "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time."
> believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism
The main problem with communism was that it was much worse than Western propaganda portrayed it to be. Because if Western propaganda had tried to depict it truthfully, no one would have believed it. Communism is so much worse that it is literally unbelievable, so anti-communist propaganda has to make communism look good in order for anyone to believe it.
Propaganda tends to make the victims of that propaganda sound incoherent, but that's ok, the only purpose it really serves today, is to explain to you why you can't have health care.
Small-c conservatism, think-of-the-children Think Tanks™ have long been a part of British politics and we go barely a week between legitimate studies and idle thought pieces where we introspect modern parenting and despair.
Like it or not, kids have access to the internet in a way that wasn't true 20, 25 years ago. Parents of teens are just realising the horrors of targeted online bullying, diet clubs, porn sharing (Snapchat and worse) and the many other small things that can just destroy kids before they've had a chance.
"But Oli," I hear you say... Yes. Parents should do better but criminalising parenting methods is hard and expensive and leaves you with a bunch of state-orphaned kids. So if we are to assume parents gonna parent, systems like this look tempting to people who don't understand the Internet.
I'm not defending the law, I just don't think this one has its roots in surveillance. It's a shitty reaction to a shitty situation.
That's assuming voting systems or checks and balances don't matter. If you made structural mistakes in how you choose politicians, you're going to have a worse time than if you use better systems.
See what is happening here in U.S. as an example; our government was rather easy to corrupt in less than a few months once all the pieces were in place (regardless of who put them in place and for what reason).
The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives. It's a completely foreign paradigm to the average American, though alarming "progress" has been made on the American front as of late.
No. We were typically indifferent to our Government. Very much a case of 'go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.' But substitute 'tea'.
But in the last couple of decades, things have changed. Arguably, a public referendum in 2016, was very much a protest vote against several Parliaments that didn't listen to its citizens. And the last decade shows nothing has changed.
My friends and family, and myself included, were never very political, and very much a case of 'No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In', but now everyone is talking about the Government. Interesting times ahead.
Obviously few would with that framing, but if they're given policies, lots of British people across the political spectrum would support ones that are more paternalistic.
Support for the OSA is very high: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
British people are much happier with the state being paternalistic, across the political spectrum, it is a very strong differentiator between the US and the UK. "The government should do something!" You can see it in attitudes to the NHS, pensions, welfare. At its peak, in the 70s, 32% of people lived in social housing!
Labour voters, young and old, are generally quite paternalistic. Lots of Conservative voters are too, depending on the flavour. The exceptions are the Lib Dems and some conservative tribes. I am consistently surprised when talking to highly-educated, politically engaged people, left or right, how much the default is that the state should act.
Why won't the government do something is the refrain that everyone including opposing parties are saying. God forbid anyone should take initiative on anything.
And the state keeps on expanding year after year. I cannot remember the last time someone did not promise to shrink the state/government and once elected did a complete 180. It's bonkers.
I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.
When I talk to people in Britain about sugar-taxes, smoking bans, porn bans, hate-speech laws, etc, most people will explain that without these things people will say/do harmful things therefore the government should stop them.
I remember when they started rolling out biometric facing scanning technology in stores and using it to ban people from all supermarkets within a designated area – basically forcing them to shop in smaller stores without these cameras or get their friends and family to buy their groceries. I thought this was utterly insane but to be horror Brits seem to almost universally support of this stuff because face scanning is a great way to identity people which private companies have flagged high-risk.
Our opinion of others is very low, and are comfort with authoritarianism is relatively high.
It's disturbing to me that so much of this type of legislation originates with the "Conservatives", and the only viable alternative in Labour thinks this type of legislation doesn't go far enough. I guess at least things will be interesting with Farage in Number 10.
They think (like many Americans right now) that it will only be done against ‘those other people’. When they realize it’s been applied to them, it’s too late (they’ve been ‘othered’ now) and people will ignore them - or they’ll have to blame themselves or cover it up in order to fit in.
It’s classic.
Eventually, enough people will have been fucked by it that the numbers will shift back the other way - and then the opposite end of the pathology (not being able to recognize the main groups own needs enough to defend them or pull together as a coherent group) starts building.
I think there’s more difference than there has been since the 1980s. People really underestimate how far the Tory base (and parliamentary party following closely) have shifted to the right. The willingness of sitting Tory MPs to knowingly lie and dissemble on immigration related issues to create heat is a real break from a past consensus.
Current opinion polls for both are abysmal, but I don't think that civic freedoms are the main reason; the main reason is immigration, which all the previous governments promised to limit and then silently decided not to.
Decided not to, but continued to actively campaign on. It’s created a really weird situation where the actual policy choices are hugely disconnected from the rhetoric and emotion in the debate.
Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.
For the Conservatives it's all about irregular/illegal immigration. Labour are hugely unpopular on that having apparently no idea what to do about it but they also have massive challenges on the economy/cost of living and the state of publicly funded services.
Immigration is sucking support more from the tories than labour. They rode into power based upon a promise to do something about it and then massively increased it.
Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.
My comment provoked you enough to create an account just to make a throwaway insult reply to it. I think perhaps it hit closer to home than you would care to acknolwedge.
As with your initial comment, none of these assertions are correct.
This is not a throwaway account or comment - it is my first and only HN account.
The comment I made was not an insult, but was made to flag the ignorance and stupidity of yours - maybe take a look at the subreddit and see if you can see some parallels. If you have taken it as an insult then that's fine.
Well, I offered my observations and a few people agreed with me to varying degrees. You asserted I'm wrong, ignorant, and stupid. Perhaps that is true; it is not, however, an argument.
Again, none of these statement are true. When you wrote "The thing you have to understand", this is not an observation - it is a statement of objective fact. I never asserted you were ignorant and stupid - I initially implied your comment was, which it objectively is.
Going by that reasoning someone must be clearly doing something wrong considering they seem to voice their political will at about the same rate as the politically active Americans.
Turnout in the latest presidential/general elections:
2025 German federal election 82.5%
2024 United Kingdom general election 59.7%
2022 French presidential election 73.69%(I)/71.99%(II)
This is the first time in a long time on Hacker News that I've not seen universal disapproval to this measure. People are actually arguing for it, even as a devil's advocate? What the UK has been doing is wrong, it is disenfranchising and disempowering people.
The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore. It's always been ruled by a crowd of people who went to privately-funded schools that cost a fortune. Half the government's politicians and staffers can trace their relations back to the same historical personage.
They aren't afraid for their kids with these laws. They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break, and they will be out of a job with pitchfork-wielding crowds chasing them out of London.
I don't think anyone can assume that every comment on HN comes from a real human anymore. This law comes from the same nation that gave us Cambridge Analytica.
HN is a large enough forum that it would be included in any serious propaganda campaign.
Hacker News users now profit from extensive invasion of privacy, from Facebook to LinkedIn, to every ad network, VPN, ISP, etc... They all trade in our private info daily. 20 years ago, the battle cry was around privacy and government monitoring of all traffic and how bad that was. Now people climb over one another to give away their data for free in exchange for mind-altering social media platforms and AI driven nonsense.
I am convinced Libertarians do not exist. The current state of the US should drive them to utter insanity, and yet, they tend to be mostly silent on all of these corporate over reach issues. People who say they are Libertarian just don't want to pay parking tickets. If the real techno Libertarians existed, they'd be burning our current Valley to the ground. Anyone who cared about the 2nd amendment should be losing their minds over military deployments on US soil. Constitution huggers should be screaming bloody murder, daily. Instead, those types are super happy with their new dictator. Funny how all the performative anger goes away when it's their side that is performing the authoritarian actions. The NRA seems to LOVE this willing take over of the well armed militias by the federal government... But I digress.
Instead, the reigning philosophy here is now greed. Privacy, sovereignty, ownership, open source, all those things are forgotten in the backseat of the crypto and VC cash car.
It surprises me how little the newer generations care about ethics, morality, principles. Call them whatever you want, but it really feels like everyone screams about how righteous they are, how wrong everyone else is, and then they take the cash and stand up for nothing when the chips are down.
Remember when the big thing we were worried about was the NSA recording our phone calls? Now large corporations harvest our call info, chat texts, social media posts, and even the raw microphone input on our phones to strip every last piece of information about us and mine it for data to influence our lives, purchases, and even out thoughts. And what did we do in the last election? We put in the party that will remove even more roadblocks from this type of thing, and has deregulated crypto. Victory!
How did we get here? Where are the Cypherpunks? Where are the high ideals we used to have?
I think it's less that HN users profit from privacy invasion as much as some of them aspire to run companies that do so. Perhaps a distinction without a difference.
Clearly showcasing that the UK chose their target wisely. Use a disliked entity as the way in the door, and people will argue for it without realizing it's a trojan horse.
I'd assume those are just another symptoms of the Thielverse and where would be a better place to have it seeping into the younger, well fed tech scene than hn?
They know that they'll still be able to get around those "Inconveniences" or create their own elite places while the majority of the general public won't and we're not giving a damn about the general public anymore. That's woke and not trendy anymore.
I mean, this is so obviously wrong. People would be ashamed to argue for it back in the days.
Yep, and if that really is the case, and if they really do intend on 'preserving knowledge' in their own inner circles and special getaways, then they will be setting themselves up for a dark age. A popular backlash against all elite things will always be bad, but throwing in knowledge, liberty, and freedom into that mix will guarantee something even more terrible.
my thought on that is a lot of these folks are in for a rude awakening if they think their positions will be preserved in a society that transitions to an illiberal autocratic society. I flat do not believe they have what it takes to hang with eg the russian mafia, the saudi royal family.
It’s not an accident that we just went through one of the biggest cultural revolutions in the software development world. Look at how we treated people like Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Brendan Eich, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, and even John Carmack. One by one, they were sidelined, pushed out, or publicly flogged for being insufficiently “progressive,” for holding “outdated” views, or simply for the crime of being older white men who had the misfortune of building the foundations of the field before today’s ideological climate took over.
But the important part is that we never really replaced them with anyone of similar weight. There was no next generation of cultural or intellectual heavyweights ready to step in. Instead, the online crowd splintered into political factions, with one side demanding constant ideological purity and the other reacting by withdrawing, going independent, or outright rejecting the institutions they had once built.
In the meantime, corporations managed to capture the new generation of young hackers by presenting themselves as “woke.” Put up the right rainbow flag at the right time, make the right statements, and suddenly the deep distrust people had toward big tech in the 90s and 2000s started to fade.
When Eric Raymond, who is no longer officially involved in the Open Source Initiative (which he cofounded in 1998 or 1999 or so) addressed a forum of its members, OSI officials or forum officials banned him from the forum and invited anyone who felt traumatized by Eric's words or merely by his appearance on the forum to come forward.
> They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break
And give way to what? You're making a lot of noise that sounds like you want liberation and freedom, but freedom from what? What is it you think the current system of democracy (which has always included intrusions into absolute personal freedom by the way) will give way to? An anarcho-capitalist state? A communist utopia? A breakdown in law and order?
The system WE built over the last 800 years is the most prosperous free society we have ever known. There is no absolute monarch, no forced labor. What do you want to replace it with?
You live in a society of surveillance. Google surveils every single action you take on the internet, as does Facebook, X, and whatever partners they share that information with. That's not a system built by the government "elites" that was built by for profit enterprise in a "free-market". Now the populous at large wants to make use of those same levers of power, and you make it sound like they're responsible for all of it.
Democracies can't survive with unfettered free speech. It's called the Paradox of tolerance [1] or sometimes the Popper paradox (after Karl Popper).
I don't know if you've ever seen some of the dark corners of the Internet. This includes 4chan, Kiwi Farms and, well, arguably Twitter at this point. Twitter has really become 4chan. But I digress.
We, as a society, are fine with suppressing certain kinds of speech. We always have. We can use CSAM as an obvious counterexample to free speech absolutism. There's no way to reconcile banning that and free speech absolutism. At some point it comes down to deciding certain kinds of expression is simply unacceptable.
Now is the UK government using 4chan (etc) as a stalking horse for a wider surveillance state? Almost certainly.
We saw a similar thing when Apple wanted to scan all private messages for CSAM. They faced a completely understandable backlash and reversed course.
But we don't have to defend 4chan or Kiwi Farms to oppose a surveillance state.
The game Alpha Centauri had the most hard hitting quote that I think applies now.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
The individual isn't a broadcaster - the new broadcasters are YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and all the other platforms that choose which content to amplify.
The content recommendation algorithms are designed by humans, who are just following orders from the wealthiest, most powerful people on earth.
The only sources of information we currently see about protests happening across the US are by small broadcasters. There is plenty of news that is being systematically being suppressed by the top-down information chain because it is so effective in clamping down dissent.
IMO, free flowing information still remains the best safeguard against tyranny.
Doesn't this imply that what we're seeing today and calling tyranny is more free than what came before? (anyone can become an individual broadcaster)
Put another way - is this a case of the tyrannical calling the free tyrants? If Orwell or Huxley taught us anything it's that this how a state maintains its illusion/power - manipulating language and perception to make their control seem necessary/liberating.
That's because we're not seeing _actual_ tyranny. Maybe a would-be tyrant, tryannical tendencies or a slide toward tyranny, however you might want to phrase it, but it's not tyranny.
Individual broadcasters are also the largest detractors along with supporters.
This looks a lot like tyranny to me. Small scale and many may feel its justified but ICE appears to be acting repeatedly in defiance of lawful orders here.
When is it tyranny? When he send the military into 19 states under federal control? Or does it have to be when he’s actually ordering the killings of his opponents?
It very much is, but even if every possible solution is worse than the problem, which they very well may be, I think recognising there is a problem there is useful.
Rather than the angry denial and cries of censorship that often occur after someone points it out.
Those are two independent problems. If you have a centralized system, you're screwed, because they just capture it. If you have a decentralized system vulnerable to propaganda techniques then they do that.
What you need is a decentralized system resistant to propaganda techniques.
Maybe it just needs provenance. So bad actors can't flood the system.
Counter to the above is that, your bad actor may be my leader. People like convenience. When someone is expressing what you want to say, in a better and smarter way, you just reshare/retweet them. And the 'other side' will feel like your leader is a 'bad actor' who is flooding the system. So even the method of resharing/retweeting needs some sort of provenance/single use only. So you can 'agree' with your thought leader, but they shouldn't be able to mass manufacture consent. Since you might even reshare 'fake news' since you generally trust your leader. It's messy, not sure what that would look like - every post that starts getting traction needs to be fact checked? Community Notes on X is a step in the right direction maybe.
Of course not. That shouldn't even be possible in a properly designed system.
Rather what you need is a means for propaganda to be rapidly identified and refuted with counterarguments in a way that its would-be victims can see it.
Additionally, it’s usually more effort to refute something than to state something, especially as it seems there is little requirement for proof when making the statement.
We already have largely decentralized speech in the US via the internet. And much like how the printing press gave everyone a voice or how radio created Hitler, the internet is the modern age vehicle of populist messaging.
The reason someone like Trump can rise to power and consolidate said power is because he speaks simple and lies work in a decentralized system. Populist messaging is built on the fact that humans are naturally drawn to simple solutions and emotional responses. 90% of the time throughout American and European history, if you just tell people "this is ethnic/racial group X's fault!", that works.
I mean, just as the phrase goes "your terrorist is my rebel," one could say "your propaganda is my information." That's exactly why a decentralized system matters. It doesn't just resist capture by a single authority, it allows competing narratives to exist side by side. What one group sees as misinformation, another might see as essential context. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate bias entirely, but to prevent any one group from controlling the flow of all information.
And how do you prevent the bad actors from flooding the decentralized systems with propaganda? Nowadays there are millions of bad actors each sending one propaganda message, all slightly different. When any other criteria is not reliable (like source of information, or lack of bias), volume of message distribution (how often that and related messages pop up in the feed) becomes the last indicator people use.
Not specifically related to this “child protection” thing, but you can’t deny that the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things, driven by actors such as states, magnified x1000 by social media, and now also AI.
Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I’m 100% for personal liberty and accountability, and admittedly I don’t have a solution for this.
I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.
Again just to be clear this has nothing to do with the UK thing which I strongly disagree with.
The free flow of information isn't driving extremism, it's echo chambers. People have a tendency of surrounding themselves with only those who already agree with them on some topic, so that a heavily partisan position suddenly becomes 'moderate.' This is how you have people simultaneously claiming, for instance, that the US is becoming more liberal than ever, and that it's becoming more conservative than ever.
You can also see this with the perception gap [1]. Those who are most involved in politics tend to be the paradoxically least knowledgeable about what 'the other side' thinks and believes. Typical contemporary examples would be republicans thinking democrats want to defund the police, or democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.
When you have contrary ideas bouncing against each other, poor ideas are easily demonstrated to be such - and you get a more realistic view of what people 'on the other side' actually think and believe. It naturally tempers against radicalism. But when you start to control information, you get the opposite. This is made even worse by the sort of people that find themselves on a life trajectory to go work, let alone volunteer, for the 'Ministry of Truth'. They tend to be the exact sorts that want to create information bubbles and echo chambers.
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In general I think the truth tends to trickle up, even if it might get a bit dirty on the way there. I'd appeal to places like the USSR on that. They not only directly controlled absolutely all published information, but strictly controlled migration in and out of the country, informers everywhere making people terrified of speaking their mind, and just generally had a rock solid grip on information. The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. There's a great series of jokes from the era here. [2] On of my favorites, "Why do we need two central newspapers, Truth (Pravda) and News (Izvestiya) if both are organs of the same Party? Because in Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth."
> The result? People still knew they were all full of shit.
It's just that the purpose of all this totalitarian control wasn't so that people wouldn't know. It was so that people couldn't do anything about it even if they knew.
The result was achieved, the measures you listed as examples worked effectively.
Was it? The USSR didn't even make it to its 70th birthday. The leaders of the next generation are brought up in the current. Gorbachev essentially destroyed the USSR, but that's probably in large part because his formative years where under Stalin. His first major foray into politics was as as a rather enthusiastic advocate of the de-Stalinization that happened after Stalin's death. So the leader of a system was somebody who lived under, suffered under, and likely loathed, even if secretly, that system.
This is one of the many examples of the consequences of actions stretching out much further than many realize. A famous quote from Stalin is that, "I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy." His Machiavellian vision likely had him seeing himself as the savior of the USSR, when in reality his actions are almost certainly a key reason that it no longer exists today.
> The USSR didn't even make it to its 70th birthday.
Not because the will or the struggle of the people.
Gorbachev began to abolish the aforementioned totalitarian measures, creating the opportunity for a party coup. If totalitarian control had not been weakened, nothing would have prevented the Soviet Union from existing to this day.
> Gorbachev essentially destroyed the USSR
No, he didn't do that. He loosened the totalitarian control, and that was it. Then other opportunistic leaders of the Communist Party took advantage of the situation and seized power, dividing up the resources of the huge country among themselves. And because the old regime was full of shit and everyone knew it, no one stood up for it.
> his actions are almost certainly a key reason that it no longer exists today.
Rather, his actions were the reason why the Soviet regime lasted so long. I mean, the unviability of the socialist project was a proven fact in 1918, long before the USSR was even called that. And everything that happened after that was simply an attempt to cling to power by totalitarian and terrorist methods, first by Lenin, then by Stalin.
I don't suppose I really disagree with any of this, but I do want to highlight that there are really more than two sides on basically all issues. Traditional media did a terrible job of portraying this, typically lazily assuming that the parties form the opposite ends of the political spectrum and that people discontented with both parties naturally fall between them. This is the dynamic that implies one or two "wedge" issues dominate politics, and most things people likely want to discuss/improve/address aren't even on the table. Social media may stoke radicalism, but the underlying discontent was there before—politicians could just act like it was ridiculous.
And yes, there are people—like you—who continue to act like there is "the other side" when the way people characterize themselves outside of partisan affiliation is much more nuanced and complex. Eg there are many, many Americans who are anti-war, but there is simply no anti-war vote on most ballots, nor certainly any anti-war party.
In other words, manufacturing consent got us into this mess, social media just makes us anxiously aware of how bad mainstream media was at capturing the political sentiments of the people who live here. That includes, yes, radicals (violent bigots & ideologues), but this also includes realizing that many or most people have no idea what the party whose candidates they vote for actually stand for.
I've put a lot of effort in surrounding myself with people very unlike myself in the last year for reasons, in-person, around real-life activities and scenarios, where politics is simply not relevant outside of stimulating conversation. What I've put together is that basically nobody in this country is both well-educated about politics and satisfied with either party. We've somehow created a two-legged monster that doesn't want to do, you know, the actual substantial end of democracy. Now, I discovered this in the real world, but social media has made it much easier to see if you relentlessly block all "both sides"/"other side" partisans and look directly to values, struggles, desires, etc.
But, this does take discipline, and if you're trying to tune out, you're a prime candidate to be taken directly into outragetainment.
When asked "On the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today?", 64% of Republicans state it is a good thing. [1] And note that that question has dubious phrasing since it simply says immigration. Change that to legal immigration and the number will probably be more in the 90% range.
Notably this (64%) is higher than even the Democrat level up until about 2012, after the Occupy Wallstreet movement.
There’s a concept in economics called “revealed preferences.” The idea is that you might not say what you really want, or even know it, but your behavior reveals it.
For example, somebody might say that they hate tiny airline seats and they’d gladly pay substantially extra for more legroom. But then they’ll be presented with a choice of an airline ticket with more legroom, or the exact same ticket but with less legroom for $3 less, and they’ll choose the latter. Their revealed preference is that they don’t actually value legroom very much, despite what they say.
Likewise, if someone says that they support immigration, but you vote for and continue to support someone who opposes immigration to the point of carrying out heinous human rights abuses against legal immigrants, well, actions speak louder than words.
I’m pretty sure this is the “virtue signaling” that people are always going on about. Supporting immigration is seen as a good thing, so people say they do. But when it comes down to actual concrete policy, they don’t. This used to be covered by the fig leaf of “we support legal immigration” but that’s gone now.
With due respect, think about what you're doing. You're now simply discarding any poll that doesn't conform to your own personal biases, and replacing those data with some rather extreme partisan talking points. This is the point about stepping out of bubbles. The people you see as 'the other side' do not think in any way, shape, or fashion like you believe that they might.
For instance if you went up to an average Republican and said 'So what do you think about the human rights abuses being carried out against legal immigrants?' The overwhelming majority would have literally no clue what you're talking about. If you explained this incident or that, their response is going to be 'Well that's dumb. I hope they're doing something so this doesn't happen again.'
It's like if you went up to the average Democrat and asked them what they think about having explicit LGB books made available to minors in schools? Again the overwhelming majority would have literally no clue what you're talking about. If you explained this incident or that, their response is going to be 'Well that's dumb. I hope they're doing something so this doesn't happen again.'
The 'other side' these bubbles build up simply doesn't exist in reality.
What "rather extreme partisan talking points" are those? Referring to the well-attested, widely-reported abuses of immigrants by this administration is not extremely partisan, it's just facts.
I know Republicans. I talk to Republicans. They know about this stuff and they're fine with it. They know they're not supposed to be, so they deflect. They'll say what's happening to immigrants is no different from being arrested for a crime you didn't commit, then released. They'll insist that the victim was a terrible criminal regardless of the facts. What they don't do is express any reservations whatsoever about it.
I suppose you might make an argument that this deflection indicates an overall approval of immigration since they need to find excuses to support the administration's anti-immigration actions. I would argue that if you claim to believe one thing, but you always find an excuse to defend actions against it, then you don't actually believe it.
Polls are not magic opinion-finding systems. They report what people say. This demonstrably frequently diverges from what people actually do, think, and feel.
1. What republican constituency wants and what republican polices are do not align. For example, most Republicans support Donald Trump. Most do not know anything about Donald Trump's policies. Most will directly say they disagree with a policy, and yet they will still support Trump. If you tell them said policy is a Trump policy, they will either say that it's not true or say that they misspoke, and they do agree with it.
For example, practically all of Project 2025 has been well underway. Prior to the election, it was clear that republican constituents DID NOT support Project 2025. However, if you simply say Project 2025 policies without using the word "Project 2025", then they do support it.
2. Republicans and conservatives at large will just lie if they believe you are willing to make a moral judgment on them.
For example, if you ever go on Hinge or Tinder or whatever dating app you choose, Republican voters will almost all be "apolitical" or "not interested in politics". They will not mention who they voted for and they will purposefully deceive potential partners so they can avoid what they feel is a moral judgement.
Probably republican voters here felt the question was asked in a pointed or morally judgmental way, so I'm sure a good amount just lied and said they do support immigration. If you then poll how many voted for, say, Trump, who is explicitly anti-immigration (not anti-illegal immigration, anti-immigration) then your numbers will change.
Now, this IS NOT to say that republican voters are stupid or liars. The republican party is, right now and for the past decade and then some, run by populist leaders.
This is the direct result of populist messaging. There are also populist leftist leaders - they just do not currently exist in the US.
That's a lot less true than the "all democrats want to defund the police". Where all democrats certainly didn't want to defund the police immediately post-George Floyd but there were a large amount of democrats that wouldn't publicly say that when prompted to.
On the other hand, you'll find plenty of Republicans today who would say that they think legal immigration is great.
The main point is neither of those were ever true and the situation with Democrats was largely caused by the outsized influence of vocal minorities, not of actual sentiment. Similarly, there are plenty of Republicans who think that the current actions of ICE are over the line but won't speak up.
Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
Different technologies are in different places on the "societal usefullness versus danger" spectrum. Nuclear weapons are obviously on the "really fricking dangerous" side, no country lets a civilian own them. Forks are obviously on the "useful" side, even though you can technically use one to gouge somebody's eye out.
What's the right tradeoff for guns, printing presses, typewriters and social media companies is a matter of some debate.
Knives in the UK are age restricted for purchase. Anyone can carry a folding pocket knife with a blade less than 3" without needing a reason. Any other mechanism, fixed blade, or longer blade require a lawful reason to carry. This includes recreation (e.g. fishing, camping) work (e.g. joinery, cooking).
There are a handful examples of overzealous officers misunderstanding and detaining for the wrong reasons, and plenty of examples of people who pretended to the media it was for innocent reasons until the court case showed otherwise.
For your point about forks, I'll note that they are actually covered by the same law; as are all pointed objects.
You do however have to undergo age verification, but under a much less intrusive process than online (a shop assistant looks at you and guesses, or looks at your ID and does not retain a copy).
> The Us has even higher limits - many things are banned to many adults. Alcohol, lottery tickets etc.
Not trying to start an argument, because I could indeed be missing some crucial info here, but what kind of adults aren't allowed to purchase alcohol or lottery tickets in the US?
The most scrutiny I ever got while attempting to purchase either alcohol or lottery tickets in the US was the establishment's employee glancing at my ID (and even that happens less than 1/5 of the time for me).
I mean, sure, I never disputed that (because I have zero idea how difficult it is to buy a knife in the UK, and I’ve never even said anything about knives).
My question was about the stricter limits on purchasing alcohol or lottery tickets in the US (which were brought up in the comment I originally replied to), because that was the first time I heard about that. I was curious what those alluded-to limits were, and I still have zero idea.
They're probably referring to the fact that you can buy alcohol at the age of 18 in the UK vs 21 in the US. It's also much more easily accessible, for example, we don't have dry counties or state-run liquor stores.
And I bet you felt really accomplished and proud about yourself with that insult to a random person on the internet. The peak of your intellectual capabilities. You know what they say, people who have no value to add in a conversation, can only attack other people.
What insult? I quoted your hilarious profile bio, and then said you're parroting brainwashed tropes. I haven't insulted you...but you clearly feel offended, but as people like you tend to say "your feelings aren't my problem"
> Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
This is a reasonable enough metaphor but we don't have to pretend to be idiots either and act like every single technology is totally neutral in its design. Knives are a good example, actually. Kitchen knives are totally adequate for killing people (I assume, I'm no expert) but they clearly have a design meant for something else. A nuclear weapon, to choose a stupidly obvious example, has no capability other than mass death. It seems reasonable to ask ourselves whether we want these two objects to be under the same regulatory regime.
They would be used for constructive purposes far more if not for mutual distrust between nuclear powers, and the public hysteria around anything associated with the word "nuclear":
I cant help but feel this analogy misses the mark. With the information people are consuming being guided by algorithms, its extremely hard for people to realise theyre being herded towards a specific viewpoint these days. It kind of reminds me of one of those mirror houses at the fairground - its extremely hard to get the correct signal in all the noise. You are what you consume and if everything you consume is of a misguided point of view, very quickly you're sliding towards being assimilated into that point of view.
I now believe that guiding technology use comes down to leadership. "with the exact same technological advances, on one side of the world we created modern america, while on the other side we created the soviet union"
Except they can't choose for their kids, or at least, not easily. Google basically own the android ecosystem and they don't want to provide any controls that could be used to limit their ability to generate as revenue. Look at Chrome's extensions. Try blocking domains. Your only hope is to use the god-awful Google Family controls AND NextDNS AND an adblocking mobile browser. These days some parents are trying to get schools to ban phones, because individual parents can't, "or my little Tommy will be the only one without a phone". So you then have to worry about what other kids have access to. Porn in private WhatsApp channels etc.
The biggest problem with giving kids phones is that it opens them up to potential non stop bullying over WhatsApp/iMessage/etc. And yet the online safety act doesn't even claim to try to "do something" about that (not that it would be possible anyway but that didn't stop them elsewhere).
As a parent who using family link, I don't find it bad or inadequate. What is bad about it. How is it unfit for purpose? My child literally has no access to anything I don't want her to. If I had a complaint, it's that tracking her media consumption on YouTube is a PITA.
