UK ditches ban on 'legal but harmful' online content | Hacker News Reader

UK ditches ban on 'legal but harmful' online content

reuters.com

291 pointsisaacfrond438 comments

Say what you will about the US, but the UK and Australia seem to be trying to competing in a speed run to see who can reach ridiculous authoritarianism faster.

I thought it would the the UK with the way they have literally arrested people for tweets... but then I saw the insane and petty corruption taking place in Aus and a journalist getting their house firebombed.

You say "... the way they have literally arrested people for tweets", as if "tweets" is a special "thing" , but it's just communication. If something is illegal to say, it stands to reason that it would be illegal to say through the medium of a tweet. Is it less ridiculous to arrest people from what they write in a blog post or what they say on the street than what they say in a tweet?

It seems like one should either take free speech absolutist approach and say speech should never be illegal, or accept that some speech is illegal which would obviously mean that it's illegal even on Twitter. But you're not the first person I've seen who seemingly find it extra ridiculous to react to something someone tweeted, as if publishing a tweet or a series of tweets is not an act of speech, and I don't understand it.

The "special thing" in terms of authoritarianism was the arrest part, not the tweet part. Arresting for (offline) communication is not unheard of in the UK, as evidenced by anti-monarchist protesters getting arrested for expressing their views during Charles' proclamation.

If I was talking about someone arrested for speaking against the monarchy on Twitter, I wouldn't talk about that as someone being "arrested for a tweet", maybe I would talk about someone being "arrested for tweeting critically about the monarchy" or just "arrested for being critical of the monarchy". If one thinks the speech in question should be legal, you'd think one would mention the kind of speech, not just the medium.

As it is, we can't judge for ourselves whether the arrest is warranted or not, which is kind of a big deal when the arrest is used by robswc to illustrate how the UK is approaching authoritarianism.

An example discussed earlier this year on HN: Joseph Kelly tweeted

> the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuuurn

in relation to Tom Moore’s death. He deleted the tweet after 20 minutes. He was convicted of grossly offensive communications under the Communications Act, and was sentenced to 18 month’s probation and 150 hours of unpaid work.

That's certainly crass, but it shouldn't be illegal to say.

If people don't want to support their country's military and servicemen, that should be their business; it's a legitimate political position to take. Not least because all British soldiers are volunteers, and most of what British soldiers have been doing for the past generation is tagging along with American imperial military adventurism.

>I wouldn't talk about that as someone being "arrested for a tweet"

When the reasons are "being critical of the monarchy" or "causing anxiety" I think "for a tweet" can only make things look less ridiculous, lol.

> If one thinks the speech in question should be legal, you'd think one would mention the kind of speech, not just the medium.

Fundamentally, all speech should be legal, barring very special circumstances. That's freedom of expression.

>Arresting for (offline) communication is not unheard of in the UK

This is not unheard of in the US either. So what is the distinction being made here?

And for the record the UK and Australia are generally higher up on the various freedom lists that rank countries. I don't know that there is much of an argument that their stricter speech restrictions have them any closer to authoritarianism than the various problems in the US have us.

>And for the record the UK and Australia are generally higher up on the various freedom lists that rank countries.

Do you have a source for the ones you are referencing?

I looked a few and they track things like "whether both men and women feel comfortable expressing themselves in public"

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

And very few seem to give proper weight to objective measurements like laws and actual consequences of speech.

There are plenty of them. You can start here[1] and do digging to find whichever one you think is most appropriate. It has been years since I have looked at any of these in depth, but the general consensus has often been that at our best the US is on par with countries like Australia and the UK and is occasionally a tier bellow those two. I'm not aware of any that have us a tier above either of them when it comes to general freedom metrics.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

I looked at a random few of those and I honestly believe their categories are too broad/subjective.

Funny enough, downloading an actual report (https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index/2021), the UK scores almost perfect (9.8) on "Freedom of internet Expression." The country where you can quite literally be arrested for making an offensive tweet (not a threat), scores just shy of 10/10 on internet freedom? Are the arrests the reason for losing 0.2? I would _love_ to see the methodology behind that score.

Germany, the country where you can have your house literally raided over calling a politician a "dick", scores 9.36 "Internet Expression." 9's are some of the highest scores you can get.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...

The institutions that put these together have 0 skin in the game. I have tried to find how they create their "indicators" but haven't found anything. I honestly just cannot take these reports seriously unless someone has an answer for how countries that can arrest citizens over offensive tweets could score so high on this particular metric.

Maybe some of them do have categories that are too broad or subjective. That is why I referred to the consensus of the lists and not any individual list. Those list come from a variety of political and ideological backgrounds, so any biases should be reduced in aggregate and they all seem to end up showing the same pattern. The US is generally in the 2nd or 3rd tier while Australia and the UK are generally in the 1st or 2nd tier.

I would assume this means the experts have concluded that the right to be rude to a politician on Twitter is not a particularly important right and its removal doesn't have much impact on the overall freedom of that society. That seems more likely than a diverse group of think tanks, academic institutions, journalistic outlets, and NGOs have all either joined a conspiracy or randomly acted in concert to misrepresent the relative freedom of the US in comparison to our peers.

>Maybe some of them do have categories that are too broad or subjective.

All of the ones I have looked through have that. Every single one.

We're looking at just one metric though. Freedom to express ideas on the internet. Countries where you can get arrested for "offensive" tweets or get your house raided for calling a politician a dick score a few 0.1s away from the maximum of 10. We don't know how, because AFAIK, they do not go into specifics about why they give the UK/Germany a 9.x/10 on "Internet Freedom."

>I would assume this means the experts have concluded that the right to be rude to a politician on Twitter is not a particularly important right

Then I, along with most people, would conclude that their metric (and possibly by extension, their entire index) is useless. Not having your house raided for calling a politician a dick is exactly what most people would consider a particularly important "right."

Laws can be irrelevant. Hong Kong had freedom of speech in 1997, but it was gradually eroded without any changes to the law, until recently.

The People’s Republic of China guarantees freedom of speech in its constitution. However, china doesn’t really do rule of law (the judicial branch has no power to interpret law or rebuke executive application of the law, instead it’s more rule by law), so it is mostly meaningless.

Respectfully, it is my opinion that arresting anyone who says something, in real life, on a blog or whispering to themselves, that is not a direct threat or inciting physical violence is wrong.

That makes a lot of sense if you think that only direct calls for violence result in violence. There's a slow burning genocide afoot that's taking place though "reasoned debates," that serves as a counterexample. It's, however, a lot easier to relabel it as something else than accept that speech falling outside "inciting physical violence" could be the cause.

>There's a slow burning genocide afoot

Sounds like you're inciting a call to violent action.

Do you realize what you just did? You equate pointing out the existence of a genocide with a "call to violent action". In a conversation where a "call to violent action" is used to mean something which is worthy of arrest. Your comment, in the context of this conversation, argues in favour of arresting anyone who points out that a genocide is taking place. That is extremely dangerous.

>You equate pointing out the existence of a genocide with a "call to violent action"

I take it you favor a more passive approach.

>Your comment, in the context of this conversation, argues in favour of arresting anyone who points out that a genocide is taking place. That is extremely dangerous.

This is exactly what my comment was arguing. I wrote that comment not as a reflection of my personal views, but to highlight the consequences of prosecuting individuals for statements which aren't direct threats.

I don't believe arresting and prosecuting individuals for making such statements is justified. I agree that the context of this conversation argues in favor of arresting anyone who points out that genocide is taking place, and I agree that accepting it as a precedent is extremely dangerous. You've elucidated my reasoning on the subject perfectly.

What "slow burning genocide" are you referring to here? Because, without knowing the specifics, this sounds like extreme hyperventilating.

There is always a lot of debate about how you define a word like genocide. The UN definition outlines several actions that qualify as genocide but specifically limits it to attacks on a community of people based on race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Actions like preventing medical care and removing kids from their parents would qualify as genocide according to that UN definition.

The US is guilty of both those things (and more) when it comes to our treatment of trans people. However, trans people clearly aren't a singular racial, religious, ethnic, or national group. That means they can't technically be the victims of a genocide according to that UN definition, but that is an awfully uncomfortable technically we need to not be guilty of genocide.

You could be right. Was that really kelseyfrog's point, though? Or was it Israel's treatment of Palestinians? Or Russia's treatment of Ukraine? Or China's treatment of the Uighurs? Or the police treatment of blacks? Or the Great Replacement theory? I honestly can't tell.

And, once we know what was actually being claimed, then we can debate whether it meets the definition of genocide.

I really hate vague-posting like kelseyfrog's post. Don't hint. If you have a claim to make, make it. (Just to be clear, this last paragraph is not aimed at the parent.)

I obviously can't know for sure without them chiming in. However, the context made me immediately think of trans people. It was in a conversation about issues specific to the US, UK, and Australia so I doubt they are talking about China's treatment of Uyghurs. They mentioned "reasoned debates" and the anti-trans contingent often defends themselves by saying they are "just asking questions" or are looking for reasoned debates about high school girls volleyball. OP also called out the speech that leads to violence even if it isn't a direct call to violence. That seems to be a reference to the way that numerous conservative figures have started using "pedo groomers" as a slur to describe people who participate in drag shows, are trans, or even just generally LGBT+ people. Someone just recently heard all that rhetoric, walked into an LGBT+ bar that does drag shows, murdered 5 people, and injured over a dozen more.

One of the reasons people are vague on HN about these issues is because a simple "The US is committing genocide against trans people" comment is more likely to be downvoted and flagged as being political. We often can only talk about these things here by hinting at them. Ironic considering how pro free speech this community claims to be.

A direct comment that the US is committing genocide against trans people I would downvote, not for being political, but for being BS. At least one thing more is needed to be genocide - some level of being systematic.

Yes, trans people get beaten to death in numbers that are appallingly high. That's a tragedy and a disgrace on our society. Does it rise to the level of genocide? Blacks get shot in numbers that are appallingly high, too. Is that a genocide?

Preventing medical care? Are trans people being denied medical care for, say, cancer or heart disease? Or are they only being denied medical care for transitioning? Or are they only being denied medical care at public expense for transitioning?

If trans people are being denied medical care for regular medical issues, in large numbers, yes, I could call that genocide. If they're being denied care at public expense for transitioning, no, I probably would not call that genocide.

The problem with lowering the bar to calling things genocide in order to highlight a particular issue is that it lowers the bar for everybody else, too. And if everything's a genocide, then nothing is.

The problem with just hinting at things is it leaves the rest of us unclear on what, exactly, is being claimed. One of the things that most people on HN ought to agree on is that the details matter. If you're making vague claims, all we can do is talk in platitudes, which is unlikely to be effective.

Some would argue that there are indeed systemic origins and incitements in both violence against trans people and violence against black people, that there are elements within the US government (or at least political apparatus) interested in the oppression of both groups, and actively engaged in spreading fear and encouraging violence against them.

I mean, you can trace a direct line from the current moral panic about "groomers" through QAnon to Pizzagate, and it goes through one specific political party, and you can trace another line from police brutality against black people to Jim Crow and segregation to slave-catchers. The systemic links are there.

The only things people are calling genocides are things that look disturbingly like genocides. No one is arguing everything is a genocide.

Strong disagree. You don't need "systematic origins", you need systematic violence for it to be genocide. Compare, say, the Holodomor or the Armenian genocide, to what's happening to blacks and trans people. They are not similar.

> At least one thing more is needed to be genocide - some level of being systematic.

The two examples I mentioned were actions by the state. How is that not systemic?

When it's done by the state, that's systemic, but it's not systematic. It's systematic when it's done to all trans people (or whoever), not just a few.

(Yes, "all" isn't actually necessary. Some large fraction, though. You can't have a genocide by killing 1% of the people. That's an atrocity, but it's not a genocide.)

Sorry, I apparently didn't read that close enough to notice the systemic/systematic difference.

The UN definition specifically calls out that it doesn't have to be directed at the entire population. It also doesn't make any effort to define any "large fraction" that needs to be met before the definition can be applied. A culling of a percentage of specific population would likely still qualify, but the specifics of these things always varies depending on the context of the specific example being judged. However, it is clear that the UN definition primarily hinges on how people are targeted and the actions that are taken, not the scope.

You believe that there is an escalating movement in online discourse advocating for the killing of all trans people?

That isn’t a requirement to meet the UN definition of genocide. Not every genocide looks like The Holocaust.

> There's a slow burning genocide afoot that's taking place though "reasoned debates," that serves as a counterexample.

I don't know if this is the right place to share a feeling, but I'm going to try to express it anyway.

I'm not sure whether you're right about this or not, but I think you might be, and it makes me sad almost more than you could believe. It genuinely depresses me.

The claim seems to be nothing short of saying that at the end of the day, all human intelligence sums to a net negative, at least in this area. That we're not collectively capable of rational discourse. That ultimately, we're so blinded by hate for the Other that debating our differences might actually lead to worse outcomes than if we just pulled guns to solve our problems. We're all ultimately just stumbling around in the dark. Maybe, one day, the light of humanity is doomed to go out.

I suspect that one reason liberals, rationalists, civil libertarians, and their allies are so insistent on free speech and an open public square is that they can't really bring themselves to take this possibility seriously. Or, to the extent they do, they think we have to ignore the possibility, because in the event this turns out to be true, who cares about humanity anyway?

Maybe the American attitude toward free speech is just a reflection of optimism about human nature?

I think that the perpetrators of violence carry the responsibility for it, not the people who may have inspired them. Since perpetrators are agents, the cause of violence terminates at the decision making process of the perpetrator. The best way to address violence is to arrest and imprison perpetrators.

Attempting to control second-order factors that may influence behaviour is a very short road to tyranny. How do we decide which factors to control for? Who gets to make this decision? How do we know in retrospect that such a decision was mistaken? The only justice lies in conviction beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of one's peers.

