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UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

bbc.co.uk

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Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#71

Post by commandlinefan »

luiscleto wrote: post #2

> But it also covers harmful behaviour that has a less clear legal definition such as cyber-bullying, trolling and the spread of fake news and disinformation. So, basically any site with user content can be fined/blocked at any time at the official's discretion.

The web has been more or less mainstream for going on 25 years now - before that, the dominant mainstream mass communication medium was television. Television was, and still is, subject to government censorship and regulation based on very tenuous legal arguments (viciously supported by pearl-clutching moral panicking puritans), and we've seen what it becomes: mindless, thoughtless, brainless, and above-all only "offensive" or thought-provoking in very specifically constrained ways. As soon as the web started to become well known, I was idly curious how long it would take to become television - to be honest, it's taken longer than I realistically expected, mostly because world governments can't quite seem to agree on exactly how they should oppress us, but believe me, it's coming. And when it does, there really won't be many of us that see it as a negative.

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#72

Post by jquery »

wallace_f wrote: post #70
jquery wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even one of my friends with an Ivy degree read and espoused the views of a popular conservative pundit for years, even lauding them as as basically a religious liberal. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, are you saying that no well-educated person would have any conservative viewpoints? That seems patently nonsense.

No, I was agreeing with the parent comment and offered an example. Within this context, I'm not trying to make any left vs right, or vice versa, political arguments. This person self-identified as liberal. However, they only recognized liberal views within the contexts they had been pre-familiarized with. In fact, this person read, regurgitated, and lauded conservative views for years while beleiving them to be liber…

Thanks, that makes sense, and I totally agree. You can see this in (American) society with the politics of race, free speech, and many other domains.

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#73

Post by commandlinefan »

sparkling wrote: post #15

What is it with the obsession about "hate speech" in some random internet comment section? Report that user, ignore it, turn off the screen, whatever. How in the world is it worth spending actual policing resources on this nonsense?

Well, the justification - mind you, I don't agree, I'm just answering your (rhetorical?) question - is that speech can sway opinions, opinions can shape behavior, and (the wrong sort of) behavior can lead to chaos, so it's best to nip the wrong sort of speech in the bud before it cascades into genocide. The problem with that sort of "slippery slope" thinking is that it always ends up slippery-slope-ing in the other direction: hate speech regulations designed to silence nazis calling for genocide are almost immediately applied to reasoned, principled, thoughtful people like Jordan Peterson whose conclusions are outside the mainstream.

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#74

Post by odessacubbage »

gnode wrote: post #24
bArray wrote: post #16

Assuming all the best intentions in the world, this will most certainly be abused. Where do they think all of the people they want to silence will go? They will no doubt go to the darker web and concentrate there.

I find this argument similar to: regulating the construction of buildings will just lead to seasteading. The issue isn't really about silencing people, but removing their access to a mainstream audience.

and more importantly, removal of the ability to facilitate dissent in the public sphere. it's far easier to brand your opponents as reactionaries and pedophiles when they can only voice counter opinions in free speech ghettos that are already deemed unsavory.

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#75

Post by zachguo »

maze-le wrote: post #34
hugh4life wrote: post #11

I find it baffling how western nations can't understand how they're now providing ideological justification to the same stances Russia and China are taking towards the internet.

Only if you still belive the cold-war narrative of Freedmon=West vs. Tyranny=East. We live in the wold of a worldwide corporate kleptocracy -- regardless of geographic region. There are of course differences in how the states handle opposition and dissenting voices, but all in all the East-vs-West distinction (or ideological differences in general) are not a good framework of description, when trying to analyze issue…

State Owned Corporations v.s. Corporation Owned State

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#77

Post by dragonwriter »

ohiovr wrote: post #76
C1sc0cat wrote: post #50

Would that include the Daily mails website :-)

The UK should delegate which media gets banned to the Queen so therefore it never happens.

> The UK should delegate which media gets banned to the Queen so therefore it never happens.

The UK already does that with some decisions (which is technically the Queen-in-Parliament delegating to the Queen with the advice of the Privy Council), but that doesn't stop action (Orders in Council) on those matters from occurring. Of course, in practice this is almost exactly delegation from the Parliament to the government.

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#78

Post by Throwway32 »

FakeComments wrote: post #59
Throwway32 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is founded on the idea that personal determination and defending individual liberators are paramount to a moral society I wonder what US citizen Anwar Al Awlaki would have said to that argument. The truth is that political free speech has limits, even for the United States. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-a...

This seems a strange response, since the extra-judicial killing of an American by the Obama administration was widely regarded as a serious breakdown in American norms — precisely by the same crowd who says things like GP. Your link then would be support for their point, not a refutation. Generally speaking, point out something in the past few years that’s an example of what the person is talking about isn’t a way to…

I never bought into Obama’s hype machine, but the drone strike was carried out by the United States armed forces, who are required to not follow illegal orders; via a chain of command. There is a different party in power now: have there been any prosecutions?Presumably there was a lot of legal advice that sanctioned the hit on a US citizen exercising his ostensible free speech rights,[1] otherwise it would not have happened.

[1] My personal opinion is that praising terror and “inspiring” others is not free speech, but I don’t pretend otherwise

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#79

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

megous wrote: post #32
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for sharing this phenomenal video. not from the US so I wasn't familiar with him. really enjoyed the tear-down and explanation on this propaganda campaign and how it works in contrast to before the internet.

Don't forget to check his track record on claims about past incidents from his past videos, that were actually later investigated by competent third parties. You may be less excited as a result, about his other claims.

thanks

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#80

Post by bArray »

gnode wrote: post #24
bArray wrote: post #16

Assuming all the best intentions in the world, this will most certainly be abused. Where do they think all of the people they want to silence will go? They will no doubt go to the darker web and concentrate there.

I find this argument similar to: regulating the construction of buildings will just lead to seasteading. The issue isn't really about silencing people, but removing their access to a mainstream audience.

> I find this argument similar to: regulating the

> construction of buildings will just lead to seasteading.

You're calling it out as a slippery slope argument [1], which is fair enough - except there is already evidence to suggest that users kicked off of these platforms migrate to Minds (Twitter alternative), Gab (Facebook alternative) and BitChute (Youtube alternative).

The BBC article for example has almost 70 comments on Dissenter [2]. Removing a persons ability to comment only hides the problem, you can't stop them thinking a given way and you're less likely to change their mind if you cut off dialogue with them entirely.

> The issue isn't really about silencing people, but

> removing their access to a mainstream audience.

You're removing their access to a mainstream audience by silencing them. In this case they are the same.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

[2] https://dissenter.com/discussion/begin-extension?url=https%3...

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