The whole "my kid will be left out" thing is so bizarre to me. So what? My kid is already banned from Roblox and that means of her whole circle, she's the only one who doesn't play and oh well. When I was a child it wasn't uncommon for a child to be without something their peer group had usually for money reasons. I don't see technology as any different. Kid has stuff their friends don't and vice versa.
That's why I get mad about age restriction laws on the internet. I do want to introduce my child to some of these things in a supervised way so I can teach her about them. Something I can't do if it's literally illegal because other parents decided to shove a phone/tablet in their kid's face and walk away.
I know way too many parents who never bother to use parental controls and learn that they're not actually will to live through their kid's whining about their restrictions.
> Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I remember what it was like before the internet, and misinformation and propaganda were just as pervasive and perverse, except you couldn't be sure about it unless you read a book, did actual research or talked to an expert, and you sure as shit weren't going to change anyone's mind or at least be able to say "you're wrong and here's why" when you hear obvious bullshit.
IMO, there was a big change in the nature of harmful misinformation once you could Google things like "did convenience store workers really celebrate on 9/11" when that particular urban myth spread in the aftermath of the attack.
I do agree that the nature and vector of misinformation and propaganda are different. The ways in which we're wrong and dumb changed, but we were just as wrong and dumb before the internet, and we were statistically more hateful and violent then, too.
Look at the positives: now you are aware that every channel is full of misinformation and propaganda and treat it all as such. That gives you better media literacy than previous generations who tended to trust everything that was given to them "from above" - it enables us to be more intellectually mature and honest with ourselves about the nature and history of news media, even if you might not actually find that pleasant or convenient to deal with.
True, awareness of misinformation is higher today. But, being aware that all channels are polluted with misinformation doesn’t automatically make someone better at distinguish the truth. Also older generation automatically are not buying everything they see https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-...
Actually, having "misinfo everywhere" goggles can push people think that everything is propaganda or nothing can be trusted. This is also one way Russia and China is using its propaganda: give so much multi meaning information that normal governance information is also considered as something that cannot be trusted. Or atleast trying.
I concede that but awareness is a better starting position for potential improvement rather than ignorance. I guess we are agreeing on the substance but I am taking an optimistic view rather than a pessimistic one. I accept that I might be very misguided.
The main misinformation you see on the Internet is attention-grabbing women pretending to care about you and people trying to misrepresent mass-made white-label Chinese stuff as indie original designs.
Few people spread hate other than to say our society is a disaster and we'd be better off with communism or anarchy which has been typical discourse of young men since the dawn of the modern age.
In general I've found much higher quality of content on the Internet than elsewhere, with genuine testimonies, in-depth analyses, and a variety of opinions and experiences. Whenever I watch the news on TV I am appalled by how superficial and one-sided it is, sometimes misunderstanding the issue altogether, completely out of touch and misrepresenting reality.
I dont buy the misinformation/propaganda argument as the past was far far worse on all fronts in that regard than today. Additionally, most platforms are highly censored and curated being the exact opposite of free flow of information.
I think the let people decide for themselves is the best option as any alternative is by definition tyranny/control and why the parent quote is so spot on.
You got a point, though I am not sure which things you are referring to. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi tried to have tight control in east Berlin but eventually failed. China is doing currently the full scale automated information gathering and control against Uighur Muslims. Not sure how China is using propaganda for the Chinese themselves. Also NSA uses mass surveillance already at the moment for foreigners and internal political opponents.
But propaganda as a weapon is not a thing to underestimate. As investigated e.g. Jessika Aro https://www.igpub.com/putins-trolls/ and some might argue about the role of election interference for the Trump election and re-election as well.
So, if the leaders are dictators and hates people, it wont be good with or without new surveillance laws as there are already existing ways to do that.
> the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things
Being alive is a prerequisite to being able to suffer, die, etc. None of the things you listed are unique to free flows of information, in fact misinformation and propaganda are even worse in a closed loop of information.
Look at North Korea, and tell me that they'd be worse off propaganda-wise if they had unfettered access to internet.
> The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
No, the entities flooding social media have also flooded all the pre-internet, closed-loop media as well. Right-wing propaganda like Fox News, Alex Jones (first started his radio show in 1996), and literally the entire Cold War-era Red Scare propaganda, on radio and tv, all predated social media. And those were not free-flow channels, the information they put out was 100% controlled by the owners.
The issue with social media isn't the free flow of information but the amplification of certain information — the information that tends to make you angry. The amplification is the cause of echo chambers, spreading of misinformation and disinformation, etc. It makes possible what in essence is a distributed denial of service attack on the human brain.
Sure, chain emails existed before, but they had a pretty low ceiling of how many it would reach. It didn't scale well.
In other words, you should regulate the amplification mechanism ("algorithm"), not what information is allowed to be said. I think forcing platforms to go back to subscribe+reverse chronological feeds would be a pretty good start.
Genuinely astounding how few commenters here understand that the outrage is deliberate and curated because outrage improves messaging persuasiveness.
All of the corporate-owned social media platforms have censorship, curation, and selection policies which impose an editorial slant on what's boosted and what isn't.
All of them. No exceptions.
None of them offer anything resembling a free, open, flow of information. (Mastodon does, or at least tries to, but it has very little reach compared to others.)
And all of them are poisoned by the output of huge well-funded bot farm networks posting harmful content. Whether it's anti-vax nonsense, climate change denial, inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric, divisive political rage bait of all kinds, or covert propaganda designed to look reasonable and pull people into a rabbit hole of fake activism and misinformation, all of these networks are acting as a public brainwashing service for political ends.
There is no "marketplace of ideas." Nothing that happens on social media is truly organic and bottom-up.
And this is not an accident. These are primarily influence, behaviour modification, and persuasion networks, tailored using personal profiling, but disguised as entertainment and social connection, and allowing just enough dissent from the official party lines to create a superficial veneer of free speech.
This process is essentially unregulated. There used to be some FTC oversight, but there isn't any more.
The above acts either carry no intrinsic information content and/or very few people apart of free-speech absolutists would be OK with them. They’re not evocative of the controversy at hand, and I can’t find anyone defending them.
Perhaps more appropriate:
* Instructions for making an illegal firearm
* Unpopular political opinions
* Instructions for engaging in illicit speech without detection
* Silently standing still with head bowed and hands folded in public
* Using a VPN
* Holding a sign at a protest
There are probably many more examples like the above, which would engender a more nuanced discussion.
> above acts either carry no intrinsic information content
This is an exercise in censorship, in a sense. So is blocking spam.
OP’s point stands. Information flow requires regulation in any society. I’ve been something of a free-speech absolutist most of my life, but I’m strongly re-thinking that after seeing Europe and America fall to what can only be described as populist stupidity.
> Information flow requires regulation in any society.
I agree! But where to draw the line? Your examples include crimes (distinct from whatever speech/expression) that are far beyond where anyone is saying should be allowed. This seemed a bit disingenuous to me. I was trying to engender a higher-quality discussion.
That's the thing, when you draw the line you no longer have "free" speech/expression, you only have "speech that's not considered a crime"
The examples are what society have collectively decided are forms of speech/expression (yes they are all speech/expression) that people shouldn't be free to use.
You can't stop online stupidity and misinformation with censorship. It would at best create an echo chamber of government supported online stupidity and misinformation.
> You can't stop online stupidity and misinformation with censorship
Shame and ostracisation handled this through antiquity. There is no evidence introducing those elements online cannot work.
> would at best create an echo chamber of government supported online stupidity and misinformation
But that’s what we got anyway.
It’s just as clearly the case that a lack of regulation amplifies people willing to be stupid online. Taking that amplification away takes us back, per your worst case, to what we have now.
I mean, we already have that. And you're right. But in fact, misinformation and stupidity are already baked into the social media moderator's handbook, and the filters in their moderation tools. Disagreeing with them will get you banned in noisy online platforms.
Laws don't stop things, they provide a mechanism where conduct that matches what is described in the law is punished as described by that law.
The hope is that the punishment proscribed by the law is enough to make people think again before breaking it, and, if the law involves depravation of liberty (jail), that people who do break it are removed from society for a limited amount of time to prevent them further transgressing.
This is civics 101, honestly, anyone that's a student of history understands that laws are created because all other forms of preventing what society agrees to be bad behaviour have failed.
Laws, therefore, are the last resort, because everything else has failed.
Edit: I just want to add (here, because it's too late to edit my original comment) that someone /flagged/ my comment that disagreed about there being a thing where speech/information flows completely uninhibited - hilariously proving my point :-)
Have you considered parenting your children instead of letting the state do it for you? The latter means they can use the good old “for the children” rhetoric to control what adults can and cannot see: for example, they can choose that homosexuality is a sin and bad therefore any LGBT friendly website is bad. Apply freely as your government dictates, such as pro-Palestine content. We must protect our kids from terrorists, after all. :)
Meanwhile your children are absolutely going to find a way to get that content regardless, likely in darker corners of the internet, exposing them to much, MUCH worse content than if they would have just gone on the good old hub (plus actual predators) while also making it basically impossible for you to control instead of just making it a firewall rule away from locking it yourself instead of letting the government do it.
I'm a full adult (legally anyway) but I can't control everything I see on HN or Reddit or whatever when I'm passively scrolling; I for one am glad that there's giant teams of moderators curating the internet for me.
I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.
Hard disagree. I would love for moderation to be opt-out, for example. I might not agree with moderator actions, so I would very much prefer to see an unfiltered HN instead of having someone else dictate what I am allowed to see or not. The same applies to other websites, especially Reddit.
Alas, I have no choice in the matter, but I would very much prefer I did.
While I understand some content HAS to be regulated (CSAM) doesn’t mean everything has to be, because inevitably that will devolve into the government policing wrongthink.
And you just end up with poorly integrated moderation with extra steps when community starts cooperating to make it more efficient (e.g. maintaining filter lists).
Or there's no effective moderation so people that want more curated content and better UX moderation-wise will move elsewhere.
Nobody's forcing you to use moderated platforms either.
That said, I think the showdead setting in HN is good to have, so you can still opt to see content that would otherwise be filtered.
I don't understand why you see these as either-or propositions. It's important that I parent my children to understand the dangers of alcohol, and it's also a good idea that it's illegal for my local grocery store to sell them any, and neither of these are contradicted by the fact that they'll be able to find some if they really want to. Norms and friction matter.
It’s a good idea for grocery stores to not sell children alchohol. It’s a bad idea for grocery stores to not sell alcohol to ANYONE, adults included, because children might buy it by faking their IDs. That’s the difference here.
Alcohol is a perfect example as well, because I personally drink it only occasionally but would very much rather see it completely banned, as I think it would solve a lot of problems with society. In reality it likely wouldn’t, but the gut feeling is there. If I were to blindly follow my instinct and not know history, I would call for a total ban on it to protect the children.
The same is happening here, but at a much more dangerous level.
Plenty of friction exists. Access to devices being banned at schools, ISP parental controls, selective DNS blocking, Google/Apple child accounts.
For the most part it's just carelessness. Before the Internet children that were persistent enough and that had apathetic parents still found a way (perhaps less volumes and less extreme though)
Perhaps a better implementation of the law would be requiring all sites to mark content as NSFW if it is, and having opt-in device level toggles, so parents could protect their kids more easily, but anyone who’s actively seeking the content is able to. Teenagers will get around this ridiculous verification with ease either way.
This argument is basically the same as saying that stores should be allowed to sell alcohol to kids because it's the parents' responsibility to guard the store so their kids don't buy it.
Kids do not only have access to their own devices (for one, these days schools provide them with devices that parents have little say over often with only trivial filtering). And that is assuming the best case scenario where parents have the technical know-how to put in place non-trivial limits. Most don't.
People under age can obtain fake IDs, all over the world. This is illegal, but it still happens. At some point, it is ultimatey a parents responsibility to prevent their children from doing so by acting as a parent to their child and preventing them from engaging in destructive behavior. This is established law, even, in many countries, where a parent can be held accountable for the criminal actions of their children for failing to prevent it.
And frankly, I don't give enough of a shit about other peoples' kids to believe that internet usage should require identification like is being pushed by major governments. I want good things for these kids, I want them to grow up in a good society and a good world, and I dont want harm to come to them. But I recognize that a "good society" and a "good world" and one that minimizes harm to people is one where information is available without restrictions and without censorship and without the risk of a government that might decide it wants to commit genocide against you in the not-so-distant future using your search history to persecute you. Pardon my riffing off Flowbots' Handlebars there, but this really is the world that people live in today; powerful world-stage governments want to restrict information about topics they do not like, and are persecuting people who posess this information; the next steps are very, very well documented.
Creating the monster we are watching grow is not worth anything anyone could ever promise you.
Pretty much. Everytime they mention porn, they are poisoning the discussion.
If porn was the only thing getting affected, I would gladly support all these surveillance tactics, every single one of them. Porn and prostitution in general is riddled with trafficking, drug addiction and other forms of exploitation.
The reality is that what's at stake here are things that (unlike porn) are not harmful to us, but very important to us. Like the ability to have a free space for thought and information sharing without the oversight of anybody else, not least a potential adversary. This defence is very important against a tyrannical state.
But let's ignore all that and instead make it about children's right to "explore their gender and sexuality" on the internet. This is what I saw some guy arguing a few days ago.
Children can also be groomed over text messages, should we let the government read all our text messages now?
Children can also be depicted wrong in photos, should we let the governments of the world have access to our photos so they can check for themselves if that is happening or not?
(both are hypothetical questions, the answer is no of course not. This is the responsibility of the caretaker in their life to guide them safely through the world.)
I also remind people that laws change over time and that perfect crime prevention is actually a bad thing. The easiest example one can point to homosexuality. We now accept that people attracted to the same sex. But at one point in time in many places that was illegal. The last person in Canada to go to jail for being gay was in 1965, charged with gross indecency. But times and morals change so imagine if we had perfect police and everyone had to wear a camera at all times and every single thing you did was monitored and reported back to the police. No gays, no abortions, no alcohol, no speaking against governments or police, so many ways we would be oppressed.
I am not saying people who harm children should free to break the law but the solution can not be to monitor everything every person does. The solution for me would be to teach people how to better set parental controls for their kids and to educate both parents and kids about dangers and online safety.
When you want to grant the very state, that actively protected ethnically targeted organized gang-rapes-to-prostitution-rings, with enough trust to even remotely care about children having unlimited access to pornography, maybe you are part of the problem.
I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem. The other problem is that adults should not be forced to share their identity to view content - particularly that which might be used to blackmail them. I don't have children. And I don't think your children outweigh my right to privacy.
It’s not like the internet was censored when I was coming up, and I don’t think less of kids today than I do of myself.
Kids stumbling across something when browsing innocently isn’t really a major issue, and if they seek it out: they will find it, you won’t stop them, kids are smarter than you think (just, immature and unwise).
The best method, honestly, is for parents to be forethcoming..
however you have now successfully reframed the discussion into “what about the kids”, when in reality it’s about getting everyone’s ID so that they can better enforce their draconian internet comment laws… the government even outright said this. https://archive.is/3pave
if the government really cared about protecting children, they would’ve made a freely available child protection software that anyone can install in their home network, or subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
> subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
The thing is, the tech and infra for this is already out there. For example DNS services that offer adult-website filtering. The cost to implement this at the ISP level really wouldn't cost much (at at technological level).
Honest question - when were you "coming up" and are you sure it didn't do anyone any harm then?
I'm mid-late 40s and the internet was not really there when I was growing up. Someone ten years younger than me would have much more porn available to them, easily, in the home during their formative years. But even since then it's likely become more pervasive and present by an order of magnitude, and people have connected devices with them all the time in a way they wouldn't have back then.
We also have lots of academics saying that porn is changing attitudes to sex and what is acceptable behaviour (the rise of choking, for instance).
So it seems reasonable to ask the question, not whether today's kids are vulnerable to harms we weren't vulnerable to, but have things changed significantly in the intervening years?
Note - I'm not defending the clusterfuck that is the OSA. But the world is not always as it was.
I’m 35 now, so in the 00’s I had my entire pre-teen and teenage years.
My brother and sisters are 26, 28 and 33- we aren’t worse than our parents (we have 3 different mothers between us) or grandparents from a mental health or moral perspective; and we were all exposed to liveleak and 4chan in various ways.
I’m not sure how else to measure to he honest with you.
Just because we don't want children to do something doesn't mean the state should impose upon all of its population a norm to control their actions, and I don't think anyone pretending otherwise has a valid or respectable opinion.
> I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem.
The thing is, in the UK, porn websites are already blocked by default by most ISPs and mobile networks. Only the account owner can unblock that content, either by calling the provider or by changing something in their account settings. And yes, you'll need to verify that you're an adult if you signed up to the service without providing them with details (possible with some mobile providers).
This has been the case for the past 10 or so years, so why exactly do we need this age verification stuff?
Is it? Children viewing porn has been a thing ever since the invention of the printing press, or at the very least, ever since the first Playboy got printed.
Were those videos? No. Did they depict sex acts? No. It's qualitatively different. I was raised in an extremely liberal household full of Playboy mags, looking at photos of naked women since I was 5 years old. The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe, and probably impossible to find outside an underground video group for sadists. I have no real problem with kids looking at nudes. That is not this. Porn has pushed itself into dementia chasing shock value. Seeing a blowjob photo was something a child could encounter in the early 90s, maybe a very sophisticated child with very early access to all the dark shit on the early internet. If you spent hours figuring out how to find one. But maybe you'd see one or two. Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem. It is a real problem, and it doesn't matter whether it's shown to a child on a website or on a home VCR, it's enormously corrupting and there absolutely is a societal harm in allowing it to happen. The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
> The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe
I want to push back against some of this comment. I would argue that for non-boomers, today's mainstream porn is most likely OnlyFans, where women have greater control than ever over adult content being created.
> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten
This is a tiny, tiny fraction of adult content. The rest of your comment reads like "clutching your pearls" to me.
> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem.
That is not that new either, BDSM has been a thing for decades. "Histoire d'O" for example came out in 1975, the literary work it's based on is even older. And the panic back then about these books is exactly the same kind of bullshit we're seeing today.
> The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
Teach your kids about sexuality from early age. That also helps cutting down on cases of sexual abuse - think of all the clergy and sports trainer scandals. A lot of these failed prosecution or went on far too long because the kids lacked the vocabulary to describe what happened to them, or didn't recognize that what they went through was wrong.
The problem is, anything veering into this direction is immediately attacked by Conservatives, religious extremists and the likes.
You've strayed considerably from your initial argument of contraband playboys being prevalent before the internet. Playboys were prevalent, yes, but not magazines with graphic depictions of violent fetishes. That such magazines existed at all isn't disputed.
Do you think absolutely all content should be allowed to be accessible?
If you wouldn't allow child porn (which 4chan deletes/doesn't allow), where exactly do you draw the line between blocking sites with cp, and allowing sites like 4chan which host porn without consent (voyeur/spy/revenge)?
There's a difference between prosecuting a crime, and restricting people to prevent it from even happening. Both have a place but only the former retains your liberty.
Yes, thats the problem. Prosecuting crimes on the internet is near impossible due to the restrictions and often anonymity. Thats why we rely on platform providers to help us, the public.
Facebook, Youtube and others put in effort to take down illegal content.
4chan only does the bare minimum such that they don't gain too much relevancy in the public eye.
UK or other countries may decide that 4chan doesn't to enough and ban it because of the help of 4chan in faciliating the spreading of illegal content.
So again, where is the difference between 4chan which hosts/spread illegal content and other sites where we're fine with banning them?
> Prosecuting crimes on the internet is near impossible due to the restrictions and often anonymity.
The US does it quite well. The FBI has a near endless number of court cases where they subpoena ISPs and content hosting platforms to de-anon and gather evidence to build cases. My biggest concern about the movement of crime from the streets to "cyberspace" is that almost all Internet crime is considered Federal (across state lines), thus carries much harsher penalties that state-only crimes.
The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
And then released when the mistake came to light. Not 'disappeared'.
The whole mess around the proscribed group is awful and seems like a massive overreaction - sure, you do not mess with a country's defence infrastructure. But the appropriate thing to do is arrest those involved and charge them with specific crimes, not misuse anti-terror legislation.
But lets not pretend people are being taken off the streets and made to disappear as they do in autocratic nations.
> It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I'm not entirely sure this is true. At least in the west, this perspective seemed to rely on most "public discourse" not being visible to most of the public. Social media has destroyed this illusion.
I read on twitter, can't find the exact link, a chinese content site operating in .sg for many years, survived multiple "internet purges" by China, got banned by UK authorities last month.
I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
The UK is where the US is headed if we don't grow a pair and snap out of this weak autocrat worshiping phase we seem to find ourselves in. It could happen so easily here.
Partisanship being the highest civic value in the US guarantees that we will not break out of that phase but will instead usher it in fully with two mildly different flavors. Coke and Pepsi autocracy with each insisting the other tastes like sewage and their own is ambrosia.
And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills, as if the “wrong government” will never ever take control. Perhaps we should all do more things for ourselves, and advocate for more laws that restrict what the government is allowed to do
This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.
This is a silly take. The answer to preventing one branch of the federal government from abusing power is to strengthen the other branches, and to strengthen federalism itself. Both are enshrined in the constitution and are the largest checks on growing executive power? In effect “weakening” any one part of the government.
The UK doesn’t have Texas or California or New York.
The UK has Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Scotland, particularly, is anti-authoritarian.
The only thing that kept Scotland from voting for independence was a promise the UK would stay in the EU. If the Scottish referendum was to happen today, I don’t think England would win their vote.
And leaving the EU has caused massive complications for the Good Friday agreement that specifically agreed to removing border controls between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Yet none of these countries were able to apply enough pressure to change the UK government’s downward spiral.
Looking at the current US, that seems to work not at all. The checks on power is only effective if enforced, and as there is no effort to enforce separation of powers, there are no checks.
This. The antidote to authoritarianism is a mobilized and motivated populace.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
A slim chance of getting outed for watching porn is more important to UK males than enforcing an age gate to stop kids having unlimited access. This is all that shows.
You're on hacker-news, so this is simple to explain;
Create a new flag in the http header that indicates under-age, and put heavy restrictions (and fines) on what content is allowed to be served as a response. Get this through to google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple as a device-wide parent-control feature. Universally enforced and legally backed parent control.
1. Simple to enforce
2. No major security issues
3. No risk of abuse as a surveillance or control mechanism.
4. No issue of "did not know user wasn't child" loophole if anyone is found in violation. If a child is still found on a adult website; it is entirely blamable on parent not running the parent control feature, or the website not respecting the flag.
This type of solution is proposed by the Russian state using special sim-cards for children under 14. Odd how the UK is the extreme one all of a sudden.
Instead we get;
1. Difficult to enforce effectively and easy to circumvent with rudimentary methods for those it actually affects.
2. Security nightmare to do correctly. (recent tea leak)
3. Easy excuse to ban any content the government disapproves
of. (wikipedia is now a adult site)
4. A normalization to hand out personal ID and photos to random websites.
5. A perfect excuse for authoritarian governments to implement something similar since "free and democratic nation did the same".
This is not about children. It is never about children. Banning encryption, collect all personal digital communication for review, and personally identify all people online. These three things are non-negotiable, regardless of motive. "protect the children" is easy to say, easy to make everyone agree with, easy to straw-man opponents into monsters. But whenever its used, we better make darn sure that's the real motive.
I would gladly back the first solution above. We need to protect children better, but this law is not about that.
Wikipedia is on the list of sites that the government is trying to force age verification on[1].
This isn't about people being scared they're going to be outed for watching porn. Even if the government honestly have no intentions to further restrict people's access to information, this is a genuine step towards authoritarian censorship.
I'm (somewhat hypocritically) not against purging 4chan & other sites that ferment dangerous right wing hatred from the internet, I am against anything that tries to limit or restrict access to legal content
They have done it, and the west (over half the US states, the UK and Australia at a bare minimum) have entirely ceded any moral high ground regarding it.
Yeah we ceded it long ago in the US being reliant on child sweatshop labor for the lowest price possible and demanding allegiance to America but no obligation to provide each other any social welfare
Western countries had no morality before just a facade of one. Now that they are loosing economic power they are also loosing the ability to control the narrative.
This is beyond vague. What do you even mean by morality? And how is it better for non-western entity to allegedly control the narrative, except also using it for its own benefit, which would be immoral by definition?
'The West also does bad stuff' is not the same thing as 'China and the west are the same' or 'Russia and the west are the same'. That's a false equivalency. The west has a long tradition of respecting individual rights. You aren't going to get disappeared like you absolutely will in those places. Say what you will about the failings of the west, but there's a clear moral high ground there, even if that height is an inch tall.
The main difference I see is part of the government of "the west", e.g. US, hasn't been able to get all the way to how China operates yet, not that they don't want to. Given the chance, which looks like they're getting, China (the government) is what they want to be.
Don't make up stuff learn your own history individual rights in the west have been by race, color, education, wealth or sexual orientation and easily forgotten when the individuals are not white.
Ah no on a topic of censorship someone was saying how good western countries were before about personal freedoms and I called out that lie as many of those freedom are just for TV shows and literature only. All citizens did not and still do not enjoy all the freedoms he is spouting the only difference the restrictions are being more broadly applied so he is effected so talks about the past was better. The past was better only for white skinned straight man maybe you could add rich as when when it come to personal freedoms
You are heavily mixing freedom with access to opportunity. They are not the same.
I come from an Eastern European country. Before 1990, if I would have wanted to not study and only drink and let my live go like Diogenes, that would have never worked. The authorities would pick me up from the street and forcefully make me go work something, even if I don't like it. Even if I have studied, the authorities still may decide where I can go to work. The possibility to decide how I can build or fuck up my own live - this is what I understand as freedom.
Opportunity - this is something very different. And to that I can agree with you about the "white skinned man", even if it is very far away from my understanding about the world because of where I was born and how I lived.
No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians, but it's one of their most dominant traits. That is, if you ascribe normal ethics and morals to them. But politicians' are a different breed, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
Remember, half the population are under 100 IQ points.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
I’m quite sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy. China censors the internet because they want to control everything about their citizens lives. But us? Oh, we’re censoring the internet to protect the children.
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
It's just a different version of the same thing. In chinas case, they aggressively locked down internet influence. In the wests case, they held off a bit and made up bullshit reasons like saving the children with age verification. I cant stand this version of the 'free' west where they promote totalitarian information control and demand real IDs. This is nazi shit.
The free internet might be gone in the next decade. Probably time to buy a few hard drives and do some archiving. I don't just mean piracy. Articles, blogs, anything you find precious.
It sounds just as unfair as including a levy on blank CDs paid to music copyright holders, regardless of how the CDs are used. But being unfair doesn't mean it can't happen in your country.
Flashback to Sweden, around 2011 or so. Copyright owners convince the government to add a $/GB levy to digital storage mediums like USBs, just in case people would use it for storing copyrighted material. The kicker? Personally archiving copyrighted material to your personal storage is (was?) fully allowed by law, but somehow it went through anyways. Glad I don't live there anymore :)
> A common misconception is that levies are compensation for illegal copying such as file sharing. This is incorrect, however, levies are only intended to compensate for private copying that is legally allowed in many jurisdictions. For example, uploading a purchased CD on to another personal device such as a laptop or MP3 player.
"Private copying" is generally allowed under copyright law -- except that under DMCA, it's only allowed if you're not circumventing DRM. So for example, you can legally make a private copy of a CD, but not a Blu-ray disc.
> "Private copying" is making private copies of is generally allowed under copyright law -
Private copying is not generally allowed, but private copying levies tend to be adopted alongside specific exceptions for certain cases of private copying in the copyright law of the jurisdiction adopting them (e.g., in the US, those in the Audio Home Recording Act.)
Right, what I meant is that private copying is allowed because these levies exist -- but the fact that they exist only allows you to make private copies, not (as was stated) download anything.
Depends on the jurisdiction. In several personal use rights are broad enough to download almost anything (eg except software or databases), and the levy is explicitly described in law as a compensation.
Back in another life (videography), I had acquaintances who would throw looks when they heard I’d purchased a single terabyte.
Seems that narrative might already be - at least mildly -pervasive.
I don't get it. What do you need 400TB of storage for? (To be clear: I am not saying that you should not be allowed to buy it.) I assume this is for personal use. I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year. Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations?
Also: Why did you pay cash, in the center of Berlin, Germany? Even if you are paying rock bottom used prices around 100 EUR, why carry 2,000+ EUR in cash?
> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year
There are so many (legal) use cases for TBs of space... Photography, video editing, 3D graphics, 3D simulations (think VFX explosions, destruction), ML/AI, Dataset curation/archiving, backups, doing Rust development (each target/ directory ends up being GB large usually), and so on.
Some weeks ago GPT-OSS was released, so I wanted to play around with the 120b weights, they take ~60GB of disk space already. Imagine that same thing every time new open weights are released, and you end up with +TB large collection relatively quickly.
> Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations
Seems to me like the reverse. I have more and more friends asking me about how to setup self-hosting for music, tv-shows and movies, especially when Netflix et al do their monthly purge of content and some friend noticed their favorite show/music is suddenly gone because some contract with a 3rd party expired.
> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year.
You must not work with video.
Even with photography, a single raw photo can already use tens of megabytes (source: just looked at a raw photo file I happened to have around). A single raw video (or even a single already edited video) uses even more.
Now consider that you need at least twice that for redundancy (RAID-1 at the minimum). If you use things like Ceph for speed and redundancy, it's AFAIK recommended to have at least four separate nodes, each with its own storage.