Also, how "slow burning" does a "genocide" have to be before it's indistinguishable from a normal process of cultural shift and assimilation? (honest question)

I think this makes sense if we're ok with the number of perpetrators going up due to being convinced it's ok to perpetrate.

> Attempting to control second-order factors that may influence behaviour is a very short road to tyranny. How do we decide which factors to control for? Who gets to make this decision? How do we know in retrospect that such a decision was mistaken? The only justice lies in conviction beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of one's peers.

It is very hard to read this as not sealioning. Is there a way you could rephrase it so that it doesn't come across that way?

> the number of perpetrators going up due to being convinced it's ok to perpetrate

It's an inevitable consequence of power (read: to do harm) being distributed rather than concentrated. With distributed power you're at the mercy of group dynamics and trends. However the risks of concentrated power have borne out to be much more severe.

> rephrase it so that it doesn't come across [as sealioning]

I'm genuinely mystified as to what distinguishes "well-intentioned" use of authority to control people from what we see as obviously tyrannical. What principle would you use to distinguish between the kind of control over speech exercised by the UK and what is commonplace in China? Or are you willing to concede that these are different degrees of the same thing? I'm simply arguing that this "thing" (the use of authority to limit speech) should be avoided at all costs in a free society.

That would make sense if we were talking about centralized vs decentralized power to do harm, but we're not having that conversation. We're having a conversation about the freedom of speech that has the power to convince people to do harm in ways that aren't direct calls to violence. Please stay on topic, or find someone else to engage with.

Again, please refrain from sealioning. Simply rephrasing your arguments in ways that don't appear indistinguishable from it. If you keep doing it, I will have to assume you're doing it on purpose an in bad faith. It's not a good debate tactic in a conversation about "rational debate" and its effects on violence. Sealioning is exactly one of the tactics used in the topic we're discussing. You must appreciate the irony.

To have a conversation about freedom of speech you have to have a conversation about "freedom", it's meaning, and it's value. Freedom of speech does indeed have the power to convince people to do harm. However the only alternative to "freedom of speech" are constraints on speech enforced by authority. In order to oppose freedom of speech you have to support the use of authority to constrain speech. You therefore must argue that such a use of authority does less harm than the freedom it is curtailing (and as a policy is resistant to corruption).

In addition to all of this, we have to agree that "reduction of harm" is a valid guiding principle to hold above all others. This is fundamentally consequentialist (and valid as such). My thesis though is that "freedom" itself has deontological value, even if it causes harm. Deontologists and consequentialists have a notoriously hard time seeing eye to eye.

I'm not at all trying to derail the conversation, but it just doesn't seem all that clear-cut to me.

You do know what sealioning is, right? It's a denial of service attack on the debate format. I really wish you could engage in a way that doesn't evoke this style. You seem smart, why not try?

Asking one question, which can be phrased as "what test would you propose to determine whether speech was responsible for violence?" is hardly sealioning.

It's weird how sealioning doesn't feel like it to the person who does it. I don't doubt you have no intention of doing it, but it always has the guise of "reasoned debates" and the strategy of pestering the other person with questions until they give up.

I'm so sorry that you came up with the idea that I need to have a test and then continue to ask me what it would be. I hope you can simply lay this to rest. The longer you insist that you're asking questions under the pretense of rational debate, the more and more it looks like it's definitionally sealioning.

You of course don't have to have a test. Not proposing one simply opens the position to a criticism of vagueness. This is compounded by the fact that this position seeks to empower authority. A vague limit is one of the strongest criticisms for a proposal to empower authority, particularly in a system that relies on checked power. There is a reason that our legal system relies on tests that are maximally well-specified.

Kelseyfrog, I'm sorry, but I'm deeply struggling to understand how you can interpret thegrimmest as sealioning, and I think you need to re-evaluate your tone and the way you're framing his responses.

The parent reply that started this discussion says they believe it is wrong to suppress speech that is not a call to violence. You responded saying that this logic doesn't work if speech that is non-violent can still lead to violence, with the insinuation being that you are okay banning speech that falls into this category of "not violent, but leads to violence." Which is a perfectly valid point, and I believe a strong argument!

thegrimmest has then attempted to point out that it can be extremely difficult to pinpoint what speech falls into this category, and stated that these sorts of bans can be inappropriately used as tools of oppression by authoritarian governments. He asks how you feel this sort of ban could be properly implemented, given these potential problems. This is a very on-topic response; you appear to be proposing that the government expand its abilities to censor speech, and thegrimmest is asking how we could ensure the government doesn't abuse this power if it is implemented. Given the current state of the world, and the authoritarian trends rearing their head in dozens of countries, this criticism is valid, on-topic, and very far from sealioning.

Rather than try to address his concerns by proposing ways this sort of ban could be thoughtfully and morally implemented, you immediately chose to accuse him of sealioning, which is a form of trolling and a pretty serious accusation. He gamely attempted to appease you by rephrasing his wording, only for you to become snarky, smug, and accuse him of repeatedly pestering you with questions--when you had directly asked him multiple times to please rephrase his questions!

As someone who has experienced sealioning, and finds it quite infuriating, I am genuinely baffled how you can see this interaction as thegrimmest sealioning. I think you may need to take a moment to re-read the HackerNews code of conduct and remember that engaging in good faith is a must.

If you don't wish to engage with thegrimmest's criticisms, that is 100% okay. You can always say, "I support banning speech in this category, and I'm not interested in discussing the possible ways a government could abuse this power." But you cannot pretend that thegrimmest is somehow morally at fault for wishing to discuss government abuse, because presenting these sorts of on-topic and civil criticisms is exactly what these forums are for.

You're a very intelligent person, and I think you raise some great points. I almost always enjoy reading your comments and listening to your insights. But they get lost when you engage like this. I see from your previous comments that this isn't the first time this has happened; other commenters have complained of you being rigid and accusatory. It's probably worth taking a step back and examining why this is a recurring theme in your interactions on here.

Thanks. You're right. I'm not the right person to debate this appropriately. I can't hold that space and be a participant in it at the same time. I have too much skin in the game.

Right, so someone could be justly "arrested for a tweet" in your eyes, if that tweet contains a direct threat or inciting physical violence. If someone was arrested for tweeting something which is clearly not arrest-worthy, say someone was arrested for tweeting that the UK monarchy is bad, I would probably write that someone was "arrested for being critical of the monarchy", not that someone was "arrested for a tweet".

It depends on if you are writing a click bait headline to get higher engagement or not. So, someone paid to write those headlines would absolutely say arrest due to tweet and ignore the content of the tweet.

>I would probably write

suggests that you are not a click bait headline writer.

And I disagree, stuff like american Westbrook Church protesting on funerals should be illegal and I'm glad it is in my country.

It's pretty typical for people who live in authoritarian systems to actually support the authoritarian laws.

Just as typical as it is for people who live in democratic countries to support democratic laws. I'm not quite sure what you expect us to conclude here.

The point is that one shouldn't expect people to stand up and say "that's an authoritarian law"! It doesn't work that way. Authoritarian laws get passed because people want them.

> Authoritarian laws get passed because people want them.

I don't think I agree. Almost by definition authorianism doesn't acknowledge what people want. A law passed because people want it would be either democratic or populist, depending on whom you ask.

I think that the issue here is that all laws are authoritarian at some level, since the principle of a law is to impose. And indeed most citizens would probably support most laws. That doesn't really make the law "bad" or "good" per se, though.

Democracy isn't the opposite of authoritarianism...

Imagine you're a gay person, and marrying the person you love is illegal in your country. The authoritarianism of that isn't contingent on whether that law was put into place by a man in a scary suit or your fellow citizens voting.

You're right it's not the media that matters, it's the message. But the reality is that people are being arrested for unambiguously political messages [1]. Nobody would care about people being arrested for making credible death threats over twitter, versus over snail mail. When people say "arrested for tweets" they're referring to stuff like the above link.

1. https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2022/august/army-vet-alle...

“you're not the first person I've seen who seemingly find it extra ridiculous to react to something someone tweeted, as if publishing a tweet or a series of tweets is not an act of speech, and I don't understand it.”

because people say stuff online they would never say in real life. i hope that cleared things up for you

as if that makes it hunky-dory. hope that clears things up for you as well.

Rather as if it makes the reality (and therefore the norms, and therefore any rules which aim to be descriptive rather than prescriptive) of online speech different from in-person speech.

At least in the U.S., nothing is "illegal to say." Rather, some illegal act defined by particular circumstances may be performed through speech. For example, "true threats" are illegal and not protected speech. But tweets have characteristics that make them less likely to be true threats. The famous example of a true threat is a Vietnam War protestor who shouted "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J." https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/707/watts-v-uni.... That was held to be a political statement. The same speech in a tweet has the same hallmarks of a political statement--made in public, physically distanced from the target of the speech.

By contrast, if a protestor said that while right outside the President's office, that could be a true threat. The medium and surrounding circumstances matters, not merely what is said.

Many people think of tweets as offhand, throwaway remarks that are not well considered and often not especially serious. People tend to get ranty and emotional on twitter much more than in real life. People tweet when they are drunk or high, often to their later embarrassment.

Anything I hear about what anyone said on twitter immediately has reduced weight in my mind, just because it's twitter.

By 'journalist' are you referring to the recent firebombing of the house of YouTube personalty friendlyjordies?

Love the guy, but it sounds like you're implying this is an example of an attack on independent journalism, and think the government is involved?

Perhaps worth reviewing the reliability /agenda of your news sources?

Would it require it to have gov't involvement to be bad? Let's say that the leader of a country stood up on a stage during a speech (which was preceded by years of pro-violence rhetoric) that was very suggestive of committing acts of violence. Would that be gov't involvement even if it the violence was actually perpetrated by private citizens?

No, I don't think the government needs to be directly involved for it to be considered bad. The example you describe sounds very bad to me.

But my comment was questioning OP's suggestion that the incident was tied to authoritarianism.

You do realize I wasn't describing a hypothetical situation, right?

I kinda assumed you were referring to Trump (?)

But my point all along has been that "youtube personality getting house firebombed" != "ridiculous authoritarianism in Australia".

If you are arguing against this point, I may need you to explain further.

I don't follow Australian politics closely, so what has/hasn't been said by its leaders is unknown to me. I was merely suggesting that if a leader has insinuated that something like that wouldn't be a bad idea, then some might say you now how a gov't official involved.

No, didn't mean the Gov did it... they just did a ton of shady stuff that lead up to that.

It does raise the question of _who_ would care enough to firebomb his house though...

I mean, just a few months ago a local gov official literally stabbed a reporter to death for a hell of a lot less.

https://cpj.org/2022/09/police-arrest-local-official-suspect...

So... stranger things have happened.

OK, but you did seem to be holding the firebombing incident up as an example of Australia's "ridiculous authoritarianism".

I'm just not quite seeing how it shows authoritarianism if you weren't suggesting government involvement?

Also your original comment sounds like you're saying Aus and UK are worse than the US on this front, but the worst case example you've just provided is from the US.

Well, a journalist goes after a politician for corruption and then his house is firebombed... The government itself doesn't have to "organize" that but a corrupt politician with friends certainly could.

>Aus and UK are worse than the US on this front

They are. Just look at how people were treated during COVID and how you can literally get arrested for tweeting "offensive content." That wouldn't happen in the US.

And yes, the example shows that it is not above a politician to literally kill a journalist with their own hands because their corruption is being uncovered. I guess in this case, the dude unfortunately succeeded but there's still two attempted murders and arson cases in AUS over a journalist uncovering corruption. Seems much more organized and deeper than a dude singlehandedly breaking into a house to do such things.

Given that his producer was arrested by what amounts to Australia's secret police, at the request of the then deputy premier, I'm not certain that it's easy to dismiss. There's been a pretty strong condemnation of the way that situation was handled, both in the political and legal sphere, that wrong-doing took place.

As for the firebombing, to me that feels much more like ClubsNSW/Bikey gang related hush tactics.

The whole thing is surreal

Most first world countries do not really have freedom of speech. While the headlines are quite excessive from UK and Australia (for obvious reasons), there are a lot of countries where the simple existence of those laws are never talked about. Denial of the holocaust is illegal in a lot of countries, denial of historic events in a few less, insulting people in a few more.

Getting pulled through the legal system because you showed a middle finger to someone or because you said that some random war crime was not really that bad is a thing that just should not happen. But it is a thing that happened before.

Protests and speech being regulated has the effect of everyone just trying to not get jailed. Even if there are no big headlines about it. And that damage is arguably worse than media coverage, which pulls attention to the issue.

Are you aware that those first world countries you call out, still have way more freedom of speech than almost all other countries?

You can freely criticise all the governments of those countries. You can disagree with them, you can mock them, you can challenge their claims. Nobody in the US has gone to prison for their "alternative facts". Compare this to Russia where discussing the war can land you in prison for 15 years, China with its extreme censorship, and plenty of other countries where criticising powerful people or reporting inconvenient news can get you in all sorts of trouble.

It's true you can't say everything. That's always been true, but in recent centuries and decades it has moved from banning what's inconvenient to the powerful to banning that what hurts the powerless. Libel and slander are illegal, threats are illegal. There's the classic example of yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater. Planning crimes is illegal despite the fact that that's all just speech. But it's all speech that can lead to situations in which innocent people get hurt. Or silenced, or compelled to do things they don't want to do, or otherwise limited in their freedom. And the same is true for hate speech. We've seen what it leads to. It creates a culture where the people being attacked are more likely to get hurt. Words aren't harnless; they're powerful. It's why free speech is important. But it's also why we shouldn't tolerate lies meant to hurt vulnerable people.

