The UK is building their own digital gulag. Most social media companies are not going to institute these authoritarian measures for one small nation that wants to regulate the world. You are going to see yourselves cut off.
UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
161–170 of 394 posts
Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ac…
The Online Safety Act is about content moderation. If Ofcom taps you on the shoulder, they're asking for your moderation policies, and proof you're enforcing them. Platforms can no longer wash their hands of responsibility by saying that some random user uploaded the content and an opaque algorithm showed it to hundreds of thousands of people: the platform allowed the content to remain, and it was the platform's algo…
This comment talks about large platforms with opaque algorithms showing some content to hundreds of thousands of people. I will not debate the merits of this law in that context here. My objection addresses your example of a "small Mastodon instance", which I'll extend to include a hobbyist forum, a blog with a comment section, or any similar website that can be run by a single person or informal, noncommercial group of people.
By not exempting the latter, this legislation makes it unreasonably risky for an individual with sufficient connection to the UK to operate such a website. The moderation policy is "I run some open source spam filter software and if I happen to see anything heinous, I delete it". Such websites are usually not businesses and often represent a net cost to their operators. A universal duty to moderate will accelerate the disappearance of hobbyist websites and further entrench corporate social media. I think that's a bad thing.
Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
#163As 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…
I'm trying to give this comment a gracious reading. You can find videos on YouTube from the last couple months of police talking to people about comments they left online, and tweets, and FB posts, etc. So saying that practice "was put to an end a couple of years ago" is a complete fiction. The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American? Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on t…
> The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American?
It's a quote from one of the American founding fathers. I don't remember which, and I don't remember the exact quote.
> Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on them what does it matter whether or not a particular government acknowledges it?
In British law, most of what we now call 'human rights' were granted as settlements following rebellions or civil wars, the most notable example being those in the Bill of Rights 1689[0]. It was the Americans who copied that piece of legislation and wrote God's name at the top. The Parliamentarians who first wrote that bill remembered the Second English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I on charges of Tyranny - he wanted to levy taxes that Parliament opposed. (Sound familiar?)
> It's still an infringement and should be fought.
We don't have absolute freedom of speech in this country and that's fine. Freedom in this country is about doing not speaking.
> Or maybe that's exactly the time you should make those assertions all the more loudly. Principles don't mean anything if you only hold them when it's easy, and we should all stop treating people who drop their principles at the slightest road bump as some kind of warrior for safety or whatever they'd like to frame it as, and treat them as they are - cowards and authoritarians.
We don't do abstract principles in Britain, we're all about 100% organic realpolitik. Our system of government has been slowly evolving for nearly one thousand years, and continues to evolve. One of our kings was a tyrant, so we killed him. The republic that replaced him was worse, so we restored the monarchy. We solve the problem in front of us - there's no need to solve every problem ever right now.
> Oh so the hope is just that the government is too ineffectual to prosecute something they're completely within their rights to prosecute? How is that not absolute madness?
This is how Britain has always been governed - with minimal effort. Yes, it's mad. With specific reference to prosecutions, the Crown Prosecution Service only prosecutes if it think it will get a guilty verdict.
> Why in the world would you trust a government to enforce this fairly? What's to say your Conservative Party doesn't use this to target prominent supporters of Labour, or vice versa?
The government (i.e., the Cabinet and other Ministers of the Crown) have no direct control over the implementation of this legislation; that is delegated to Ofcom, a regulatory body that answers to Parliament as a whole. Any attempt to seize control of Ofcom would require legislation, which would be heavily scrutinised by the House of Lords (which is not elected, and therefore is only weakly influenced by party whips) and would also have to gain Royal Assent, which would probably be refused if the legislation were seen to weaken British democracy.
> As an American (the horror, I know, that I deign to comment on something British), I'd love to know where your freedom of speech is codified and what a government would have to do if they wanted to change what counts as speech, what doesn't, and what's protected and what isn't. I suspect that you and I have very different definitions of what qualifies as free speech.