In my view it is irresponsible to not carry on your person at all times your passport and enough money for a week of food and hotel and a plane ticket to the country of passport issuance. Carrying a card introduces working internet as a dependency for food and shelter, which is stupid and unnecessary.
Also, card payments are warrantlessly tracked at all times by the state, creating a location tracklog of where you go and when you go there.
I'm always disappointed that the geometric growth in spinning magnet disks slowed - if the growth curve from the '80s to 2010 had continued to today we'd have petabyte HDDs now.
I've been downloading YouTube videos for the past few years. Not randomly, from specific channels I select. Today I passed 12100 videos.
It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.
When I try to capture a few friends videos of events I had run from instagram stories with yt-dlp, I get nice friendly warning that to avoid my account being restricted or deleted i should stop using tools.
Since many of the channels are monetized, my personal policy is only to upload videos to the Internet Archive if the original goes offline. Otherwise, it's better if people support the original channel by watching them on YouTube.
Sure, but by that logic you’re saying piracy* in general is bad, but when you pirate* the video it’s okay. And if I pirate* the video the same way it’s okay. But if we cross share it’s bad, while the only real difference is via this route , google is paying for more bandwidth and yt-dlp becomes less effective because it’s redundantly executed at scale.
*pirate, for lack of a better term. I couldn’t give a fuck what people call it.
I doubt it. As a Brit they "blocked" Pirate Bay and torrent sites about a decade ago and I've hardly had any problems accessing them and torrenting stuff. It's all very half arsed.
What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
The free internet is mostly gone already. Most people already only browse the same 5-10 sites belonging to big tech, thus already part of the surveillance apparatus.
I think about the same. Right now we are at the normalizing the ID verification stage and banning specific content in certain countries/states, once we are desensitized, VPNs will come next, and then some government solution to track everything you do online.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
If you don’t use rss, just say you don’t use rss. I assure you that many of us do. It continues to deliver me hundreds of articles from dozens of sources day after day, decade after decade. my services that check rss, continue to run their automated tasks. It’s an amazing protocol and even when big corpos try and take it away, hacks come up to restore access.
Podcasts tend to be available from different sources to extend their reach YouTube and Spotify don't offer RSS feeds, however other services like redcirle.com, megaphone.fm, anchor.fm, and audioboom.com all offer RSS feeds. Even Apple should as it has a set of iTunes extensions for RSS to annotate things like the episode number.
I've been able to find RSS feeds for all the podcasts I listen to.
> As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
RSS is alive and well. I use it daily with dozens of sites and authors. It's incredibly useful, widely used, and well supported.
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
> [RSS] is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
RSS isn't dead. I use it daily. Most podcasts — all if you subscribe to the philosophy that mp3s without rss aren't podcasts — are built on it. Most websites still provide a feed, even if the owner isn't aware of it.
This has been brewing for years. The international network will not survive multiple independent governments all attempting to impose their own laws on it. It's bound to fracture into several regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
This is really important. It's time to take history into our own hands given the penchant for erasure by the elites and how dumb the elites have become.
The Internet was philosophically designed to move information, and for every effort to prevent that there is a workaround. There will always be a free protocol.
> Can we count on ISPs not mucking with stuff at the transport layer?
That used to be common in the past, many ISPs ran transparent HTTP proxies to reduce the use of their slow upstream links. The current push to use strong encryption and authentication everywhere (for instance, plain HTTP without TLS has become rare) makes it much harder.
Same as market; anything that does not use it will use less efficient alternatives like politics. Sadly market like tao and politics has no moral either.
And notice it’s not being destroyed by the (largely fantastical) “fascist threats” constantly being whined about; rather, this is all the direct act of a decidedly left-wing government. Shocking to no one who has even a passing familiarity with the history of the 20th century…
It's almost like an uneducated public is easier to control..
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
> This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
Anyone who asks that is arguing in bad faith and using children as political weapons to achieve their ends. It's gotten to the point I outright dismiss anything the politicians say the second I hear the words "children" and "terrorists".
This is what I mean when I say it has to be reckoned with. You can outright dismiss it yourself but it doesn’t make it go away when a sizeable number of voters do not dismiss it.
It is more a long the lines that large document leaks have allowed people to see how NGOs have become vehicles for State Intelligence and corporate/political power.
Can you point me to some leaks you are referring to? Honestly curious. I have no doubt that there are some bad actors in this space, but Non Governmental Organizations is such a wide category I find it strange that that acronym keeps popping up like some evil entity rather than calling out the individual orgs.
I don't see where disinformation or Russians come in. It is well documented that some NGOs are pushing changes in internet legislation to benefit themselves and their donors financially.
>And the parents that are worried about their children getting fucked up by hardcore porn and social media.
Rarely brought up during the OSA debate, but I think we all know every UK ISP has "Safety Shield" on to block access to adult entertainment - by default. When purchasing the service you're asked if you want it disabled.
If parents are disabling it, they can't be that worried.
I know plenty of lifelong smokers who lack cancer, so it’s fine then?
In any case, if we’re to share anecdotes, I don’t have a single man I know that has said “wow, pornography has enriched my childhood / adult life.” I know plenty that have had trouble in their relationships, however.
1. "Parents of children", unfortunately, have little political clout (also when including their votes).
2. Children are not "fucked up" by seeing people having sex. I mean, ok, parents can be worried about them being "fucked up", but this is to a great extent the same engineering-of-consciousness that the TF article is discussing, and which the UK government wishes to affect.
It depends what you consider a “serious NGO,” but the NSPCC, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Breck Foundation, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and other NGOs actively campaigned for and supported it.
This is either a tautology or meaningless, depending on semantics.
Q: Are there today, or have there ever been in history, any non-corrupt governments (that by your implication are invulnerable to lobbying)?
I’m pretty sure lobbying is a thing everywhere, regardless of corruption. People want the government to do stuff and will try to make it happen, from autocracies to direct democracies and everything in between.
There are a lot of extra steps the UK government can take beyond the fines:
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
Unfortunately the government is winning, Apple’s ADP encryption is no longer available in the UK. The Online Safety Act was finally forced through after over 10 years.
They’ll eventually get what they want in any case the same way a chisel can eventually dig through a mountain.
In the UK. Their abuse will be restricted to people living within their borders unless the US allows it. The UK is not in any position to harass US companies, even more so now that they lack EU's backing.
Only UK residents (including their children) will really be harmed by this nonsense.
eSafety is a joke. However, the Human Rights Commission has the funding to launch multi-year investigations into YouTubers that make people cry and poop their pants. That's power, although they do admit the investigations cannot currently proceed beyond investigations due to there aren't any punishments or remedies in the statute. But that's a clerical error that should be remedied some day.
>a stand-off has been engineered between UK censorship measures nobody asked for, and the constitutional rights of all Americans.
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
>Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children
More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.
Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?
Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.
Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..
These laws weren't created by Ofcom. They were passed as primary legislation by the previous government (and enthusiatically implemented by the current one).
Already underway in several states. Bills in Texas and Utah have already been approved, with several other states entertaining such proposals, although none have moved out of committee as yet.
It's all so tiresome.
If this were really about protecting the children they could've solved the matter with the equivalent of a mandate on device manufacturers and website operators to respect a DO-NOT-SERVICE-I-AM-A-CHILD (or whatever) header in HTTP. Hell, if it were really about protecting children, parents would get access to dumbed down versions of the kind of tools corporate IT has for managing business phones ... so they can lock them down, limit how they're used, right down to what apps can be installed.... but that would deprive advertisers of a golden ticket for knowing what views are legit, put parents back in control, and actually work... so can't have that. :D
I imagine they would counterargument your proposal along the lines of: "the most endangered children cannot rely on their families to protect them online"
If that is so then that is a problem to be solved by the local equivalent of child protective services by removing them to a safe environment, not by imposing tyranny on everyone else. See how easy it is to dismantle statist arguments if you just stand your ground?
I'm largely in line with where a lot of the comments under these political posts are coming from, but there's no discussion in them. It's rhetoric, outrage, and oversimplifying things.
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
In general I agree, but I think this is one of those cases where theres no oversimplifying, it really is just what you see on its face.
A UK bureaucracy is threatening fundamental and constitutional rights of an American. Its so outrageous, I really dont think there's any nuanced discussion to be had.
The whole western world is looking at this to know if their own populations will passively accept this particular brand of tyranny. If the UK citizenry doesn't vote it out in the next round of elections, this is coming for all of us.
You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.
The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.
"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."
Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.
I've recently had a glimpse of that - buying my first .no domain required me to be registered on the Norwegian population register, and full digital verification. There was even a phone call with the registrar! Some of the other rules are bonkers too [1]:
- Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no
- Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no
Is it wrong for Norway to protect its domain? They don't want the ".no" domain to be the target of "domain hacks" from people who have nothing to do with Norway.
So if you want a ".no" domain, prove that you are Norwegian, the limits are to prevent the kind of abuse we see in most other TLDs (domain squatting, etc...). All that seem reasonable to me. Some countries put less restrictions on their own TLDs, especially tiny countries with interesting TLDs which they see as a revenue source, that's fine too, but to each his own.
If you don't like it, use any of the generic TLDs. AFAIK, Norway doesn't put any restriction on them.
You don't connect to domains, you connect to IPs. You can resolve a domain to an IP however you want. And IPs can be shared or change regularly.
The convention is use DNS to resolve domains and DNS providers play by some rules, but if enough people start to dislike the rules you will start seeing unsanctioned DNS services and the like.
Another option is for browsers to consult a p2p DHT (just use the one for torrents) for a special class of domains (eg. https://[pubkey].dht). This is similar to how Tor does this but in this case you don't need to hide your server location because presumably it's located somewhere where the laws favor you.
IP blocking is a very different type of problem and one that would require hiring China as a consultant. And still be only marginally effective.
What makes IP blocking so difficult, and why would China need to be brought in as a consultant? Does setting up such technologies exceed the capabilities or experience of Western engineers?
That's the best case scenario. Honestly we'll be lucky if we can even run "unauthorized" software that hasn't been digitally signed by the government on our own computers. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is coming to an end.
Warning> Incoming rant..... The bizarre thing about the UK, ( and possibly other 1st world countries ), is the seemingly unaware populace -that many institutions are nepotistic and gated. This may just be a universal thing, but it took me most of my adult life to slowly come to terms with the fact, the local council ( people in charge of a borough), of a small nice (going downhill over 30 years) suburb here in london, don't allow, and have never allowed as far as I can tell, the ascension to power of any outsider from the council. I could hardly believe it when I found out, I had just assumed all political / council positions were a slow process of democratic voting. But no, you can't just canvas for the role of councillor. It differs from village to village.
So , 1- this is the case, 2- I was unaware most of my life ( people dont know. discuss it ) 3- the only "old timer" business man in the area, whose been there and worked 50 years has himself said "are corrupt" - clearly atleast a dim view. Now I understand this is heresay, but perhaps it honestly just take 40 years or so for endemic corruption to even "come out" and by then its just the old "who know", who soon enough pass away, their children perhaps believing it too, leaving for other areas of the globe for opportunity.
One can slowly understand why the fabric of a SEEMINGLY unfair, un-meritocratic, rule bending, society that limits vertical movement slowly ebbs apart.
EDIT > The reason I said rule bending is simply, one of the most successful people I know just lied about their academic achievements, no one seemingly bothered to check, and they took the position of someone who was honest. This must be somehow related.
This whole online safety act thing gives me goosebumps.
I had lived most of my live in Russia until migrating in 2022 and I’m pretty familiar with what it means when the gov starts messing with digital censorship.
If you’re not aware, it’s getting systematically harder and harder to browse the free web in Russia despite 50%+ of population using “some” VPN app.
And I’m not even talking extremist / anti-russian resources that the government turned against originally, but most of the independent websites that use CloudFlare free tier, for example. Because cloudflare enables proxying and a couple other IP-masquerading techniques by default, to effectively block a single website you have to block the entire cloudflare IP range and DNS - which is >20% of the web.
As for the VPNs, most of the common protocols and frameworks (eg OpenVPN) are already banned + detected via DPI, and people have to get into more and more sophisticated setups like VLESS+Reality (= most of the non-technical people can’t set it up by themselves or even buy a subscription to such thing).
“Simple” shadowsocks, originally popularized in China to fight the great firewall are already almost rendered completely useless.
And it will get worse. The gov service which is responsible for blocking has a very high budget + some pretty neat tech to help them cut off more and more ways to bypass the censorship.
This is the future of any state that gets into this game. The future where you might have to become very proficient in networking and use some “shady” stuff like Tor to just read a blog post about Linux.
It doesn’t matter what it starts with - fighting anti-gov propaganda or, for god’s sake, porn (the least harmful thing for the kids in this horrible ai-post-capitalism world that we live in) — once the regulators get the feeling of power over the free web, every lobbyist, organization and party will come for a part of the web that you personally might enjoy, or even earn living from.
The new ban is easily bypassed even without a VPN. The government is trying to block cracks in a dam with their fingers. Assuming they even care about results rather than performative posturing.
Little bit unrelated, but "Just verify your age (impossible without verifying your identity)" is false.
It is possible to verify the age without verifying identity.
It can be done using Zero Knowledge Proof.
4chan is not in the UK and ofcom has no jurisdiction. This would be like Singapore trying to prosecute you for smoking marijuana in your own home in the U.S.
Have you ever opened 4chan? There are literally 3 threads right now with "drawn images" illegal in many countries. To me it's crazy it's still open. Early 4chan had the worst kind of images you could think of.
Being mean, for varying degrees of "mean", is actually illegal in most countries that aren't the USA and surely 4chan passes the threshold in at least some of them.
I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back. Their motivation will have nothing to do with defending free speech, but an enemy of my enemy IS my friend.
If the limitations on conducting A/B tests on people under 13 are enforced, you will need a driver's license to connect to the internet, and you will need to show it to every website.
Surely a state ID is enough, right? I know at least 3 legal adults in my circles alone without a driver's license, though I believe they all have either a state ID or permit. (Not that I support requiring any sort of meatspace identification for acting in cyberspace).
> This bill requires covered online platforms, including social media platforms, to implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17.
What is an "online platform", and how would they know the visitor is under 17?
What the summary leaves out is that elements of it like 'harm to minors' have loopholes you could drive a truck through. It's designed to allow arbitrary censorship of wrongthink with 'think of the children' as cover.
>> I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
Hard disagree. Trump can apparently be bribed. This could be solved by a discrete transfer of cryptocurrency to a specific Maltese or Transnistrian wallet.
If anything, it is in 4chan's interest to be banned by UK ISPs since this will induce the sale of a few more passes, which permit posting from VPNs.
Anyway, 4chan barely keeps the lights on as it is. Worrying about 4chan bribing politicians is absurd. Either politicians will help 4chan out of some sense of self-interest, or they won't help at all.
> If anything, it is in 4chan's interest to be banned by UK ISPs since this will induce the sale of a few more passes, which permit posting from VPNs.
I sense a bit of a flaw in this strategy, given that 4chan being banned in UK would presumably block any payments for passes from UK-origin banks/cards made to 4chan bank accounts as well.
No, there is no "poster child" to justify wider site-blocking, nor even narrower site blocking. It is illegitimate governments to manipulate Internet nodes so as to filter what passes through them. If they have a problem with some website, let them take it up with the publisher/creator.
If the UK government is worried about children exposed to harmful content, well, let us first remember that they are assisting and supporting the massacre of children in Gaza, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands of them. And when that stops - I suppose they're welcome to suggest content filtering software to parents.
The most insane thing about this headline is that implies parents are giving their children devices with unfiltered access to the Internet and then the government needs to play wack-a-mole with every single website they come across to prevent children from accessing it.
I don't know about iOS, but on Android I have access to Family Link which means I can control what apps my kids can run off the app store, and I can control whether they can access explicit websites (according to google) or have free access. I know other parents that are well aware of this tool, but they have to make sure those phones or tablets are signed into with accounts they have ownership of. I think this is the direction that the government should be pushing for and making sure apple google and microsoft are all playing nicely to allow parents to manage devices under the family.
iOS is similar. You can also limit apps/books/movies/etc. by content age rating, block adult sites, etc. without parental approval (which just happens over messages).
There is even an on-device image classifier for images/video to blur pornography from messages and keep them from sending it to others.
That’s the hallmark of socialist countries. It used to be that where in Eastern Germany people would look to government for a solution, those in the West would start a business, or learn a new skill, or read self help books. Nowadays, the self help books are read only for entertainment, and people look to government as the solution to any problem, no matter where they are, or how individualistic and free market they call themselves as a nation.
Parents are absolutely giving children devices with unfiltered internet access. I think people here need to step out of their ivory tower. I would say most people don't even know to think about the things people here think about. "Unknowns unknowns", if you will. We all agree here that this is a bad idea. What percentage of the worlds population do you think reads Hacker News?
If you're going to say that, I think most people wouldn't even access websites to begin with. They spend most of their time on Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok.
I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
who wouldn't want the gov banning workers organizing collective action online? can you think of the damage to children if they mistake it for a Minecraft server? do you want to be responsible for that?
That's just par for the course in UK culture.
During American criminal trials, the jury is told not to watch the news.
During British criminal trials, the entire British press is legally forbidden from reporting on the trial.
Well-paced article. The exposition sounds bleak, but then Betteridge's law creeps up slowly over the middle of the article, and the piece crescendos toward a final showdown.
There needs to be a place for 4chan, but mainly so those users spend less time on normal sites. If I recall, one of the admins was outed as a government agent after many years... lol
Site-blocking won't work, and NERF'ing the world under the guise of protecting kids is a poorly obfuscated despotic strategy. Bouncy castle politics only undermine institutional credibility. =3
It's pretty straight forward, using its dominance when it comes to internet platforms to try to impose American speech standards and values on foreign countries, the vice president has been quite explicit about that when he interfered in political discourse in several European countries.
Any country that has its wits together would do well to establish sovereignty over its communications infrastructure. It's quite telling that the only country that has been able to stand up to American bullying is China because they were smart enough to not outsource control over their information space to the US.
Even worse than blocking certain sites, would be if they burden everybody in a mountain of paperwork, making a lot of internet endaveours no longer feasible. I'm not sure how they do it in China, I know there is an internet registration number, not sure if they have paperwork, e.g. to demonstrate that your site is compliant. Let's hope they come to their senses!
I have met plenty of millenial's, veterans of the worst of deviant art and 4chan, and the kids are allright.Perhaps a bit extra adult and focused, but that's a good thing right!
They have no fucks to give, and rightly expect the worst from there overlords, but make light of it in an obnoctios abrasive kind of way, while standing and fighting the most egregious excesses and violence brought from our governments, who want pasty soft and confused masses of worky workers to exploit, rather than alert, 18 year old vetrans who have seen, heard, and fought depravity on the internet and beyond.
So now, bieng too late, the gubberment, is trying to use strong arm and smeer tactictics to controll everything, when they dont grasp the basic realitys that everything on a computer is a file, and all processors have an input/output interface and some kind of widly availible comunications protocol, oh and hundreds of millions of significantly intelligent and pissed of people who are not buying it.
key word in the title is "justify", but these are purely self justifications from a dangerous and out of touch group who have taken all of the strings of power and wealth into there clutchy overfull desperate grasp.
The truely sureal part of banning file sharing is that the powers that be would rather have people rip thier media, than end up talking with each other and sharring there own.
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
If you're an engineer, contribute to technologies that take power away from those who lord over you. Which in this case would be distributed, censorship-resistant communication technologies. There's a lot of work to be done, not only in hard engineering, but also in things like UI and marketing, as widespread adoption is the best way to maximise the chance of success. For all its flaws, cryptocurrency (in particular anonymous ones like Monero) is a demonstration that this is possible: no government desires for its citizens to have a means to transact large sums anonymously online, yet Monero still exists. And as governments impose more restrictions on the internet, there'll be more and more demand for means to bypass those restrictions.
By all means work on better privacy technology but censorship isn't a technology problem. It is a human problem. We cannot work around ignorance forever. We have to engage the system to affect real change.
Over the last few years, it's become ever more apparent to me that technology can't fix what's broken. Even as we invent more ways to bypass censorship it becomes more so that people have less to say that I might want to hear with those technologies. And it's not just an ideological thing either, because best I can tell there's plenty of that stuff for whichever way you lean. What I mean is that people write less, there's less for me to read. But they have plenty of hustlely Youtube videos of the sort I have no inclination to watch. Less journalism, but plenty of opinions/editorials (I have enough opinions of my own, thanks). Less music... the whole recording industry seems to have imploded.
We're not in danger of censorship so much as we're in danger of there no longer being anything for them to censor away from me. I don't think it's just me either, I know some of you are seeing the same things I am.
Sure. I'm absolutely certain that there has always been music... so much 15th century Bulgarian folk music that it could fill a record store, for instance. But just because that music existed doesn't mean I have access to it or even awareness of it unless I am an academic researcher that pours years of my life into it. Your indy music stuff is just like that... but I have no desire to spend the next 10 years learning to dig it out of remote corners of the world just to listen to it.
It's permanently and sociologically walled off from me in ways that I don't care to overcome. If I was interested in music discovery in 1980, how many record stores would I have had access to that I could walk into and just browse? How many of those are still around today? While radio was still pretty bad in 1980, it wasn't 12-stations-of-ClearChannel bad... I've heard those same 300 songs on an endless loop since I was a child.
They represent their constituents - you are one of those. If the majority of their constituents support the legislation they're doing their job. Could you post their full response to you? Pretty shocking if they accused you of being a terrorist pedophile and worth making people aware of which MP this was!
More made up problems for a fundamentally inept government to solve because fixing real problems like a broken healthcare system is hard and not a guaranteed political win.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
> Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
> They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
Labor won the last two general elections though? And the alternative is currently in disarray.
I'm not going to argue that Labor Australia are doing god's work - particularly on health at the system seems to be in crisis and need a lot more funding. But the opposition are in total disarray and desperately trying every wedge-issue in the book in an attempt to ignite culture-wars style partisanship here, which is (thankfully) falling on barren soil.
I think it was an agenda years in the making. I saw the groundwork being laid for this in 2021 and it somehow survived a general election and an entirely new government with a different political alignment. Ive seen other laws like this. It was nothing to do with the politics or the politicians, it has to do with civil servants who are working with their own agenda. Just like yes prime minister.
We should have something that sets the TCP SYN bit in every packet (between participating hosts) so that it overloads surveillance systems.
Bittorrent letters aren't from a generic surveillance system - it's participating copyright holders downloading the files from you and then pressing charges for you sharing it to them.
I still can't believe the UK got suckered into the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. All it took was like two years of making you vote every three months and you gave up your democracy.
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
The fixed term act, as the other poster pointed out, was repealed in 2022
It was also a hilarious failure given that during the 11 short years it was active there were two two-year parliaments. It also didn't stop PMs being deposed from within, during that same period there were 5 different prime ministers.
So I think your read on it is a little exaggerated there.
The Online Safety Act was passed when the Tories were still in government.
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
> The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
The problem the majority of people have with this law is "I can't easily access my free porn anymore". The counter-argument is "child kills self"[1] because shitty tech companies can't control their thirst for money. Like I said, I don't agree with the legislation but it's not an easy argument to make.
In a world where you can cast your vote anonymously in the voting booth, it’s a dangerous game to piss off a large number of voters, even if they can’t admit publicly why. They will be reminded every day of that idiotic policy. Like cookie consent banners.
I think you’re correct and the person you’re replying to is correct too.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
He's not doing a very good job of anything. His main problem is he has very few fundamental beliefs. All he has is some vague left wing aligned principles which he allows others to advise him on and then selects whatever position will gain himself the most goodwill. Which is why his ministers can propose atrocious ideas and he will go along with them. It's not as if he has anything better to suggest.
He says he's against the OSA but he's also funded by religious right nutters who think it's a great first step. So if/when he gets into power, don't expect anything better to replace it. Not that I would expect him to uphold a single promise: as I understand it, Reform doesn't even commit to a formal manifesto, anyway.
Farage is a moral-free scumbag who will be known in history as one of the architects of Britain's period of decline. The fact that he hasn't been held to account is one of the great scandals of our age.
I'm no brexiteer but ... it's not like the Tories were going to hand him the keys to Number 10 and say "Have at it". He wasn't an MP at all at that point.
It's like the "Idiots didn't even know what they were voting for!" argument. Sure, they didn't. Because the people who actually had the power to make a plan to vote for, declined to do so, specifically to increase uncertainty and perception of risk for voting leave.
You can blame Farage and brexit voters for a lot (and you should!) but neither he nor they ever had the political power to make or execute a plan.
I'm all about liberal freedom, but blocking 4chan would actually help society given how abused it is by counter-intelligence. There is bullshit spewed there constantly and no one should be subject to that trash in a functioning society.
I don't think you know what counter intelligence means. That'd just be a regular intelligence or government PR operation.
I don't use 4chan but that stuffs pretty easy to spot on Tiktok and reddit if you're paying attention. Conspiracy type stuff is rampant on those sites. Especially around elections or conflicts like wars.
Content moderation or censorship can be an equally dangerous vector for government influence campaigns as well.
Q anon was started by Chan's admin, some random guy living in South East Asia, and was embarrassingly amateur
You can be upset about the sort of content on 4chan. Most of the planet would agree. You don't need to frame it as something sophisticated because you don't like it and want it censored.
I don't think censorship is a good thing unless it's censoring concerted efforts to spread false information which reshape the political landscape. You are underselling the bullshit that you say "8chan admins" were responsible for. It's inexcusable.
I'm not upset about the content aside from it being a clear devious effort to spread lies and shift public opinion.
Stop framing it as something different. No one with a brain is buying it, and yes, we are pissed.
The funny thing about "false information" being "spread" by "8chan admins" (or 4chan for that matter) is.... you can avoid it by simply not going there. Stop going there if you don't like it.
So true! I wish people would stop eating up the false information from 4chan and whatever else chan, 8chan apparently but the reference got removed. Its a cesspool.
Have you considered that spreading false information is common on that forum that i should simply not attend? Maybe the idiots you talk to on 4chan should be held to a higher standard? Or do you think "doing your own research" means believing in the first thing a right wing retard news source tells you?
If "false information" is common there... don't go there. No, I don't think they, or indeed anyone, needs to be held to a "higher standard". No one is obligated to tell you "the truth" as you see it. If you're uncomfortable being on a forum where you opinions may be challenged then the American side of the Internet simply isn't for you. In fact, if it really bothers you that much, may I suggest that your country recommend de-peering from the global Internet? That would certainly solve the problem.
I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law.
Also:
Step 1: Build mass surveillance to prevent the 'bad guys' from coming into political power (its ok, we're the good guys).
Step 2: Your political opponents capitalize on your genuinely horrific overreach, and legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public as fighting against tyranny (unfortunately for you they do have a point). They promise to dismantle the system if coming to power.
Step 3: They get elected.
Step 4: They don't dismantle the system, now the people you planned to use the system against are using it against you.
Sounds brilliant, lets do this.
Simple. The UK is not a pro democracy, pro human rights state.
It might be uncomfortable to admit this, but if your government is a police state that's pretty much mutually exclusive with being a pro human rights state.
Yeah this applies to nearly all of Europe IMO. Recent events show that the American Bill of Rights is definitely not a panacea, but at least there's some legal standing to push back against Orwellian measure like those put in place by the UK or the EU.
Given the current situation in the US, it's a huge cautionary tale for how not to do democracy. To non-ironically hold it up as an example at this point of time is truly amazing. No, the rest of us don't want current US style dictatorship in our countries.
While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world. Democracy is something we need to keep working towards. There is not one simple set of rules that will keep it healthy, at least as far as recently history shows.
> While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world.
Don’t let defensiveness lead you to say nonsensical things. Nearly every single country in the EU has a worse-than-trumpian party waiting in the wings, or even in power, see Hungary. Ascribing some sort of special property to the EU, a region with absolutely terrible standards for personal liberty, because at the moment there is more respect for liberal democracy there than elsewhere.. well it’s just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Yes, but many places in the EU use proportional representation or something close to it, so even if those parties gain significant traction, there is still protection as they are forced to work together with the rest of the parties.
In contrast, my own country Canada is far more at risk of the rise of an authoritarian adjacent party. A party with majority control has too much power here, and lack of proportional representation also means that majority control can be achieved with less than 50% of the voting population supporting you.
This is why I say the EU has better protections. The existence of parties that want more authoritarian control shouldn't be a measure of the health of a democratic system. In fact, somehow forcing these parties out would be pretty against the principles of democracy and free speech.
I do suppose its worth asking the question of whether democracy should allow the voting down of democracy itself, but I don't think the EU is at risk of that as a whole, even if a few member states are.
Could you describe with specific examples what qualifies the USA today as a "dictatorship"?
Executive orders to ban something explicitly deemed legal under the constitution by the supreme court? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/25/trump-flag-b...
Boy if you think non-constitutional executive orders are new or a trump thing, you're in for quite a surprise.
Yeah, it's politics. He assumes it will get appealed to the supreme court who will take his side.
I personally don't like the Texas v Johnson decision. Burning flags is un-American and should be illegal. How is that dictatorial?
It's an executive order that contravenes existing legislative and judicial precedent, sets penalties, and is expected to be unchallenged. It limits free speech by fiat because a single man wants it to be so.
It's clearly dictatorial, you'll have to demonstrate why it's not an act of a single person dictating policy.
Burning American flags is free speech? It's definitely an interpretation... and one that many legal scholars disagree with, similar to Roe v Wade. Not that repealing Roe v Wade was a good thing, but it didn't have a solid legal foundation.
