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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

#111

Post by greycol »

_fjg8 wrote: post #78
MassiveQuasar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'll remind you of two thing which a lot of people often forget with hobbies/volunteering and may make this argument moot for you: Just because someone gives time for free doesn't mean that time doesn't cost them or can easily be increased without significantly impacting the giver. Secondly that some parts of a hobby can be work that is required for the fun part of the hobby and changing the ratio of fun:work can kill any motivation for the hobby.

To your point even your extract from the link there are compliance costs.

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

Your source admits there are extra costs that will likely cause some small services to have to shutdown if the costs are to burdensome for them, they are just saying that they hope the costs are small enough that it doesn't put most small services in that position.

Even in your quote it explicitly lists extra costs. i.e. the cost of a compliant compliance tool. Obviously the government isn't going to implement it or spend the time moderating reports or abuse of reports. Which means the cost of extra hours moderating and setting it up are on the service provider.

"Must have an individual responsible for compliance". So either employ someone to take this risk or take on the risk and responsibility yourself and the associated due diligence costs (lawyers in the UK are only free if you're already losing hours of your life to the court system).

These costs will definetly push some people over the line to not wanting to host such services. Especially when the wording is so wide that you need to moderate out insults in your forum.

Jesus Christ! Your comment would probably be flagged as foreign propaganda to soft peddle broken UK policies, that is if the US had such rules. My comment should be flagged because that could be an insulting insinuation or the expletive at the start of this paragraph could be stirring up religious hatred by being needlessly blasphemous. And a moderator has to read the entire post to get to the non compliant part.

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

#112

Post by Asooka »

rich_sasha wrote: post #84
observationist wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I see no reason why hate speech should be given the benefit of the doubt. And no, it's not because my government told me so, I have my own opinion, which is that freedom of speech ends where threats of violence appear. If you don't want it tolerated online, which I don't, you need some kind of legal statement saying so. Like a law that says, you can't do it, and websites can't just shrug their shoulders and say it's…

The problem is that policing hate speech creates a police state worse than allowing hate speech to exist. The system you need to create to police the hate speech will result in more violence against people than letting the hate speech exist. To me, your very statement "freedom of speech ends where threats of violence appear" is a form of hate speech. You are hating on my principle of free speech. It actually makes me physically sick to read those words, because I know where they lead.

Generally on the Internet you would make use of existing tools to prevent people from talking to you if you find them hurtful. For example, I could just block you and not deal with you any more. Sometimes people get around those to harass others. That is definitely bad and we already have laws against harassment and ways for law enforcement to find those individuals without creating a full police state on the Internet. Posting your opinion once is not harassment, no matter how much it makes me want to puke. Or as we used to say in a more civilised time, I abhor your speech, but I will fight to the death for your right to speak it.

I don't know where you got your conclusion from - I am European and I don't mind violent speech. In fact I think we generally need a lot more freedom since many countries give their citizens barely more freedom than serfs had. School shootings have been a perennial favourite for your type to parade around so you can rule over a disarmed population, but e.g. Czechia lets you have a gun at home as easily as the USA and they do not have that problem. USA's problem is mostly societal.

Your opinion sounds like it was formed in the ivory tower of university with no connection with reality. Please get more varied life experience and reconsider your position.

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

#113

Post by x0x0 »

aimazon wrote: post #105
x0x0 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We pinky swear to totes not enforce the law as written [unless and until we decide, with no notice or warning, to do so] up to and including criminal penalties". Not as reassuring as you claim it to be.

We don’t need to trust what they say, we just need to engage in a little critical thinking. What’s the benefit for Ofcom in pursuing tiny websites? There’s no political benefit, no financial benefit… the guidance from Ofcom reaffirms the natural conclusion.

Sorry, but that's foolish beyond belief. The law allows and probably mandates them to do so. You can pretend that's not what the law says but it clearly does. And it was written with intent and advice, so that's what the writers intended as well.

But if it's so simple, volunteer. Take on the criminal penalties yourself and perform the reviews.

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

#114

Post by TeaBrain »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #53
mbostleman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By Internet do you mean Western Civilization?

I was gonna say looking at world affairs, it's starting to feel like the end of the Westphalian system.

Any pretense of the Westphalian system in most of Europe ended with the European Union.

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

#115

Post by jltsiren »

_bin_ wrote: post #102
jonathanstrange wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I geo-block UK visitors on all of my websites. It's sad but the safest solution.

why? if you're located elsewhere you can literally just ignore UK/EU law. they don't have jurisdiction over you; worst-case scenario is probably them ordering ISPs to block your site.

While the actual risk is minimal, countries do have reach beyond their borders.

For example, if you ever leave your home country to visit a third country, that country could arrest you and extradite you to the country that doesn't like you.

Or they could force any financial institution (or even any company) that wants to do business within their territory to stop doing business with you. The EU probably wouldn't do that, because it's difficult and expensive to get the member states agree on sanctions. The US does it regularly. The UK could probably try, but they have less leverage.

