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Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

forums.hexus.net

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Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

#71

Post by rich_sasha »

staticautomatic wrote: post #65
rich_sasha wrote: post #59

It's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere. At some level, I think…

Hate and radicalization are products of existential purposelessness. You can’t make them go away by preventing existentially purposeless people from talking to each other.

No, you can't, but also theres is no reason why the law about allow these to be up. Plenty of people have racist thoughts, and that's not illegal (thoughts in general aren't), but go print a bunch of leaflets inciting racist violence and that is illegal.

I see this as an internet analogy.

Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

#72

Post by macintux »

cjs_ac wrote: post #47
aqueueaqueue wrote: post #37

Some kinda online safety law is probably needed (download button is just up there if you must :/) but there should be a carve out for small operations. Set a revenue minimum or something.

The Act does in fact scale the obligations according to the size of the community/service.

But size and revenue/budget are different things entirely. Does it scale down to pocket change for large community forums with no commercial backing?

Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

#73

Post by observationist »

rich_sasha wrote: post #59

It's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere. At some level, I think…

You don't. "Hate speech" is code for "the government knows better and controls what you say."

Yes, racism exists and people say hateful things.

Hate speech is in the interpretation. The US has it right with the first amendment - you have to be egregiously over the line for speech to be illegal, and in all sorts of cases there are exceptions and it's almost always a case-by-case determination.

Hateful things said by people being hateful is a culture problem, not a government problem. Locking people up because other people are offended by memes or shitposts is draconian, authoritarian, dystopian nonsense and make a mockery of any claims about democracy or freedom. Europe and the UK seem hellbent for leather to silence the people they should be talking with and to. The inevitable eventual blowback will only get worse if stifling, suppressing, and prosecuting is your answer to frustrations and legitimate issues felt deeply but badly articulated.

Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

#74

Post by MassiveQuasar »

aimazon wrote: post #66
rjbwork wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just read any of the writing by the people operating these fora that are closing.

I have read every post, every article, every piece of guidance. I’m asking for specifics, not hand waving. What are the actual compliance costs?

> I have read every post, every article, every piece of guidance.

Prove it. I’m asking for specifics, not hand waving.

Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

#75

Post by jonatron »

HEXUS stopped publishing in 2021, and the company no longer exists. The forums were kept because they don't take much work to keep online. Now, there's a lot of work to do, like reading hundreds of pages of documents and submitting risk assessments. There's nobody to do that work now, so the idea was it could go into read only mode. The problem with that was, some users may want their data deleted if it becomes read only. Therefore, the only option is to delete it.

Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

#77

Post by mjburgess »

rich_sasha wrote: post #71
staticautomatic wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate and radicalization are products of existential purposelessness. You can’t make them go away by preventing existentially purposeless people from talking to each other.

No, you can't, but also theres is no reason why the law about allow these to be up. Plenty of people have racist thoughts, and that's not illegal (thoughts in general aren't), but go print a bunch of leaflets inciting racist violence and that is illegal. I see this as an internet analogy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Quran_burnings_in_Sweden

Does burning a religious book "incite violence" ? It causes it, for sure. Free expression brings about, in the fanatic, a great desire to oppress the speaker. That's why we have such a freedom in the first place.

Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

#78

Post by _fjg8 »

MassiveQuasar wrote: post #74
aimazon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read every post, every article, every piece of guidance. I’m asking for specifics, not hand waving. What are the actual compliance costs?

> I have read every post, every article, every piece of guidance. Prove it. I’m asking for specifics, not hand waving.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...

Last month.

“ We’ve heard concerns from some smaller services that the new rules will be too burdensome for them. Some of them believe they don’t have the resources to dedicate to assessing risk on their platforms, and to making sure they have measures in place to help them comply with the rules. As a result, some smaller services feel they might need to shut down completely.

So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is unlikely to be the case“

“If organisations have carried out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment and determined, with good reason, that the risks they face are low, they will only be expected to have basic but important measures to remove illegal content when they become aware of it. These include:

easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions; a complaints tool that allows users to report illegal or harmful material when they see it, backed up by a process to deal with those complaints; the ability to review content and take it down quickly if they have reason to believe it is illegal; and a specific individual responsible for compliance, who we can contact if we need to.”

Your turn. Where are these compliance costs?

Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

#79

Post by rich_sasha »

mjburgess wrote: post #69
rich_sasha wrote: post #59

It's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere. At some level, I think…

Is it a thing? I mean we had the holocaust, Rwandan genocide and the transatlantic slave trade without the internet. The discovery, by the governing classes, that people are often less-than-moral is just as absurd as it sounds. More malign and insidious is that these governors think it is their job to manage and reform the people -- that people, oppressed in their thinking and association enough -- will be easy to go…

It is a thing for sure. How often it happens, I don't know.

I read a number of stories about school children being cyber-bullied on some kind of semi-closed forum. Some of these ended in suicide. Hell, it uses to happen a lot on Facebook in the early days.

I totally understand a desire to make it illegal, past a certain threshold. I can see how you start off legislating with this in mind, then 20 committees later you end up with some kind of death star legislation requiring every online participant to have a public key and court-attested age certificate, renewed annually. Clearly that's nonsense, but I do understand the underlying desire.

Because without it, you have no recourse if you find something like this online. For action to be even available, there has to be a law that says it's illegal.

Re: Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

#80

Post by verisimi »

rich_sasha wrote: post #59

It's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere. At some level, I think…

> online hate and radicalization really is a thing

People have always had opinions. Some people think other people's opinions are poor. Talking online was already covered by the law (eg laws re slander).

Creating the new category of 'hate speech' is more about ensuring legal control of messages on a more open platform (the internet) in a way that wasn't required when newspapers and TV could be managed covertly. It is about ensuring that the existing control structures are able to keep broad control of the messaging.

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