It's not all about getting your way... well maybe the better way to say it is that the left got their way, for sixty years. And some of those wins from that period for the left were built on shaky ground. There has to be give and take in any healthy political system.
Yes. The Supreme Court affirmed this in Texas v Johnson. It is an act that expresses a political view through a symbolic act. It might be offensive to you, but "I find it offensive" is not sufficient defense to stop political speech.
And the left did not get their way for sixty years. The left is predominantly socialist, communist, anarchist. Democrats are not a leftist party. The left hasn't held many political positions in the US. But we on the left hate the democrats as much (or more) than folks on the right. We also tend to be broadly supportive of individual freedoms (most of my leftist colleagues are anti gun control, for instance.)
You sound like a tankie. You know communism failed, several times right?
A better example might be the treatment of whistleblowers?
Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were both pursued aggressively during the Obama administration. Next, please. I can go all day
Obama also engaged in dictatorial policy... Just because two people have done it does not make it "not dictatorial".
Or, using logical constructs - "A therefore B" is not made invalid by "C therefore B".
But it's obvious when people say "dictatorship" or "fascism" today in the USA it is just a dog whistle for not liking Trump. Nobody called Obama a fascist for how Chelsea Manning was treated.
It's absolutely not the case. The US is an empire with increasingly dictatorial power centralized in the executive. Clinton increased prison populations and increased police power. Bush increased executive power during his post 9-11 presidency. Obama regularly enforced U.S. policy at the end of a drone strike and shut down U.S. domestic agitation. Biden increased police funding and continued to sell surplus military equipment to cops. He also shut down a workers strike. Trump is a symptom of a general slide towards dictatorial policy. If it wasn't him this time it would have been one of the next 5 presidents from either policy.
Trump is doing some fucked up shit, but he doesn't get to be able to do that without decades of groundwork from both sides of the aisle.
Okay here's a secret that you probably won't hear other than in some books that are hard to find.
The youth desire a strong executive. They don't yet understand why it can be a bad thing, because they have little experience with people having power over them that aren't their parents or teachers.
The middle aged desire a strong legislative branch, the most fair branch of government. They have enough life experience to understand why. They are not quite old enough to be set in their ways just yet.
The elderly desire a strong judicial branch. Judges are almost always old, and biased towards the opinions of the elderly, left or right.
There is nothing wrong with a strong executive. It is just completely at odds with those who still control the vast majority of the money and power, and of course, mainstream media: the Boomers. JFK, Great Society, these are marked by a desire for a strong executive. Ironic, of course.
A strong executive can stop them, and the Boomers have never been told 'no' in their entire lives. Really truly, everybody was young in the 1960's. They warped society to their will, just like the people in every baby boom in history. You misinterpret their tantrum as something substantive.
I'm old (50s), I don't want a strong any of those. I especially, however, don't want a strong executive because I don't think decision making should be strongly centralized.
I'm a syndicalist anarchist, who believes communities should be primarily bottoms up driven, democratic, and cooperative. I argue we don't need any of those branches to be strong.
A few things are different.
1. Degrees / magnitude. How many cases of dictatorial behavior were there with Obama vs Trump? Every president signs executive orders, but trump signs a lot more of them.
2. Defiance to checks in power. The current administration seems uniquely defiant of both the legislative and the judicial branches, both in rhetoric and act.
And in turn federal district judges have signed a lot more nationwide injunctions? Orders of magnitude more than had ever been issued?
And now they are using a protected class loophole to keep doing it? After it was struck down by the Supreme Court?
No, but it's different when my opponent does it.
You have to stop thinking it's us or them. You have to stop imagining that somehow any of this is ok because my team or your team did or didn't do something.
I certainly hope I've been clear that this isn't some D vs R conflict. Both parties are at fault, both parties own some blame, but the situation today is not ok. It was also not ok under Biden, Trump 1, or Obama. We should be looking at ways to get the working class to look past our differences and securing more of the pie for ourselves. We should be reducing the power of the executive, no matter who is sitting in the seat. We should be focusing on the wellbeing of all.
Stop making a team sport, or at least correctly identify that you have way more in common with me (a working class anarchist) than you do with the people in power.
Politics is a team sport..? I have nothing in common with tankies, sorry.
I'm not a tankie, and if you think all leftists are tankies you definitely need to refresh some definitions.
Unless you are saying, "I have nothing in common with the narrow subset of leftists that are tankies" rather than implying I'm a tankie then, sure. I guess you could make that case.
Today? No, maybe not yet. But you'd be a fool to look at the actions of the current admin and not see that that's where they're headed.
But here's something from today: "A lot of people are saying maybe we'd like a dictator." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koruWF1cfyc
Militarizing law enforcement to go after entire classes of people who aren’t politically aligned.
The executive branch has that right. It's happened many many times in the past. I recommend reading a history book and not MSM or social media
yea right. Privacy is a fundamental right in the EU (GDPR, Charter of Fundamental Rights), while the U.S. legal system offers almost no general privacy protection. On top of that, the NSA has a long history of warrantless surveillance and backdoors (Snowden, PRISM), with very limited oversight. In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.
> Privacy is a fundamental right in the EU (GDPR, Charter of Fundamental Rights)
A fundamental right that is being challenged every 6 month or so for the last 3 years with the push for Chat Control.
> In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.
Absolutely false. With the way the EU commissions work, all you need is to buy or lobby your way in single one place and then you can push for any agenda that you want.
It does seem culturally popular in UK to have rules and government hoop jumping for every small thing, to the point it's become a tired meme on the internet. The backlash on this one was likely because it happened very quickly and very broadly across the internet at once. They should have slowly expanded the scope as most governments do and maybe the backlash would have been lower.
You seem to be describing the same "boiling frog" idea that Gramsci had of the "Long March through the Institutions", the takeover of a society without need to resort to violence, slowly occupying institutions (government departments, universities, arts, media, schools, corporations, etc) to decide the direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...
The frog has been slowly boiled on online privacy and censorship for decades now. Make no mistake, this is not a swift move - it's a meticulous progression.
I mean, you tell someone 20 years ago that you have to use your real name on websites or provide a phone number and they would look at your like you're crazy. Now, we're demanding people upload real pictures of their real life ID to fuck around on the internet.
I think most of the EU is like this but the UK seems to be either much more so or just much further along the path. Cultures around the world seem to have a kind of familiarity with some "default" type of governance and, in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".
> in Europe, it seems like a tendency to defer to or obey "elites".
This varies a lot by country. The French are still known for their protests, certainly not nearly as violent or disruptive in the modern day as their famous 18th-century revolution but very much quite impactful even so. And German trade unions use strikes very effectively to have a fair outcome in contract negotiations with employers.
Countries in the English-speaking world, certainly including the UK but also the US and Canada, seem a lot more deferential to elites in many ways than most of continental Europe.
It's not uncomfortable everyone knows it. The problem is with self righteous political activists masquerading as judges and civil servants who are so convinced of the justice of their cause that they feel no need to justify themselves to anyone and trample on dissent . And a class of elitist politicians with contempt for the people who voted them in.
Most of the comments here suggesting the UK it's evil have been downvoted. It's clearly still uncomfortable for a lot of people.
The UK has never been a free speech state. Remember the extremely weird era when Gerry Adams MP could not be heard on TV and had to have his voice dubbed?
Few European countries have free speech in the way the US does because their legal frameworks explicitly recognise potential harms from speech and freedoms speech can inhibit and attempt to balance these competing freedoms.
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
> Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
You can find clips of their spokespeople all over the news. There are no restrictions on accessing or viewing it here.
It’s weird to read people from other countries whose views of free speech have shifted so much that they can’t imagine a country where news outlets are allowed to broadcast things like this if they want.
That is a good definition of not having free speech. If it can be whittled away every year at the stroke of a pen by a single parliamentary body (without judicial oversight) it's not really a right, it was just a temporary policy like taxing some new product.
What is an example of any right we have that can't be whittled away at the stroke of a pen?
Well the original US system is (so far) the best designed system for protecting from that sort of thing. It has multiple layers of checks via separation of powers, which is the greatest contrast to UK system where courts can't overrule parliament. The courts in the US closely protect the constitutional rights like free speech and are always shutting down new laws.
Constitutional amendments are also an extremely high bar (2/3rds in congress + 2/3rds of state legislators), so much so that they never even try them anymore. So adding a hate speech amendment or "sending offensive messages" law, like the UK did via parliament, would basically be DOA in the US.
But of course all rights can hypothetically be taken away in any human system, if there's enough public support or obedience.
Currently speaking in the US will get you deported, or thrown in jail, or attacked by the government. The supposed checks and balances in the US system have all failed completely, either being overruled or simply ignored. You are at the point where your government is actively censoring your museums to tell a story that fits their propaganda.
It's genuinely hard to see a way out of complete degradation to a failed democracy at this point. None of this is hypothetical either. Sometimes I wonder if people on this site read the news at all, or are just willfully ignoring the reality of the situation.
American museums should not be telling stories to our people that we should be ashamed of ourselves. It's become too much, the pendulum is swinging back. Sorry
> our people
Do you think Black Americans, or native Americans feel shame when visiting these museums?
Or are they not "our people" to you?
We are all Americans. I however don't want to be constantly re-told why our great, if flawed, history makes WASP Americans out to be the bad guys at every turn.
Slavery and segregation are as much a blight on US history as the holocaust on Germany’s. It’s important that the US is not proud of its entire history. I’d rather not have obvious political hacks making decisions about what is on display and for that decision to be at least nominally in the hands of those with most knowledge of the historical details.
So it wasn't political hacks that tried to add their left spin to every piece of American history that they could get their hands on? Not trying to be offensive, but the tone of how American history is re-told today is not what I would consider moderate.
Also see i.e. the bundies who used guns to prevent the government from taking away the private ranching rights that had been homesteaded and passed down prior to the them being nationalized by the BLM.
The 'pen' says they are not allowed to keep grazing their cattle there in Clark county, yet they still are to this day.
The past decade kinda proves this to not be the case though. I think you're conflating constitutional amendments with laws as well to make a point when it's simply a bad comparison. It's like comparing the UK prime minister to a mayor.
I'm not looking this up at work, but didn't OBL have a mainstream media interview in the 90s?
Also, nearly every enemy of the US is on Twitter under their official names.
> Also, nearly every enemy of the US is on Twitter under their official names.
I'm not sure how fair argument that is. When you're literally the owner of the platform, of course you'd use your real name and the names of the companies you own, on the platform you just bought. Doing anything else would be weird :)
This comment has no value.
Clever girl.
|Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media.
I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.
I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.
The IRA were literally blowing up shopping centres around the time their speech was restricted (not banned) on national TV. Sinn Fein mps were elected because of our weird fptp system and the extreme concentration of nationalist voting blocks.
I didn’t agree with banning Gerry Adam’s voice and had sympathy with the nationalist cause, but let’s not make out like these were mainstream figures. Adam’s and McGuinness were apologists for people waging war against the British state. I strongly suspect a communist group with similar aims would get short shrift in the US.
Free speech is never absolute. Europe and the US have different mechanisms to protect free expression, but net they don’t end up in very different places.
https://www.today.com/video/leader-of-islamic-jihad-militant...
> Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
clips can be easily and readily found on most social media sites like youtube.
the really scary ones generally are only in arabic with arabic names and titles, so the english-only gringo demographic aren't going to see them
If social media existed then, no doubt Sinn Fein would be on there. The restrictions were only on the voice— not the words— of people like Adams on national TV channels. I really don’t think the UK treatment 40 years ago is that unusual and definitely doesn’t speak to the relative freedom of speech in US vs UK
War correspondent Jeremy Scahill of Blackwater and Dirty Wars fame has been doing interviews with and reporting on communiqués from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for quite some time now. I wouldn't be surprised if being able to do this was part of the reason he and Ryan Grim bailed from the Intercept.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/islamic-jihad-hamas-gaza-trum...
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/osama-hamdan-hamas-interview-...
Free speech in the US is not absolute. You cannot make true threats or incite violence. For example, calling for the extermination of Democrats or Republicans would cross the line.
That would not cross the line.
Not exactly. The Supreme Court has ruled that general hateful statements can be protected, but if a politician says "Democrats/Republicans should be exterminated" in a way that sounds like a real threat or call to action, it can become incitement or a true threat. So the line isn't about the words alone, it's about context and intent.
The standard as decided in Brandenburg v. Ohio is "imminent lawless action". You're correct that context matters; the speech must be tied to an imminent violation of law. This is a very high bar and in practice is very hard to reach.
Yes the US laws aren't prosecuting speech in isolation, it's always involves some sort of IRL plan to do something illegal. Just like criminal conspiracy laws, they aren't just about telling someone you plan to commit a crime but actually taking earnest steps towards a crime with another party.
IIRC the "I eat ass" bumper sticker guy lost his attempt to sue the police because judges ruled obscenity is an exception to the 1A.[]
Other examples include "appeal to prurient interest" even when the "interesting" activity is not illegal.
[] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.36...
It looks like the guy lost at the summary judgement phase because of qualified immunity. The case you cite doesn't appear to make your point.
If police have QI to stop your speech with impunity, and actually do so, that is just regulating that speech with extra steps.
>The case you cite doesn't appear to make your point.
It does if you go on and read the judgement, which cites that that it is reasonable to initiate a stop for obscenity, which was part of the reasoning used to grant QI.
> It does if you go on and read the judgement ...
I think this is beside their point. Police are practically given qualified immunity by default; the case isn't strictly "lost" at this stage, it's lost if that decision is appealed and upheld until the victim is out of appeal options.
To your point, the summary judgement is still a clear injustice and it does practically give police the ability to stop speech whenever they want. But there's an element of random punishment if the person they stop has the resources to appeal the first decision. I'd be surprised if that appeal would be lost in this case given the main problem was the content of the expression; that's a pretty cut-and-dry 1a violation.
(It's a separate issue but there's another problem with the cases in which the officer loses qualified immunity in that the city they work in (tax payers) will pay the damages to shield them from consequences. I forget the legal mechanism but it pretty much always happens.)
Does that also extend to things like calling for your followers to invade the white house?
The thing that didn't happen that you are alluding to would, in fact, not, even if it had happened, be restricted speech.
The original intent was supposed to be that Adams and others would not be on TV at all. The TV broadcasters relatively quickly realised that there was a loophole which meant that as long as his voice wasn't broadcast they were within the rules. But what was weird was that the UK government didn't immediately close this loophole (especially given that the same loophole was not available in the Republic of Ireland where the same broadcast ban existed at the time).
Small nitpick: I don't think it's right to refer to him as "Gerry Adams MP", due to the policy he followed of refusing to swear the oath of allegiance and thus not taking up the seat.
The problem with the nitpick is it inevitably runs into the issue of who the authority is here, and, by the very nature of the beast, said authority is disputed here. It seems small, but in reality it’s the whole thing.
IIRC, Gerry Adams was always performed by Stephen Rea, a moderately successful actor and heart-throb in certain circles. Adams said that SR “did me better than I do”.
Can't have the populace heating the voice of the guy who was never proven to be a member of the ra, better they listen to the sexy husband of convicted provo bomber Dolours Price instead.
Dolours being the sister of Marian Price who is currently suiting Disney over being depicted shooting Jean McConville in the back of the head in Say Nothing.
For what it’s worth, despite the legal situation, it is virtually unanimously accepted by historians, journalists, academics, and the wider Irish and British public, that Gerry Adams was a member of the IRA. Nobody seriously disputes this.
I mean, I have no opinion on this, but I know that if someone asks me “Are you a member of an organisation it’s a criminal offence to be a member of?” I’m gonna say no.
Price, of course, was a vocal opponent of the peace process championed by Gerry Adams. Lord knows what she says on the Boston Tapes.
Ironically, Stephen Rea was in V for Vendetta, a film about a British surveillance state.
Democracy and monarchy are also at odds.
The actions and words of the United Kingdom are vastly different.
A political establishment that builds a "total surveillance police state" is not going to allow itself to be displaced by "elections".
> A political establishment that builds a "total surveillance police state" is not going to allow itself to be displaced by "elections".
Kier Starmer may be a wildly unpopular leader, even within his own party, and may have declared inconvenient protest groups to be terrorists so they can be banned, and may support a porn ban and an encryption ban, and an expansion of police facial recognition, and may back jailing people for misinformation posted on twitter that lead to riots, and may happily play lapdog to the wildly unpopular Trump government for little benefit.
But he will not call off the next elections, or refuse to step down. He is nowhere near popular enough to succeed at that, even if he tried. He can't even get his own party to pass his government's flagship spending reductions.
It's the direction the state is taking, not the political establishment. Elections are fine because they won't change anything in the way the state is run. If you want proof look at Israel. The moment the right wing, which has been continuously elected into power for the last 20 years or so, and have a clear and undeniable mandate tried to bring the institutions more in line with the people they suddenly found themselves innundated with protests and outright rebellion. Democracy has its limits apparently. I hate to see the UK sliding in that direction.
The revisionsism and one-eyed delusional rewriting of history is, almost, amusing.
Yes of course. Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society. It's an old, tired narrative and most of the country can see through it which is why he keeps getting elected.
>Netanyahu in a narcissistic and tyrannical move tried to seize control of the judicial system as part of his ongoing attempts to subvert democracy and justice. He's corrupt and if he's found guilty he'll go to prison so he's trying to control the process. But the brave protestors are speaking out and not allowing him and his far right government from destroying Israeli democracy and society.
Well yes this, but unironically.
Of course, add commission of genocide to that list.
It's genocide to defend your country these days. It's amazing how good pr and a concerted media campaign can shift a narrative so far that it's taken for granted, even by pro Israel people that they have to defend against charges of genocide. It's the sort of thing put out by people who want zero accountability and are looking to deflect blame (the UN, Qatar and every other Arab state who helped create this crisis). Yeah I know you're going to say that's netanyahu, but it's obviously not because he would deal in good faith with anyone who would reciprocate. On the very rare occasions that happens he does. He's so far honoured the ceasfires and politically he's offered many concessions to which are usually rejected, because most of the time people are dealing with him and his government in bad faith.
It's quite simple: European states require serious restrictions on liberty in order to do the incredibly unpopular but morally good things they feel they're doing.
One of the weirder ones was up until ~2021 it was illegal in Germany to display the YPG flag (that is you would get stopped by police but not necessarily prosecuted) but not to engage in YPG activities.
https://anfenglishmobile.com/news/german-court-rules-that-yp...
> in order to do the incredibly unpopular but morally good things
Who is electing the leaders of those states if the things they do are incredibly unpopular?
The notion that states are the perfect reflection of the democratic will is quite silly.
Suppose a party in Europe is elected on the premise that they will provide free ice cream for all. This is an important issue for people, so they vote for the party. When they get into power, they ban ice cream to promote "healthier living".
Most citizens do not support this policy but they did support the government being elected due to various leveraged mechanisms, such as political polarization, identity politics, laws, outright lies & manipulation, etc.
Ironically, these states keep turning over their leadership because it's incredibly unpopular and the new leadership just continues to do incredibly unpopular things.
It is worth noting that the principles behind the online services act are still broadly popular in the UK
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
Did you read this link?
>This reluctance extends to different types of platforms. Only around a third would be likely to provide age proof for messaging apps (38%) or social media sites (37%). For user-generated encyclopaedias like Wikipedia, half (51%) say they would be unlikely to submit any proof of age. Just 19% say they would be willing to submit proof of age for dating apps, lowering to 14% for pornography websites.
Good things such as supporting Israel's genocide
> your political opponents
are on the same "side" with you. A country is not divided into two (or more) political sides. A country is divided into classes.
It was even how modern voting system originated. See: Estates-General, Prussian three-class franchise, etc.
See also: both parties of the US didn't release Epstein files.
The sooner Americans realize the democrats and the republicans aren't actually in opposition, the sooner we maybe get some parties who are.
I think we were moving in that direction. But when Newsom starting posting snark on social media they all fell back in line. People want to be on the winning side. Given the enforcement of the dichotomy they pick one.
Newsom is a fucking nightmare. Willing to burn every minority community alive if it gets him 5% at the ballot box.
Don't worry, the Democrats and Republicans will have those parties outlawed or otherwise neutralized before they become a threat.
My money is on 'never', but who knows. Perhaps people will miraculously get smarter.
Here’s a guy who doesn’t remember the Civil War.
Both tories and labour are doing the same kind of politics and are not different at all. From their POV us, people, are the bad guys who has to be restricted.
I'm not a fan of the OSA but proponents of it will *keep winning* if you *keep misrepresenting it*.
You can, and should, argue about the effects but the core of the OSA and how it can be sold is this, at several different levels:
One, most detailed.
Sites that provide user to user services have some level of duty of care to their users, like physical sites and events.
They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
They should implement mitigations based on those risk assessments. Not to completely remove all possibility of harm, but to lower it.
For example, sites where kids can talk to each other in private chats should have ways of kids reporting adults and moderators to review those reports. Sites where you can share pictures should check for people sharing child porn (if you have a way of a userbase sharing encrypted images with each other anonymously, you're going to get child porn on there). Sites aimed at adults with public conversations like some hobby site with no history of issues and someone checking for spam/etc doesn't need to do much.
You should re-check things once a year.
That's the selling point - and as much as we can argue about second order effects (like having a list of IDs and what you've watched, overhead etc), those statements don't on the face of it seem objectionable.
Two, shorter.
Sites should be responsible about what they do just like shops and other spaces, with risk assessments and more focus when there are kids involved.
Three, shortest.
Facebook should make sure people aren't grooming your kids.
Now, the problem with talking about " a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored," is where does that fit into the explanations above? How do you explain that to even me, a highly technical, terminally online nerd who has read at least a decent chunk of the actual OFCOM guidelines?
This isn't a new issue, and it predates the internet. There were publishers of magazines containing pornography (or anything else unsuitable for children). These were sold in shops. A publisher had to ensure that the material in the magazines was legal to print, but it wasn't their responsibility to prevent children from looking at their magazines, and it's difficult to see how that would even be possible. That was the responsibility of the people working in the shops: they had to put the magazines on the top shelf, and weren't allowed to sell them to children.
On the internet, people don't get porn videos directly from pornographic web sites, just as in the past they didn't buy porn directly from the publishers. The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops. So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs. And British ISPs are within the UK's jurisdiction.
And before anyone points out that there are workarounds that children could use to bypass controls, this was also the case with printed magazines.
I don't have a problem with holding companies responsible for the products they sell. But your analogy breaks down because the shop owner chooses the products to sell in his shop. The porn mags aren't in the shop unless he specifically arranges to sell them, so it's easy to say he's responsible for keeping kids away from them.
An ISP doesn't do that. A better match for an ISP would be the trucking company that hauls magazines (porn and otherwise) from publishers to shops, or the company that maintains the shop's cash register.
> I don't have a problem with holding companies responsible for the products they sell.
That's why I wrote, "A publisher had to ensure that the material in the magazines was legal to print." Web sites should also follow the laws of the countries where they are based, but not be required to follow other countries' laws. In the specific case here, a UK body is trying to collect daily fines from a US based web site (4chan.org) with no physical UK presence.
> An ISP doesn't do that.
For over a decade, they have been blocking traffic to/from web sites deemed unsuitable for children, by default. Which should make people wonder what this adult verification is actually for.
> but it wasn't their responsibility to prevent children from looking at their magazines
They weren't made to guarantee no child could peek at them, no, but they do have age restrictions that are followed (a child who picks one up couldn't buy it) and they were often on the top shelf. The kind of thing a basic risk assessment would flag "hey we keep the hardcore porn in front of the pokemon magazines...".
> The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops
The pictures emit photons which fly through the air to the child. The air is the shop.
Or for websites your computer is the shop.
The ISP is not the shop. Nor in the OSA is it viewed as such. The company who makes the service has some responsibility.
> So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs.
This fundamentally cannot work for what is in the OSA, and if you cannot see why almost immediately then you do not know what is in the OSA and cannot effectively argue against it. It is not a requirement to add age checks to porno sites.
This seems like a misrepresentation of OSA more so than the parent post. It prevents people accessing content they may well need. Look at some of the subreddits being blocked if you want to see how far they go. Subs about periods, sex education, stopping smoking, suicide prevention, lgbtq. Not sure how you justify that nobody under 18 would ever have a need to access these things.
When you have to prove you're a child you have to prove you're and adult. The privacy implications of that are why it's a police state problem. It eliminates the anonymity and allows for perfect personal tracking of any wrongthink you may do.
It's also not the only thing the UK government has done to become a police state by a long shot. UK is 1984 adjacent in quite a few ways.
Again that's a second order thing as I said, and those are choices by reddit - not mandated by the OSA.
> When you have to prove you're a child you have to prove you're and adult.
Again, not required by the OSA.
This is mostly true. It fails to mention "is the user a kid" is unverifiable without imposing identify verification, which implies that all speech (which is already monitored) is now self-censored, effectively turning the state in a surveillance state. You don't need to be throwing people in jail for that, having a credible means of identifying anyone online is enough.
Age checks are not fundamentally required by the OSA. It's really, really important that if you want to argue against it you argue against what's actually in it.
I was not arguing against OSA, I was arguing about your point that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with "if there are kids involved, care should be taken". Yes there is, because we can't know if there are kids involved without turning into a surveillance state.
> They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
The problem is when one group wants to impose their definition of harm on everyone else, saying that everyone else shouldn't be allowed to be 'harmed' even if they don't consider it as such. In the UK this is not unique to the OSA discussion(see the UK's anti-trans turn), and but it is very relevant.
This is a very valid point and importantly one of the more detailed issues.
So it's a good one to start with when arguing against the OSA - you say harm but what does that mean? What must sites assume it could mean? And examples of helpful kinds of things that would fall under at least the risk of getting caught out.
You are covering for a bad law with “concern” because your chosen political party implemented it.
If I put you in a bottle and told you that it was “the fascists” that proposed and implemented this exact law you would be raging.
I personally, would appreciate the intellectual honesty on this. Thank you.
> You are covering for a bad law
Read the post again. I am not. I am trying to show those against it that they are failing to argue effectively against it.
> allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government
The UK isn't any of that, it's always be an authoritarian country. The fact that British are amongst the most apathetic people on Earth fuels that, they just accept everything.
Except conquest by the Germans. Much to Hitler’s dismay, the Brits very much refused to accept that.
They accepted what their government told them, which supports the point.
You're right - it's disgusting that their government told them that Nazism is bad and that they should fight to defend their own country. Fucking appalling, really.
The British were also very evil, but they got to write the history books.
Just to clarify, what you're saying is that the nazis weren't actually all that bad, the British history books have just deliberately written them as bad people?
I don't think that's what the parent was saying. They are saying the Nazis are truly evil, but the Brits are also truly evil. A different truly evil, of course, I'm not going to weigh tragedies against one another.
And they're not wrong. The British empire killed millions through policy -- read up on the Bengali famine to understand one example where Britain killed millions. Britain was one of the earliest users of concentration camps, deploying them during the Boer War.
This feels very broad strokes. It's like saying Germany is bad because of Nazi Germany. That's not to excuse terrible actions but that these histories are long with a variety of leaders and popular beliefs. So viewing a country as a monolith in line with all its past crimes seems very nationalistic.
Using more current context, leadership and events seems like a more realistic view of things. Which doesn't mean the UK is a shining beacon of freedom or democracy, but just to better explain why things happen instead of blaming events of leaders who are not in office or even alive.
They're not saying the Nazis are truly evil at all, they're just saying that the British people shouldn't have fought the Nazis or were hoodwinked by the govt.
The British were evil, the Chinese were evil, the Japanese were evil, the Belgians were evil, the Spanish were evil, the Incas were evil, the Mongols were evil, the French were evil, the Iroquois were evil, the ancient Egyptians were evil, etc etc etc.
> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored
It’s not like this is new or unique to the UK, the US has been busted indiscriminately spying on all of its citizens multiple times - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Nobody really cared and nothing changed.
Mass surveillance doesn’t seem very difficult to build if you have power. If you don’t build it, it seems like step 4 hit becomes “they build it and use it against you.” That’s not to say it’s a good idea to build such a thing, but the “your enemies will use it against you” argument doesn’t make much sense to me. The only real solution to bad guys gaining power is to either prevent them from gaining power or remove them if they already have.
But that is astonishingly idealistic in the best case.
What happens is generational shifts over longer periods of time mean that draconian law or feature has more and more chances to be used by someone with bad intentions. It's the law of large numbers or murphy's law in full effect, it's not just 1 or 2 people.
I think we should distinguish between someone with bad intentions in a position of power, and the entire power of the state being taken over by people with bad intentions. The possibility of the former does indeed seem like a good argument for not building total surveillance systems. But I read the comment as talking about the latter.
The West aren't good guys and have never been the good guys. We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to, but without that to contrast with, we look increasingly like the managed democracies you see out East.
What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.
- It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
- It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
- It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
- It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
- It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
Places like China are finding out why you need these things, and are building these systems so their society can succeed.
Democracy's just an (Western) artifact of enforcing and maintaining rule of law.
> What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.
The trouble with this is that it isn't compatible with prosecutorial discretion. It requires that if someone is breaking the law, they get prosecuted for it. Otherwise unenforced laws accumulate until everyone is breaking a hundred laws at any given time and then only the disfavored get prosecuted.
But if you want laws to be consistently enforced then they need to be few and simple enough for people to understand and comply with them, and that was historically the magic formula, which we've increasingly abandoned, much to our detriment.
> It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
Civil asset forfeiture suggests that's very much a thing to fear.
> It's why you know the water's safe to drink
Tell this to the people of Flint, Michigan. Or the many communities near fracking sites.