"[...]you can mock them[...]" is already something that i do not agree with. This could very easily be seen as an insult and in court you would get fucked over. But then again, I am not american. It is illegal to show the middle finger here. Even to objects. Welcome to Germany. I would say that the US still has freedom of speech. Just with a lot of cops that should not be cops at all. My country? No.

I'm Australian and this remark is lunatic-fringe hogwash. These governments are not firebombing domestic youtube-grade nonentities or anyone else, nor are they enabling it.

The notable corruption we saw recently was Scott Morrison making himself a secret minister of several portfolios, and for these and other sins the electorate severely rebuked his party at recent state and federal elections.

That is what democracy, not authoritarianism, looks like.

The folks you should be suspicious of are those spoonfeeding these garbage takes to the credulous.

Democracy that infringes on rights and liberties is still authoritarianism. Trump was democratically elected, did that make his bans on Muslims entering the US or other such policies any less authoritarian? Without protections of civil liberties democracy is easily capable of resulting in authoritarianism. As the saying goes, two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner is a democracy.

> Trump was democratically elected, did that make his bans on Muslims entering the US or other such policies any less authoritarian?

This is nonsense, Trump never put a ban on Muslims, from the ACLU (a stronlgy anti-Trump organization) President Donald

> Trump signed an Executive Order that banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from visiting the country for 90 days, suspended entry to the country of all Syrian refugees indefinitely, and prohibited any other refugees from coming into the country for 120 days.[1]

Banning people from certain countries is a whole different ball game than banning people from a certain religion, further the country with the world's largest Muslim population, Indonesia wasn't even on the list.

Let me ask you how do you feel about the government labeling and suppressing misinformation?

[1] https://www.aclu-wa.org/pages/timeline-muslim-ban

Trump repeatedly stated that the point of the ban was to ban Muslims from entering the country. Your own source calls it a "Muslim ban":

> As the Muslim ban went into effect on Saturday, lawyers from the ACLU-WA and the NW Immigrant Rights Project rushed to SeaTac Airport to help immigrants on incoming flights who were being denied entry to the U.S.

Kind of hard to take this seriously, when your own source contradicts you. As an analogy, conservatives talk about gun bans in California and New York yet bolt action rifles remain legal there. Not every gun is banned, so it's wrong to call it a "gun ban"?

> Let me ask you how do you feel about the government labeling and suppressing misinformation?

They shouldn't and the fact that said governments are democracies doesn't make it any less authoritarian.

"Trump repeatedly stated that the point of the ban was to ban Muslims from entering the country."

Do you have a citation for this? I’m no fan of Trump, but that’s not what I remember.

He called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/28/mi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13769#Trump_ca...

Fair enough - this was pre-election but still inexcusable. I didn't think he had explicitly called the 2017 travel ban a ban on Muslims, and I haven't seen anything to suggest he did.

>These governments are not firebombing domestic youtube-grade nonentities or anyone else, nor are they enabling it.

We don't know that one way or another. We just know he has pissed off someone enough to firebomb his house. Unless he's pissing people off in private, the only people he seems to piss off are those that are involved in corruption. The vast majority of times a journalist is murdered or targeted, it is relation to their reporting. But sure, that is all speculation.

What isn't speculation is the wide array of shady actions taken before the firebombing. Also some of the stuff that happened during covid was just insane to see.

Are we talking about friendlyjordies here? He most certainly has pissed people off. I wouldn't put it past mafia types to have a go at him after his relentless mockery of Barilaro. Not to suggest he's connected, just the whole Italian thing.

Not to take away from your point though. I too feel that our government, both state and federal, goes unchecked. Just that conspiracies about firebombing are hardly evidence. Instead consider the refusal to implement a federal ICAC or the NSW liberals overthrowing their own and cherry picking candidates.

You won't see it until you leave that place. The firebombing of Shanks-Markovina should be a wake up call about the power of deeply entrenched corrupt and anti-democratic bodies. The existence of the private criminal investigation into Shanks by interest groups should leave one fearful on the path being followed there.

The Australian economy exists as source of raw materials for the world, a laundromat for wealth via gambling, and a ponzi around housing to enrich the ruling class. Any political force that challenges these pillars is not allowed to be.

> Scott Morrison making himself a secret minister of several portfolios, and for these and other sins the electorate severely rebuked his party at recent state and federal elections

Didn't this "secret minister" situation only really come to light AFTER the elections?

There were people arrested for posts on Facebook during COVID lockdowns. We had police on the ground hassling every person in sight. Multiple friends of mine were fined for taking a momentary pause on their 1 hour of allotted outside time per day. Police were checking whether coffee cups were indeed full of liquid. We had statewide man hunts for people who sneezed in lifts that they were the only one in. Protests against the draconian measures were violently suppressed by the state government. It was one of the most important and impactful government decisions in the history of the country, affecting the lives of every person and dissenting political demonstration was banned.

The Federal government passed a law requiring a backdoor for all encrypted communication in the country and the press was completely silent. We ban drawn Japanese porn for some unknown reason while allowing real porn which unambiguously provides greater risk of harm. Prior to internet distribution of video games, many were simply banned for import on the whims of a parental advisory board. Australia is a nation obsessed with prohibition and there's nothing Australians love more than collective moral outrage followed by a cathartic wholesale ban.

I'm Australian and whenever I see valid criticism of the country on the internet I soon find an upset Australian replying. They never really refute the underlying point, they'll reply with a non-sequitur or talk about how it doesn't affect their lives. The reality is most Australians don't even feel the noose around their neck because they've never stepped out of line in any way. Most protections on liberty are for extreme and unusual circumstances, you don't notice their absence until it's too late. The vast majority of Chinese people trust their government, and believe the various restrictions on speech and liberty are in the best interests of the nation. Their curbs on liberty are too invasive of course, ours are necessary.

We had statewide man hunts for people who sneezed in lifts that they were the only one in

Source?

https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/covid-positi...

> statewide man hunts for people who sneezed in lifts that they were the only one in

This is why we can't have a reasoned discussion. Use of hyperbole to replace actual good reasons.

"statewide manhunt" is actually more like a missing persons notice.

"sneezing" is actually having COVID.

"in lifts that they were the only one in" is actually leaving mandated quarantine to go spread COVID amongst a non-vaccinated society desperately trying to stop exactly that.

This is a glorified missing person's notice for someone who was being a dick. At the time, not many people were moving about and many had not much to do so yeah, a lot of people may have seen this news item in some form. But it wasn't a statewide manhunt.

EDIT: and instead of reasoned response. A downvote.

The fact that you can't see such measures as being draconian is kinda the point of this thread. The way that the heavy handed nature of the Australian government approach seems normalized to your average Australian is precisely the normalization of authoritarianism being protested!

Here's a summary of US states' quarantine and isolation statutes (since, to many Australians "freedom" means whatever the US does):

https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-quarantine-and-is...

Have a look at "freedom-loving" red states like Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama. All seem to be quite "draconian" when it comes to quarantine

That eliminates the US. Maybe there's some other country that doesn't have "draconian" quarantine measures?

I'm genuinely confused by your point. Are you saying that because other countries have quarantine restrictions, that makes their pandemic approach equivalently restrictive as Australia was? Victoria spent over 250 days in lockdown between March 2020 and October 2021. We had curfews at 6pm for weeks and were allowed out of the house for 1 hour a day and not beyond 5km of our houses. Are you seriously asserting that if the US enacted these restrictions, I would be on here professing that these were the pinnacle of freedom?

What I will remark is that US citizens have certain constitutional protections which we do not that in theory inhibit their government's ability to enact restrictions like these i.e. "freedom of movement".

6pm curfew? Did Sydney do that? Melbourne didn't. The rest seems about right.

But having seen what Italy was going through - lockdowns with COVID still spreading and hospitals overloaded with the dying. I didn't want that for us.

The "freedom of COVID movement" people were cursed many times - they kept the lockdown running for longer because they couldn't see beyond themselves. They were the cause of the curfews because they tried to use cover of darkness.

We were talking about the "lift sneeze man" violating quarantine, and whether it was "draconian" or not for the authorities to pursue him. I pointed out, by way of the US, that authorities pursuing someone who violated a quarantine order is not uniquely Australian nor particularly draconian.

We were not discussing the merits, or lack thereof, of lockdowns. Let's not shift the goalposts. But FYI: Here's a list of lockdowns in response to Covid worldwide, including the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns

... Not sure where in my post I comment on authoritarianism. I was criticising an absurdly skewed take compared to the source provided.

But sure. Lets go into this.

Part 1. Authoritarianism.

I don't like it. I do see the Australian government getting worse with it. And there is very little I could do to stop it other than vote right wing nutters out of parliament.

Part 2. heavy handed approach to COVID

I agree with it - even in hindsight. Society had no vaccine. No RAT. Awkward PCR testing process with delays. No real defense. The ONLY thing that we could do was to halt the spread until we could get a vaccine. As demonstrated by "elevator sneeze man", you can't trust the populace at large not to spread it.

And there were fuckups. Apart from "elevator sneeze man", the airport quarantine bungle anyone? These fuckups should be investigated in their own right.

But it largely worked.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

USA 100 526 312 cases, 1 105 029 deaths

Australia 10 651 218 cases, 16 119 deaths

Right now, Australia has ~10% of the number of cases as the US. Which is fair because we're roughly 10% the population size and now we're vaccinated COVID has been allowed to roam.

Australia has ~1.5% of the number of COVID deaths as the US. Which is down to being vaccinated BEFORE we let COVID roam.

I like my parents. I like the parents of many of my friends. At least some of them would have died due to COVID if it had been let to run rampant before we got a vaccine.

Conclusion

So yeah, I was happy to live through the Melbourne lockdown. As traumatic as it was, it was better than the alternative.

But ScoMo should be friggin' nailed for his "multiple ministries" bullshit.

As a data point, I'm in Melbourne too and agree with your take on both parts. :)

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1598202863414497281/p...

The hypocrisy is so obvious to anyone not blinded by fear and partisan politics.

That has literally nothing at all to do with Melbourne.

And yes, some governments definitely show two faces when it comes to China vs what they do themselves.

I'm not sure why you've decided to be so angry, instead of realising our government was doing it's level best to try and get it right. eg Give 'em a break dude.

The analogy is very obvious, come on now. Melbourne's lockdowns were even worse and longer than Canadas.

Not all actions get a "Well shucks, better luck next time" second shot. The anger of myself and others is completely justified. Unless you would also say the same to the Chinese at the moment?

To me the instincts of our leaders in high stress unique situations are critically important. The actions taken by Dan Andrews are disqualifying from leadership in my book. I'm not saying he's a bad guy in his personal life or anything like that, but not fit for office. His actions are by far the grossest breach of human rights in Australia in the last 50 years and will not be forgotten.

k. What's (in hindsight) the right approach that _should_ have been taken, that likely would have worked out better in important measures?

By "important measures" I'm meaning things like "number of deaths", "number of COVID infected", but also things like "people who kept their jobs" (etc).

Note that I'm not arguing here, I'm genuinely asking. My impression is that we (in Melbourne) "did ok" as we had low numbers of deaths/infections, and the government support package(s) seemed to have worked for a lot of people. With some notable exceptions (eg artists), which I really don't think should have been excluded from support. :/

You can't seriously be saying this is just a right-wing problem. Dan Andrews literally shutdown playgrounds to stop children playing (sorry "their parents congregating").

A brutal streak of authoritarianism runs deep on both sides of Australian politics. They only get angry about who gets to hold the whip.

> Dan Andrews literally shutdown playgrounds to stop children playing (sorry "their parents congregating").

What are you on about? There was literally a pandemic on (and still kind of is).

Do you really think people can just go about their ordinary lives, with no thought for other people?

More people were dying from COVID in June and July in Melbourne than at any point during the pandemic. Case numbers look low because nobody even bothers getting the PCR anymore unless they work in health.

The public can't be trusted to do the right thing. Many people aren't getting additional doses of the vaccine so their immunity has weakened. Why are we not in lockdown right now? It's literally costing lives as we speak.

Yep, exactly. Lockdowns can only have been justified if we are willing to take the same action going forward under similar conditions and risk. If we aren't, then they were gross overreach of government powers.

For the record, I am not against the idea that the government would provide some financial support for people so they could have stayed at home etc. But the forced closure of the whole society including and especially the banning of seeing other people was unbelievably totalitarian and indefensible.

Isn't that what we are doing now? Have you seen rates of uptake on boosters?

Lockdowns were a shocking totalitarian action I never thought I would live to see in my own country. But of course many can only see/say that when looking at China, even though what is happening there is just a more extreme mirror of our own crimes against humanity.

Lol, well that story is significantly different to a manhunt because someone sneezed in a lift.

It’s the story of someone who was sick and legally ordered to quarantine, breaking that quarantine which authorities then wanted to track down. He was spotted on CCTV in a lift.

You can argue the real story is ‘totalitarian’ too if you like, but that doesn’t make the original statement either false or at best a very misleading summary.

Multiple police were out looking for him for days, they appealed to the public for info about his whereabouts. His face and name were plastered all over national media. I live in a different state and this guy was all anyone could talk about. People were desperate for him to be caught. If you saw this man, you were supposed to call the emergency services.

For context, I have never seen a murderer or armed robbery command this level of attention.

I've got to be honest here mate, your point of view is skewed.

This guy was being g tracked down because he was a quarantine dodger during a time when everyone was trying hard to contain the virus so it didn't break out and kill people.

The only banned Japanese porn is the kiddy stuff, but even then the law is around any kiddy porn stuff, filmed, animated, drawn, or otherwise.

The backdooring of security was discussed at large in the media, and to the best of anyone's knowledge hasn't even attempted to be implemented. This particular point is quite shit and we all should be up in arms about it, but Joe Average tunes out when it gets any more technical than their Ladbrokes multi on the weekend.

