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UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

ofcom.org.uk

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Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#41

Post by eru »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #31
collyw wrote: post #6

The steady march towards authoritarianism continues. Is there any way that we can overwhelm them?

> Is there any way that we can overwhelm them? Yes: leave the UK. I and a lot of high earners are thinking about leaving the UK because it's simply a punishing country where you have high taxes like others in Europe but nothing to show for them. It's also by far the most authoritarian western country, as exemplified by measures like this one. The way to overwhelm them is to sink the UK by having most of the people it…

> The way to overwhelm them is to sink the UK by having most of the people in relies on to function (high earners) leave and let the country collapse.

Leaving is useful, if it improves your personal well-being.

No need to be spiteful about it.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#42

Post by JoshTriplett »

krisbolton wrote: post #37
JoshTriplett wrote: post #2

Better alternative to first-party propaganda: https://www.eff.org/pages/uk-online-safety-bill-massive-thre...

Well, that links to EFF's own "propaganda" - perpetuating privacy at all costs. Inevitably the place law and regulation should is somewhere in between, balancing risk and striving for an acceptable position all things considered within a democratic framework.

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

It is never "inevitable" that the correct place for law and regulation is somewhere in the middle on every issue. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's never inevitable.

Assuming that it is makes it far too easy to move the Overton window: regulation proposes something stricter than the status quo, "compromise" moves in that direction, repeat.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#43

Post by devjab »

collyw wrote: post #6

The steady march towards authoritarianism continues. Is there any way that we can overwhelm them?

I’m not sure you’re going to find a lot of sympathy for SoMe platforms in many European countries. Maybe you would have before Twitter was bought and a lot of the “media elite” used it. Today I think you’d mostly find a lot of happy parents applauding you if you were the first politician to manage to ban something like Tik-Tok, Facebook or similar. Not that I’m trying to justify it. I both think the way that it’s being done is wrong and that a lot of people will miss the open web more than they think.

Not holding big tech companies responsible for the content which is housed on their platforms was always a one way street into heavy regulation here in the EU. As with everything EU it takes decades, but I fully expect us to eventually ban many social media products. Or get left by them because it will not be possible for them to make money if they actually have to be custodians of their content.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#44

Post by bratbag »

red_admiral wrote: post #21

The UK has a thing called non-crime hate incidents ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-in... ) where the police records alleged complaints about discrimination, even if they are not a crime (otherwise they would be hate crimes). This could be used to direct policing resources sensibly ("lots of incidents recorded at such-and-such a place, maybe we should patrol there a bit more") or to build a…

This is overblown.

The police are responsible for deciding how to classify a report. Their decisions need to be audited to avoid corruption.

Ergo they have to maintain a record of reports they decided were not hate crimes.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#45

Post by wesselbindt »

foldr wrote: post #35
briandear wrote: post #13

My problem with all of these sorts of things is the idea of who determines “harmful.” Because that’s a term of such ambiguity that it could literally mean anything. “Covid came from a Chinese lab” — “harmful because it causes ‘racism’” “Pakistani grooming gangs in Rotherham are targeting young British girls” — harmful because it could promote social unrest. “Eating meat can improve metabolic health” — harmful because…

There's a lot not to like about this legislation, but you're way off the mark here. The legislation doesn't impose a generic ban on anything that someone or other considers 'harmful'. It's a raft of quite specific regulatory requirements relating to specific kinds of content. There are certainly arguments to be made against it, but your examples are quite irrelevant.

> psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress

Has shown itself to be vague enough to be a perfect stand in for "harmful" in everything the parent comment says.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#46

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

krisbolton wrote: post #37
JoshTriplett wrote: post #2

Better alternative to first-party propaganda: https://www.eff.org/pages/uk-online-safety-bill-massive-thre...

Well, that links to EFF's own "propaganda" - perpetuating privacy at all costs. Inevitably the place law and regulation should is somewhere in between, balancing risk and striving for an acceptable position all things considered within a democratic framework.

> all things considered within a democratic framework

The UK has a very funny (literally ha-ha funny) notion of "democracy" -- with people just voting against the status quo most of the time and with "first past the post" resulting in leadership that doesn't have, and cannot even credibly claim, genuine popular support. It's a totally broken system.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#47

Post by demarq »

turblety wrote: post #10
collyw wrote: post #6

The steady march towards authoritarianism continues. Is there any way that we can overwhelm them?

We can support projects like Autonomi [1] (the rebranded MaidSafe [2]). It should create what (I feel) the internet was always ment to be. Peer to peer communications. I think the only solution to this is to stop the centralised mess the internet has become. 1. https://autonomi.com/ 2. https://maidsafe.net/

I looked at all three website sites but no docs, it's a rough start with no headline app, or docs to create an app.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#48

Post by contracertainty »

threeseed wrote: post #26
collyw wrote: post #6

The steady march towards authoritarianism continues. Is there any way that we can overwhelm them?

The problem for you is that the majority of the public support this. Because there is plenty of scientific evidence that social media is bad for children with many parents having first hand experiences with grooming, deep fakes, bullying etc. And I think almost everyone can agree that companies like Meta, TikTok, X have major problems with their algorithms pushing people into ideological extremes, allowing rogue acto…

You are absolutely right, and you have indavertebtly hit the nail on the head. This legilsation is supported by parents who would like their children to be able to use the internet, all of it, without any effort on their part to police their children's online habits. There are many parents who give their kids smartphones at 10 years old, or younger, and create Google and Facebook/Insta accounts with fake ages for their kids to use, and let them at it. No supervision, no discussion, no parental controls. This renders any action on the part of the tech companies moot, as parents are proving that their pre-teen kids are adults by providing false information. Kids then go online, go into Snapchat or whatever, cue torrent of DPs and grooming. Quelle surprise!

Schools in the UK spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with this, and in almost every case it turns out parents have no idea what their kids are sending/seeing online.

So the result is that bad parents demand bad legislation so that they can, in their minds, transfer responsibility for parenting their kids to the state. The state, well meaning rather than malicious, massively overreaches in its attempt to provide an answer. As a result everyone else suffers. And the 'majority of the public' think parents should parent, rather than making it the government's problem, and butt out of their internet.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#49

Post by frikskit »

benfrain wrote: post #25

I’d like to see all social media sites require proper age verification, much like any gambling sites in the UK have to. No under 18 needs social media. Feel, especially for children, they are a net negative.

Agree with you. I’m not sure why people believe that only the physical world and not the virtual one should have some amount of regulation. I think a good portion of HN has drunk the kool aid of their employers/industry and is almost religiously unwilling to consider an alternative viewpoint without resorting to shouting ‘fascist’ and ‘1984’. Maybe someone needs to write a book called 2024 about the hellscape we currently live in and folks could circle jerk around this new shibboleth.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#50

Post by protocolture »

red_admiral wrote: post #21

The UK has a thing called non-crime hate incidents ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-in... ) where the police records alleged complaints about discrimination, even if they are not a crime (otherwise they would be hate crimes). This could be used to direct policing resources sensibly ("lots of incidents recorded at such-and-such a place, maybe we should patrol there a bit more") or to build a…

>waste police time.

I dont know if you intended it but "wasting police time" is a pretty good book on the subject of administrative detections.

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