Absolute freedom of speech is only granted to parliamentarians when speaking in Parliament. The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law; Article 10 of the Convention provides for a general right to freedom of expression, but permits certain restrictions. Prior to the Human Rights Act, there was no general freedom of speech; instead everything that was not specifically prohibited was allowed.
Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 th…
The party that has got a plurality of the vote runs the government, in fact. Same as in the USA this time, eh? But again, in case it is not clangingly obvious yet: we don't vote for parties to control government. We don't vote for party leaders. We vote for constituency MPs, and if there are enough of them who can agree to form a government, that is what they do. Political parties are not, particularly, even essentia…
What happens in practice is, parties do control the government. There are these things called "whips". Also, voters watch national media and mostly vote based on the leadership, stated manifesto etc of each party at the national level.
Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Online Safety Act is about content moderation. If Ofcom taps you on the shoulder, they're asking for your moderation policies, and proof you're enforcing them. Platforms can no longer wash their hands of responsibility by saying that some random user uploaded the content and an opaque algorithm showed it to hundreds of thousands of people: the platform allowed the content to remain, and it was the platform's algo…
This comment talks about large platforms with opaque algorithms showing some content to hundreds of thousands of people. I will not debate the merits of this law in that context here. My objection addresses your example of a "small Mastodon instance", which I'll extend to include a hobbyist forum, a blog with a comment section, or any similar website that can be run by a single person or informal, noncommercial group…
Blog and news website comment sections are explicitly exempted from the Act.
> A universal duty to moderate will accelerate the disappearance of hobbyist websites and further entrench corporate social media. I think that's a bad thing.
I also mourn the loss of the lawless Internet, but it's spilling out into the real world, and that's where I happen to live. We have to make compromises.
When the English people decided that our flirtation with being a republic was a failure, the some of the puritans who supported that republic refused to compromise, and left to start a new country across the Atlantic Ocean. They called themselves... Pilgrims.
Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone else will make a joke about police officers investigating tweets. That practice - which was put to an end a couple of years ago This claim is 100% false. We’ve seen multiple people jailed for tweets this year alone. > I have much greater faith in my government to protect my freedom of speech You don’t have free speech. The U.K. has no such general right. That’s why people are in jail for tweets.
...jailed for inciting rioting. That would land you in jail in the UK no matter what forum you said it in. No we have no right to incite people to riot in the UK. That is something I'm rather proud of.
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Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment talks about large platforms with opaque algorithms showing some content to hundreds of thousands of people. I will not debate the merits of this law in that context here. My objection addresses your example of a "small Mastodon instance", which I'll extend to include a hobbyist forum, a blog with a comment section, or any similar website that can be run by a single person or informal, noncommercial group…
Blog and news website comment sections are explicitly exempted from the Act. > A universal duty to moderate will accelerate the disappearance of hobbyist websites and further entrench corporate social media. I think that's a bad thing. I also mourn the loss of the lawless Internet, but it's spilling out into the real world, and that's where I happen to live. We have to make compromises. When the English people decide…
Do you think harmful behavior from anywhere online other than large platforms is spilling out into the real world in a way that the Online Safety Act will prevent? If so, can you offer examples?
Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone else will make a joke about police officers investigating tweets. That practice - which was put to an end a couple of years ago This claim is 100% false. We’ve seen multiple people jailed for tweets this year alone. > I have much greater faith in my government to protect my freedom of speech You don’t have free speech. The U.K. has no such general right. That’s why people are in jail for tweets.
...jailed for inciting rioting. That would land you in jail in the UK no matter what forum you said it in. No we have no right to incite people to riot in the UK. That is something I'm rather proud of.
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Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
#169As 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…
Seems like its not really possible to run an indie web site with a forum any more in the UK if you don't want to accept the risk of an 18 million pound fine -
Re: UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
#170We love our regulation, especially if the government can't easily tax it. Yet, we still have gambling adverts on UK TV and on football shirts. At the same time we've also banned adverts for "certain types" of porridge. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgrwzx8er9o
Well "porridge" is not a synonym for "healthy", but i see your point in gambling ads...
Goldilocks aside, I’ve not seen a family ruined by porridge. I have seen it first hand with gambling.