> This guy was being g tracked down because he was a quarantine dodger during a time when everyone was trying hard to contain the virus so it didn't break out and kill people.

Are you capable of understanding nuance. Do you sincerely think my complaint is that a man was punished for breaking quarantine laws? My critique was of the sum total of the restrictions and the hysterical reaction of the public.

> The only banned Japanese porn is the kiddy stuff, but even then the law is around any kiddy porn stuff, filmed, animated, drawn, or otherwise.

Just simply false, all it requires is a google search [1]. The border force has blocked the import of any 18+ material from Japan. This ban probably affects less than a thousand Australians, but I included it to give people a taste of the Australian style of governance. Grant sweeping powers to enforcers and hope they don't abuse them.

> The backdooring of security was discussed at large in the media,

One particular bill in 2018 received attention, mostly from international media and orgs. This bill [1] passed last year and gave the AFP further ability to backdoor encryption as well as the power to modify your data and impersonate you. There were minor mentions prior to it being tabled. The day it was passed in parliament there wasn't an article about it on any major news provider. Most people are unaware this even happened.

> and to the best of anyone's knowledge hasn't even attempted to be implemented

Do you get much insight into what the AFP, ASIO and ASIS are working on usually? Yes, I'm sure that they make it public knowledge that they've implemented this. That wouldn't defeat the intended purpose at all. Can I clarify, they sought these powers just to have them they don't actually want to use them? And it's my viewpoint that's skewed?

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgz8md/japanese-hentai-is-no...

[2] https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...

Yeah sure, but it’s different to what you claimed originally.

To use an example:

Person A: “I saw a person arrested for licking a lollipop!”

Person B: “That person had a communicable disease and was ordered by law to isolate. They weren’t arrested for licking the lollipop.”

Person A: “Well you don’t see murderers get the same level of attention as this lollipop guy! That’s all I’m saying!”

Regardless of how you feel about enforced quarantine, the person was not arrested for licking a lollipop.

He seems to have violated a quarantine order at a time when Covid was under control.

There are no countries in the world, including "bastions of freedom" that allow infectious public health risks to willfully violate quarantine,

BTW: one side-effect of the quarantine travel restrictions was that people overseas saw Australia as being in some sort of draconian lockdown, when, in fact, life was almost totally normal for most of the pandemic because of travel restrictions and qurantine (outside of Melbourne and parts of Sydney in 2021). And many Australians (especially those without overseas ties) assumed that life was "normal" for the rest of the world, when there was, in fact suffering and death, in addition to restrictions.

I don’t know if you justifying the event with “well, he had Covid!” Is really defense you might’ve thought it was.

Considering that life was normal for most of the country, the virus was contained until vaccines arrived, and the economy was booming, someone violating quarantine was a big deal.

I’m sorry, my satire detector was broken. Recalibrated it with and the economy was booming.

They surely meant the booming of rubber bullets and riot shields. Victoria boomed like never before.

IT salaries have gone through the roof, the economy grew by 3.9% over 2021-22. This is an objectively true statement.

3.9 is less than half in inflation here. Is it not for you?

Yes, the man appeared to have violated the law. I guess my criticism that the Australian government is overly restrictive and the public are hysterical moral busybodies has been rendered void because there was a law in place that he violated.

My friend was unable to go and see her dying mother in France because the Federal government wouldn't allow her to leave the country. Her request to leave was initially rejected and took so long that her mother was dead by the time she was given permission. Now I heard many people have similar experiences because of the inability to find flights. I didn't realise the government forbidding you to leave was a completely normal experience worldwide.

If she had travelled and gotten covid while travelling she could've easily passed it on to vulnerable people she'd bumped into and caused the untimely deaths of other peoples' loved ones.

We ALL had to make sacrifices during the pandemic.

No. We did not.

Hindsight shows we were wrong and distracted on the wrong thing. Society doesn't care about flu this year, and it's hitting just as hard as covid was. Yet, all I see is messaging on Covid still.

These governments are not firebombing domestic youtube-grade nonentities

No one said it was governments who firebombed the person in question. As for Youtube-grade non-entities: I think the line is rapidly blurring between people on the internet and "real" journalists. I don't really follow the person in question though, so I can't speak for his credentials.

for these and other sins the electorate severely rebuked his party at recent state and federal elections State elections maybe, but this secret portfolio stuff only came out after the federal election, when he lost his importance. If he had won the election, would it have come out?

>Scott Morrison making himself a secret minister of several portfolios

For anyone confused about this, like me, wikipedia has an overview. The TLDR is that in Australia apparently you can have more than one person holding a ministry (health, etc) and the incumbent prime minister did this without telling the public.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Morrison_ministerial_p...

NZ's giving it a bit of a go.

We're pushing legislation that moves the country away from democracy, and hate crimes laws that prohibit mocking religion.

As an Australian this true, but does vary a bit depending on each state. Most Aussies want more government control in their lives and are rather apathetic.

> Most Aussies want more government control in their lives

You don't have to look far, there's plenty of them in this thread defending it.

We do have some utterly bizarre shit going down in Australia, like this: https://www.maddocks.com.au/insights/high-court-confirms-med...

> the decision of Justice Rothman of the Supreme Court of NSW in Voller v Nationwide News Pty Ltd, extended the reach of defamation law such that media outlets could be held liable as ‘publishers’ for defamatory Facebook comments made by third parties on the media outlets’ Facebook posts.

But it was a Judge, not the government. And it was the big media that as targeted, not Joe Citizen. Yet the net effect was a curtailment of Joe Citizen's ability to broadcast their thoughts on the news of the day, and how it was reported. The size of the penalty his honour handed out and the broadness of the ruling meant there was only one sane response from the media giants: heavy moderation of their comment sections, or shut them down. They mostly chose shut down. Heavy moderation is very expensive, so I don't blame them.

The end result has been a biggest reduction of internet speech, comment and civil discourse triggered by news events I've seen in 20 years. Yet it strangely goes mostly unmentioned. Instead we get these conspiracy theories. I guess a conspiracy theory is more titillating than gross incompetence by one powerful individual. If want to go for conspiracy theories try this: why the haven't the law makers drafted a new law to fix the judicial mistake?

The governments are largely just a product of the nosiest citizens. So there is always a connection to 'Joe Average'.

You see defenders of censorship all over HN these days, especially by people from the UK and Australia. The people saying "it's nothing to worry about because it only happens to bad people who deserved it" sort of defenses that pop up early on.

Then when authoritarianism naturally grows larger and larger people only blame the politicians, not the people defending it every chance they get.

The whole bill is a clusterF**. Some potentially useful bits of regulation of Big Tech thrown together with some dangerously authoritarian attempts at criminalising encryption. Bits of the bill keep getting taken out, put back in and then taken out, sent in, sent out before being recycled as firelighters, depending on which way the political wind is blowing on any given day.

You put your authoritarian measure in, you take your regulation clause out, you put special intrests and you shake your constituents about.

You do the government pokey and you spin the media around. That's what it's all about.

You put your pay raise in, you take your public good will out, you put your pork in and you shake the public about.

You do the government pokey and you spin the lies around. That's what it's all about.

Thank you, that is now going round in my head on a continuous loop!

I pretty much completely agree with the content of what you said as well.

It could be worse. You could be imagining Peter Jurasik as Londo Mollari singing this in a continuous loop.

This image made my day!

As the Minbari teacher said; I rather enjoyed that.

That's not worse, that's an outstanding mental image.

It doesn't make sense! I'd rather be nibbled to death by cats!

How do we get off this ride?

The temptation of course is to elect a ‘strong good man’ (or woman, but historically it’s men) to untangle it. They’ll of course need lots of power to do it.

Also, they’ll of course have lots of detractors (whiners all of them!) when they start to untangle things and step on toes, so the temptation is of course to shut them up or get them out of the way.

And voila, fascism and/or outright dictatorship.

Or, you know, we could research what our elected representatives actually do and accomplish instead of what they say they do and accomplish, and vote for those who effectively and reliably do what is in our best interests.

That is, unfortunately, much harder.

Benevolent dictatorships do seem by far the best system of government. Until his kid takes over and turns out to not be quite so benevolent, at least.

Or they get corrupt/powermad.

Or you happen to be in a group singled out as ‘the bad guys’ when people start getting tired of the dictator or their methods, etc.

It’s extremely rare to have a true Cincinnatus, but pretty common to have someone who says they are. Until they get in the seat, anyway.

It’s very simple.

does a politician push for smaller and more restrictions on government.

Or do they push for bigger government.

> those who effectively and reliably do what is in our best interests.

That there is the "and then come the Martians" part.

You bet. But when you think about it, that’s exactly what we’re expecting of the dictator too. But we remove any potential checks and balances by giving them unlimited power.

It’s the ‘this relationship ship will get fixed by having kids’ of politics.

If self governance was easy, someone would have figured it out by now.

if is in fact easy... it's called media and tech monopolies!

If only the bigger governments hadn't historically just taken over the smaller governments we might live in a very different world

The US constitution was written specifically to limit the power of government.

Basically giving the government the absolute minimum amount of power to be functional. With crazy restrictions on making changes so that it’s hard for the government to grab more power.

An armed population helps keep the government from going too crazy like what China is doing to people over Covid.

Hard to weld doors shut on peoples homes if they have shotguns.

It is truly interesting seeing in Canada how they're slowly removing gun rights away from their citizens - while also pushing bills like C-11 that allow governments to influence what social media companies can show to Canadians' eyeballs. They've recently said they're not going to ban hunting rifles, but 5 days ago the SKS is now part of the list of banned guns in Bill C-21, one of the more popular hunting rifles - due to generic bill wording of "center-fire, semi-automatic guns capable of firing more than 5 rounds in a magazine"

Even better, the original (at least, publicly known) intent of the gun ban was to limit ownership of handguns.

Bill C-11 is promoted under the guise of "promoting Canadian content" but of course it's going to be mis-used and abused to control information and the narrative on both domestic and foreign events - if they have the power then they're going to use it for what they want to. A Liberal MP actually stated that they could use the bill to limit 'misinformation' on platforms, though my memory is blank on exactly who it was.

I'm eagerly awaiting for the western first-world political climate to do a complete 180 so all the citizens who supported these emotionally-backed "feel good" laws while voting for the candidates who support them can have "I told you so" thrown into their faces at Mach infinity when the laws they thought were a good idea get used against them by people they don't like.

The western-world is getting increasingly authoritarian now that people are realizing that their country isn't what was sold to them anymore - the never-ending cycle continues.

Is granpaw's shotgun really going to prevent the government from enforcing a law someone doesn't like? Highly doubtful. Police are likely going to be more heavily armed than a random citizen, and if not, the military definitely will be. An armed population is not going to be effective against a professional force. What an armed population does seem to be good at is: hunting and sport, but also domestic violence, mass shootings, school shootings, road rage shootings, and so on...

The idea, presumably, is not that an armed populace would win an all-out battle against the government in which the people fighting on behalf of the government are fully motivated and committed.

A bee does not expect to kill a dog(or whatever) with its stinger. It is a deterrent.

Now, I'm not saying that it is necessarily worth it for the population to be armed in this way. I don't know whether it is worth it. Maybe not? But the question is more complicated than "well obviously the government is going to be more armed, and therefore there is no point." .

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

While sieges haven't ended favorably throughout American history, the threat used to be explosives/IEDs and domestic terrorism.

The ATF did a decent job of policing this but now the threat is shifting to insider threats and insurrection (something we're terrible at policing). When you can't beat the adversary in conventional warfare, you turn to psyops to use the adversary's own weapons against them.

If the military gets called to your ranch, there's no guaranteeing whose side they'll fight on. You may start with plastic AR-15s...until sympathizers toss you the keys to the Abrams.

There are a lot more armed citizens than there are police.

And a lot of them won't care what the government does as long as it doesn't touch their guns. Hell, a lot of them will probably take the government's side in the revolution, depending on who's in office and who they're oppressing.

Some of the strongest gun control laws in the country (Mulford Act) were made not because of a liberal idealism against firearm violence but rather as a direct reaction to the Black Panthers doing armed patrols of police and community watch under a republican state government. I predict you'll see more of this as more minorities lean deeper left and the culture war types start blowing gaskets about armed antifa whatevers.

An armed population is not going to be effective against a professional force.

I'd say Vietnam, Afghanistan prove those points wrong.

>Hard to weld doors shut on peoples homes if they have shotguns.

This point is always brought up but is never argued to its natural conclusion.

On the surface it seems you are implying that citizens should have powerful guns so they can threaten and potentially kill police officers trying to do something despotic. However if someone did that, the police would just crack down 10x as hard on that individual with more powerful, government purchased guns and arrest them for life. No matter what guns people are allowed to have, it's not a deterrent against despotism on an individual level.

The argument that the point of the 2nd amendment is for the citizenry to defend against government power is ridiculous. Why would a blueprint for a government install protections to make sure it can be violently overthrown, when the rest of the constitution is entirely focused on ensuring the consent of the people is funneled up to government power in a non-violent matter? To argue that that's the point of the 2nd amendment implies the founders didn't believe that the Constitution would be effective in forming a representative democracy.

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

>Why would a blueprint for a government install protections to make sure it can be violently overthrown, when the rest of the constitution is entirely focused on ensuring the consent of the people is funneled up to government power in a non-violent matter?

You're confused that the constitution has more than one kind of safeguard against tyranny?

"The idea that airbags are to prevent injuries is ridiculous. Why would a car have protections stop someone hitting the steering wheel, when there are also seatbelts entirely focused on ensuring that the driver doesn't hit the steering wheel?"

Also note that the guarantee of anti-tyranny violence makes it much less likely that someone's gonna try to do a tyranny in the first place. Compared to a disarmed and helpless population just waiting to be tyrannized.