And those exceptions largely prove the rule - the default expectation (not just desire) is that those things not happen. They still do, but it's not something that occurs to most off the tops of their heads. When you educate people on civil forfeiture you get a lot of shocked Pikachu; somewhat fewer with severe water quality issues, but I think that's mostly due to broad publication of Flint's situation in particular raising general awareness.
FWIW… that you can only point to one specific place in the USA with bad water, and some non-specific generalized place is a fairly good point against your argument.
Roughly one in three Americans water sources are chemically polluted, predominantly in minority areas: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP14721?mc_cid=180f74...
> It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Scott_(criminal)
> It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
https://troymedia.com/lifestyle/your-money/debanking-is-otta... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/a...
> It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint,_Michigan
> It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
> It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/tax-evasion-by-wealthiest-am...
I mean, I get that it could be worse, but...
Yeah the comment you're replying to feels very insulated from the real world. It's the kind of thing you'd hear in a middle school social studies class about how great America is.
I mean, I'm not one of those "America/West Bad" people either, it's just "rule of law" is not it. We are well into our Kleptocracy era. Still prefer what we have to alternatives though.
All of these examples serve to prove their point, being that "advanced societies" use rule of law to deal with such problems. It is consistent in that view that they occur due to a lack of enforcement of the laws/regulations that prevent them.
This is a bit complicated. Law can absolutely be used to persecute people.
For example, there once was so-called Bill of Attainder, which basically meant that a certain person was labeled as an outlaw, traitor, and handled as such.
It was an actual law, voted on by the Parliament, but even though usage of Bills of Attainder was perfectly consistent with rule of law, it was not that different from a classical Stalinist show trial in effect.
This is also why Bills of Attainder are banned by the US Constitution.
And by contrast it is America which which has the civil forfeiture practices.
While the West aren't really the good guy, I think there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy. Because while government outreach like those discussed are a scary possibility in the West nowadays, in the 'East' (more like Russia & China), it is a given and there are no recourse.
> there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy
The problem is you don't know how you are actually behaving towards the global south, so your perception is very skewed and people outside the west will have a vastly different perception than you, that you will never understand. Like some people in the west are waking up on Israels behavior now, but the rest of the world was aware of their genocidal terror for over half a century while you lived in innocent bliss. They see your support for Obama and Dove emojis in your profile picture while their entire extended families are getting systematically murdered by your bombs to this day.
Meanwhile in your made up fantasy land, its China that is this great threat to world peace.
Anyone who thinks the West is the better guy needs to look closely at the Western-backed Genocide in Palestine.
Yeah, its amazing how good the isralies are at everything (tech, intelligence, manufacturing) but its taking them years to commit genocide. Despite their massive force advantage.
Genocide is a process and intent, not an outcome. Are you saying it's not genocide because everyone's not dead or forced off their land yet?
Considerably fewer civilians died in say, Srebrenica. Bosnian Muslims still live there. There are still Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda. The original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia still live there.
I'd also note -- as someone who's lived there -- that what Israel as a nation really excels at isn't tech, intelligence or manufacturing. Plenty of other countries are equal and above. I'd say it's marketing and comms.
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You're going to have to explain yourself there, son.
> Everyone knows what genocide means.
Yes, it's spelled out very clearly to be based in intent and not outcome here: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-...
If anyone is trying to "gaslight" anyone, it's going to be in the direction of justifying the actions of Israel (or the West's support of or complicity in it).
The West is the least bad if you live in an area where Western forces aren't currently bombing you or directly supporting the people starving you to death. Then China probably seems a lot better.
So if Germany supports Israel bombing Gazans they are bad, but if China supports the Russian bombing of Ukrainians, suddenly it's a lot better?
Maybe re-read my comment.
From the perspective of the Gazan parents watching their children starve to death, yes, China probably seems a lot better than the UK, which is directly responsible for their situation.
The Ukrainian parent suffering Russian bombing is likely has a much better opinion of the UK for their support, but that doesn't make the UK the good guys. Just less bad in that particular situation.
From the perspective of the Gazan parents, the worst of all should be Hamas (who is actually directly responsible for their situation) since they insist on poking the bear and getting Gaza into military conflicts they can't win.
Sometimes I wonder what contemporary Hacker News would say about my country freedom fighters back in the day. If they lost, I'm pretty sure we would call them terrorists or bandits instead.
Yeah, definitely don't blame the country actually committing genocide.
You sound like someone who is excusing domestic violence by saying, "if she didn't want to get hit, she shouldn't have talked back".
Fuck Hamas, I don't support hamas, but like, Israeli actions in Gaza are clearly inexcusable.
False equivalence. One of them is a (failed) proxy war the other is genocide.
Pretty callous. I doubt dying Ukrainians care that you dismiss their war as "proxy". The unprovoked invasion and resulting deaths are a fact. And Russia absolutely wants to destroy the Ukrainian identity, so that actually is a genocide.
Forced deportation of Ukrainian children, the rhetoric denying Ukrainian nationhood and massacres in places like Bucha definitely put the Ukrainian war into genocide territory.
But if you want to talk about "real" genocides, China is backing Myanmar.
> the other is genocide
How is it a genocide? It's pretty clearly a war in an urban environment where there will be a lot of civilian casualties. Was the battle of Stalingrad a "genocide" too?
Did you ever expect to be making this kind of argument when you were growing up and learning about 20th century horrors? Or did you imagine yourself the kind of person who would have resisted in 1930s germany?
I wonder how quickly people will start to scrub their online presence now that the zeitgeist has turned against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
You're on the wrong side of history and a despicable human being.
So naive. Talking points from the mouthpieces of the CCP and Russia who would love us to believe we’re all the same
Russians of any gender or minority could vote for their representative in 1917. Women in the States only got full suffrage in 1920, African Americans in 1965. So no real pedigree there.
And only in 1917... :)
African Americans got the right to vote in the US in 1870.
But a whole state-level legislative architecture meant that suffrage wasn't accessible nationwide till the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Modern voter registration laws, which are gathering pace today, are largely targeted at keeping minority voters from exercising their democratic rights.
Great timeline here: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/politics/black-v...
If you want to talk about whether something exists in practice rather than on paper then I have some news for you about Russia.
Yeah, exactly. I'm saying the UK and America have democracies of equal quality to and poorer pedigree than Russia.
Edit for clarity.
Not everyone you disagree with is a CCP/Russia/<insert_scapegoat> mouthpiece.
No, but they could very easily be using the same talking points
So? Maybe the Russians are right about some things, now and then.
Doubtful
the propaganda has worked wonders on you
you've been brainwashed
No, it's not naive at all. The UK in particular are not the good guys.
Apart from their appalling behaviour during their recent expeditionary wars, their current support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, their sexual and physical abuse of locals near British Overseas bases, they also have an incredibly poor record with their own citizens.
British behaviour in Northern Ireland was itself genocidal, and involved the regular murder of civilians from decades. Even today they are continuing the legal protection of the perpetrators.
I consider it naive to even start talking about nation states in terms of ‘good guys’
Well, all countries are complex collections of people and ideas, so like people, there are no pure good guys.
But we have all been subjected to particularly US propaganda portraying the West as the global good guys, and specproc challenged that worldview in the comment to which you replied. Ironically, you criticised him for being naive as he was challenging the concept of the West as the good guys, something you now call naive yourself.
So it seems you aren't internally consistent.
Yes. I don’t know why anyone would point to people with the safest and most economic mobility in history as some sort of success story!
> the safest and most economic mobility in history
Do you believe this is the US?
From what I witnessed over years is, European countries loved to point fingers to other countries to educate them about how their democracies shall look like.
Now they are doing the very same things they pointed fingers about and, now there's no structured information flow to hide this.
As I sometimes tend to say: "God has an interesting sense of humor".
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia all have fairly robust democracies. Yes, some of them probably look and feel different than those of NATO, but they are a great improvement over previous colonial administrations, monarchies, theocracies, and "single party democratic states" (Korea and Taiwan before late 1980s/early 1990s break-throughs).
I was thinking largely of Russia, but when it comes to internet freedoms we're absolutely heading in a China direction.
Coming at it here from a broadly UK perspective. We have:
- Very little difference between ruling parties on core issues since the seventies, I'm thinking largely on the economic and foreign policy front here.
- Prison under terrorism offenses for peaceful protest.
- Arrests for (checks notes) complaining about the management of your local school in a WhatsApp group.[1]
People who argue we're somehow better than the people we happen to be fighting need to take a long hard look around. And maybe also remember that when we're not fighting folks (e.g., Saudi, Israel) abhorrent behaviour is tolerated and supported.
[^1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo
Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years. If the ruling party was not friendly to the West, then I bet you it would be called something else than democracy.
> We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to
You can't think yourself a free thinker to realize the west is a force for evil in the world and simultaneously believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism is it makes for a very incoherent world view. "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time."
> believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism
The main problem with communism was that it was much worse than Western propaganda portrayed it to be. Because if Western propaganda had tried to depict it truthfully, no one would have believed it. Communism is so much worse that it is literally unbelievable, so anti-communist propaganda has to make communism look good in order for anyone to believe it.
Propaganda tends to make the victims of that propaganda sound incoherent, but that's ok, the only purpose it really serves today, is to explain to you why you can't have health care.
That isn't how this came to be.
Small-c conservatism, think-of-the-children Think Tanks™ have long been a part of British politics and we go barely a week between legitimate studies and idle thought pieces where we introspect modern parenting and despair.
Like it or not, kids have access to the internet in a way that wasn't true 20, 25 years ago. Parents of teens are just realising the horrors of targeted online bullying, diet clubs, porn sharing (Snapchat and worse) and the many other small things that can just destroy kids before they've had a chance.
"But Oli," I hear you say... Yes. Parents should do better but criminalising parenting methods is hard and expensive and leaves you with a bunch of state-orphaned kids. So if we are to assume parents gonna parent, systems like this look tempting to people who don't understand the Internet.
I'm not defending the law, I just don't think this one has its roots in surveillance. It's a shitty reaction to a shitty situation.
Politicians represent the country, if politicians are corrupted and stupid then the country is corrupted and stupid
That's assuming voting systems or checks and balances don't matter. If you made structural mistakes in how you choose politicians, you're going to have a worse time than if you use better systems.
The people will always get the politicians they deserve.
nobody "deserves" stephen miller.
See what is happening here in U.S. as an example; our government was rather easy to corrupt in less than a few months once all the pieces were in place (regardless of who put them in place and for what reason).
The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives. It's a completely foreign paradigm to the average American, though alarming "progress" has been made on the American front as of late.
No. We were typically indifferent to our Government. Very much a case of 'go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.' But substitute 'tea'.
But in the last couple of decades, things have changed. Arguably, a public referendum in 2016, was very much a protest vote against several Parliaments that didn't listen to its citizens. And the last decade shows nothing has changed.
My friends and family, and myself included, were never very political, and very much a case of 'No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In', but now everyone is talking about the Government. Interesting times ahead.
> now everyone is talking about the Government
How are they talking about it?
Are you (or do you know) many 'average Brits' who would agree with this statement (as applying to themselves)?
Obviously few would with that framing, but if they're given policies, lots of British people across the political spectrum would support ones that are more paternalistic. Support for the OSA is very high: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
British people are much happier with the state being paternalistic, across the political spectrum, it is a very strong differentiator between the US and the UK. "The government should do something!" You can see it in attitudes to the NHS, pensions, welfare. At its peak, in the 70s, 32% of people lived in social housing!
Labour voters, young and old, are generally quite paternalistic. Lots of Conservative voters are too, depending on the flavour. The exceptions are the Lib Dems and some conservative tribes. I am consistently surprised when talking to highly-educated, politically engaged people, left or right, how much the default is that the state should act.
As much as US folks bemoan the ‘nanny state’, it’s because they look at the UK and cringe.
We have the same issue in France as well.
Why won't the government do something is the refrain that everyone including opposing parties are saying. God forbid anyone should take initiative on anything.
And the state keeps on expanding year after year. I cannot remember the last time someone did not promise to shrink the state/government and once elected did a complete 180. It's bonkers.
I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.
For what it's worth as a Brit I agree with you.
When I talk to people in Britain about sugar-taxes, smoking bans, porn bans, hate-speech laws, etc, most people will explain that without these things people will say/do harmful things therefore the government should stop them.
I remember when they started rolling out biometric facing scanning technology in stores and using it to ban people from all supermarkets within a designated area – basically forcing them to shop in smaller stores without these cameras or get their friends and family to buy their groceries. I thought this was utterly insane but to be horror Brits seem to almost universally support of this stuff because face scanning is a great way to identity people which private companies have flagged high-risk.
Our opinion of others is very low, and are comfort with authoritarianism is relatively high.
It's disturbing to me that so much of this type of legislation originates with the "Conservatives", and the only viable alternative in Labour thinks this type of legislation doesn't go far enough. I guess at least things will be interesting with Farage in Number 10.
They think (like many Americans right now) that it will only be done against ‘those other people’. When they realize it’s been applied to them, it’s too late (they’ve been ‘othered’ now) and people will ignore them - or they’ll have to blame themselves or cover it up in order to fit in.
It’s classic.
Eventually, enough people will have been fucked by it that the numbers will shift back the other way - and then the opposite end of the pathology (not being able to recognize the main groups own needs enough to defend them or pull together as a coherent group) starts building.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
>The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public
does not mean
>the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives
The average Brit doesn't want foreign entities pushing porn and self harm / pro suicide stuff to their kids. Can you perhaps see the difference there?
I notice most of the outrage in HN is from foreign entities wanting freedom to push whatever. The Brits are ok telling JD Vance et all chill.
The Brits can go bugger off and build their own China Firewall™.
There is a kernel of truth.
But I think you are, maybe to a large extent, misattributing political apathy.
Average Brit here - we do not like this and the way politics here has been so tumultuous has shown the general public are sick of this behaviour too.
Tumultuous in what way? There's so little distance between Conservative and Labour today that it really doesn't matter who's in power.
I think there’s more difference than there has been since the 1980s. People really underestimate how far the Tory base (and parliamentary party following closely) have shifted to the right. The willingness of sitting Tory MPs to knowingly lie and dissemble on immigration related issues to create heat is a real break from a past consensus.
And they have record low shares of the vote, so … seems consistent?
And both are now more unpopular than ever.
and yet they keep voting for blue labour or red labour…
Current opinion polls for both are abysmal, but I don't think that civic freedoms are the main reason; the main reason is immigration, which all the previous governments promised to limit and then silently decided not to.
Decided not to, but continued to actively campaign on. It’s created a really weird situation where the actual policy choices are hugely disconnected from the rhetoric and emotion in the debate.
Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.
For the Conservatives it's all about irregular/illegal immigration. Labour are hugely unpopular on that having apparently no idea what to do about it but they also have massive challenges on the economy/cost of living and the state of publicly funded services.
Immigration is sucking support more from the tories than labour. They rode into power based upon a promise to do something about it and then massively increased it.
Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.
The average Brit isn't even aware this is happening.
The OSA is the first time people may actually notice, because their porn habits will be disrupted.
What are you on about?!
You're speaking like someone who needs a loud narcissist to tell them who to hate today.
I'm speaking like someone who has to live with the consequences of horrible legislation like this because I live here.
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My comment provoked you enough to create an account just to make a throwaway insult reply to it. I think perhaps it hit closer to home than you would care to acknolwedge.
As with your initial comment, none of these assertions are correct.
This is not a throwaway account or comment - it is my first and only HN account.
The comment I made was not an insult, but was made to flag the ignorance and stupidity of yours - maybe take a look at the subreddit and see if you can see some parallels. If you have taken it as an insult then that's fine.
Well, I offered my observations and a few people agreed with me to varying degrees. You asserted I'm wrong, ignorant, and stupid. Perhaps that is true; it is not, however, an argument.
Again, none of these statement are true. When you wrote "The thing you have to understand", this is not an observation - it is a statement of objective fact. I never asserted you were ignorant and stupid - I initially implied your comment was, which it objectively is.
they're kinda right, in europe we really don't give a shit about politics and if we do you're doing something wrong.
Going by that reasoning someone must be clearly doing something wrong considering they seem to voice their political will at about the same rate as the politically active Americans.
Turnout in the latest presidential/general elections:
2025 German federal election 82.5%
2024 United Kingdom general election 59.7%
2022 French presidential election 73.69%(I)/71.99%(II)
2022 Italian general election 63.85%
2023 Spanish general election 66.6%
2024 United States presidential election 64.1%
Yah, exactly, we do care about politics right this moment because the goverment did fuck up badly.
You should give a shit because Europe is on its way to implementing its own horrible legislation [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
https://legiscan.com/MS/text/HB1126/id/2988284
America ! America! God Shine Her Light On Theeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
The average American needs church to tell them how to live.
And there are now openly right wing Christians in government...
This is the first time in a long time on Hacker News that I've not seen universal disapproval to this measure. People are actually arguing for it, even as a devil's advocate? What the UK has been doing is wrong, it is disenfranchising and disempowering people.
The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore. It's always been ruled by a crowd of people who went to privately-funded schools that cost a fortune. Half the government's politicians and staffers can trace their relations back to the same historical personage.
They aren't afraid for their kids with these laws. They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break, and they will be out of a job with pitchfork-wielding crowds chasing them out of London.
I feel a similar sense of confusion at the overall reaction from HN. Ten years ago there would have been unanimous disapproval.
Has the userbase changed so much? If this is hackernews, what about the general population of developers?
I don't think anyone can assume that every comment on HN comes from a real human anymore. This law comes from the same nation that gave us Cambridge Analytica.
HN is a large enough forum that it would be included in any serious propaganda campaign.
Times are dark now; people jaded, perspectives eroded. There's not much holding dreams hostage anymore.
I wish there was a refund for all the wasted time on propaganda.
Hacker News users now profit from extensive invasion of privacy, from Facebook to LinkedIn, to every ad network, VPN, ISP, etc... They all trade in our private info daily. 20 years ago, the battle cry was around privacy and government monitoring of all traffic and how bad that was. Now people climb over one another to give away their data for free in exchange for mind-altering social media platforms and AI driven nonsense.
I am convinced Libertarians do not exist. The current state of the US should drive them to utter insanity, and yet, they tend to be mostly silent on all of these corporate over reach issues. People who say they are Libertarian just don't want to pay parking tickets. If the real techno Libertarians existed, they'd be burning our current Valley to the ground. Anyone who cared about the 2nd amendment should be losing their minds over military deployments on US soil. Constitution huggers should be screaming bloody murder, daily. Instead, those types are super happy with their new dictator. Funny how all the performative anger goes away when it's their side that is performing the authoritarian actions. The NRA seems to LOVE this willing take over of the well armed militias by the federal government... But I digress.
Instead, the reigning philosophy here is now greed. Privacy, sovereignty, ownership, open source, all those things are forgotten in the backseat of the crypto and VC cash car.
It surprises me how little the newer generations care about ethics, morality, principles. Call them whatever you want, but it really feels like everyone screams about how righteous they are, how wrong everyone else is, and then they take the cash and stand up for nothing when the chips are down.
Remember when the big thing we were worried about was the NSA recording our phone calls? Now large corporations harvest our call info, chat texts, social media posts, and even the raw microphone input on our phones to strip every last piece of information about us and mine it for data to influence our lives, purchases, and even out thoughts. And what did we do in the last election? We put in the party that will remove even more roadblocks from this type of thing, and has deregulated crypto. Victory!
How did we get here? Where are the Cypherpunks? Where are the high ideals we used to have?
All burned alive at the altar of money.
I think it's less that HN users profit from privacy invasion as much as some of them aspire to run companies that do so. Perhaps a distinction without a difference.
The cypherpunks are still here, working hard everyday, but we’re a small group.
Where, doing what? How does one get involved?
In their bedrooms dusting off their sneakers and 1.44MB diskettes. :P
For real though, IRC is still where old-school nerds are still out there chatting in my experience.
Clearly showcasing that the UK chose their target wisely. Use a disliked entity as the way in the door, and people will argue for it without realizing it's a trojan horse.
I would believe its a government thing not a people thing if half of UK didn't vote for Brexit.
I'd assume those are just another symptoms of the Thielverse and where would be a better place to have it seeping into the younger, well fed tech scene than hn?
They know that they'll still be able to get around those "Inconveniences" or create their own elite places while the majority of the general public won't and we're not giving a damn about the general public anymore. That's woke and not trendy anymore.
I mean, this is so obviously wrong. People would be ashamed to argue for it back in the days.
a sad day when liberty and freedom are considered woke
Yep, and if that really is the case, and if they really do intend on 'preserving knowledge' in their own inner circles and special getaways, then they will be setting themselves up for a dark age. A popular backlash against all elite things will always be bad, but throwing in knowledge, liberty, and freedom into that mix will guarantee something even more terrible.
my thought on that is a lot of these folks are in for a rude awakening if they think their positions will be preserved in a society that transitions to an illiberal autocratic society. I flat do not believe they have what it takes to hang with eg the russian mafia, the saudi royal family.
It’s not an accident that we just went through one of the biggest cultural revolutions in the software development world. Look at how we treated people like Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Brendan Eich, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, and even John Carmack. One by one, they were sidelined, pushed out, or publicly flogged for being insufficiently “progressive,” for holding “outdated” views, or simply for the crime of being older white men who had the misfortune of building the foundations of the field before today’s ideological climate took over.
But the important part is that we never really replaced them with anyone of similar weight. There was no next generation of cultural or intellectual heavyweights ready to step in. Instead, the online crowd splintered into political factions, with one side demanding constant ideological purity and the other reacting by withdrawing, going independent, or outright rejecting the institutions they had once built.
In the meantime, corporations managed to capture the new generation of young hackers by presenting themselves as “woke.” Put up the right rainbow flag at the right time, make the right statements, and suddenly the deep distrust people had toward big tech in the 90s and 2000s started to fade.
I know about how Stallman was attacked; there's this website describing things:
https://stallmansupport.org/#intro
and a bunch of HN pages:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3417033
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20989696
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103133
but can you perhaps post links to text about the other figures?
When Eric Raymond, who is no longer officially involved in the Open Source Initiative (which he cofounded in 1998 or 1999 or so) addressed a forum of its members, OSI officials or forum officials banned him from the forum and invited anyone who felt traumatized by Eric's words or merely by his appearance on the forum to come forward.
> They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break
And give way to what? You're making a lot of noise that sounds like you want liberation and freedom, but freedom from what? What is it you think the current system of democracy (which has always included intrusions into absolute personal freedom by the way) will give way to? An anarcho-capitalist state? A communist utopia? A breakdown in law and order?
The system WE built over the last 800 years is the most prosperous free society we have ever known. There is no absolute monarch, no forced labor. What do you want to replace it with?
You live in a society of surveillance. Google surveils every single action you take on the internet, as does Facebook, X, and whatever partners they share that information with. That's not a system built by the government "elites" that was built by for profit enterprise in a "free-market". Now the populous at large wants to make use of those same levers of power, and you make it sound like they're responsible for all of it.
Democracies can't survive with unfettered free speech. It's called the Paradox of tolerance [1] or sometimes the Popper paradox (after Karl Popper).
I don't know if you've ever seen some of the dark corners of the Internet. This includes 4chan, Kiwi Farms and, well, arguably Twitter at this point. Twitter has really become 4chan. But I digress.
We, as a society, are fine with suppressing certain kinds of speech. We always have. We can use CSAM as an obvious counterexample to free speech absolutism. There's no way to reconcile banning that and free speech absolutism. At some point it comes down to deciding certain kinds of expression is simply unacceptable.
Now is the UK government using 4chan (etc) as a stalking horse for a wider surveillance state? Almost certainly.
We saw a similar thing when Apple wanted to scan all private messages for CSAM. They faced a completely understandable backlash and reversed course.
But we don't have to defend 4chan or Kiwi Farms to oppose a surveillance state.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Thank you
The game Alpha Centauri had the most hard hitting quote that I think applies now.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
> As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
This had until recently been only tested for top-down information. Nowadays, everyone can be a broadcaster and we're seeing quite different results.
> everyone can be a broadcaster
The individual isn't a broadcaster - the new broadcasters are YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and all the other platforms that choose which content to amplify.
The content recommendation algorithms are designed by humans, who are just following orders from the wealthiest, most powerful people on earth.
The only sources of information we currently see about protests happening across the US are by small broadcasters. There is plenty of news that is being systematically being suppressed by the top-down information chain because it is so effective in clamping down dissent.
IMO, free flowing information still remains the best safeguard against tyranny.
But the tyranny we're seeing today is arguably a result of individual broadcasters ...
Doesn't this imply that what we're seeing today and calling tyranny is more free than what came before? (anyone can become an individual broadcaster)
Put another way - is this a case of the tyrannical calling the free tyrants? If Orwell or Huxley taught us anything it's that this how a state maintains its illusion/power - manipulating language and perception to make their control seem necessary/liberating.
Maybe very, very indirectly—it seems a lot easier to just blame the people currently wielding power, either in government or in business.
That's because we're not seeing _actual_ tyranny. Maybe a would-be tyrant, tryannical tendencies or a slide toward tyranny, however you might want to phrase it, but it's not tyranny.
Individual broadcasters are also the largest detractors along with supporters.
This looks a lot like tyranny to me. Small scale and many may feel its justified but ICE appears to be acting repeatedly in defiance of lawful orders here.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04ryk6ed5lo
When is it tyranny? When he send the military into 19 states under federal control? Or does it have to be when he’s actually ordering the killings of his opponents?
https://apnews.com/article/trump-executive-order-flag-burnin...
You can't even make this shit up.
Interesting that I read about protests in America all the time. Maybe The Associated Press is just a small broadcaster?
Free flow of information should be considered different from free flow of nonsense.
And who determines which is which? It is quite a hard problem.
Is this a trick question? The Ministry of Truth obviously.
Seriously, I'm glad we narrowly averted that one.
It very much is, but even if every possible solution is worse than the problem, which they very well may be, I think recognising there is a problem there is useful.
Rather than the angry denial and cries of censorship that often occur after someone points it out.
Nonsense.
I feel like totalitarians are learning to hack and exploit the free flow of information using sophisticated propaganda techniques.
Doesn’t mean a locked down system is better though. With that they don’t have to bother.
Those are two independent problems. If you have a centralized system, you're screwed, because they just capture it. If you have a decentralized system vulnerable to propaganda techniques then they do that.
What you need is a decentralized system resistant to propaganda techniques.
> a decentralized system resistant to propaganda techniques
That would be nice. What's becoming increasingly clear is that the current system (optimizing for engagement) is not that.
Yes, the question is what such a system would look like. E.g. would there be limitations of free speech?
Maybe it just needs provenance. So bad actors can't flood the system.
Counter to the above is that, your bad actor may be my leader. People like convenience. When someone is expressing what you want to say, in a better and smarter way, you just reshare/retweet them. And the 'other side' will feel like your leader is a 'bad actor' who is flooding the system. So even the method of resharing/retweeting needs some sort of provenance/single use only. So you can 'agree' with your thought leader, but they shouldn't be able to mass manufacture consent. Since you might even reshare 'fake news' since you generally trust your leader. It's messy, not sure what that would look like - every post that starts getting traction needs to be fact checked? Community Notes on X is a step in the right direction maybe.
Of course not. That shouldn't even be possible in a properly designed system.
Rather what you need is a means for propaganda to be rapidly identified and refuted with counterarguments in a way that its would-be victims can see it.
I think the problem with such an approach is that the majority of people will stop reading if the arguments become too complicated.
This is how populism works.
Additionally, it’s usually more effort to refute something than to state something, especially as it seems there is little requirement for proof when making the statement.
Yes, exactly.
We already have largely decentralized speech in the US via the internet. And much like how the printing press gave everyone a voice or how radio created Hitler, the internet is the modern age vehicle of populist messaging.
The reason someone like Trump can rise to power and consolidate said power is because he speaks simple and lies work in a decentralized system. Populist messaging is built on the fact that humans are naturally drawn to simple solutions and emotional responses. 90% of the time throughout American and European history, if you just tell people "this is ethnic/racial group X's fault!", that works.
I mean, just as the phrase goes "your terrorist is my rebel," one could say "your propaganda is my information." That's exactly why a decentralized system matters. It doesn't just resist capture by a single authority, it allows competing narratives to exist side by side. What one group sees as misinformation, another might see as essential context. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate bias entirely, but to prevent any one group from controlling the flow of all information.
And how do you prevent the bad actors from flooding the decentralized systems with propaganda? Nowadays there are millions of bad actors each sending one propaganda message, all slightly different. When any other criteria is not reliable (like source of information, or lack of bias), volume of message distribution (how often that and related messages pop up in the feed) becomes the last indicator people use.
Honestly in Alpha Centauri the person who really dreams himself your master is the one nerve stapling drones left right and center.
I mean, yes, but also…
Not specifically related to this “child protection” thing, but you can’t deny that the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things, driven by actors such as states, magnified x1000 by social media, and now also AI.
Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I’m 100% for personal liberty and accountability, and admittedly I don’t have a solution for this.
I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.
Again just to be clear this has nothing to do with the UK thing which I strongly disagree with.
The free flow of information isn't driving extremism, it's echo chambers. People have a tendency of surrounding themselves with only those who already agree with them on some topic, so that a heavily partisan position suddenly becomes 'moderate.' This is how you have people simultaneously claiming, for instance, that the US is becoming more liberal than ever, and that it's becoming more conservative than ever.
You can also see this with the perception gap [1]. Those who are most involved in politics tend to be the paradoxically least knowledgeable about what 'the other side' thinks and believes. Typical contemporary examples would be republicans thinking democrats want to defund the police, or democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.
