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UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

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Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#101

Post by throw646577 »

HPsquared wrote: post #76
pjc50 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is true of many different pairs of parties! It's been a long time since any winner had over 50% of the popular vote. 2024: 33% 2019: 43.6% 2017: 42.3% (Lab: 40%!) 2015: 36.9% 2010: 36.1% 2005: 35.2% 2001: 40.7% 1997: 43.2% 1992: 41.9% The last election where the winning party got over 50% of the popular vote was .. 1931.

Yes it's been undemocratic for a long time. The 2024 one was just particularly egregious.

It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?

It's a series of (balanced) regional votes for elected representatives from equal-sized constituencies who are supposed to be responsive to that region.

Suddenly this is a massive problem for tories because it's red-faced angry right-wingers on the losing side. Whenever it contributed significantly to a tory win, it has not been a problem.

If you look at what actually happened you will see that, repeatedly, right-wing candidates lost out on a constituency-by-constituency level because the Conservatives were largely incumbents who had built up enough very personal bad reputation to be booted out, or inexperienced first-time candidates who are very rarely elected anyway and were parachuted at the last minute into seats where grandees were retiring, and the Reform candidates were a gaggle of weirdos, randoms, odd-bods, extremists and idiots who were lining up to stand for election for a party that had such a thin platform it ultimately resolves to "oooh we don' t like them", where "them" varied a little region by region but usually meant foreigners.

(And, of course, they split part of the vote between them.)

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#102

Post by Zak »

cjs_ac wrote: post #56

As a software engineer in the UK (and former schoolteacher) I'm supportive of the Online Safety Act. People prefer to interact with people who are similar to them, so they end up with a belief that most people are like them, but as a teacher, I had to grapple with the full distribution of human intelligence. It's wider than I'm comfortable with. Most people struggle to deal with the complexity of everyday life in the…

> For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is?

The problem is that it's very easy to selectively enforce this sort of thing. Most people will never have an issue, but whoever manages to sufficiently annoy someone who has the ability to trigger an enforcement action could be screwed. That leads many of the people who might find themselves in that situation to stop annoying the government or stop running websites entirely.

That's called a chilling effect.

People would probably not be as concerned if the law only applied to large platforms.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#103

Post by throw646577 »

pas wrote: post #78
HPsquared wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conservatives + Reform got more votes than Labour. More people voted against Labour than for them. In any other system they wouldn't have won, and at the very least wouldn't have a majority. The other thing to consider is that the electorate basically moved to the right in 2024 (Tory voters moved to Reform), but parliament shifted hard to the left.

Okay, but what kind of voting system can capture this well (and what does it mean)? We don't know how people would have voted in this hypothetical. (Likely there would be a lot more parties, which generally is good.) Also C+R could have formed a coalition. (Or merge into a new party ... or - I haven't looked up how R came to be, but I assume it's a spin-off of/from C - R could have merged back into C, right?)

Reform is a spinoff, yes, in the same way that UKIP is a spinoff: it's a party consisting of people who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't get selected as conservative MPs, plus on the odd occasion one or two who left (Lee Anderson, who is terrible, awful, self-serving and alarming, and before him for UKIP Douglas Carswell, who was largely better characterised as a nice enough bloke who was completely wrong)

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#104

Post by Zak »

Dalewyn wrote: post #52
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.

At least in the US, legislation for age verification already exists and it actually far predates social media: COPPA[1]. It is, however, seldom actually enforced due largely to the impracticality and inconvenience of the matter. The law also doesn't regulate the presentation of content to children, rather the collection of information from children. I think the most recent enforcement of COPPA that had actual tangibl…

COPPA does not appear to require age verification. It actually appears to have the opposite effect, only coming into effect when the service provider has actual knowledge of the user's age. Actively avoiding collecting the user's age or clues to it is safer for the service provider.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#105

Post by [deleted] »

HPsquared wrote: post #68
pas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is it not popular support? or your point is that plurality is not enough? or that in a different voting system (alternate voting, ranked choice, etc..) the winner would be completely different?

Conservatives + Reform got more votes than Labour. More people voted against Labour than for them. In any other system they wouldn't have won, and at the very least wouldn't have a majority. The other thing to consider is that the electorate basically moved to the right in 2024 (Tory voters moved to Reform), but parliament shifted hard to the left.

[deleted]

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#106

Post by unethical_ban »

EpicQuest_246 wrote: post #33
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.

Which kills any sort of online anonymity as all social media posts will be directly linked to your ID. This will make it much easier to go after anyone that is a dissident in the UK. Many these awful laws such as one being discussed are sold to us under the guise of protecting the children. The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related crimes in the UK (and I checked a while ago). Pa…

I think laws and regulations can be put in place that, while imperfect, would highly discourage the use of social media by minors.

I wouldn't want every user to validate their age with government ID.

But we can say schools should ban kids from using phones. We can say that large social media platforms need to whitelist content/creators that children are allowed to access. We can insist that social media companies throttle the ability for minors to scroll through videos at a dopamine addiction pace.

More generally and more applicable to the discussion, I think regulations for social media need to be applied proportional to the userbase and centralization of a platform, and target viral algorithms.

Old school message boards should be safe from government interference, broadly.

It may be time to research simpleX chat and Briar if we will maintain the ability to communicate without government filtering.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#108

Post by herghost »

EpicQuest_246 wrote: post #33
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.

Which kills any sort of online anonymity as all social media posts will be directly linked to your ID. This will make it much easier to go after anyone that is a dissident in the UK. Many these awful laws such as one being discussed are sold to us under the guise of protecting the children. The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related crimes in the UK (and I checked a while ago). Pa…

>Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's social media usage.

I guess we should stop checking age when buying alcohol in pubs (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's alcohol purchases_)

And stop checking age when buying cigarettes (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's tobacco purchases_)

etc.

It's illuminating that your post is both "tech can't solve it" and so brazenly pro-tech with manifestations of its laziest arguments each way.

Of course tech can solve the ID problem. It could solve it in a way that doesn't need to give ground to your slippery slope argument too. It just doesn't have the incentive model to do so. Any "control" in this space would reduce the marketable headcount and so it's not in tech's interests to solve - without government intervention.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#109

Post by pessimizer »

throw646577 wrote: post #101
HPsquared wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's been undemocratic for a long time. The 2024 one was just particularly egregious.

It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it? It's a series of (balanced) regional votes for elected representatives from equal-sized constituencies who are supposed to be responsive to that region. Suddenly this is a massive problem for tories because it's red-faced angry right-wingers on the losing side. Whenever it contributed significantly to a tory win, it has not been a pr…

> It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?

You're talking with someone who thinks that it is egregious that a party that gets the minority of the vote runs the government, and the grandfather of your own comment points out that in 2024 it was with the lowest percentage vote in 30 years, which is particular.

The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.

Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

#110

Post by protomolecule »

cjs_ac wrote: post #56

As a software engineer in the UK (and former schoolteacher) I'm supportive of the Online Safety Act. People prefer to interact with people who are similar to them, so they end up with a belief that most people are like them, but as a teacher, I had to grapple with the full distribution of human intelligence. It's wider than I'm comfortable with. Most people struggle to deal with the complexity of everyday life in the…

>To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state

Ha-ha-ha. Writing from Russia.

No, seriously, it started with completely reasonable law mandating that internet providers block pages encouraging suicide or providing information on ways to do it.

And remember, Orwell was British.

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