A mugger is bound by law not to mug you. But he might do it anyway, regardless of what the paper says. However, if he knows you're armed, he's less likely to try. And if he does try, he's less likely to succeed.

The "defense against tyranny" argument for the 2nd amendment was borne out of individual regulated state militias defending against a federal army, not each individual being free to exercise their will as they see fit.

Are you asserting that the American Revolution was launched by "regulated state militias", as in: regulated by King George, or indirectly by his governors in the American colonies?

Because given the chance, one person at the right place at the right time can make all the difference in the world. See _any_ political assassination attempt/success in recent history.

It's not to defend against the local police force that smashes your door down - it's not to defend against the military that wants to predator drone your hidden compound of Q-cultists in rural Montana because they've been popping shots at National Guard convoys.

It's to give anybody a chance (albeit an infinitesimally small one, with gigantic risks their own life) to immediately and permanently remove a government representative from office.

I personally don't agree with the premise or concept, but that's probably the most likely intention.

This is completely delusional.

Enabling assassinations is not in any way a part of the intent of the second amendment.

You can easily see this in US where police acts extremely tyrannically in everyday situation under premise that anyone can have a gun.

ClusterFuc? ClusterFuk?

>"Companies can't just say 'yes we only allow children over 13 to join our >platform', then they allow 10-year-olds and actively promote it to them," she >told BBC radio. "We're stopping that from happening."

>She said companies could face fines of up to 10% of their turnover if they did >not have systems in place to restrict underage access.

So what does this mean? All social media websites have to check the passport of every UK user that registers? It will be illegal to post anything in a forum, without first uploading your passport?

that is one way of looking at it, and it's a perfectionist view. I'm sure that everybody knows that one simply can't filter out 100% of underage access, but there are things that CAN be done to reduce it.

Maybe it should just be an HTTP header. Shift the responsibility for enforcing age restrictions to the client side; anything else is likely to be highly authoritarian and/or a massive privacy violation.

Surely we can come up with solutions to help ease the burden for parents/guardians instead of just leaving them out in the cold because we're offended by the mere idea of taking some collective action to prevent abuse.

I believe the poster above was suggesting the client browser, not the user of the client, could assist.

So Safari knows that a user is under 13 (due to information entered at sign up by guardians) and will block the user from creating an account if a page has the appropriate HTTP header. Or iOS could do the same for app signups.

Correct. The problem here is two-fold:

1. Sites have no reliable way to determine a user's age without massive privacy violations. (E.g. To access this site, upload a copy of your driver's license.)

2. Making the government the final authority on who is allowed to access the adult internet would enable way too much authoritarian abuse. (E.g. Sorry citizen, you have been deemed a dissident, and will therefore now be treated like a child by every website you visit.)

The solution to 1 is to handle the age verification part on the client side, so sites don't need to know anything about the user except whether they're old enough to access the content in question. And the solution for 2 is for parents to enforce access at the household level rather than governments doing it at the national level. (E.g. Don't let your kids use devices/software that lies to sites about their age, unless you're there to supervise.)

The exact details of how that gets implemented at the protocol level aren't as important as the overall principle. (Though I have a few ideas.)

No thanks. As a parent, I am well aware of the risks of unintended consequences from drastic collective action by government or industry. I'll take the burden. Leave me out in the cold.

Leaving parents out in the cold? Surely not.

It’s obviously parents leaving their children out in the cold if a 10 year old is given unrestricted access to apps and the internet.

There are abundant and powerful options to track, monitor, and censor content that your children are exposed to on their devices, assuming a parent chooses to provide their children access to such a device.

Asking every single service everywhere to somehow gatekeep when the client-side can do it simply and easily is such a bizarre approach to solving the problem that I can only see it as an obvious and bold-fisted attempt to clamp down on anonymous speech, which is entirely essential for a functional democracy.

Parent here trying to straddle the line between still having convenient tech in our house and keeping the kids from e.g. vegging out on creepily-targeted Youtube videos or stumbling on something terrible. It's a hell of a lot less simple than I thought it'd be. One wrinkle is the goddamn schools sending home devices I can't administer. Hate, hate, hate that.

Surely you can administer the network connection those devices use when they are in your home?

That's getting harder as software continues to get better at bypassing network-level snooping or content blocks (which are often done by entities like malicious Wi-Fi operators or the user's ISP, neither of which have any business deciding what content the user is allowed to see).

I can. Good luck to people who aren't paid to make computers jump through hoops as their day job.

I'm not even necessarily saying the government should step in with heavy-handed regulation, but "parents should just manage it and leave the rest of us alone" gets less reasonable with each passing day.

You can just not give your kids smartphones, and manage access to computers? Sorry to break this to you, but if kids have access to internet connected devices they will find pornography, flash games (well, not anymore, but I'm sure modern HMTL5 games are just as addicting), and various other stuff to "veg out" with. If there's a domain blacklist they'll find VPNs. I know I did back in the 2000s. Government regulation will mean jack shit, they'll just find a way to bypass whatever filter gets implemented [1].

If you don't want your kids to view such content, the only realistic solution is to not give them internet access. Supply them with a library of books, DVDs, etc. of your choice. The only way to manage the content your child sees, is to manage the content your child has access to.

> One wrinkle is the goddamn schools sending home devices I can't administer. Hate, hate, hate that.

This makes things harder, but one option to not give them your wifi password so that these electronics can't be used. If the child needs to use these electronics to complete classwork, then complaining to the school that they are supplying kids with devices that they use to watch porn will probably elicit a strong response.

1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/teen-cracks-au84-million-porn-...

Well most of this is stuff I already know and/or do (my kids aren't getting smartphones until they can pay for the phone and plan themselves, for one thing—shared dumbphone for emergencies since payphones don't exist anymore, probably, but not personal smartphones), but:

> This makes things harder, but one option to not give them your wifi password so that these electronics can't be used. If the child needs to use these electronics to complete classwork, then complaining to the school that they are supplying kids with devices that they use to watch porn will probably elicit a strong response.

Yeah, they do need them to do homework and check assignments and shit at home. Schools have made things like that more complicated and computer-dependent in the name of progress. Another way this whole computerize-everything craze has been a step back, I suppose.

Overall I'm not sure landing at "literally be someone with college training and work experience in network security and still find all this a needlessly-complex pain in the ass" is going to be where people end up wanting the state of things to settle. Here I am running an extra router on my side of my ISP's because Google's router doesn't give you MAC-level time-bounded blocking, which is pretty much what you need with school devices. And it's less porn than mindless not-actually-educational faux-edutainment web games that the school's introduced them to, for god knows what reason. I'd rather they be in the Switch than playing that crap.

... except maybe other parents they actually won't care how hard this is, since they mostly seem to have given up. Most parents seem to be giving their 3rd graders smartphones anyway. Then act like I'm the weirdo when I suggest maybe letting kids have such phones and carry them at school is batshit crazy, even in high school. Though not, I've noticed, at the not-quite-fancy private school we have some affiliation with, where smartphone ownership among even 6th-graders probably doesn't even hit 20%, way under local public schools (I have insight into several of those, mostly the middling-nice suburban sort)—I think we may be looking at a whole new kind of "digital divide" in the coming generations, and it's the ones who didn't have unlimited access to the Internet at a single-digit age that'll have the advantage. That certainly seems to be what the Fussellian upper-middle is favoring: later, more-limited access to electronics and the Internet. IDK if the climate's similar at actually-fancy private schools and among those parents, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is, and maybe even more pronounced. Meanwhile at the public schools "your family must be poor" if you don't have a smartphone by the time you hit middle school. LOL.

Eh, I and most of my classmates had unfettered access to the internet since at least the 4th or 5th grade and it didn't seem to screw us over. TikTok can't be more addictive than World of Warcraft, can it?

I think the bigger distinction is that I had a desktop PC not a smartphone. Parents can much more easily regulate computer use with the former, and withhold access if their kid isn't getting good grades. I think desktop PC use also lends itself to hacking and promoting exploration of technology. Modding and cheating in games is how I got into tech. What I'd do is give my kid a desktop and a USB drive with Gentoo and let them do whatever they want - I'm mostly joking, but only mostly.

And yeah, giving kids smartphones for use at schools seems extremely bone-headed. When I was in school, teachers were all about keeping phones out of the classroom not brining them in.

We are sleepwalking into a surveillance state. One day we will be forced to sign onto the internet. After that it's just a matter of time before they rachet down the civil liberties one by one.

I am pretty sure a previous incarnation of this bill demanded kyc on everyone who had an online account.

Yes. It's being passed to a regulator who have suggested that you could make everyone take a selfie and use AI or something, but yes, that's the jist of it.

That seems trivial to circumvent

> All social media websites have to check the passport of every UK user that registers?

credit card?

Last time I checked not having a debit card is not a crime in the UK, nor is one considered a valid form of id.

And being on an online-platform is not a right. It doesn't need to be valid form of id to be "good enough" for platforms as an age verification system.

"But children could just get their parents' credit cards" ... and they could also just get their parents' passports.

I mean, in the UK you can get a debit card from 13 years of age so I'm not sure how that helps. Credit cards no, but requiring one would exclude a massive portion of the population as they just aren't as popular.

Frankly, to me that's just an argument against requiring anything to prove your age on an online platform. It shouldn't be necessary and I consider this a bad development.

If it's 13+ that would work if the minimum age for these platforms is also 13+. It's certainly not perfect, but if implemented, it would probably not be the only way to verify your age (or it might if credit card companies are smart and pay the platforms).

Germany has similar simple ways to provide pseudo-verification, e.g. they'll use direct-deposit or direct-debit to transfer a cent or three and put a code in the subject field that you'll need to enter. It's not perfect, and they wouldn't even know who you are, since account numbers aren't tied to names, but it proves (sufficiently for them to say "we really tried") that you are the account owner. While they don't know who you are, your bank has to because of KYC, and in case of trouble they could say "talk to the bank, they know who's hiding behind this username". Of course there are edge cases and ways around it, but it's enough that they get out of hot water.

I don't really have an opinion on whether age should be verified. I'm past most minimum ages and I don't have children, so I'm not affected.

There is no minimum age to get a debit card in the UK, 13 just happens to be a common limit imposed by the banks themselves.

Go Henry describes their debit cards as "perfect for kids aged 6-18". My son is 13 now, but he's had a Go Henry card for years.

https://www.gohenry.com/uk/debit-cards/

Or they will just use platforms outside of their governments control.

Like is a platform run out of China going to care what fines the UK government threatens.

Possibly, but the same argument can be made for GDPR, and it works pretty well there. In the end, the Chinese will either want to monetize it, at which point they need a presence in the UK, or they're monetizing via psy-ops paid for by the CCP and they will be considered a security issue by the UK and probably shut down (at least for access from the UK).

Sure, that might lead to teenagers using VPNs to access it, but I wouldn't count on that. Most of them aren't even using adblockers.

And children can get them:

https://www.gohenry.com/uk/debit-cards/

I’m almost 40 and have never had a credit card… don’t see why that would be a fair requirement.

The companies backing AVPA (age verification providers association) which include Experian, have been pushing for the child protection stuff, big time. Guess why.

Backdoor national digital ID system?

Not so back door, and no need for the gov’t to get involved of course. Experian can use it’s AIMagic(tm) to do so, as long as they get access to everyone’s medical records from birth, I imagine.

No, Experian's dream is that anytime anybody online creates an account for any service at all, Experian gets to charge a "service fee" for verifying their identity.

It's a capitalist desire. They're just exploiting the statists and nationalists.

The issue gets messier when you consider what just happened in Australia, when one of the largest medical insurance providers accidentally over-shared the Excel sheet with all their passwords in it (or something like that) and now all their customer's id documents are on the dark web.

I would imagine that some rando social media site that collects this stuff to prove someone is over age to be a whole lot less secure (if that is possible?).

The 'remote' aspect is the complicating factor but the basis of this is no different to other services.

At the shop cash tills I noticed recently a sign that said "if you're purchasing alcohol and are fortunate enough to look under 25 we will need to age check you" (or some very similar words).

Same goes for anyone buying solvents and glues, or knives and blades, vapes, etc.

The aim is good - the challenge is the implementation.

Only feasible way seems to be prove you're older than the minimum (which feels like persecuting those that are old enough) rather than prove you're too young!

"Legal but harmful" is the logical expansion to "non-crime hate incident," which is when the police detain and interview you in order to create permanent records of hate non-crimes based solely on someone else's offense without any indication or claim the offense constituted a crime. It eventually devolved even farther into a somewhat milder form of SWATing utilized by twitter trolls.

Imagine if SWATing didn't have much of a chance of getting you hurt, but had a 100% chance of putting you on what is essentially a domestic terrorist watchlist.

its worse when you take into consideration lists like these are what preceded all the mass murders of the 1900s

the nazis soviets and chinese all had lists of undesirables, the lists only functioned to define the targets

Uk ditches nothing, this is still going through parliament. Reuters didn't bother to name the bill by it's a name but here's a link to where it's at. https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137

I think we really need to take a step back and appreciate that to some extent the UK governmental system is kind of working here. The UK government has an 80 seat majority, and it has advanced some really shonky legislation (this was an example, but the UK Bill of Rights was just as absurd), it's been quite impressive to see how successfully parliament has delayed, derailed and modified these attempts to blunder through legislation. The UK cabinet at this point has descended into a total farce, but the parts of our parliament outside of government - the committee stages, the Lords, amendments have all had great stabilizing effects and slowly forced the government into a fairly reasonable position.

>The opposition Labour Party said replacing the "prevention of harm" with an emphasis on free speech undermined the bill's purpose.