When you have contrary ideas bouncing against each other, poor ideas are easily demonstrated to be such - and you get a more realistic view of what people 'on the other side' actually think and believe. It naturally tempers against radicalism. But when you start to control information, you get the opposite. This is made even worse by the sort of people that find themselves on a life trajectory to go work, let alone volunteer, for the 'Ministry of Truth'. They tend to be the exact sorts that want to create information bubbles and echo chambers.
----
In general I think the truth tends to trickle up, even if it might get a bit dirty on the way there. I'd appeal to places like the USSR on that. They not only directly controlled absolutely all published information, but strictly controlled migration in and out of the country, informers everywhere making people terrified of speaking their mind, and just generally had a rock solid grip on information. The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. There's a great series of jokes from the era here. [2] On of my favorites, "Why do we need two central newspapers, Truth (Pravda) and News (Izvestiya) if both are organs of the same Party? Because in Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth."
[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/
[2] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
> The result? People still knew they were all full of shit.
It's just that the purpose of all this totalitarian control wasn't so that people wouldn't know. It was so that people couldn't do anything about it even if they knew.
The result was achieved, the measures you listed as examples worked effectively.
Was it? The USSR didn't even make it to its 70th birthday. The leaders of the next generation are brought up in the current. Gorbachev essentially destroyed the USSR, but that's probably in large part because his formative years where under Stalin. His first major foray into politics was as as a rather enthusiastic advocate of the de-Stalinization that happened after Stalin's death. So the leader of a system was somebody who lived under, suffered under, and likely loathed, even if secretly, that system.
This is one of the many examples of the consequences of actions stretching out much further than many realize. A famous quote from Stalin is that, "I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy." His Machiavellian vision likely had him seeing himself as the savior of the USSR, when in reality his actions are almost certainly a key reason that it no longer exists today.
> The USSR didn't even make it to its 70th birthday.
Not because the will or the struggle of the people.
Gorbachev began to abolish the aforementioned totalitarian measures, creating the opportunity for a party coup. If totalitarian control had not been weakened, nothing would have prevented the Soviet Union from existing to this day.
> Gorbachev essentially destroyed the USSR
No, he didn't do that. He loosened the totalitarian control, and that was it. Then other opportunistic leaders of the Communist Party took advantage of the situation and seized power, dividing up the resources of the huge country among themselves. And because the old regime was full of shit and everyone knew it, no one stood up for it.
> his actions are almost certainly a key reason that it no longer exists today.
Rather, his actions were the reason why the Soviet regime lasted so long. I mean, the unviability of the socialist project was a proven fact in 1918, long before the USSR was even called that. And everything that happened after that was simply an attempt to cling to power by totalitarian and terrorist methods, first by Lenin, then by Stalin.
I don't suppose I really disagree with any of this, but I do want to highlight that there are really more than two sides on basically all issues. Traditional media did a terrible job of portraying this, typically lazily assuming that the parties form the opposite ends of the political spectrum and that people discontented with both parties naturally fall between them. This is the dynamic that implies one or two "wedge" issues dominate politics, and most things people likely want to discuss/improve/address aren't even on the table. Social media may stoke radicalism, but the underlying discontent was there before—politicians could just act like it was ridiculous.
And yes, there are people—like you—who continue to act like there is "the other side" when the way people characterize themselves outside of partisan affiliation is much more nuanced and complex. Eg there are many, many Americans who are anti-war, but there is simply no anti-war vote on most ballots, nor certainly any anti-war party.
In other words, manufacturing consent got us into this mess, social media just makes us anxiously aware of how bad mainstream media was at capturing the political sentiments of the people who live here. That includes, yes, radicals (violent bigots & ideologues), but this also includes realizing that many or most people have no idea what the party whose candidates they vote for actually stand for.
I've put a lot of effort in surrounding myself with people very unlike myself in the last year for reasons, in-person, around real-life activities and scenarios, where politics is simply not relevant outside of stimulating conversation. What I've put together is that basically nobody in this country is both well-educated about politics and satisfied with either party. We've somehow created a two-legged monster that doesn't want to do, you know, the actual substantial end of democracy. Now, I discovered this in the real world, but social media has made it much easier to see if you relentlessly block all "both sides"/"other side" partisans and look directly to values, struggles, desires, etc.
But, this does take discipline, and if you're trying to tune out, you're a prime candidate to be taken directly into outragetainment.
“ democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.”
Um, I don’t know if you’ve just returned from a long journey in the wilderness or something, but Republicans are definitely against immigration.
When asked "On the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today?", 64% of Republicans state it is a good thing. [1] And note that that question has dubious phrasing since it simply says immigration. Change that to legal immigration and the number will probably be more in the 90% range.
Notably this (64%) is higher than even the Democrat level up until about 2012, after the Occupy Wallstreet movement.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigratio...
There’s a concept in economics called “revealed preferences.” The idea is that you might not say what you really want, or even know it, but your behavior reveals it.
For example, somebody might say that they hate tiny airline seats and they’d gladly pay substantially extra for more legroom. But then they’ll be presented with a choice of an airline ticket with more legroom, or the exact same ticket but with less legroom for $3 less, and they’ll choose the latter. Their revealed preference is that they don’t actually value legroom very much, despite what they say.
Likewise, if someone says that they support immigration, but you vote for and continue to support someone who opposes immigration to the point of carrying out heinous human rights abuses against legal immigrants, well, actions speak louder than words.
I’m pretty sure this is the “virtue signaling” that people are always going on about. Supporting immigration is seen as a good thing, so people say they do. But when it comes down to actual concrete policy, they don’t. This used to be covered by the fig leaf of “we support legal immigration” but that’s gone now.
With due respect, think about what you're doing. You're now simply discarding any poll that doesn't conform to your own personal biases, and replacing those data with some rather extreme partisan talking points. This is the point about stepping out of bubbles. The people you see as 'the other side' do not think in any way, shape, or fashion like you believe that they might.
For instance if you went up to an average Republican and said 'So what do you think about the human rights abuses being carried out against legal immigrants?' The overwhelming majority would have literally no clue what you're talking about. If you explained this incident or that, their response is going to be 'Well that's dumb. I hope they're doing something so this doesn't happen again.'
It's like if you went up to the average Democrat and asked them what they think about having explicit LGB books made available to minors in schools? Again the overwhelming majority would have literally no clue what you're talking about. If you explained this incident or that, their response is going to be 'Well that's dumb. I hope they're doing something so this doesn't happen again.'
The 'other side' these bubbles build up simply doesn't exist in reality.
What "rather extreme partisan talking points" are those? Referring to the well-attested, widely-reported abuses of immigrants by this administration is not extremely partisan, it's just facts.
I know Republicans. I talk to Republicans. They know about this stuff and they're fine with it. They know they're not supposed to be, so they deflect. They'll say what's happening to immigrants is no different from being arrested for a crime you didn't commit, then released. They'll insist that the victim was a terrible criminal regardless of the facts. What they don't do is express any reservations whatsoever about it.
I suppose you might make an argument that this deflection indicates an overall approval of immigration since they need to find excuses to support the administration's anti-immigration actions. I would argue that if you claim to believe one thing, but you always find an excuse to defend actions against it, then you don't actually believe it.
Polls are not magic opinion-finding systems. They report what people say. This demonstrably frequently diverges from what people actually do, think, and feel.
There's two major problems here:
1. What republican constituency wants and what republican polices are do not align. For example, most Republicans support Donald Trump. Most do not know anything about Donald Trump's policies. Most will directly say they disagree with a policy, and yet they will still support Trump. If you tell them said policy is a Trump policy, they will either say that it's not true or say that they misspoke, and they do agree with it.
For example, practically all of Project 2025 has been well underway. Prior to the election, it was clear that republican constituents DID NOT support Project 2025. However, if you simply say Project 2025 policies without using the word "Project 2025", then they do support it.
2. Republicans and conservatives at large will just lie if they believe you are willing to make a moral judgment on them.
For example, if you ever go on Hinge or Tinder or whatever dating app you choose, Republican voters will almost all be "apolitical" or "not interested in politics". They will not mention who they voted for and they will purposefully deceive potential partners so they can avoid what they feel is a moral judgement.
Probably republican voters here felt the question was asked in a pointed or morally judgmental way, so I'm sure a good amount just lied and said they do support immigration. If you then poll how many voted for, say, Trump, who is explicitly anti-immigration (not anti-illegal immigration, anti-immigration) then your numbers will change.
Now, this IS NOT to say that republican voters are stupid or liars. The republican party is, right now and for the past decade and then some, run by populist leaders.
This is the direct result of populist messaging. There are also populist leftist leaders - they just do not currently exist in the US.
That's a lot less true than the "all democrats want to defund the police". Where all democrats certainly didn't want to defund the police immediately post-George Floyd but there were a large amount of democrats that wouldn't publicly say that when prompted to.
On the other hand, you'll find plenty of Republicans today who would say that they think legal immigration is great.
The main point is neither of those were ever true and the situation with Democrats was largely caused by the outsized influence of vocal minorities, not of actual sentiment. Similarly, there are plenty of Republicans who think that the current actions of ICE are over the line but won't speak up.
Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
Different technologies are in different places on the "societal usefullness versus danger" spectrum. Nuclear weapons are obviously on the "really fricking dangerous" side, no country lets a civilian own them. Forks are obviously on the "useful" side, even though you can technically use one to gouge somebody's eye out.
What's the right tradeoff for guns, printing presses, typewriters and social media companies is a matter of some debate.
Knives in the UK are age restricted for purchase. Anyone can carry a folding pocket knife with a blade less than 3" without needing a reason. Any other mechanism, fixed blade, or longer blade require a lawful reason to carry. This includes recreation (e.g. fishing, camping) work (e.g. joinery, cooking).
There are a handful examples of overzealous officers misunderstanding and detaining for the wrong reasons, and plenty of examples of people who pretended to the media it was for innocent reasons until the court case showed otherwise.
For your point about forks, I'll note that they are actually covered by the same law; as are all pointed objects.
> This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
No it doesn’t. I can easily go to any number of local shops and buy a knife without any hassle.
A large number of Americans believe all sorts of nonsense about the UK
The US is a big place and many Americans never travel anywhere else. Heck, a large number of Americans believe criminals are burning down LA.
You do however have to undergo age verification, but under a much less intrusive process than online (a shop assistant looks at you and guesses, or looks at your ID and does not retain a copy).
Same as buying alcohol or a child ticket on the bus or an old age discount
The Us has even higher limits - many things are banned to many adults. Alcohol, lottery tickets etc.
> The Us has even higher limits - many things are banned to many adults. Alcohol, lottery tickets etc.
Not trying to start an argument, because I could indeed be missing some crucial info here, but what kind of adults aren't allowed to purchase alcohol or lottery tickets in the US?
The most scrutiny I ever got while attempting to purchase either alcohol or lottery tickets in the US was the establishment's employee glancing at my ID (and even that happens less than 1/5 of the time for me).
In Arizona, 20 year olds aren’t allowed to buy powerball tickets.
As far as IDing to confirm age, I haven’t been IDed in the U.K. since I was 2007. I was IDed in DC last year.
Much the same way that no one will stop you from buying a knife if you have ID in the UK.
I mean, sure, I never disputed that (because I have zero idea how difficult it is to buy a knife in the UK, and I’ve never even said anything about knives).
My question was about the stricter limits on purchasing alcohol or lottery tickets in the US (which were brought up in the comment I originally replied to), because that was the first time I heard about that. I was curious what those alluded-to limits were, and I still have zero idea.
They're probably referring to the fact that you can buy alcohol at the age of 18 in the UK vs 21 in the US. It's also much more easily accessible, for example, we don't have dry counties or state-run liquor stores.
Right, which isn’t really any hassle at all.
The U.K. doesn’t ban knives. It has an age limit to buy them, and bans carrying them in public without a lawful excuse.
>The U.K. doesn’t ban knives.
Yet
There's no evidence that we're moving that way other than fear-mongering from the US right.
[flagged]
And I bet you felt really accomplished and proud about yourself with that insult to a random person on the internet. The peak of your intellectual capabilities. You know what they say, people who have no value to add in a conversation, can only attack other people.
What insult? I quoted your hilarious profile bio, and then said you're parroting brainwashed tropes. I haven't insulted you...but you clearly feel offended, but as people like you tend to say "your feelings aren't my problem"
> Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
This is a reasonable enough metaphor but we don't have to pretend to be idiots either and act like every single technology is totally neutral in its design. Knives are a good example, actually. Kitchen knives are totally adequate for killing people (I assume, I'm no expert) but they clearly have a design meant for something else. A nuclear weapon, to choose a stupidly obvious example, has no capability other than mass death. It seems reasonable to ask ourselves whether we want these two objects to be under the same regulatory regime.
> has no capability other than mass death
A 30-kiloton nuclear explosion was used by the USSR to extinguish a large natural gas fire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtabulak_gas_field
They would be used for constructive purposes far more if not for mutual distrust between nuclear powers, and the public hysteria around anything associated with the word "nuclear":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion
And the massive amounts of harmful fallout, don’t forget that.
I cant help but feel this analogy misses the mark. With the information people are consuming being guided by algorithms, its extremely hard for people to realise theyre being herded towards a specific viewpoint these days. It kind of reminds me of one of those mirror houses at the fairground - its extremely hard to get the correct signal in all the noise. You are what you consume and if everything you consume is of a misguided point of view, very quickly you're sliding towards being assimilated into that point of view.
I now believe that guiding technology use comes down to leadership. "with the exact same technological advances, on one side of the world we created modern america, while on the other side we created the soviet union"
> I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.
I thought the Elon Musk approach was to control the algorithm and decide for his users what they see. Or just ban journalists he dislikes.
Except they can't choose for their kids, or at least, not easily. Google basically own the android ecosystem and they don't want to provide any controls that could be used to limit their ability to generate as revenue. Look at Chrome's extensions. Try blocking domains. Your only hope is to use the god-awful Google Family controls AND NextDNS AND an adblocking mobile browser. These days some parents are trying to get schools to ban phones, because individual parents can't, "or my little Tommy will be the only one without a phone". So you then have to worry about what other kids have access to. Porn in private WhatsApp channels etc.
The biggest problem with giving kids phones is that it opens them up to potential non stop bullying over WhatsApp/iMessage/etc. And yet the online safety act doesn't even claim to try to "do something" about that (not that it would be possible anyway but that didn't stop them elsewhere).
As a parent who using family link, I don't find it bad or inadequate. What is bad about it. How is it unfit for purpose? My child literally has no access to anything I don't want her to. If I had a complaint, it's that tracking her media consumption on YouTube is a PITA.
The whole "my kid will be left out" thing is so bizarre to me. So what? My kid is already banned from Roblox and that means of her whole circle, she's the only one who doesn't play and oh well. When I was a child it wasn't uncommon for a child to be without something their peer group had usually for money reasons. I don't see technology as any different. Kid has stuff their friends don't and vice versa.
That's why I get mad about age restriction laws on the internet. I do want to introduce my child to some of these things in a supervised way so I can teach her about them. Something I can't do if it's literally illegal because other parents decided to shove a phone/tablet in their kid's face and walk away.
I know way too many parents who never bother to use parental controls and learn that they're not actually will to live through their kid's whining about their restrictions.
> Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I remember what it was like before the internet, and misinformation and propaganda were just as pervasive and perverse, except you couldn't be sure about it unless you read a book, did actual research or talked to an expert, and you sure as shit weren't going to change anyone's mind or at least be able to say "you're wrong and here's why" when you hear obvious bullshit.
IMO, there was a big change in the nature of harmful misinformation once you could Google things like "did convenience store workers really celebrate on 9/11" when that particular urban myth spread in the aftermath of the attack.
I do agree that the nature and vector of misinformation and propaganda are different. The ways in which we're wrong and dumb changed, but we were just as wrong and dumb before the internet, and we were statistically more hateful and violent then, too.
Life itself leads to both good and bad things. But it's not worth making life worse by denying people freedom of communication and privacy.
Look at the positives: now you are aware that every channel is full of misinformation and propaganda and treat it all as such. That gives you better media literacy than previous generations who tended to trust everything that was given to them "from above" - it enables us to be more intellectually mature and honest with ourselves about the nature and history of news media, even if you might not actually find that pleasant or convenient to deal with.
True, awareness of misinformation is higher today. But, being aware that all channels are polluted with misinformation doesn’t automatically make someone better at distinguish the truth. Also older generation automatically are not buying everything they see https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-...
Actually, having "misinfo everywhere" goggles can push people think that everything is propaganda or nothing can be trusted. This is also one way Russia and China is using its propaganda: give so much multi meaning information that normal governance information is also considered as something that cannot be trusted. Or atleast trying.
I concede that but awareness is a better starting position for potential improvement rather than ignorance. I guess we are agreeing on the substance but I am taking an optimistic view rather than a pessimistic one. I accept that I might be very misguided.
Let's not be overly dramatic.
The main misinformation you see on the Internet is attention-grabbing women pretending to care about you and people trying to misrepresent mass-made white-label Chinese stuff as indie original designs.
Few people spread hate other than to say our society is a disaster and we'd be better off with communism or anarchy which has been typical discourse of young men since the dawn of the modern age.
In general I've found much higher quality of content on the Internet than elsewhere, with genuine testimonies, in-depth analyses, and a variety of opinions and experiences. Whenever I watch the news on TV I am appalled by how superficial and one-sided it is, sometimes misunderstanding the issue altogether, completely out of touch and misrepresenting reality.
"just let people decide for themselves” is not new, the idea goes way back to John Stuart Mill at least. The "marketplace of ideas".
It was also the prevailing attitude to speech in the UK until the past 10-15 years.
I dont buy the misinformation/propaganda argument as the past was far far worse on all fronts in that regard than today. Additionally, most platforms are highly censored and curated being the exact opposite of free flow of information.
I think the let people decide for themselves is the best option as any alternative is by definition tyranny/control and why the parent quote is so spot on.
You got a point, though I am not sure which things you are referring to. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi tried to have tight control in east Berlin but eventually failed. China is doing currently the full scale automated information gathering and control against Uighur Muslims. Not sure how China is using propaganda for the Chinese themselves. Also NSA uses mass surveillance already at the moment for foreigners and internal political opponents.
But propaganda as a weapon is not a thing to underestimate. As investigated e.g. Jessika Aro https://www.igpub.com/putins-trolls/ and some might argue about the role of election interference for the Trump election and re-election as well.
Even highly educated people are susceptible to propaganda eventhough they consider not https://www.mpg.de/24132917/0205-bild-online-misinformation-...
So, if the leaders are dictators and hates people, it wont be good with or without new surveillance laws as there are already existing ways to do that.
> the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things
Being alive is a prerequisite to being able to suffer, die, etc. None of the things you listed are unique to free flows of information, in fact misinformation and propaganda are even worse in a closed loop of information.
Look at North Korea, and tell me that they'd be worse off propaganda-wise if they had unfettered access to internet.
> The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
No, the entities flooding social media have also flooded all the pre-internet, closed-loop media as well. Right-wing propaganda like Fox News, Alex Jones (first started his radio show in 1996), and literally the entire Cold War-era Red Scare propaganda, on radio and tv, all predated social media. And those were not free-flow channels, the information they put out was 100% controlled by the owners.
The issue with social media isn't the free flow of information but the amplification of certain information — the information that tends to make you angry. The amplification is the cause of echo chambers, spreading of misinformation and disinformation, etc. It makes possible what in essence is a distributed denial of service attack on the human brain.
Sure, chain emails existed before, but they had a pretty low ceiling of how many it would reach. It didn't scale well.
In other words, you should regulate the amplification mechanism ("algorithm"), not what information is allowed to be said. I think forcing platforms to go back to subscribe+reverse chronological feeds would be a pretty good start.
Genuinely astounding how few commenters here understand that the outrage is deliberate and curated because outrage improves messaging persuasiveness.
All of the corporate-owned social media platforms have censorship, curation, and selection policies which impose an editorial slant on what's boosted and what isn't.
All of them. No exceptions.
None of them offer anything resembling a free, open, flow of information. (Mastodon does, or at least tries to, but it has very little reach compared to others.)
And all of them are poisoned by the output of huge well-funded bot farm networks posting harmful content. Whether it's anti-vax nonsense, climate change denial, inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric, divisive political rage bait of all kinds, or covert propaganda designed to look reasonable and pull people into a rabbit hole of fake activism and misinformation, all of these networks are acting as a public brainwashing service for political ends.
There is no "marketplace of ideas." Nothing that happens on social media is truly organic and bottom-up.
And this is not an accident. These are primarily influence, behaviour modification, and persuasion networks, tailored using personal profiling, but disguised as entertainment and social connection, and allowing just enough dissent from the official party lines to create a superficial veneer of free speech.
This process is essentially unregulated. There used to be some FTC oversight, but there isn't any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades
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Fuckin’ Lal was always a warmonger. Time to send in the mind worms to teach him a lesson.
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The above acts either carry no intrinsic information content and/or very few people apart of free-speech absolutists would be OK with them. They’re not evocative of the controversy at hand, and I can’t find anyone defending them.
Perhaps more appropriate:
* Instructions for making an illegal firearm
* Unpopular political opinions
* Instructions for engaging in illicit speech without detection
* Silently standing still with head bowed and hands folded in public
* Using a VPN
* Holding a sign at a protest
There are probably many more examples like the above, which would engender a more nuanced discussion.
> above acts either carry no intrinsic information content
This is an exercise in censorship, in a sense. So is blocking spam.
OP’s point stands. Information flow requires regulation in any society. I’ve been something of a free-speech absolutist most of my life, but I’m strongly re-thinking that after seeing Europe and America fall to what can only be described as populist stupidity.
> Information flow requires regulation in any society.
I agree! But where to draw the line? Your examples include crimes (distinct from whatever speech/expression) that are far beyond where anyone is saying should be allowed. This seemed a bit disingenuous to me. I was trying to engender a higher-quality discussion.
> But where to draw the line?
That's the thing, when you draw the line you no longer have "free" speech/expression, you only have "speech that's not considered a crime"
The examples are what society have collectively decided are forms of speech/expression (yes they are all speech/expression) that people shouldn't be free to use.
You can't stop online stupidity and misinformation with censorship. It would at best create an echo chamber of government supported online stupidity and misinformation.
> You can't stop online stupidity and misinformation with censorship
Shame and ostracisation handled this through antiquity. There is no evidence introducing those elements online cannot work.
> would at best create an echo chamber of government supported online stupidity and misinformation
But that’s what we got anyway.
It’s just as clearly the case that a lack of regulation amplifies people willing to be stupid online. Taking that amplification away takes us back, per your worst case, to what we have now.
I mean, we already have that. And you're right. But in fact, misinformation and stupidity are already baked into the social media moderator's handbook, and the filters in their moderation tools. Disagreeing with them will get you banned in noisy online platforms.
Laws don't stop things, they provide a mechanism where conduct that matches what is described in the law is punished as described by that law.
The hope is that the punishment proscribed by the law is enough to make people think again before breaking it, and, if the law involves depravation of liberty (jail), that people who do break it are removed from society for a limited amount of time to prevent them further transgressing.
This is civics 101, honestly, anyone that's a student of history understands that laws are created because all other forms of preventing what society agrees to be bad behaviour have failed.
Laws, therefore, are the last resort, because everything else has failed.
Edit: I just want to add (here, because it's too late to edit my original comment) that someone /flagged/ my comment that disagreed about there being a thing where speech/information flows completely uninhibited - hilariously proving my point :-)
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The very moment that you decided you could determine what is, or isn't, information, you engaged in censorship.
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Have you considered parenting your children instead of letting the state do it for you? The latter means they can use the good old “for the children” rhetoric to control what adults can and cannot see: for example, they can choose that homosexuality is a sin and bad therefore any LGBT friendly website is bad. Apply freely as your government dictates, such as pro-Palestine content. We must protect our kids from terrorists, after all. :)
Meanwhile your children are absolutely going to find a way to get that content regardless, likely in darker corners of the internet, exposing them to much, MUCH worse content than if they would have just gone on the good old hub (plus actual predators) while also making it basically impossible for you to control instead of just making it a firewall rule away from locking it yourself instead of letting the government do it.
I'm a full adult (legally anyway) but I can't control everything I see on HN or Reddit or whatever when I'm passively scrolling; I for one am glad that there's giant teams of moderators curating the internet for me.
I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.
Hard disagree. I would love for moderation to be opt-out, for example. I might not agree with moderator actions, so I would very much prefer to see an unfiltered HN instead of having someone else dictate what I am allowed to see or not. The same applies to other websites, especially Reddit.
Alas, I have no choice in the matter, but I would very much prefer I did.
While I understand some content HAS to be regulated (CSAM) doesn’t mean everything has to be, because inevitably that will devolve into the government policing wrongthink.
enable showdead to see killed comments/articles on HN.
Thank you!
>I'll advocate for freedom of speech but I don't want to have to listen to everything.
Nobody is preventing you from filtering out at the client side whatever it is that you don't want to hear.
And you just end up with poorly integrated moderation with extra steps when community starts cooperating to make it more efficient (e.g. maintaining filter lists). Or there's no effective moderation so people that want more curated content and better UX moderation-wise will move elsewhere. Nobody's forcing you to use moderated platforms either.
That said, I think the showdead setting in HN is good to have, so you can still opt to see content that would otherwise be filtered.
I don't understand why you see these as either-or propositions. It's important that I parent my children to understand the dangers of alcohol, and it's also a good idea that it's illegal for my local grocery store to sell them any, and neither of these are contradicted by the fact that they'll be able to find some if they really want to. Norms and friction matter.
It’s a good idea for grocery stores to not sell children alchohol. It’s a bad idea for grocery stores to not sell alcohol to ANYONE, adults included, because children might buy it by faking their IDs. That’s the difference here.
Alcohol is a perfect example as well, because I personally drink it only occasionally but would very much rather see it completely banned, as I think it would solve a lot of problems with society. In reality it likely wouldn’t, but the gut feeling is there. If I were to blindly follow my instinct and not know history, I would call for a total ban on it to protect the children.
The same is happening here, but at a much more dangerous level.
Plenty of friction exists. Access to devices being banned at schools, ISP parental controls, selective DNS blocking, Google/Apple child accounts. For the most part it's just carelessness. Before the Internet children that were persistent enough and that had apathetic parents still found a way (perhaps less volumes and less extreme though)
Their parent can apply blocks on their devices is what I'd tell you.
Because these are ultimately excuses for spying on adults
Perhaps a better implementation of the law would be requiring all sites to mark content as NSFW if it is, and having opt-in device level toggles, so parents could protect their kids more easily, but anyone who’s actively seeking the content is able to. Teenagers will get around this ridiculous verification with ease either way.
This argument is basically the same as saying that stores should be allowed to sell alcohol to kids because it's the parents' responsibility to guard the store so their kids don't buy it.
Kids do not only have access to their own devices (for one, these days schools provide them with devices that parents have little say over often with only trivial filtering). And that is assuming the best case scenario where parents have the technical know-how to put in place non-trivial limits. Most don't.
People under age can obtain fake IDs, all over the world. This is illegal, but it still happens. At some point, it is ultimatey a parents responsibility to prevent their children from doing so by acting as a parent to their child and preventing them from engaging in destructive behavior. This is established law, even, in many countries, where a parent can be held accountable for the criminal actions of their children for failing to prevent it.
And frankly, I don't give enough of a shit about other peoples' kids to believe that internet usage should require identification like is being pushed by major governments. I want good things for these kids, I want them to grow up in a good society and a good world, and I dont want harm to come to them. But I recognize that a "good society" and a "good world" and one that minimizes harm to people is one where information is available without restrictions and without censorship and without the risk of a government that might decide it wants to commit genocide against you in the not-so-distant future using your search history to persecute you. Pardon my riffing off Flowbots' Handlebars there, but this really is the world that people live in today; powerful world-stage governments want to restrict information about topics they do not like, and are persecuting people who posess this information; the next steps are very, very well documented.
Creating the monster we are watching grow is not worth anything anyone could ever promise you.
Pretty much. Everytime they mention porn, they are poisoning the discussion.
If porn was the only thing getting affected, I would gladly support all these surveillance tactics, every single one of them. Porn and prostitution in general is riddled with trafficking, drug addiction and other forms of exploitation.
The reality is that what's at stake here are things that (unlike porn) are not harmful to us, but very important to us. Like the ability to have a free space for thought and information sharing without the oversight of anybody else, not least a potential adversary. This defence is very important against a tyrannical state.
But let's ignore all that and instead make it about children's right to "explore their gender and sexuality" on the internet. This is what I saw some guy arguing a few days ago.
You realize that being gay or being non binary are considered pornography to some legislators?
Until we can decouple those things, banning porn has the effect of criminalizing LGBTQ lives.
You ate the “save the children” koolaid.
Children can also be groomed over text messages, should we let the government read all our text messages now?
Children can also be depicted wrong in photos, should we let the governments of the world have access to our photos so they can check for themselves if that is happening or not?
(both are hypothetical questions, the answer is no of course not. This is the responsibility of the caretaker in their life to guide them safely through the world.)
Both are included in EU's chat control proposal. Reading text because "grooming" and searching of storage.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
I also remind people that laws change over time and that perfect crime prevention is actually a bad thing. The easiest example one can point to homosexuality. We now accept that people attracted to the same sex. But at one point in time in many places that was illegal. The last person in Canada to go to jail for being gay was in 1965, charged with gross indecency. But times and morals change so imagine if we had perfect police and everyone had to wear a camera at all times and every single thing you did was monitored and reported back to the police. No gays, no abortions, no alcohol, no speaking against governments or police, so many ways we would be oppressed. I am not saying people who harm children should free to break the law but the solution can not be to monitor everything every person does. The solution for me would be to teach people how to better set parental controls for their kids and to educate both parents and kids about dangers and online safety.