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

#116

Post by observationist »

rich_sasha wrote: post #109
thorncorona wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What defines hate speech? Who defines hate speech? Does hate speech result from the speech or the actions of those against the speech? Should the speech of protestors have consequences for disturbing the peace? What consequences should the state force onto individuals for speech, or actors affected by speech? Americans for lack of a better description grapple with violence of the state differently than Europeans, but…

This act itself, I believe, does not reference "hate speech", which as you seem to point out is ambiguous, and I in turn only use it as short hand. For the most part, this act says that content already considered illegal by existing and new laws must be policed by platforms. What is illegal is actually quite well defined, it seems. This article covers it nicely: https://www.theguardian.com/law/article/2024/aug/08/wha…

The practical impact is the self censorship and suppression of all sorts of speech because it's too onerous and burdensome to maintain. This effectively centralizes control, in as blatant and evil a way as the Great Firewall. Decades old forums and communities have been destroyed, all for the sake of... what? Things that were already criminal and offenders could be held to account?

Freedom of speech is a binary choice for a society. When you introduce politically motivated discretion and ambiguity, then instead of protecting people, such laws serve only as tools of power and control. With freedom of speech and press, the laws preclude any attempts at control like this. Freedom of expression and press supersede responsibility for the potential of other people doing something bad.

This is why they can't have nice things. It's the equivalent of shutting down businesses because you impose a law that 20 armed guards must attend every building 24x7, just in case some bad guys with guns try to get in.

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

#117

Post by rich_sasha »

Asooka wrote: post #112
rich_sasha wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no reason why hate speech should be given the benefit of the doubt. And no, it's not because my government told me so, I have my own opinion, which is that freedom of speech ends where threats of violence appear. If you don't want it tolerated online, which I don't, you need some kind of legal statement saying so. Like a law that says, you can't do it, and websites can't just shrug their shoulders and say it's…

The problem is that policing hate speech creates a police state worse than allowing hate speech to exist. The system you need to create to police the hate speech will result in more violence against people than letting the hate speech exist. To me, your very statement "freedom of speech ends where threats of violence appear" is a form of hate speech. You are hating on my principle of free speech. It actually makes me…

> To me, your very statement "freedom of speech ends where threats of violence appear" is a form of hate speech. You are hating on my principle of free speech. It actually makes me physically sick to read those words, because I know where they lead.

Hmm. Well, it's the US that has liberal freedom of speech and freedom of violence. It also has a "free speech absolutist" as a first buddy and that's going great too. To me that is a picture of where this kind of "absolute free speech" leads to, and I'm frankly happy with going in the opposite direction.

> Your opinion sounds like it was formed in the ivory tower of university with no connection with reality. Please get more varied life experience and reconsider your position.

You have literally no idea. I could easily say the same to you - except this is highly impolite. But suit yourself.

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

#118

Post by Yizahi »

kelnos wrote: post #48
hexator wrote: post #17

Feels more and more like we're at the end of an era when it comes to the internet.

How so? This is just the UK. While the UK really does want to enforce this globally, they really have no enforcement power against non-UK citizens who do not reside in the UK. Certainly it's possible (and perhaps likely!) that the EU and US will want to copycat this kind of law, but until that happens, I think your alarm is a bit of an overreaction.

USA has backdoor laws afaik. Sweden is targeting Signal to force them create a backdoor. And this is only from regular news, I'm not even reading infosec industry updates. All govts are targeting privacy tools and the clock is ticking for them. I'm only hoping that one day these fuckers will be targeted themselves via exploits they have forced on us.

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

#119

Post by ninininino »

jonatron wrote: post #75

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…

Sort of like burning down a library because you can't make it ADA compliant and install a wheelchair ramp.

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

#120

Post by kimixa »

mattlondon wrote: post #57
nerdile wrote: post #6

Summary: The UK has some Online Safety Act, any websites that let users interact with other users has to police illegal content on its site and must implement strong age verification checks. The law applies to any site that targets UK citizens or has a substantial number of UK users, where "substantial number" is not defined. I'm going to guess this forum is UK-based just based on all the blimey's. Also the forum see…

It's for 7 million active UK users per month. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli... - definition on page 64. That's quite sizeable. How many sites can you name have 7 million monthly active UK users? That's over one-in-ten of every man, woman and child in the UK every month using your site.

Yes, the actual draft doesn't really add many requirements to non "large" services, pretty much having a some kind of moderation system, have some way of reporting complains to that, and a filed "contact" individual. I note it doesn't require proactive internal detection of such "harmful" content that many people here seem to assume, just what they already have 'reason to believe' it's illegal content. Even hash-based CASM detection/blacklisted URLs isn't required until you're a larger provider or a file share product.

It just seems like an overly formalized way of saying "All forums should have a "report" button that actually goes somewhere", I'd expect that to be already there on pretty much every forum that ever existed. Even 4chan has moderators.

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