I mean... they're not wrong. The original intention behind this bill was insane, and it no longer does what it wnated. The fundamental problem that the government is facing is that there's behavior they want to discourage but can't functionally ban. Legally you have a choice, you either get ambiguous and open it up to abuse, or you go narrow and fail to really address the issue. I think this approach is fine, but we may have to revisit it.

The thing about democracies is they are resilient but appear resilient. Autocracies are fragile but appear resilient. This is because democracies have open debate about policy, and criticism is an integral part of the system. This disagreement appears chaotic but actually helps the end product of things like legislation work better. Autocracies, on the other hand, discourage open discussion of policy, which creates a veneer of unity, but makes the end product worse.

> resilient but appear resilient

You mean "appear chaotic", right?

Yes I did, thanks...

You're right about the appearances, but what goes behind the scenes varies - there are very unstable democracies, and very stable autocracies.

The UK parliament has been a farce since at least the indicative votes. Then the Tory party got purged to “get brexit done”

This is a sign that the government is so dysfunctional that not even the military/intelligence industrial complex can get them to pass a bill - they’re no strangers to unenforceable nonsense.

They will hopefully ditch the entire bill eventually, but I don't have much hope. The 'legal but harmful' part was just one of many horrible parts of the bill. It's depressing that the main opposition party is criticizing the government, not for proposing censorship, but for proposing too little censorship. I hope we be able to move to decentralized censorship-resistant alternatives before the government destroys what remains of free speech on the internet.

even the so-called Liberal party is completely for this bill, and wants it strengthened :)

So called liberal parties (in the US sense here) have all shown their more authorian colors over all over Europe. Formerlly is was conservatives that were the scare mongers and gifted laws to increase subjective security. Now their supposed opposition does the same exact shit. The whole continent is old and fearful.

Cynically, I doubt this decision is driven by the principles of free speech. Like a lot of people & organisations, the Conservative Party is only interested in protecting the freedom of speech that they approve of.

I think it is more likely that this new minister had it explained to them how impossible this was to enforce or take action against, given the difficulty of proving mental harm.

Either way, it's the correct decision. Content policies should be based on clear cut laws in addition to a platform's self authored content moderation policy.

Can you point to the part of the bill that doesn't protect speech they don't approve of? I'm aware the UK Labour Party is in favor of censorship of disapproved topics [1], but I couldn't see any in this bill.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/11/labour-to-vote...

> Can you point to the part of the bill that doesn't protect speech they don't approve of?

Pornography is speech - and the age verification provisions effectively mean any non-mass scale platform in the UK will have to remove all adult content because the costs of age verifying every visitor are insane.

What does the bill protect in there?

I think there is a widely accepted view that children have limited rights, that may include free speech - porn included. They have no right to vote in all countries, no right to drink in most, no right to own guns (looking at USA mainly), so a limit on free speech does not look like a new approach to children's rights.

I think he is getting at this part "non-mass scale platform." He's implying it only protects the big players that can afford the change.

Do you think everything in this world should be doable as a mom and pop business? I don't. For example, I wouldn't want a moon-lighter handling my medical records, or my money accounts and credit cards. We have many examples where limiting who can work in certain spaces has become reasonable.

While this is generally true for any regulation ... for small businesses we do have one approach to address the problem of regulatory compliance: outsourcing to specialized firms. For example small sites can just use an identity provider (maybe something like AuthO presuming they add an age-verification module) which can be easily integrated.

>Pornography is speech

How did we get to this point? I assure you the idea that porn is speech is not an idea that the even liberal Brits would agree with.

Eh, actually, stuff like Ulysses was considered pornography at one point.

The point is, if you let the state draw the line on what is and isn't allowed speech, they'll draw it where it is convenient for them.

In US, it was when attempts by the courts to define what distinguishes protected speech from obscenity ended up with the judge proclaiming, "I know it when I see it" (i.e. there was no clear articulable standard).

The latest changes, of which there have been many iterations, are generally well-intentioned but biased to those who have the ear of Government. Child safety advocates, celebrities, age-verification providers, newspaper publishers and Big Tech are the ones the many Ministers have listened to. The turnover of Ministers has been high but not those lobbying. Privacy and human rights advocates and innovators have not had a fair hearing.

Child safety folks are happy for now, but naive. Celebrities are fountains of wisdom so that's all good. The age-verification and trust-washing industry are waiting for their payback. "Recognised" journalism gets protected. And Big Tech is all for it; compliance falls much hard on challengers.

To be fair the dropping yesterday of the "legal but harmful" provisions for adults is finally showing there is some hope for sanity. Although paradoxically this will likely speed and increase the prevalence of a gated UK splinternet; as it will be become required to age-gate children across all (user-to-user and search) services.

When they left the EU they left a steaming pile of dung in form of the new copyright "guidelines", essentially making copyright a mess for anyone trying to run free services, since now they liability is on the hoster's side for content the user uploads to the hoster's platform. At the same time they retain liberal laws in that regard.

Society still doesn't seem to be asking itself why this law covers Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, etc, and what it would do to them.

"Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." -Dark Helmet

The new iteration goes further to protect free speech by stopping companies, such as Facebook-owner Meta and Twitter, removing content or suspending or banning users where there is no breach of their terms of service or the law.

If true this is the bigger story here. Illegal speech in the UK already encompassed a goodly chunk of anything "harmful" or likely to cause hurt feewings. Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary. Even forcing platforms to disclose to each banned user what part of the ToS they violated and how would rock the digital landscape.

That would not protect free speech, it would infringe on it. Forcing someone to host someone else's speech is both an infringement on their right to free speech and on the free speech rights of users who want a well-moderated community, which you cannot have if the government is overriding moderator discretion. It's also quite dangerous, as the government will likely use that power to promote speech it likes and drown out speech it doesn't like.

I wonder if I will have to use a VPN to access Hacker News from the UK in the future, as this site will surely not let the UK government prevent it from moderating itself.

> Forcing someone to host someone else's speech...

The solution is easy: stop lying about being a "platform" if you want editorial control.

> ...the free speech rights of users who want a well-moderated community...

Wut? How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?

They're conflating "free speech" with "freedom to not read or see things I don't like".

They forgot you can close your browser tab if you don't like something, or stop using a service if the content isn't something you like.

ie, making their problem everyone else's.

> Wut? How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?

I think the idea is that you don't really have free speech is some group of people are afraid to speak, which is what you have when it's not well moderated.

It's, I think, the argument in the center of "cancel culture is bad for free speech". Cancel culture don't stop people before they talk, and don't legally condemn anyone, but they force some people to not say what they have on their mind because the consequences will be unpleasant for them. In fact, I would even say that people who are critical against cancel culture but are also arguing that free speech should not be moderated are just hypocritical: cancel culture is what you get (amongst other things) when there is no "moderation".

Freedom of speech isn't freedom from being told en mass to "shut up" and being made to move along somewhere else (or everyone else blocking or moving elsewhere away from you)

Rightly so. Freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach.

Not sure I see what you mean.

First, I did not say "freedom of speech is ...", but "you don't really have freedom of speech if ...". It's a bit like saying "you don't really have freedom of movement if you have a law abolishing the borders but at the same time another law that says that citizen will have their legs amputated". Of course, "freedom of movement" isn't "freedom of having your legs", but the point is that the GOAL of freedom of movement can be, in practice, impaired if you apply some rules that impair it.

The problem here is that "move along somewhere else" is impacted by this law: apparently (not 100% but some sentence in the text seems to say that), this law can say that every "somewhere else" can be forced to accept the mass of "shut up" people. So, there will be nowhere to go where they can speak freely, which, in practice, will force them to just not being able to exercise their freedom of speech right.

I really don't get people who are pro freedom of speech, but at the same time have no much problem will people being coerced, in one way or another, to not speak. Either they are hypocritical (and want to be able to impose their speech without caring about the speech of others), or they've released the substance for the shadows (they are putting values on an empty concept instead of focusing on the goal).

Because though all voices should be spoken, I personally get to decide what I hear and how loud, and get to choose how I respond.

Across an entire population it has a democratic effect when freedom of speech is in full effect without being restricted or controlled by government for means of shaping the outcome.

If I say "Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm" I will fully expect to be boo'd at, shouted down, blocked, shunned and made unwelcome. That tells me my views are not welcome. I can choose to stay, and keep using my voice, but it'll be counter productive.

So i'll make a space where I can say that Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm, and find like minded people. And if I find enough, we might start a party and get votes. Enough people vote and my islamic fundamentalist government runs the country.

Or, people just keep telling me I am an idiot and that's OK too.

I have big issues with forcing (vs being made uncomfortable by other people's free speech) to move on, but someone's right to say something doesn't trump my right to tell them they are wrong.

> If I say "Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm" I will fully expect to be boo'd at, shouted down, blocked, shunned and made unwelcome. That tells me my views are not welcome. I can choose to stay, and keep using my voice, but it'll be counter productive.

100% agree. But it works both ways, and you cannot say that "cancel culture" is a problem: they are just doing that.

> So i'll make a space where I can say that Islamic fundamentalism should be the norm, and find like minded people. And if I find enough, we might start a party and get votes. Enough people vote and my islamic fundamentalist government runs the country.

Uh? That does not make any sense. If they get enough votes to be elected, it means that the majority of the population will not boo them in the first place. And if you argue that by organizing in a small safe place they've found strategies to convince more and more people, you are just saying that it was wrong (for a freedom of speech point of view, I'm personally in support of some moderation) to boo them in the first place: if their opinions are convincing people, when you were booing them, you were doing exactly what the concept of freedom of speech try to avoid: you were working against the freedom of idea and the possibility for new ideas to find their public.

> I have big issues with forcing (vs being made uncomfortable by other people's free speech) to move on, but someone's right to say something doesn't trump my right to tell them they are wrong.

And inversely, right? right?

I think this is the point: "How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?" Exactly like that.

More succinctly: Nothing about free speech requires ANYONE to hear you. If you cannot convince people to listen to you, that is not a violation of your speech.

That disengenuiously misrepresents the problem of cancel culture. Cancel culture is the propagation of a vocal minority conspiring to stop certain topics being discussed, i.e. deplatforming. What cancel culture should be is that some shill hawking defunct idea's can't sell enough tickets to a talk to cover costs and therefore stops, or they end up with no followers and no audience, not someone else taking away my ability to hear certain topics.

> ...some group of people are afraid to speak...

What you are describing is called a "hugbox", aka: safe-space. Any platform that actually catered to every neurosis would be totally silent.

> ...cancel culture is what you get (amongst other things) when there is no "moderation".

I wonder how much thought you've actually put into that opinion. Because, for example, Twitter was very aggressively "moderated" and is also the birthplace of what most would characterize as "cancel culture". With such a counterexample I don't know how such a claim could be made with a straight face.

> Any platform that actually catered to every neurosis would be totally silent.

Well, it's a false dilemma: you don't need to have either a law that force all moderation to be identical everywhere or having places that are absolute safe-space. As long as you have some place that guarantee some opinions safe space, where is the problem?

The hypocrisy is that the neurosis of someone is the freedom of speech of another. Bigotry, racism, sexism, ... are arguably as legitimately a neurosis as "woke culture". Yet, anti-cancel-culture people are often promoting solutions where, in practice, we force everywhere to be a safe-space for those anti-woke "neurosis".

> With such a counterexample I don't know how such a claim could be made with a straight face.

You are failing at logic.

"what happens if you don't have a place well moderated" does not imply "if a place moderated exists, it cannot happen".

Twitter was not "well" moderated, because it allowed cancel culture. It was heavily moderated, which does not mean it was well moderated.

In fact, I even think that "well moderated" is rather impossible (you notice the quote-marks around the word moderation in the quote you've used, right?). The best we can have is "diversity of moderation", with several instance that have different moderation rules. Absolute freedom of speech is a concept that just takes water quickly when you think about it with intellectual honesty.

> The solution is easy: stop lying about being a "platform" if you want editorial control.

The "platform" argument is based on a misreading of an American law. Whether or not someone call themselves a platform is completely irrelevant. I don't lose my right to not disseminate your speech just because I may choose to disseminate somebody else's speech.

> Wut? How does free speech infringe on free speech, exactly?

If I want to host a community for a particular purpose, but the government forces me to host the community for another purpose, my right to free speech along with everyone who wanted to participate in my community has been violated.

For example, maybe I wish to host a community for supporters of a particular politician, but the government says I also have to include the much more numerous opponents of that politician, maybe I wish to host a community for a marginalized group of people, but the government says I also have to include those who hate those people, or maybe I just wish to host a community that as many people as possible want to use so that they will look at my ads, but government says I also have to include people who make the community worse for everyone else. Regardless, the government has used force to control speech, and has in effect banned certain kinds of communities. That's not free speech.

> The "platform" argument is based on a misreading of an American law.

... and then you go on at length about the safe harbor provision without specifically mentioning the safe harbor provision because that would undermine your point. It has already been litigated, a platform that caters to a special interest is able to do so - so long as that is what is actually going on. You want to eject anyone making threads about non-car related topics on your car-centric board? Cool, you enjoy platform protection. You want to ban users expressing opinions contrary to whatever your agenda is on the platform you've described as "the free speech wing of the free speech party"? That is a problem.

Which litigation are you referring to exactly? Can you cite some specific US federal case law?

> That would not protect free speech, it would infringe on it.

By American standards (according to my limited understanding of the presumably simplified version I hear from American YouTube lawyer Legal Eagle), but those standards aren't universal.

Is a corporation really supposed to have free speech, or just natural people?

That said, I also expect British legislation related to the internet to be a bag of wishful thinking sprinkled with unicorn dust and marinated in snake oil.

A corporation is made up of people. You cannot take away their free speech without infringing in the free speech of individuals. I have never even visited the US, and I still support free speech. It's not a uniquely American concept.

>A corporation is made up of people. You cannot take away their free speech without infringing in the free speech of individuals.