When you want to grant the very state, that actively protected ethnically targeted organized gang-rapes-to-prostitution-rings, with enough trust to even remotely care about children having unlimited access to pornography, maybe you are part of the problem.
I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem. The other problem is that adults should not be forced to share their identity to view content - particularly that which might be used to blackmail them. I don't have children. And I don't think your children outweigh my right to privacy.
It’s really not though.
It’s not like the internet was censored when I was coming up, and I don’t think less of kids today than I do of myself.
Kids stumbling across something when browsing innocently isn’t really a major issue, and if they seek it out: they will find it, you won’t stop them, kids are smarter than you think (just, immature and unwise).
The best method, honestly, is for parents to be forethcoming..
however you have now successfully reframed the discussion into “what about the kids”, when in reality it’s about getting everyone’s ID so that they can better enforce their draconian internet comment laws… the government even outright said this. https://archive.is/3pave
if the government really cared about protecting children, they would’ve made a freely available child protection software that anyone can install in their home network, or subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
> subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
The thing is, the tech and infra for this is already out there. For example DNS services that offer adult-website filtering. The cost to implement this at the ISP level really wouldn't cost much (at at technological level).
Honest question - when were you "coming up" and are you sure it didn't do anyone any harm then?
I'm mid-late 40s and the internet was not really there when I was growing up. Someone ten years younger than me would have much more porn available to them, easily, in the home during their formative years. But even since then it's likely become more pervasive and present by an order of magnitude, and people have connected devices with them all the time in a way they wouldn't have back then.
We also have lots of academics saying that porn is changing attitudes to sex and what is acceptable behaviour (the rise of choking, for instance).
So it seems reasonable to ask the question, not whether today's kids are vulnerable to harms we weren't vulnerable to, but have things changed significantly in the intervening years?
Note - I'm not defending the clusterfuck that is the OSA. But the world is not always as it was.
No, thats totally fair.
I’m 35 now, so in the 00’s I had my entire pre-teen and teenage years.
My brother and sisters are 26, 28 and 33- we aren’t worse than our parents (we have 3 different mothers between us) or grandparents from a mental health or moral perspective; and we were all exposed to liveleak and 4chan in various ways.
I’m not sure how else to measure to he honest with you.
Just because we don't want children to do something doesn't mean the state should impose upon all of its population a norm to control their actions, and I don't think anyone pretending otherwise has a valid or respectable opinion.
> I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem.
The thing is, in the UK, porn websites are already blocked by default by most ISPs and mobile networks. Only the account owner can unblock that content, either by calling the provider or by changing something in their account settings. And yes, you'll need to verify that you're an adult if you signed up to the service without providing them with details (possible with some mobile providers).
This has been the case for the past 10 or so years, so why exactly do we need this age verification stuff?
> Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem
Is it? Children viewing porn has been a thing ever since the invention of the printing press, or at the very least, ever since the first Playboy got printed.
Were those videos? No. Did they depict sex acts? No. It's qualitatively different. I was raised in an extremely liberal household full of Playboy mags, looking at photos of naked women since I was 5 years old. The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe, and probably impossible to find outside an underground video group for sadists. I have no real problem with kids looking at nudes. That is not this. Porn has pushed itself into dementia chasing shock value. Seeing a blowjob photo was something a child could encounter in the early 90s, maybe a very sophisticated child with very early access to all the dark shit on the early internet. If you spent hours figuring out how to find one. But maybe you'd see one or two. Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem. It is a real problem, and it doesn't matter whether it's shown to a child on a website or on a home VCR, it's enormously corrupting and there absolutely is a societal harm in allowing it to happen. The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem.
That is not that new either, BDSM has been a thing for decades. "Histoire d'O" for example came out in 1975, the literary work it's based on is even older. And the panic back then about these books is exactly the same kind of bullshit we're seeing today.
> The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
Teach your kids about sexuality from early age. That also helps cutting down on cases of sexual abuse - think of all the clergy and sports trainer scandals. A lot of these failed prosecution or went on far too long because the kids lacked the vocabulary to describe what happened to them, or didn't recognize that what they went through was wrong.
The problem is, anything veering into this direction is immediately attacked by Conservatives, religious extremists and the likes.
> BDSM has been a thing for decades
But decades ago it was not possible to reach content like that in a few seconds, using magical device we carry 24/7.
You've strayed considerably from your initial argument of contraband playboys being prevalent before the internet. Playboys were prevalent, yes, but not magazines with graphic depictions of violent fetishes. That such magazines existed at all isn't disputed.
Do you think absolutely all content should be allowed to be accessible?
If you wouldn't allow child porn (which 4chan deletes/doesn't allow), where exactly do you draw the line between blocking sites with cp, and allowing sites like 4chan which host porn without consent (voyeur/spy/revenge)?
There's a difference between prosecuting a crime, and restricting people to prevent it from even happening. Both have a place but only the former retains your liberty.
Yes, thats the problem. Prosecuting crimes on the internet is near impossible due to the restrictions and often anonymity. Thats why we rely on platform providers to help us, the public.
Facebook, Youtube and others put in effort to take down illegal content.
4chan only does the bare minimum such that they don't gain too much relevancy in the public eye.
UK or other countries may decide that 4chan doesn't to enough and ban it because of the help of 4chan in faciliating the spreading of illegal content.
So again, where is the difference between 4chan which hosts/spread illegal content and other sites where we're fine with banning them?
If they do it, I never want to hear any criticism of the great firewall of China from them ever again.
The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
Anti olympic posters got police raids. Plasticine action on your tshirt got arrests.
What so especially ironic is the posters views comes from the narrative control the UK is so disparate to get control of.
Any notion that the UK is actually run by the people is nonsensical, the so called democracy is pure and utter theatre.
> Plasticine action on your tshirt got arrests.
And then released when the mistake came to light. Not 'disappeared'.
The whole mess around the proscribed group is awful and seems like a massive overreaction - sure, you do not mess with a country's defence infrastructure. But the appropriate thing to do is arrest those involved and charge them with specific crimes, not misuse anti-terror legislation.
But lets not pretend people are being taken off the streets and made to disappear as they do in autocratic nations.
A lot of UK institutions are run on "norms" with no actual law placing legal check and balance in place.
This is also why it's so crucial for the UK not to let bad laws pass.
> It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I'm not entirely sure this is true. At least in the west, this perspective seemed to rely on most "public discourse" not being visible to most of the public. Social media has destroyed this illusion.
> democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse
> UK
...
I read on twitter, can't find the exact link, a chinese content site operating in .sg for many years, survived multiple "internet purges" by China, got banned by UK authorities last month.
I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
And there are ways to hide VPNs as bittorrent sharing. No matter what the blocking method, there is a counter tech ready for battle.
(Bitorrent encryption was largely a reaction to ISP shaping/blocking a couple decades ago.)
The UK is where the US is headed if we don't grow a pair and snap out of this weak autocrat worshiping phase we seem to find ourselves in. It could happen so easily here.
Let us be brutally honest: UK did not land where it is now because it is in a weak autocrat worshiping phase. It is in FULL-NANNY mode.
"Now children, none of you can play nice, so I'm taking the toy away".
Bluesky has already decided to block Mississippi rather than comply with their age verification requirements.
Partisanship being the highest civic value in the US guarantees that we will not break out of that phase but will instead usher it in fully with two mildly different flavors. Coke and Pepsi autocracy with each insisting the other tastes like sewage and their own is ambrosia.
And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills, as if the “wrong government” will never ever take control. Perhaps we should all do more things for ourselves, and advocate for more laws that restrict what the government is allowed to do
> And yet so many look for the government to solve society’s ills
I mean, this is why state and government came into being, so nothing strange with such expectation.
This is a silly take. As soon as an authoritarian government takes power they just strip away the protections put in place to prevent abuse. The answer to preventing the "wrong" government from taking power is to have a strong "right" government.
This is a silly take. The answer to preventing one branch of the federal government from abusing power is to strengthen the other branches, and to strengthen federalism itself. Both are enshrined in the constitution and are the largest checks on growing executive power? In effect “weakening” any one part of the government.
The UK doesn’t have Texas or California or New York.
The UK has Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Scotland, particularly, is anti-authoritarian.
The only thing that kept Scotland from voting for independence was a promise the UK would stay in the EU. If the Scottish referendum was to happen today, I don’t think England would win their vote.
And leaving the EU has caused massive complications for the Good Friday agreement that specifically agreed to removing border controls between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Yet none of these countries were able to apply enough pressure to change the UK government’s downward spiral.
Looking at the current US, that seems to work not at all. The checks on power is only effective if enforced, and as there is no effort to enforce separation of powers, there are no checks.
And how exactly having Texas or California or New York would solve this?
These things can happen over time. They don't have to suddenly jump into place out of nowhere.
i.e, as long as the people in charge are the people I like, its fine!
This. The antidote to authoritarianism is a mobilized and motivated populace.
Liberals (small l) have spent 200 years being afraid of the masses and mass revolts, instead being enamored with pieces of paper that are supposedly holding everything up and keeping the forces of authoritarian reaction at bay.
They don't.
Well, nobody would rally over a few blocked porn sites, would they now? I can already imagine the banners.
You have come to the central tension at the heart of democracy!
A slim chance of getting outed for watching porn is more important to UK males than enforcing an age gate to stop kids having unlimited access. This is all that shows.
You're on hacker-news, so this is simple to explain;
Create a new flag in the http header that indicates under-age, and put heavy restrictions (and fines) on what content is allowed to be served as a response. Get this through to google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and apple as a device-wide parent-control feature. Universally enforced and legally backed parent control.
1. Simple to enforce
2. No major security issues
3. No risk of abuse as a surveillance or control mechanism.
4. No issue of "did not know user wasn't child" loophole if anyone is found in violation. If a child is still found on a adult website; it is entirely blamable on parent not running the parent control feature, or the website not respecting the flag.
This type of solution is proposed by the Russian state using special sim-cards for children under 14. Odd how the UK is the extreme one all of a sudden.
Instead we get;
1. Difficult to enforce effectively and easy to circumvent with rudimentary methods for those it actually affects.
2. Security nightmare to do correctly. (recent tea leak)
3. Easy excuse to ban any content the government disapproves of. (wikipedia is now a adult site)
4. A normalization to hand out personal ID and photos to random websites.
5. A perfect excuse for authoritarian governments to implement something similar since "free and democratic nation did the same".
This is not about children. It is never about children. Banning encryption, collect all personal digital communication for review, and personally identify all people online. These three things are non-negotiable, regardless of motive. "protect the children" is easy to say, easy to make everyone agree with, easy to straw-man opponents into monsters. But whenever its used, we better make darn sure that's the real motive.
I would gladly back the first solution above. We need to protect children better, but this law is not about that.
No it does not.
It's creating the infrastructure for mass surveillance (this is mass surveillance) and shifting the Overton window.
You're fine with this, what's the next target. They're already onto the subject of VPN's.
Do you like the taste of bacon?
Wikipedia is on the list of sites that the government is trying to force age verification on[1].
This isn't about people being scared they're going to be outed for watching porn. Even if the government honestly have no intentions to further restrict people's access to information, this is a genuine step towards authoritarian censorship.
I'm (somewhat hypocritically) not against purging 4chan & other sites that ferment dangerous right wing hatred from the internet, I am against anything that tries to limit or restrict access to legal content
1 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjr11qqvvwlo
If you're worried about kids being abused in the UK you have way bigger issues to deal with than porn on the web man.
In fact screwing around with the web this way is likely to make those other issues much harder to solve.
They have done it, and the west (over half the US states, the UK and Australia at a bare minimum) have entirely ceded any moral high ground regarding it.
Yeah we ceded it long ago in the US being reliant on child sweatshop labor for the lowest price possible and demanding allegiance to America but no obligation to provide each other any social welfare
Western countries had no morality before just a facade of one. Now that they are loosing economic power they are also loosing the ability to control the narrative.
This is beyond vague. What do you even mean by morality? And how is it better for non-western entity to allegedly control the narrative, except also using it for its own benefit, which would be immoral by definition?
'The West also does bad stuff' is not the same thing as 'China and the west are the same' or 'Russia and the west are the same'. That's a false equivalency. The west has a long tradition of respecting individual rights. You aren't going to get disappeared like you absolutely will in those places. Say what you will about the failings of the west, but there's a clear moral high ground there, even if that height is an inch tall.
The main difference I see is part of the government of "the west", e.g. US, hasn't been able to get all the way to how China operates yet, not that they don't want to. Given the chance, which looks like they're getting, China (the government) is what they want to be.
Long tradition of respecting them so long as one is a white man.
Long history of trampling rights of white men too if a richer one wants their stuff.
Inch tall is generous. More like sheet of A4 paper.
Apply your same standard to ethnic minorities in Russia or China and tell me how tall that moral high ground is.
It's easy to sit in a hole 20 feet deep and criticize the west for only being an inch above ground.
Don't make up stuff learn your own history individual rights in the west have been by race, color, education, wealth or sexual orientation and easily forgotten when the individuals are not white.
“But what about America’s racism” in a thread about censorship is a pretty bog standard disinformation tactic.
It’s not the topic and whataboutism isn’t a defense even when it’s related to the topic.
Ah no on a topic of censorship someone was saying how good western countries were before about personal freedoms and I called out that lie as many of those freedom are just for TV shows and literature only. All citizens did not and still do not enjoy all the freedoms he is spouting the only difference the restrictions are being more broadly applied so he is effected so talks about the past was better. The past was better only for white skinned straight man maybe you could add rich as when when it come to personal freedoms
You are heavily mixing freedom with access to opportunity. They are not the same.
I come from an Eastern European country. Before 1990, if I would have wanted to not study and only drink and let my live go like Diogenes, that would have never worked. The authorities would pick me up from the street and forcefully make me go work something, even if I don't like it. Even if I have studied, the authorities still may decide where I can go to work. The possibility to decide how I can build or fuck up my own live - this is what I understand as freedom.
Opportunity - this is something very different. And to that I can agree with you about the "white skinned man", even if it is very far away from my understanding about the world because of where I was born and how I lived.
US government is, ostensibly, blocked from censoring speech so it props up willfully ignorant business owners.
Here we are, VC backed corpo forum used by anon agents to downvote inconvenient commentary.
What you must understand is that they do it because of a moral failing, whereas we do it because the situation requires it.
You're being sarcastic, right?
The UK is morally hollow by design.
No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians, but it's one of their most dominant traits. That is, if you ascribe normal ethics and morals to them. But politicians' are a different breed, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
> No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
Remember, half the population are under 100 IQ points.
And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.
We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".
Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
That's like saying half the population is dumber than the average
Remember, as long as you can convince people that IQ is a valid metric, they’ll believe anything you say.
I’m quite sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy. China censors the internet because they want to control everything about their citizens lives. But us? Oh, we’re censoring the internet to protect the children.
> but it's one of their most dominant traits
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
> No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians
You’re clearly not paying attention to American politics.
Let me correct that for you: No one likes hearing hypocrisy from the other side's politicians
Which apparently might be opening up significantly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44994403
I really wonder if true
"oh we're doing it to protect the children! China's firewall is meant to repress political information and democracy! See, very different!"
It is actually different.
It's just a different version of the same thing. In chinas case, they aggressively locked down internet influence. In the wests case, they held off a bit and made up bullshit reasons like saving the children with age verification. I cant stand this version of the 'free' west where they promote totalitarian information control and demand real IDs. This is nazi shit.
I’m gonna blow your mind. If it happens I’m going to loudly criticize both!
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The free internet might be gone in the next decade. Probably time to buy a few hard drives and do some archiving. I don't just mean piracy. Articles, blogs, anything you find precious.
I suspect that in some places they might start requiring ID when purchasing large volumes of storage.
"Only a criminal would need 10 terabytes of storage!"
Something stupid like that.
It sounds just as unfair as including a levy on blank CDs paid to music copyright holders, regardless of how the CDs are used. But being unfair doesn't mean it can't happen in your country.
Flashback to Sweden, around 2011 or so. Copyright owners convince the government to add a $/GB levy to digital storage mediums like USBs, just in case people would use it for storing copyrighted material. The kicker? Personally archiving copyrighted material to your personal storage is (was?) fully allowed by law, but somehow it went through anyways. Glad I don't live there anymore :)
holy shit it's real
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
Which then allows you to download without being sued because you already paid.
No, it doesn't. From that Wikipedia entry:
> A common misconception is that levies are compensation for illegal copying such as file sharing. This is incorrect, however, levies are only intended to compensate for private copying that is legally allowed in many jurisdictions. For example, uploading a purchased CD on to another personal device such as a laptop or MP3 player.
"Private copying" is generally allowed under copyright law -- except that under DMCA, it's only allowed if you're not circumventing DRM. So for example, you can legally make a private copy of a CD, but not a Blu-ray disc.
> "Private copying" is making private copies of is generally allowed under copyright law -
Private copying is not generally allowed, but private copying levies tend to be adopted alongside specific exceptions for certain cases of private copying in the copyright law of the jurisdiction adopting them (e.g., in the US, those in the Audio Home Recording Act.)
Right, what I meant is that private copying is allowed because these levies exist -- but the fact that they exist only allows you to make private copies, not (as was stated) download anything.
Depends on the jurisdiction. In several personal use rights are broad enough to download almost anything (eg except software or databases), and the levy is explicitly described in law as a compensation.
Wow
Back in another life (videography), I had acquaintances who would throw looks when they heard I’d purchased a single terabyte. Seems that narrative might already be - at least mildly -pervasive.
Thankfully streaming video games never took off, otherwise we couldn't really use that excuse.
I got casually questioned by the clerk in Berlin Mitte last month when buying 20x 20TB drives for cash.
“Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfully. I think he thought I was joking.
Pretty soon it’ll only be hyperscalers or large enterprises that have data storage. You’ll have the 4TB max in your phone or laptop and that’ll be it.
I don't get it. What do you need 400TB of storage for? (To be clear: I am not saying that you should not be allowed to buy it.) I assume this is for personal use. I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year. Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations?
Also: Why did you pay cash, in the center of Berlin, Germany? Even if you are paying rock bottom used prices around 100 EUR, why carry 2,000+ EUR in cash?
> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year
There are so many (legal) use cases for TBs of space... Photography, video editing, 3D graphics, 3D simulations (think VFX explosions, destruction), ML/AI, Dataset curation/archiving, backups, doing Rust development (each target/ directory ends up being GB large usually), and so on.
Some weeks ago GPT-OSS was released, so I wanted to play around with the 120b weights, they take ~60GB of disk space already. Imagine that same thing every time new open weights are released, and you end up with +TB large collection relatively quickly.
> Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations
Seems to me like the reverse. I have more and more friends asking me about how to setup self-hosting for music, tv-shows and movies, especially when Netflix et al do their monthly purge of content and some friend noticed their favorite show/music is suddenly gone because some contract with a 3rd party expired.
> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year.
You must not work with video.
Even with photography, a single raw photo can already use tens of megabytes (source: just looked at a raw photo file I happened to have around). A single raw video (or even a single already edited video) uses even more.
Now consider that you need at least twice that for redundancy (RAID-1 at the minimum). If you use things like Ceph for speed and redundancy, it's AFAIK recommended to have at least four separate nodes, each with its own storage.
I always carry at least that much cash on me. You never know when you might need to flee a collapsing country on short notice or bribe a cop.
https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/
Can’t do that with your debit card.
In my view it is irresponsible to not carry on your person at all times your passport and enough money for a week of food and hotel and a plane ticket to the country of passport issuance. Carrying a card introduces working internet as a dependency for food and shelter, which is stupid and unnecessary.
Also, card payments are warrantlessly tracked at all times by the state, creating a location tracklog of where you go and when you go there.
Apple hearing they have an excuse not to add more storage, cue happy shareholder noises
Who is your HDD dealer? Hmu. Do we have HDD taxis yet?
I'm always disappointed that the geometric growth in spinning magnet disks slowed - if the growth curve from the '80s to 2010 had continued to today we'd have petabyte HDDs now.
I've been downloading YouTube videos for the past few years. Not randomly, from specific channels I select. Today I passed 12100 videos.
It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.
When I try to capture a few friends videos of events I had run from instagram stories with yt-dlp, I get nice friendly warning that to avoid my account being restricted or deleted i should stop using tools.
I use a browser extension that simply gives me the download button in the interface and haven't experienced any such warnings: https://github.com/TheKonka/instagram-download-browser-exten...
Thought you might find it helpful.
Isn’t an official downloading functionality part of their premium offering? If you’re a power user perhaps it’s worth just paying.
I am a premium subscriber, but "downloaded" videos are trapped inside the app. You can't actually get them out.
Wow, what garbage. Good thing to know. It was the single thing that appealed to me about that service.
I see I had no idea.
On mobile (iOS), it requires maintaining a subscription… and, once a month at least, internet connection.
Have you considered sharing them somehow? I always thought yt-dlp would end up p2p
Since many of the channels are monetized, my personal policy is only to upload videos to the Internet Archive if the original goes offline. Otherwise, it's better if people support the original channel by watching them on YouTube.
Sure, but by that logic you’re saying piracy* in general is bad, but when you pirate* the video it’s okay. And if I pirate* the video the same way it’s okay. But if we cross share it’s bad, while the only real difference is via this route , google is paying for more bandwidth and yt-dlp becomes less effective because it’s redundantly executed at scale.
*pirate, for lack of a better term. I couldn’t give a fuck what people call it.
I doubt it. As a Brit they "blocked" Pirate Bay and torrent sites about a decade ago and I've hardly had any problems accessing them and torrenting stuff. It's all very half arsed.
What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen an open source project that uses email as an encrypted chat app in the last months.
Edit: this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44335065
Interesting - thanks. It looks like at least the Android and iOS apps have been updated in the last few days - so it is under active development:
https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-ios
Doesn't work with all email providers though, from their FAQ:
https://providers.delta.chat/
Proton mail isn't supported (I'm guessing because of the way Proton encrypts your email at rest?).
AFAIK they recommend using a dedicated chatmail-enabled provider to avoid problems with using a "normal" email provider.
https://delta.chat/en/chatmail
The free internet is mostly gone already. Most people already only browse the same 5-10 sites belonging to big tech, thus already part of the surveillance apparatus.
I think about the same. Right now we are at the normalizing the ID verification stage and banning specific content in certain countries/states, once we are desensitized, VPNs will come next, and then some government solution to track everything you do online.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
It's a good time to get an RSS reader and build some direct connections to your sources. They're coming for the "aggregators" next.
rss is dead. and aggregating won't be your main issue anyway.
If you don’t use rss, just say you don’t use rss. I assure you that many of us do. It continues to deliver me hundreds of articles from dozens of sources day after day, decade after decade. my services that check rss, continue to run their automated tasks. It’s an amazing protocol and even when big corpos try and take it away, hacks come up to restore access.
RSS is the technological backbone that enables the distribution and subscription of podcasts...which by the way is massive at the moment.
As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
That used to be the case few years ago. Now it seems that all popular podcasts are hidden inside commercial services such as Spotify.
Podcasts tend to be available from different sources to extend their reach YouTube and Spotify don't offer RSS feeds, however other services like redcirle.com, megaphone.fm, anchor.fm, and audioboom.com all offer RSS feeds. Even Apple should as it has a set of iTunes extensions for RSS to annotate things like the episode number.
I've been able to find RSS feeds for all the podcasts I listen to.
YouTube, very surprisingly, does offer RSS feeds (for now).
Youtube offers rss feeds, for example: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCXuqSBl...
It's just a bit clunky to find. You need the channel id which you can find in the page source somewhere.
Note that this is a regular rss, not podcast rss.
Nope
Still get all of my podcasts via RSS. Several dozen.
> As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.
There are RSS readers which can automatically download the full article text. I use Handy Reading on Android which can also do so on-demand.
RSS is alive and well. I use it daily with dozens of sites and authors. It's incredibly useful, widely used, and well supported.
Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?
> RSS is alive and well
That's a stretch.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss/
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...
> [RSS] is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.
arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.
The Conversation feeds say otherwise.
Hmm ironically it's how I'm reading this rn
RSS isn't dead. I use it daily. Most podcasts — all if you subscribe to the philosophy that mp3s without rss aren't podcasts — are built on it. Most websites still provide a feed, even if the owner isn't aware of it.
Most news sites have RSS feeds. Wordpress ships with an RSS feed.
And for sites that don't you can make your own feeds by selecting links on pages (such as how AP News doesn't have an RSS feed).
This has been brewing for years. The international network will not survive multiple independent governments all attempting to impose their own laws on it. It's bound to fracture into several regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
That's my suspicion. An internet governed to the least common cultural and legal denominator will be bland, boring, and useless.
This is really important. It's time to take history into our own hands given the penchant for erasure by the elites and how dumb the elites have become.
Bought some drives recently having come to the same conclusion. Future of the internet looks bleak.
The Internet was philosophically designed to move information, and for every effort to prevent that there is a workaround. There will always be a free protocol.
Can we count on ISPs not mucking with stuff at the transport layer? I feel like at some point the only way is to create new networks entirely.
> Can we count on ISPs not mucking with stuff at the transport layer?
That used to be common in the past, many ISPs ran transparent HTTP proxies to reduce the use of their slow upstream links. The current push to use strong encryption and authentication everywhere (for instance, plain HTTP without TLS has become rare) makes it much harder.
Same as market; anything that does not use it will use less efficient alternatives like politics. Sadly market like tao and politics has no moral either.
And notice it’s not being destroyed by the (largely fantastical) “fascist threats” constantly being whined about; rather, this is all the direct act of a decidedly left-wing government. Shocking to no one who has even a passing familiarity with the history of the 20th century…
It's almost like an uneducated public is easier to control..
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
„If I Were The Devil“ (1965)
https://youtu.be/jnPE8u5ONls
Not at all according to booru admninistrators. They-re specifically pointing fingers at Russel Vought.
From my perspective, this is born out of NGO's and political elite. This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
Democracy seems increasingly defined by the citizens opposing some measure, and the politicians going ahead with it anyway.
> This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
Ditto for "do you want more secure software?" It turns out people don't realise that also means making software secured against their will.
Anyone who asks that is arguing in bad faith and using children as political weapons to achieve their ends. It's gotten to the point I outright dismiss anything the politicians say the second I hear the words "children" and "terrorists".
This is what I mean when I say it has to be reckoned with. You can outright dismiss it yourself but it doesn’t make it go away when a sizeable number of voters do not dismiss it.
Every authoritarian regime relies on large numbers of useful idiots.
Is it just me or is this demonizing of NGOs a very recent phenomenon trickling into the dialogue? I find it quite alarming.
It is more a long the lines that large document leaks have allowed people to see how NGOs have become vehicles for State Intelligence and corporate/political power.
Can you point me to some leaks you are referring to? Honestly curious. I have no doubt that there are some bad actors in this space, but Non Governmental Organizations is such a wide category I find it strange that that acronym keeps popping up like some evil entity rather than calling out the individual orgs.
"Non Government Organizations" that get (a lot of) public money and then get to use it in any clandestine way they feel like is worth demonizing.
It is not recent, at least in eastern europe. It is a part of russian disinformation playbook.
I don't see where disinformation or Russians come in. It is well documented that some NGOs are pushing changes in internet legislation to benefit themselves and their donors financially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)#Criticism
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>And the parents that are worried about their children getting fucked up by hardcore porn and social media.
Rarely brought up during the OSA debate, but I think we all know every UK ISP has "Safety Shield" on to block access to adult entertainment - by default. When purchasing the service you're asked if you want it disabled.
If parents are disabling it, they can't be that worried.
> children getting fucked up by hardcore porn
What evidence do you have that this is a reasonable concern?
I've seen plenty of hard-core porn since the age of 10 and turned out just fine. I don't know anyone in my generation that has said otherwise.
I know plenty of lifelong smokers who lack cancer, so it’s fine then?
In any case, if we’re to share anecdotes, I don’t have a single man I know that has said “wow, pornography has enriched my childhood / adult life.” I know plenty that have had trouble in their relationships, however.
1. "Parents of children", unfortunately, have little political clout (also when including their votes).
2. Children are not "fucked up" by seeing people having sex. I mean, ok, parents can be worried about them being "fucked up", but this is to a great extent the same engineering-of-consciousness that the TF article is discussing, and which the UK government wishes to affect.
And not corporate despite the lobbying?
Afaik not a single serious ngo support this.
It depends what you consider a “serious NGO,” but the NSPCC, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Breck Foundation, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and other NGOs actively campaigned for and supported it.
Well sure, but no true NGO supports it.
Lobbying only does something if government is corrupt.
This is either a tautology or meaningless, depending on semantics.
Q: Are there today, or have there ever been in history, any non-corrupt governments (that by your implication are invulnerable to lobbying)?
I’m pretty sure lobbying is a thing everywhere, regardless of corruption. People want the government to do stuff and will try to make it happen, from autocracies to direct democracies and everything in between.
There are a lot of extra steps the UK government can take beyond the fines:
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
OFCOM is powerless. ISP blocks are worthless.
This is going to fizzle out, like the Australian eSafety team trying to remove content off X globally.
Or get Apple to poke holes in it's crypto. Just not going to happen.
Unfortunately the government is winning, Apple’s ADP encryption is no longer available in the UK. The Online Safety Act was finally forced through after over 10 years.
They’ll eventually get what they want in any case the same way a chisel can eventually dig through a mountain.
There is no winning. It's an infinite game of whackamole.
> Unfortunately the government is winning
In the UK. Their abuse will be restricted to people living within their borders unless the US allows it. The UK is not in any position to harass US companies, even more so now that they lack EU's backing.
Only UK residents (including their children) will really be harmed by this nonsense.
eSafety is a joke. However, the Human Rights Commission has the funding to launch multi-year investigations into YouTubers that make people cry and poop their pants. That's power, although they do admit the investigations cannot currently proceed beyond investigations due to there aren't any punishments or remedies in the statute. But that's a clerical error that should be remedied some day.
Yes, and it's not just the UK
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg2kz9kn93o
True. Proposal not law mind.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
>a stand-off has been engineered between UK censorship measures nobody asked for, and the constitutional rights of all Americans.
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
>Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children
More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.
Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?
Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.
Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..
These laws weren't created by Ofcom. They were passed as primary legislation by the previous government (and enthusiatically implemented by the current one).
Already underway in several states. Bills in Texas and Utah have already been approved, with several other states entertaining such proposals, although none have moved out of committee as yet.
It's all so tiresome.
If this were really about protecting the children they could've solved the matter with the equivalent of a mandate on device manufacturers and website operators to respect a DO-NOT-SERVICE-I-AM-A-CHILD (or whatever) header in HTTP. Hell, if it were really about protecting children, parents would get access to dumbed down versions of the kind of tools corporate IT has for managing business phones ... so they can lock them down, limit how they're used, right down to what apps can be installed.... but that would deprive advertisers of a golden ticket for knowing what views are legit, put parents back in control, and actually work... so can't have that. :D
I imagine they would counterargument your proposal along the lines of: "the most endangered children cannot rely on their families to protect them online"
If that is so then that is a problem to be solved by the local equivalent of child protective services by removing them to a safe environment, not by imposing tyranny on everyone else. See how easy it is to dismantle statist arguments if you just stand your ground?
Related:
4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44982681
I'm largely in line with where a lot of the comments under these political posts are coming from, but there's no discussion in them. It's rhetoric, outrage, and oversimplifying things.
The comments on HN are worth reading precisely because of the discussions, so I'm not sure what the point of political posts are if that fails.
In general I agree, but I think this is one of those cases where theres no oversimplifying, it really is just what you see on its face.
A UK bureaucracy is threatening fundamental and constitutional rights of an American. Its so outrageous, I really dont think there's any nuanced discussion to be had.
The whole western world is looking at this to know if their own populations will passively accept this particular brand of tyranny. If the UK citizenry doesn't vote it out in the next round of elections, this is coming for all of us.
Even if the uk.gov changes, the next .gov won't change a damn thing.
Sure, 4chan is a cesspool, but what if I start a replacement? How does the UK block it? Do we end up with an allowlist only internet?
That's the thing, one day you won't be able to.
You'll only be able to connect to domains that have been bought with a state-issued ID and digitally signed. If you run afoul of the rules, you'll be taken down, fined, or worse.
The means to publish and consume will be taken from us.
"Trusted" computing. "You wouldn't download a car." "Think of the children". "Free speech allows hate."
Within a generation of complete and total control of communications, we will be slaves. Powerless, impotent, unable to organize, disposable fodder.
1984 is coming.
I've recently had a glimpse of that - buying my first .no domain required me to be registered on the Norwegian population register, and full digital verification. There was even a phone call with the registrar! Some of the other rules are bonkers too [1]:
- Each private individual may at any time subscribe to up to 5 domain names directly under .no
- Each organisation may at any time subscribe to up to 100 domain names directly under .no
[1]: https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/
There's a reason we in Sweden has a nickname for Norway; "the last soviet state"
Is it wrong for Norway to protect its domain? They don't want the ".no" domain to be the target of "domain hacks" from people who have nothing to do with Norway.
So if you want a ".no" domain, prove that you are Norwegian, the limits are to prevent the kind of abuse we see in most other TLDs (domain squatting, etc...). All that seem reasonable to me. Some countries put less restrictions on their own TLDs, especially tiny countries with interesting TLDs which they see as a revenue source, that's fine too, but to each his own.
If you don't like it, use any of the generic TLDs. AFAIK, Norway doesn't put any restriction on them.
You don't connect to domains, you connect to IPs. You can resolve a domain to an IP however you want. And IPs can be shared or change regularly.
The convention is use DNS to resolve domains and DNS providers play by some rules, but if enough people start to dislike the rules you will start seeing unsanctioned DNS services and the like.
Another option is for browsers to consult a p2p DHT (just use the one for torrents) for a special class of domains (eg. https://[pubkey].dht). This is similar to how Tor does this but in this case you don't need to hide your server location because presumably it's located somewhere where the laws favor you.
IP blocking is a very different type of problem and one that would require hiring China as a consultant. And still be only marginally effective.
What makes IP blocking so difficult, and why would China need to be brought in as a consultant? Does setting up such technologies exceed the capabilities or experience of Western engineers?
The perl clutching on HN is hilarious. Dude, just torrent your porn if you don't want to engage with the age check.
What was the point of the age check again?
> Do we end up with an allowlist only internet?
That's the best case scenario. Honestly we'll be lucky if we can even run "unauthorized" software that hasn't been digitally signed by the government on our own computers. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is coming to an end.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
529,454 signatures and counting
Ah yes, online petitions: doing absolutely nothing for 30 years.
Online petitions give voice to people who can felt heard but ignored.
And do as much as a sternly worded letter to the editor.
Ok, but the online petitions will just be ignored anyway.
I suggest reading how this official government website works.
Warning> Incoming rant..... The bizarre thing about the UK, ( and possibly other 1st world countries ), is the seemingly unaware populace -that many institutions are nepotistic and gated. This may just be a universal thing, but it took me most of my adult life to slowly come to terms with the fact, the local council ( people in charge of a borough), of a small nice (going downhill over 30 years) suburb here in london, don't allow, and have never allowed as far as I can tell, the ascension to power of any outsider from the council. I could hardly believe it when I found out, I had just assumed all political / council positions were a slow process of democratic voting. But no, you can't just canvas for the role of councillor. It differs from village to village. So , 1- this is the case, 2- I was unaware most of my life ( people dont know. discuss it ) 3- the only "old timer" business man in the area, whose been there and worked 50 years has himself said "are corrupt" - clearly atleast a dim view. Now I understand this is heresay, but perhaps it honestly just take 40 years or so for endemic corruption to even "come out" and by then its just the old "who know", who soon enough pass away, their children perhaps believing it too, leaving for other areas of the globe for opportunity.
One can slowly understand why the fabric of a SEEMINGLY unfair, un-meritocratic, rule bending, society that limits vertical movement slowly ebbs apart.
EDIT > The reason I said rule bending is simply, one of the most successful people I know just lied about their academic achievements, no one seemingly bothered to check, and they took the position of someone who was honest. This must be somehow related.
This whole online safety act thing gives me goosebumps.
I had lived most of my live in Russia until migrating in 2022 and I’m pretty familiar with what it means when the gov starts messing with digital censorship.
If you’re not aware, it’s getting systematically harder and harder to browse the free web in Russia despite 50%+ of population using “some” VPN app.
And I’m not even talking extremist / anti-russian resources that the government turned against originally, but most of the independent websites that use CloudFlare free tier, for example. Because cloudflare enables proxying and a couple other IP-masquerading techniques by default, to effectively block a single website you have to block the entire cloudflare IP range and DNS - which is >20% of the web.
As for the VPNs, most of the common protocols and frameworks (eg OpenVPN) are already banned + detected via DPI, and people have to get into more and more sophisticated setups like VLESS+Reality (= most of the non-technical people can’t set it up by themselves or even buy a subscription to such thing). “Simple” shadowsocks, originally popularized in China to fight the great firewall are already almost rendered completely useless.
And it will get worse. The gov service which is responsible for blocking has a very high budget + some pretty neat tech to help them cut off more and more ways to bypass the censorship.
This is the future of any state that gets into this game. The future where you might have to become very proficient in networking and use some “shady” stuff like Tor to just read a blog post about Linux.
It doesn’t matter what it starts with - fighting anti-gov propaganda or, for god’s sake, porn (the least harmful thing for the kids in this horrible ai-post-capitalism world that we live in) — once the regulators get the feeling of power over the free web, every lobbyist, organization and party will come for a part of the web that you personally might enjoy, or even earn living from.
The new ban is easily bypassed even without a VPN. The government is trying to block cracks in a dam with their fingers. Assuming they even care about results rather than performative posturing.
Pied piper internet 2.0 time! Why can't we use/build a faster variant of TOR, for every day use?
Little bit unrelated, but "Just verify your age (impossible without verifying your identity)" is false. It is possible to verify the age without verifying identity. It can be done using Zero Knowledge Proof.
4chan doesn't do anything illegal unless you think that being mean should be banned.
They arrest people for saying "We love bacon".
"Police drag away a man for saying he likes bacon near a sprawling mosque construction site" (https://www.wndnewscenter.org/we-like-bacon-man-arrested-for...)
Well that depends on what laws are passed, doesn’t it? 4Chan is now in violation of a new UK law.
4chan is not in the UK and ofcom has no jurisdiction. This would be like Singapore trying to prosecute you for smoking marijuana in your own home in the U.S.
Yeah and I can guarantee you're in violation of laws somewhere too.
It's just as irrelevant.
…did you read the article?
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So we’re just throwing bugbears against a wall at this point I guess?
Have you ever opened 4chan? There are literally 3 threads right now with "drawn images" illegal in many countries. To me it's crazy it's still open. Early 4chan had the worst kind of images you could think of.
I find it more offensive that there are "many countries" where "drawn images" are illegal to share.
Women driving or walking outside without headgear is illegal in many countries.
There are no drawn or otherwise images on 4chan that are illegal under United States law.
Uh, why do you think there's a "no kik/telegram sharing" sticky post on /b/ right now?
Mohammed caricatures or 100 year old vampires that look like 12 year olds?
Being mean, for varying degrees of "mean", is actually illegal in most countries that aren't the USA and surely 4chan passes the threshold in at least some of them.
I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back. Their motivation will have nothing to do with defending free speech, but an enemy of my enemy IS my friend.
S.1748 - Kids Online Safety Act[1] is working its way through and as I understand it has fairly broad support.
There may be significant differences between KOSA and OSA in their implementation but they are the same in essence.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
KOSA is one of those bills that gets introduced in every session (sometimes under different names) without any chance of passing.
Honestly from the summary this seems pretty.. reasonable?
If the limitations on conducting A/B tests on people under 13 are enforced, you will need a driver's license to connect to the internet, and you will need to show it to every website.
Companies don't need A/B tests to tell them that requiring a driver's license is going to hurt conversions more than no more A/B tests.
Surely a state ID is enough, right? I know at least 3 legal adults in my circles alone without a driver's license, though I believe they all have either a state ID or permit. (Not that I support requiring any sort of meatspace identification for acting in cyberspace).
But it's literally the same thing.
> This bill requires covered online platforms, including social media platforms, to implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17.
What is an "online platform", and how would they know the visitor is under 17?
What the summary leaves out is that elements of it like 'harm to minors' have loopholes you could drive a truck through. It's designed to allow arbitrary censorship of wrongthink with 'think of the children' as cover.
The devil is always in the detail.
>> I look forward to the current us admin forcing the uk to very publicly walk this back
He'll need to start first with taking action at home. Florida and I believe Texas have also implemented age restrictions for various websites and did so before the UK.
So maybe they're not your friend.
But the predator of your predator isn’t your protector, just a bigger predator.
The current US administration isn’t pro free speech, they just use other tools to prevent it.
UK uses laws, US uses money respectively the lack of money for you if your speech doesn’t suit them.
US free speech has a price tag.
> But the predator of your predator isn’t your protector, just a bigger predator.
That line sounds like the start of a counter to "Won't somebody think of the children."
You're joking right?
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
Mississpi is a pretty Republican state and has enacted even more stringent and privacy-invasive laws.
Mississippi is forcing wikipedia, 4chan, a ton of other sites to have ID uploads?
The us is on a parallel track You will be underwhelmed.
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Hard disagree. Trump can apparently be bribed. This could be solved by a discrete transfer of cryptocurrency to a specific Maltese or Transnistrian wallet.
I don't know if 4chan can afford to bribe Trump and they might be better off taking the martyr approach. Being banned in the UK adds some cachet.
Just how much revenue do you think 4chan gets, from the UK of all places? I can't imagine this being worth a bribe to Hiro.
I'm not sure what size bribes the current administration takes. I'm sure that in some situations haggling takes place.
Trump, as a professed Christian, could possibly take a "widow's mites" approach to a bribe from 4chan.
If anything, it is in 4chan's interest to be banned by UK ISPs since this will induce the sale of a few more passes, which permit posting from VPNs.
Anyway, 4chan barely keeps the lights on as it is. Worrying about 4chan bribing politicians is absurd. Either politicians will help 4chan out of some sense of self-interest, or they won't help at all.
> If anything, it is in 4chan's interest to be banned by UK ISPs since this will induce the sale of a few more passes, which permit posting from VPNs.
I sense a bit of a flaw in this strategy, given that 4chan being banned in UK would presumably block any payments for passes from UK-origin banks/cards made to 4chan bank accounts as well.
4chan no longer accepts any such payment anyway. They only take crypto through coinbase.
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Sounds like their parents outta start doing their job, then.
This is a thought-terminating cliche.
No, there is no "poster child" to justify wider site-blocking, nor even narrower site blocking. It is illegitimate governments to manipulate Internet nodes so as to filter what passes through them. If they have a problem with some website, let them take it up with the publisher/creator.
If the UK government is worried about children exposed to harmful content, well, let us first remember that they are assisting and supporting the massacre of children in Gaza, and the starvation of hundreds of thousands of them. And when that stops - I suppose they're welcome to suggest content filtering software to parents.
The most insane thing about this headline is that implies parents are giving their children devices with unfiltered access to the Internet and then the government needs to play wack-a-mole with every single website they come across to prevent children from accessing it.
I don't know about iOS, but on Android I have access to Family Link which means I can control what apps my kids can run off the app store, and I can control whether they can access explicit websites (according to google) or have free access. I know other parents that are well aware of this tool, but they have to make sure those phones or tablets are signed into with accounts they have ownership of. I think this is the direction that the government should be pushing for and making sure apple google and microsoft are all playing nicely to allow parents to manage devices under the family.
iOS is similar. You can also limit apps/books/movies/etc. by content age rating, block adult sites, etc. without parental approval (which just happens over messages).
There is even an on-device image classifier for images/video to blur pornography from messages and keep them from sending it to others.
The most insane thing about western society is the tendency of a lot of the populace to abrogate all responsibility to the government.
That’s the hallmark of socialist countries. It used to be that where in Eastern Germany people would look to government for a solution, those in the West would start a business, or learn a new skill, or read self help books. Nowadays, the self help books are read only for entertainment, and people look to government as the solution to any problem, no matter where they are, or how individualistic and free market they call themselves as a nation.
Parents are absolutely giving children devices with unfiltered internet access. I think people here need to step out of their ivory tower. I would say most people don't even know to think about the things people here think about. "Unknowns unknowns", if you will. We all agree here that this is a bad idea. What percentage of the worlds population do you think reads Hacker News?
Regulate the parents then. You don't strip search every customer in your store because one person shoplifted.
If you're going to say that, I think most people wouldn't even access websites to begin with. They spend most of their time on Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok.
I know people who don't know how to use Google because they only use a smartphone to browse scroll Instagram and Facebook. They're never going to access a website.
Large companies have dozens or hundreds (even thousands) of their own internal websites, plus tons of SaaS for HR, tax, benefits, etc.
People use "websites" all the fucking time.
who wouldn't want the gov banning workers organizing collective action online? can you think of the damage to children if they mistake it for a Minecraft server? do you want to be responsible for that?
That's just par for the course in UK culture. During American criminal trials, the jury is told not to watch the news. During British criminal trials, the entire British press is legally forbidden from reporting on the trial.
Well-paced article. The exposition sounds bleak, but then Betteridge's law creeps up slowly over the middle of the article, and the piece crescendos toward a final showdown.
There needs to be a place for 4chan, but mainly so those users spend less time on normal sites. If I recall, one of the admins was outed as a government agent after many years... lol
Site-blocking won't work, and NERF'ing the world under the guise of protecting kids is a poorly obfuscated despotic strategy. Bouncy castle politics only undermine institutional credibility. =3
The USA has weaponized free-speech - no surprise other countries are building up defence.
More like "building up siege mentality".
> has weaponized free-speech
What does this mean
It's pretty straight forward, using its dominance when it comes to internet platforms to try to impose American speech standards and values on foreign countries, the vice president has been quite explicit about that when he interfered in political discourse in several European countries.
Any country that has its wits together would do well to establish sovereignty over its communications infrastructure. It's quite telling that the only country that has been able to stand up to American bullying is China because they were smart enough to not outsource control over their information space to the US.
...What? So given the option between the government having more or less control over what you can say, you'd prefer more?
Even worse than blocking certain sites, would be if they burden everybody in a mountain of paperwork, making a lot of internet endaveours no longer feasible. I'm not sure how they do it in China, I know there is an internet registration number, not sure if they have paperwork, e.g. to demonstrate that your site is compliant. Let's hope they come to their senses!
Given that web traffic to certain adult websites has dropped 90% from the UK, in waiting to hear news of the lawsuit.
What is the resultant increase in traffic from other countries I wonder? VPN endpoint traffic has to pop up somewhere.
Unexpected application of Betteridge’s law.
For someone who has never been there, sure. It’s hardly the worst *chan though and I’d argue KiwiFarms is less redeemable.
The only real difference is the size of the audience between them. It hasn't changed since its earliest days. Many of the users go between them.
I have met plenty of millenial's, veterans of the worst of deviant art and 4chan, and the kids are allright.Perhaps a bit extra adult and focused, but that's a good thing right! They have no fucks to give, and rightly expect the worst from there overlords, but make light of it in an obnoctios abrasive kind of way, while standing and fighting the most egregious excesses and violence brought from our governments, who want pasty soft and confused masses of worky workers to exploit, rather than alert, 18 year old vetrans who have seen, heard, and fought depravity on the internet and beyond. So now, bieng too late, the gubberment, is trying to use strong arm and smeer tactictics to controll everything, when they dont grasp the basic realitys that everything on a computer is a file, and all processors have an input/output interface and some kind of widly availible comunications protocol, oh and hundreds of millions of significantly intelligent and pissed of people who are not buying it. key word in the title is "justify", but these are purely self justifications from a dangerous and out of touch group who have taken all of the strings of power and wealth into there clutchy overfull desperate grasp. The truely sureal part of banning file sharing is that the powers that be would rather have people rip thier media, than end up talking with each other and sharring there own.
No. There is no poster child that justifies this dystopian slave state.
i think so.
wow this Peter Kyle guy is a disgusting populist
My local MP won’t do anything and basically dismissed me as a pedo/terrorist for even considering talking against the OSA.
What can be done if those who represent you, don’t?
Vouched.
However you really need to name your MP. These political public figures need named and shamed for using binary fallacious logic like that. And barring listening to constituents, get rid of them.
If you're an engineer, contribute to technologies that take power away from those who lord over you. Which in this case would be distributed, censorship-resistant communication technologies. There's a lot of work to be done, not only in hard engineering, but also in things like UI and marketing, as widespread adoption is the best way to maximise the chance of success. For all its flaws, cryptocurrency (in particular anonymous ones like Monero) is a demonstration that this is possible: no government desires for its citizens to have a means to transact large sums anonymously online, yet Monero still exists. And as governments impose more restrictions on the internet, there'll be more and more demand for means to bypass those restrictions.
By all means work on better privacy technology but censorship isn't a technology problem. It is a human problem. We cannot work around ignorance forever. We have to engage the system to affect real change.
Which specific projects in particular?
Over the last few years, it's become ever more apparent to me that technology can't fix what's broken. Even as we invent more ways to bypass censorship it becomes more so that people have less to say that I might want to hear with those technologies. And it's not just an ideological thing either, because best I can tell there's plenty of that stuff for whichever way you lean. What I mean is that people write less, there's less for me to read. But they have plenty of hustlely Youtube videos of the sort I have no inclination to watch. Less journalism, but plenty of opinions/editorials (I have enough opinions of my own, thanks). Less music... the whole recording industry seems to have imploded.
We're not in danger of censorship so much as we're in danger of there no longer being anything for them to censor away from me. I don't think it's just me either, I know some of you are seeing the same things I am.
There is not "less music".
There are more options than there have ever been to listen to music someone made around the world from you, even in real time.
Sure. I'm absolutely certain that there has always been music... so much 15th century Bulgarian folk music that it could fill a record store, for instance. But just because that music existed doesn't mean I have access to it or even awareness of it unless I am an academic researcher that pours years of my life into it. Your indy music stuff is just like that... but I have no desire to spend the next 10 years learning to dig it out of remote corners of the world just to listen to it.
It's permanently and sociologically walled off from me in ways that I don't care to overcome. If I was interested in music discovery in 1980, how many record stores would I have had access to that I could walk into and just browse? How many of those are still around today? While radio was still pretty bad in 1980, it wasn't 12-stations-of-ClearChannel bad... I've heard those same 300 songs on an endless loop since I was a child.
That's just the way democracy works. What you have to do is convince your fellow voters. Do that and your MP will go along. Or be replaced.
They represent their constituents - you are one of those. If the majority of their constituents support the legislation they're doing their job. Could you post their full response to you? Pretty shocking if they accused you of being a terrorist pedophile and worth making people aware of which MP this was!
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More made up problems for a fundamentally inept government to solve because fixing real problems like a broken healthcare system is hard and not a guaranteed political win.
Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
> Thanks Starmer, you're a worthless turd and no different than your predecessor.
It’s amusing/depressing that Labor in Australia is doing the same nonsense too. They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
> They’re not actually much better than their alternative, which is why they continually get voted out and kept out of power.
Labor won the last two general elections though? And the alternative is currently in disarray.
I'm not going to argue that Labor Australia are doing god's work - particularly on health at the system seems to be in crisis and need a lot more funding. But the opposition are in total disarray and desperately trying every wedge-issue in the book in an attempt to ignite culture-wars style partisanship here, which is (thankfully) falling on barren soil.
I think it was an agenda years in the making. I saw the groundwork being laid for this in 2021 and it somehow survived a general election and an entirely new government with a different political alignment. Ive seen other laws like this. It was nothing to do with the politics or the politicians, it has to do with civil servants who are working with their own agenda. Just like yes prime minister.
It's building on the Snoopers Charter 2016
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_201...
People seem to have forgotten that all major UK ISPs are now logging TCP connection metadata and all DNS queries
ISPs will send you warning letters if you're using bittorrent
We should have something that sets the TCP SYN bit in every packet (between participating hosts) so that it overloads surveillance systems.
Bittorrent letters aren't from a generic surveillance system - it's participating copyright holders downloading the files from you and then pressing charges for you sharing it to them.
This law was passed in 2023.
I still can't believe the UK got suckered into the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. All it took was like two years of making you vote every three months and you gave up your democracy.
You're not like the US. The US turns over a good portion of Congress every two years, and re-elects what is basically a active King every four. All you did was make sure that no one in government has to think about the public for a second, while they do what their backers and buddies ask, then retire in five years.
There's no way out of it. Starmer should try to get down to an <10% approval rating just to make the history books.
I can't quite tell whether you know this from the way you wrote your comment, but the Fixed-Term Parliaments act was repealed in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-term_Parliaments_Act_201...
The fixed term act, as the other poster pointed out, was repealed in 2022
It was also a hilarious failure given that during the 11 short years it was active there were two two-year parliaments. It also didn't stop PMs being deposed from within, during that same period there were 5 different prime ministers.
So I think your read on it is a little exaggerated there.
The Online Safety Act was passed when the Tories were still in government.
Rolling that back essentially makes you a prime minister that believes children should have unfettered access to porn, self-harm material, gore, and that the outspoken parents of kids who've killed themselves after accessing this material shouldn't be listened to. At least, that's how the media (on all sides) would spin it. Not really a fight worth picking.
The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
If their real interest was in protecting children, they'd make a free, publicly accessible age blocking system that parents could choose to opt into, that isn't thrust upon all citizens at once
I've only done one of these age verifications (for Bluesky) and that didn't require any personal information beyond seeing my face.
The digital credentials API trial seems interesting though: letting the browser verify your age without sharing any other personal details. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...
>a form of age check that doesn't require personal information
But your age is personal information.
sure, but it's far from the most identifying information you can hand over to a government, though
> The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.
Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.
And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
Where are you hearing those voices?
That’s populist talk, and if the PM wants to play populism, he’s not doing a very good job of it.
The problem the majority of people have with this law is "I can't easily access my free porn anymore". The counter-argument is "child kills self"[1] because shitty tech companies can't control their thirst for money. Like I said, I don't agree with the legislation but it's not an easy argument to make.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-62998484
In a world where you can cast your vote anonymously in the voting booth, it’s a dangerous game to piss off a large number of voters, even if they can’t admit publicly why. They will be reminded every day of that idiotic policy. Like cookie consent banners.
I think you’re correct and the person you’re replying to is correct too.
Voters aren’t all that rational. They could choose to vote against the person that blocked their access to porn but also choose to vote against the person who made porn available again because doing so puts children in danger or whatever the scaremongering line would be.
He's not doing a very good job of anything. His main problem is he has very few fundamental beliefs. All he has is some vague left wing aligned principles which he allows others to advise him on and then selects whatever position will gain himself the most goodwill. Which is why his ministers can propose atrocious ideas and he will go along with them. It's not as if he has anything better to suggest.
Nick Farage from Reform plans to pick this fight. Of course whether he does it or not will be seen.
He says he's against the OSA but he's also funded by religious right nutters who think it's a great first step. So if/when he gets into power, don't expect anything better to replace it. Not that I would expect him to uphold a single promise: as I understand it, Reform doesn't even commit to a formal manifesto, anyway.
Farage is a moral-free scumbag who will be known in history as one of the architects of Britain's period of decline. The fact that he hasn't been held to account is one of the great scandals of our age.
Unless he gets into power he’s just a symptom.
I like the fact that as soon as his cause 'won' he stepped down so that he didn't need to do any of the actual hard work in implementing the disaster.
He had no power.
I'm no brexiteer but ... it's not like the Tories were going to hand him the keys to Number 10 and say "Have at it". He wasn't an MP at all at that point.
It's like the "Idiots didn't even know what they were voting for!" argument. Sure, they didn't. Because the people who actually had the power to make a plan to vote for, declined to do so, specifically to increase uncertainty and perception of risk for voting leave.
You can blame Farage and brexit voters for a lot (and you should!) but neither he nor they ever had the political power to make or execute a plan.
People literally wanted this though.
Not a fight worth picking if truth, sanity, principles and integrity are worthless to you, I'm sure.
Just want to point out that none of those are guiding principles for politicians either.
I mean he has the same bosses right?
You mean the electorate ?
Maybe the Bavarian Illuminati.
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I'm all about liberal freedom, but blocking 4chan would actually help society given how abused it is by counter-intelligence. There is bullshit spewed there constantly and no one should be subject to that trash in a functioning society.
I think the world needs a 2007 /b/ right now
We'd like to, but Pool's Closed.
You are either stupid or criminal.
....and you've never been on /b/ and don't get the reference.
Worthless pool of idiocy.
Only if you werent there
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Go back to 4chan and talk about touching kids inappropriately.
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Harsh buzz man
I don't think you know what counter intelligence means. That'd just be a regular intelligence or government PR operation.
I don't use 4chan but that stuffs pretty easy to spot on Tiktok and reddit if you're paying attention. Conspiracy type stuff is rampant on those sites. Especially around elections or conflicts like wars.
Content moderation or censorship can be an equally dangerous vector for government influence campaigns as well.
You are the problem. I was very clear and do know what counter-intelligence is.
I don't think you have a point, sorry. My post was correct. That forum is abused to create counter-factual q-anon type shit.
Q anon was started by Chan's admin, some random guy living in South East Asia, and was embarrassingly amateur
You can be upset about the sort of content on 4chan. Most of the planet would agree. You don't need to frame it as something sophisticated because you don't like it and want it censored.
You're thinking of Jim Watkins who provided the hosting for 8chan, not 4chan. Two completely different image boards.
I typed "8 Chan" but it seems it was mistakenly edited it out the 8
No, 4chan is a lie factory. There is no confusion here.
I don't think censorship is a good thing unless it's censoring concerted efforts to spread false information which reshape the political landscape. You are underselling the bullshit that you say "8chan admins" were responsible for. It's inexcusable.
I'm not upset about the content aside from it being a clear devious effort to spread lies and shift public opinion.
Stop framing it as something different. No one with a brain is buying it, and yes, we are pissed.
The funny thing about "false information" being "spread" by "8chan admins" (or 4chan for that matter) is.... you can avoid it by simply not going there. Stop going there if you don't like it.
So true! I wish people would stop eating up the false information from 4chan and whatever else chan, 8chan apparently but the reference got removed. Its a cesspool.
Have you considered that spreading false information is common on that forum that i should simply not attend? Maybe the idiots you talk to on 4chan should be held to a higher standard? Or do you think "doing your own research" means believing in the first thing a right wing retard news source tells you?
If "false information" is common there... don't go there. No, I don't think they, or indeed anyone, needs to be held to a "higher standard". No one is obligated to tell you "the truth" as you see it. If you're uncomfortable being on a forum where you opinions may be challenged then the American side of the Internet simply isn't for you. In fact, if it really bothers you that much, may I suggest that your country recommend de-peering from the global Internet? That would certainly solve the problem.
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You are so embarassing.