As an employee there's things I can not say as a private individual, but I can certainly say those things in one guise or another.

Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequence.

In the above example, the consequence is of joining a business that redacts my free speech.

By your choice, yes. That’s not the government restricting your speech.

Imagine a group that gets together to form a company where they all mutually pledge that “anything goes”. What rights to free speech does that resulting company have? What rights to speech does the New York Times company have?

Whatever rights are decided in law.

A company isn't a person, they can have different and discriminatory laws applied to them, rightly or wrongly.

This is sort-of a side-effect of limited liability.

What other rights should you be forced to give up when you join together with others for business or other purposes?

You don't give up any rights. Your company (which is a creature of statute) gets whatever rights the law gives it. Which given its privileged position (perpetual succession, limited liability etc.) are inevitably going to be different from those of actual people.

Which is fine. If you want to exercise your right to free speech you can. You can't necessarily make a company exercise those rights on your behalf because the company (in a fairly profound legal sense) isn't you and has limits by law.

In a post-Citizens United setting, what legal backing exists for your opinion here? And make no mistake, that's what it is... your opinion.

"Congress shall make no law" means just that. Everything else is something somebody with a specific agenda made up.

We're not talking about how things legally are in US (especially considering that this isn't even a story about US!), but about what the proper handling of free speech vis a vis corporations should be.

And it's hard to not come to a conclusion that corporations, being legal creations of the state distinct from a mere assembly of individuals, cannot have any natural rights, since their very existence is a privilege; the society can attach whatever restrictions it wants to corporate charters, so long as they're uniform.

(Note that there's a separate question of what restrictions are actually a good idea. I would actually argue for the free speech side here, but that's beyond the point; the point is that, for corporations, either way, we're talking about granted privileges, not inherent rights.)

Separately, "Congress shall make no law", interpreted most literally, means that e.g. state legislatures can make such laws. The First Amendment was not incorporated against the states until 1925, so this country has only had federal free speech protections for less than a century.

Freedom of speech is the freedom from violent consequence. When the government enforces a law, it does that by using or threatening individuals with violence. It cannot use violence against a corporation without using violence against an individual, for the same reason you cannot burn down a forest without burning down a tree.

Regardless, it's not like you can avoid these laws by not incorporating. An individual who runs a site with user-generated content in a way the government doesn't like would be in even more trouble.

It can "use violence" against a corporation without using it against the individual.

That's exactly WHY corporations have limited liability for the individuals in many cases. That's partly WHY corporations exist.

Do your homework before making ideological mistakes that smarter people have thought of hundreds of years ago.

Your comments sound like the type of nonsense that people use to enforce their views on others; which freedom of speech doesn't grant you, though you wish it would.

No, it's not possible to use violence against a corporation. It doesn't have a body, it can't feel pain, fear, etc. Ultimately, the violence needs to be directed at an individual. The government may (or may not) have declared that the corporation is dissolved before then, but that itself doesn't change anything because the corporation is just an abstraction. The action the government want to stop or compel can only be done by individuals.

It's ironic that you accuse me of wanting to enforce my views on others when that's precisely what you are arguing for, and I'm arguing against.

Corporations own assets, assets can be damaged by acts of violence, QED violence can be directed at corporations.

That's still ultimately targeted at the individuals who control and benefit from those assets. If a married couple own a car together, you can threaten to damage their car to influence their actions. The same is true if those two people own a business together and that business owns the car, and it's still true if instead of 2 people, it's 2000 people. The distinction of it being a corporation doesn't make any practical difference. You would still be trying to influence the actions of individuals in the same way as if the corporation did not exist, and it would still be individuals who are adversely affected.

By that definition, the couple is "doing violence" against me by operating the car, as it damages the environment, which is an asset that I control via democratic means (compare and contrast one-person-one-vote of a democracy to one-share-one-vote of traded companies) and benefit from by living in.

And likewise, you're being so reductive that the same logic also makes the state and the law "just people", as the courts are made of judges and lawyers who are people, likewise the police and the bailiffs are people, the banks may be increasingly automated but they're also still people, and so on.

But then, we have the government by consent, at least to the same degree we have employment by consent; not just by elections, but also e.g. "if you don't like Brexit, move to Germany" as someone said to me, oblivious that I already had — but not everyone has that option in practice even if they do on paper, just as not everyone is in charge of their employment opportunities in practice even if they are on paper.

Of course the state is also just people. All organizations are comprised of individuals. The law is not an organization, so it's not itself people. The law is a statement made by people.

Government is by consent in the sense that you need many people to voluntarily cooperate to run a government. That doesn't mean that the government doesn't impose those people's preferences on others by means of violence. The same applies to gangs and other similar organizations. They are run by consent, but that doesn't mean everyone who interacts with them are doing so consensually. Being able to move out of the gang/state territory doesn't make the interaction consensual.

Governments usually try to maintain a monopoly on violence, so when other organizations use violence to impose its members' preferences, it's usually either in defiance of the government or on behalf of the government. Governments also often use violence on behalf of others. When an employee is (indirectly) forced to work for a corporation, it's almost always enforced by the violence of a government rather than the corporation itself.

You're on to something—this is one of the reasons why trying to color things as ethically-fine or ethically-bad purely based on whether you can find a way to associate them with violence is a dead end. It's violence all the way down when you start looking. Now, it actually can be helpful to analyze things in those terms, but not if it ends at "I found a way that it's violence, so now it's ethically bad, period, end of story". It's as if nuance and context are vital for actually making sense of things. Literally covered in Book I of Plato's Republic, but no shortage of people online using that (very selectively, always, because, as noted, it goes off the rails immediately if you apply it consistently) as the core guiding principle of their political philosophy, such as it is.

>Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequence.

Speech with consequences isn't free speech, by definition.

>Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.

Consequences are a "retaliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Alarmingly, a lot of online dictionaries - at least in English - seem to define the 2,400 year old concept of free speech as the American First amendment. Can anyone who speaks another language see if this misconception has spread to other languages?

By that definition, freedom of speech was always a fiction even in the US — and not just because broadening retaliation enough to say consequences "are" a retaliation is casting a net so wide that it denies causality.

I wonder how many people got away with sincerely saying "Hail Satan, that Jesus bloke was an idiot" in the late 17th (or even 19th) century Bible Belt?

> A corporation is made up of people. You cannot take away their free speech without infringing in the free speech of individuals.

That kind of reduction doesn't work, given that corporations necessarily (and sometimes optionally) impose various limits on the speech of their employees and contractors — NDAs and non-disparagement clauses from them directly; anti-cartel rules, customer data privacy including but not limited to GDPR, and national security letters from legal obligations.

NDAs and non-disparagement clauses are consensual and can be agreed between individuals as well. They have nothing to do with corporations as such. Laws and regulations are ultimately enforced by means of violence against individuals. When the government is sending a national security letter, it's not threatening to lock up the paper the corporation's articles of incorporation are written on, it's threatening to lock up individual human beings who will remain in prison no matter what happens to the corporation afterwards.

All contracts are legal abstractions, as are corporations themselves. “Voluntary” is a bit of a slippery concept in a world where the unemployment rate is deliberately kept above zero to avoid the inflationary consequences of it being exactly zero (see also: every argument about if is sex work consensual or not). Every aspect of corporate nature exists only as an emergent phenomena of the legal environment, likewise the laws and regulations that you accept are ultimately enforced by means of violence.

However, contrary to your claim, that violence can also be directed at assets under the control of a corporation and not just the natural persons. Indeed, in many cases, the whole fundamental point of a corporation is that individuals often should not be held responsible for the corporate actions. So, while fines and penalties for non-compliance can be directed against individuals, this is not the norm, and they are usually directed against the corporation itself; if this exceeds the corporate bank account, then in certain jurisdictions it can become a legal obligation to declare bankruptcy at that point as otherwise it becomes “trading while insolvent” which can result in individuals being banned from sitting on a board of directors for a certain period. The very brief introduction I had to corporate law at university called this “piercing the corporate veil”.

Not really, they're welcome to have in their ToS:

"We will ban accounts for anything we don't like, at our discretion, at any time and for any reason without disclosure".

Job done.

Until some judge decides such a clause is legally void and must be disregarded, since otherwise it would turn the legislation into a dead letter

If we're dealing in the hypothetical then sure.

But forcing businesses to disclose their policy in their ToS will prevent this false narrative of "free speech" used to whitewash a politicised and editorialised approach to business.

Just tell people that your "platform" isn't really a platform, it's a mechanism of control outside the bounds of the law.

> Until some judge decides such a clause is legally void and must be disregarded, since otherwise it would turn the legislation into a dead letter

It's not a judge's job to stop legislation turning into a dead letter if it's incompetently drafted, which this is.

It's to reflect the laws and intersections of them as written.

This bill is going to go down hard in judicial review, because the people writing it and the lobbyists arguing for it are cretins.

> It's not a judge's job to stop legislation turning into a dead letter if it's incompetently drafted, which this is.

That really comes down to whether the judges given the decision want to save it or sink it. Even if the legislation is poorly drafted, if they want to save it, they’ll find a way to read it which saves Parliament’s intentions. If they want to sink it, they can exploit its poor drafting to render it toothless.

I have no idea which path British judges will choose to go down. Unless you can claim some special insight into their thinking, I doubt you really do either.

It's already written in all ToS.

Good. Then we all know where we stand with out digital overlords.

Yeah, but that's how they're acting already. Forcing them to admit it openly might cause people to not use the platform, which in turn might make them adopt and enforce reasonable rules.

>free speech rights of users who want a well-moderated community

I can't even wrap my head around this argument. Is the speech of the people who want a moderated community restricted? It may be other things, but it isn't a "free speech" infringement on these people. Free speech is about "speech" first.

A common trope of people unwilling to take responsibility for their own feelings is to blame the world.

If they read something they don't like, it's the fault of the platform. It couldn't possibly be that they should take responsibility for their own offence and close the tab or log out of the service.

Or even, maybe, engage in self reflection to try and deal with their feelings and move on.

One detail where this could come into play is when some bad actors shout down other discussions. Online this can happen when spammers just post hundreds of viagra ads, or when people get doxed for unpopular opinions.

As an aside, free speech absolutists always ignore the inconvenient existence of spam. The absolutist position would definitely support the complete takeover of forums by spam, but I have yet to see an absolutist openly accept that.

"Free speech" is actually the freedom to express ideas. Viagra ads are not really expression.

Of course they are. No less than any other "recommendation".

Sure it is — the idea mainly being expressed is that it is good and you should spend money on it.

Group A wants to say X that Group B doesn't like. Group B sends massive amount of unrelated messages into the Twitterverse using the same hashtags to bury Group A's message. Do you leave it alone and thus allow Group A's freedom of speech be effectively suppressed or intervene and suppress Group B? Either way, somebody's free speech is being violated.

That is the heckle veto isn't it?

Pretty sure I was told that the louder group is the one that is the winner.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

P.S. I hope that the author sincerely regrets making this comic.

That's a purposefully insincere way of reading that comic. All that comic says is that being told "no" and "you're wrong" and people disagreeing with you isn't a violation of your free speech. It's saying that people unwilling to listen to you doesn't mean you aren't allowed to speak.

So you disagree with my parent on the fact that if A's message is being downed out by B's message that is not suppression of freedom of speech?

>Do you leave it alone and thus allow Group A's freedom of speech be effectively suppressed or intervene and suppress Group B? Either way, somebody's free speech is being violated.

Currently China is doing just that, drowning out the protests with a flood of louder voices. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/28/tech/twitter-china-protests-s...

Is that free speech?

>All that comic says is that being told "no" and "you're wrong" and people disagreeing with you isn't a violation of your free speech.

From the text of the comic: >If you're yelled at(which includes heckling), boycotted, have your show canceled(otherwise known as fired), or get banned from an Internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated.

Formatting mine.

That is a tad more than just being told 'no' or 'your wrong', isn't it. It is normalizing attacking the other.

I stand by what I said, the comic is bad and I hope that the author feels bad about it.

> Forcing someone to host someone else's speech is both an infringement on their right to free speech

No one is forcing this. It's kind of like how you can either have a restaurant that serves all races, or not have a restaurant.

I don’t see how it’s an infringement of free speech at all.

A companies TOS form a contract between the user and the company, this law is just requires that companies follow what’s written in a contract they will fully entered into.

To claim that this is an infringement of speech is to claim that there’s no situation where a court can force someone to perform, as required by a contract they entered into. In other words, it’s to say that any court enforcing a civil contract is defacto infringing upon that persons right to free speech. Clearly that’s ridiculous because it would totally undermine the value of any signed contract.

If that was the case, the law would have no real effect, as pretty much every TOS already says that any content can be removed at the site's discretion.

You seem to be under the illusion that this is a well written law, that actually achieves its creators objectives.

All of the evidence so far points in quite the opposite direction.

"forcing someone". If that someone is a corporation it isn't clear they're a someone at all. I miss when people objected to corporate personhood.

It depends what is effectively a public square.

Having a community moderated by its members is not the same as a huge corporation (which has control over one of a very limited number of effectual public squares) denying a user the right to express an opinion it simply doesn't like - in the same way that (UK) businesses are not allowed to discriminate (e.g. deny gay cake decorations by a religious cake decorator).

Corporations are legal entities in and of themselves, that exist for specific purposes. They are not people.

I appreciate the philosophical and legal concerns over compelled speech. If the government forces a private company to host and serve unwanted content then that does infringe on their free speech rights.

However, in US federal law we have carved out a narrow exception for "common carriers". A telephone company can't disconnect your calls just because you're making offensive political statements or spreading medical misinformation. Some politicians and legal scholars such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have suggested that Congress extend common carrier legislation to also cover social media platforms.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...

I think the common carrier argument might work if the major platforms just showed you posts from the accounts you follow in reverse chronological order, but when they’re algorithmically promoting and recommending specific posts it’s more akin to readers’ letters in a newspaper, which doesn’t have any common carrier rule, they’re not obliged to print your letter and can be held accountable for the contents of letters they do print.

The same people who created the environment where the police was knocking on the doors for tweets and wanted to restrict the speech significantly suddenly decided to restrict platforms from restricting speech? This doesn't sound right to me, even if right doesn't sound stable to me.

IMHO no content should be removed unless the existence of content creates tangible issues. For example hosting copyrighted material creates the issue of copyright holders not getting paid for their work, therefore removable but the record of someone saying saying something bigoted doesn't actually harm anyone(if there's a harm it has been done at the moment of expressing it) therefore should not be removed and kept as an evidence of the character and actions of the person. Any content is a historical record, thanks to that we can look what Hitler said and we can reason over it and know why he is despised. This gives fidelity and understanding of the situation. We don't say Hitler was bad because he violated rule 4.1 in the TOS, the same must be true for everyone.

If UK does something like that, it can be a huge win.

> Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary.

People going to court to unblock a twitter account is a reasonably common thing in Germany at least. Even having a lawyer fax a letter will often be sufficient.

> Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary.

It really isn't, all terms of service contain a line that effectively allows them to take down anything they like under the guise of distasteful et al.

The bill is nonsense.

> Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary.

How it would change anything? Any ToS that I bothered to look at had some form "we reserve right to ban/delete stuff for any reason at all"

> Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary.

The platforms write their own terms of service. I'm sure they're pretty broad to give them license to do basically whatever they want. Are there many examples of platform moderation decisions that are unequivocally out of touch from their terms of service?

Facebook could say "you can't post harmful content" and then it's up to Facebook (moderators) to define what "harmful content" is.

The YCombinator/Hacker News Terms of Use https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is quite broad and gives them license to remove basically whatever they want (as it should - it's their website, they should be able to run it as they see fit)

    Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

    Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.

Are there many examples of platform moderation decisions that are unequivocally out of touch from their terms of service?

Many. The larger a platform gets the more its content policies converge on "anything that makes us money is allowed, anything that costs us money is banned". For example, the sheer length of time it took Trump to get banned from Twitter despite the fact that accounts which simply copy-pasted his Tweets were banned within days for repeated ToS violations.

Well put.

"Forcing" and "to actually follow" are not a reflection of reality. The Bill details the rights to "kinds of complaints" and provisions to "bring a claim for breach of contract". Good luck with that for non-customers. Though Ofcom will be reviewing the processes used for handling these in general.

The exact same UK government supports making more speech illegal (see my other comment). Experts have warned that the bill threatens E2E encryption. It also seems to require KYC for all social media activity, killing online pseudonymity.

They'll try to pander to conservatives by appearing to "protect free speech!" (fuck Reuters) but I really hope people don't fall for it.

> Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary

Except the Bill doesn't have such provisions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33786707

That sounds horrible and like a recipe for both politically motivated censorship and ineffective moderation. I don't want the government involved in at all.

I was checking out one of the UK firms providing “age assurance”, turns out the directors also had a PPE firm now disbanded of course. That’s all you need to know about this bill…

When you have censorship, content moderation, you inevitably will accidentally hit legitimate things. https://twitter.com/alyankovic/status/1596999067279581184

What ends up happening is the political bias of the censors leaks into the decisions. You end up creating echo chambers; which are tremendously unhealthy for society.

Canada is going through the same type of censorship, but under the guise of promoting "Canadian content" As if our culture is in danger of disappearing if we cant watch "Canadian" movies and "Canadian" news. The dangerous side is that the gov wants content providers to manipulate their algorithms to promote some deemed "Canadian" content and demote others. Dangerously close to state controlled media with a prettier veneer so it doesnt look like authoritarian play it is. So far there's enough pushback to keep the bill from passing but that doesnt stop the gov from continuing to push.

I don't care about offense. What I care about is lying. If someone distributes provable untruths, that should be legally actionable -- if not by government, then in civil court by the people harmed by the lies.

That's an interesting position. Is there currently any country on earth which has a general law against telling lies?

Most countries have some form of civil defamation law, but generally you have have to be lying about a _specific person or entity_. Some countries (not as many as you may think; a lot of things described as hate speech laws are really incitement to hatred laws, which is a little different) also have hate speech laws which in principle may prevent maliciously lying about specified groups of people, but in practice, the bar for actually prosecuting someone under these is usually extremely high.

I'm not sure anywhere has a ban on _all_ lies, though. You can generally say that the sky is green, or even usually tell lies about non-protected groups ("all lawyers are criminals" is clearly a lie, say, but unless the context makes it clear that you're using it about a particular lawyer, you're probably fine).

And who exactly should be the authority of what "truth" and "proof" is? The government?

The courts. Settling such questions is what they're for.

> Settling such questions is what they're for.

No, they're there to deliver justice. Truth in courts can and does change often when new evidence is brought into view.

The idea that a single entity could somehow have a priori knowledge of truth, good enough to decide what is/isn't true in general, is a juvenile God fantasy. Truth is a tricky concept.

Courts are very much about establishing truth. I mean, they put people to death based on determinations of what actually happened. The word "fact" is derived from legal language. The purpose of all this may be the delivery of justice, but the machinery is all about establishment of what is and is not true.

Let's say your premise is granted. So in this hypothetical, courts are going to become moderation organizations for online content, in addition to their usual responsibilities?

Courts are already the arbiter of expression, we have slander and libel in the states. They generally require you to prove that the parties involved knew what they are saying is a lie, which makes them a little toothless in practice. You are free to repeat anything you like as long as you do no due diligence on the info.

Hell, alex jones literally just got slapped for his speech.

I think the question here is how that'd scale. UK already has a massive backlog of court cases that keeps growing, and that's just enforcing the existing laws. If "posting false things on the Internet" becomes a crime, we'd need orders of magnitude more courts to keep up.

At some point, you have to ask if banning something that's so pervasive that most (or even a significant minority) is a good idea to begin with.

A $1.44 billion fine is just a slap?

> in addition to their usual responsibilities

Courts have always been responsible for determining the truth. Libel is a crime. Every criminal case has a guilty/not guilty decision that must be grounded in the truth.

Not for determining the truth of all statements made. At the most just of those made about people when the people they're about make a complaint.

Not every court puts people to death. For most of them it is precisely because they cannot determine truth without leaving doubt.

https://www.signaturelitigation.com/high-court-confirms-that...

No, courts exist to decide if laws were broken. "Justice" is a squishy and subjective concept.

Justice could be defined as punishing people who've broken the law. At least that's the way I meant it.

I agree that justice, in a philosophical sense, is a subjective concept.

That inevitably leads to the truth being banned. Nobody, and least of all a government, should be trusted to decide what is the truth.

The media lie all the time and change their story later, but its not okay for normal people to lie?

Why would the media be excluded?

I doubt such a system would ever be put in place, because politicians would be the biggest targets.

Let's say there is a government body that decides what is true or not, and decides who to punish for lying.

It would be naive to think such a government body would be impervious to corruption, or groupthink, or mistakes. In fact, it would be the worlds largest target for anyone who wanted to promote misinformation or bribe/threaten people to weaponize it against their enemies.

Every time a new political party came into power, their opponents would be censored and imprisoned. And at the same time, the people in that government body who get to decide what is true or not would miraculously see their personal wealth increase. What a strange coincidence!

Bad things can even happen by accident: look at how many people were shouted down for saying masks were a good idea when Covid started, and then were shouted down for not wearing masks a few months later. Or look at who was shouted down for saying that missile that landed in Poland might not be Russian.

When the censors get things wrong, and they have the authority of the government behind them, the consequences will be terrible. It would ultimately result the end of free society, and it would not take very long for that to happen.

Doesn't that argument prove too much? I mean, it applies to anything the court system does.

Luckily UK made such content illegal, so no need for those extra steps.

Honestly, if you want something to be a crime and you write legislation (and it isnt already a crime) there are options!

Isn’t the UK also known for repeatedly trying to ban porn online? Seems like free speech means something more specific to them in this context.

> Isn’t the UK also known for repeatedly trying to ban porn online?

No. Ten years and four prime ministers ago the government was briefly talking about making it harder to access online porn if you're under 18, but nothing ever came of it.

It's currently trivially easy for people of any age to access online porn in the UK. (So I've heard.)

It depends on the kind of porn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_63_of_the_Criminal_Jus...

I still think it is crazy that people in the UK get prosecuted for (appalling) things they say in private WhatsApp groups.

You can’t (logically) legally ban legal content.

If you ban it, then it becomes illegal.

If you don’t ban it, then it stays legal.

It’s pretty much that simple.

Here's a more balanced take: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-online-safety-bill-i...

It seems it's still fairly problematic

If "legal but harmful" is illegal, then it's not "legal but harmful."

This is a good move in my opinion. Content moderation for small groups can and should be handled by a few members of the community. Once a community becomes a public platform, content moderation should be governed by a country's constitution.

```We all agree that stuff should be illegal, let's make it illegal," she told BBC News``` - I disagree. I think we should avoid any kind of censorship, whatever the content is, as long as possible, wherever possible. YOU are an idiot, if you buy into racism or whatever else hot topic mentioned on the article. but I also think that at the end of the day - it's mostly just greed trying to amplify control. such agenda will never triumph.

Okay, let's suppose then that an idiot does something horrible, is the idiot to blame 100% for the horrible thing? What about the people that should know better? What about the people who repeatedly encouraged a rabid base to attack people? What about the people who exploit the morons to do their bidding?

What if people start getting branded as "undesirable" by certain individuals, and others make sure to cleanse them?

So let me make it more clear, how many innocents are you willing to sacrifice for free speech?

Is it better when the governing class decides certain individuals or thoughts are evil and makes sure to cleanse them from the world? Could that cause harm to people, or is the government always right? How many innocents are you willing to see die and suffer for the sake of purging bad thoughts from society?

Stawman.

Who said the government should decide?

> Is it better when the governing class decides certain individuals or thoughts are evil and makes sure to cleanse them from the world?

Leave it to the people, let the people vote with their wallet. People clearly don't want that kind of speech available, exhibit all absolute free speech sites.

The government dictating what is allowed to go on platforms and forcing companies to host vitriol and calls to violence to "cleanse" society is not any different to what you describe.

It just adds a middle man so the government keeps their hands clean.

Cut the strawmans. I didn't advocate for government control, you took it there, and the fact that I am even entertaining this response is well beyond what it deserves.

And what if when it is government branding the undesirables? Only a problem when you disagree? But of course all the sane people agree with the ministry of truth and decency.

Personal responsibility is a far better position to defend despite the garbage that comes along for the ride than say an overarching unquestionable central authority that dictates and enforces what is acceptable for all with threat of government sanctioned violence (imprisonment) for non-compliance.

Who spoke about the government doing things? Yet another strawman.

The government forcing companies to host speech they do not want to host as DeSantis wants to do with Apple, and has been done in Florida and Texas is inherently fascist.

Where is the personal responsibility for the people who willingly taunt their followers and point the finger towards minorities?

Why are republican figures not facing justice for the atrocities committed as a consequence of their speech?

"We don't want people to be banned on social media if they're not committing crimes, but we want to make all these things crimes" is an insane position for the UK government to take. There are still far too many white-collar and violent crimes being committed for the government to be entitled to regulate common speech.

> YOU are an idiot, if you buy into racism

Unfortunately, idiots can carry guns and have a propensity for acting on said racism. Refusal to confront that problem in the name of some free speech ideological purity is tempting history to repeat.

how does free speech differ from [some] free speech ideological purity?

The recognition of harmful speech. See e.g., German restrictions on Nazi symbolism.

Which is a really bad example. It is clear why it is there, but in general it isn't a good solution.

> idiots can carry guns

Not in the UK, usually.

Don't take that for granted

I presume you like Hacker News - you've been here for 11 years. What are some of the qualities you like about it?

Hacker News is heavily "censored" so it can maintain what it believes to be a high quality posted links and discussion.

I don't think moderation can even be compared to government censorship. Moderation leads to more diversity of viewpoints expressed, as different places on the internet moderates in different ways, and almost anyone can start a competing community that moderates differently. The opposite is true with government censorship.

Ironically someone flagged your comment.

There is a huge difference between having a post removed in a moderated community and having a post be punishable by the law of your nation.

somewhat smart folks around here. that's about it

>it's mostly just greed trying to amplify control. such agenda will never triumph.

Sometimes it gains power for a long period of time with unfortunate results. Not that I think that is a valid argument against freedom of expression.

> YOU are an idiot, if you buy into racism or whatever else hot topic mentioned on the article.

Advertising works, so does any other form of propaganda. It's taught in psychological manipulation 101.

What you are doing is called victim blaming.

If something should be banned, perhaps it should be made illegal.

This is UK, the country that came up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order.

I agree it sounds almost paradoxical: if a law is passed to ban it, then it must be illegal. But then it is no longer “lawful but harmful”, so…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_paradox

They say as much in the article

>"We all agree that stuff should be illegal, let's make it illegal," she told BBC News, adding that the government had already pledged to make the promotion of self harm unlawful.

How they intend to make the promotion of self harm illegal I'm not sure.

Well, thank god for Brexit or we'd miss out on such a brave new world.

I thought the legal but harmful act was a brexit benefit that we couldnt have unless we had a good strong hearty brexit.

"Step right up, folks! Spin the Brexit wheel of bullsh*t! Is it a bonus? Is it a disaster? Nobody knows where the wheel will stop this time!"

Good.

Platforms should have the right to ban your hate speech. But governments should not. I prefer that social media companies handle this because it directly affects their bottom line. Nazism, racism and Andrew Tate are banned because they are bad for business.

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