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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

#171

Post by rorylawless »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #153
RLN wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I knew when I left (I was the last of my school year to do so) it was going to get bad once Elizabeth died How small was your school year?! What does Elizabeth (presumably the 2nd) dying have to do with anything?

>What does Elizabeth (presumably the 2nd) dying have to do with anything? Lets just say her replacements brother is Andrew, and his best mate was Jimmey Saville. Should tell you all you need to know about her replacement with less chance of me ending up like David Kelly. Heads of state do matter, regardless of how much propaganda they push that they only matter in other countries. These laws are not something the lab…

I don’t understand this. The monarchy hasn’t had influence over parliament and the government for over 300 years. You may be able to point to attempts at doing so (eg the Black Spider letter), however, parliament is fully sovereign.

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

#172

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

> You are hating on my principle of free speech.

Do you really think you are contributing to the conversation when you say things like this?

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

#173

Post by jacooper »

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…

Why don't they just anonymize the users? Discourse does this, and it's apparently GDPR compliant.

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

#174

Post by stainablesteel »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #172
Asooka wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You are hating on my principle of free speech. Do you really think you are contributing to the conversation when you say things like this?

that is a genuine contribution to the conversation, it points out the opposing argument doesn't make any sense and that the rules are just applied arbitrarily

instead of applying them arbitrarily (which you won't like when your political party isn't in power), just apply them fairly across the board regardless of whose in charge so we can coexist in a civilized manner without the kind of extreme psychological aggression that takes place in the heart of censorship

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

#175

Post by LAC-Tech »

sedatk wrote: post #158
massifgreat wrote: post #11

These UK laws might boost Tor usage.. let's hope something good will come from the full censorship political tyranny in Europe.

If enough people switch to Tor, then Tor will get banned. Technical solutions don’t fix bad policies.

If you're in a struggle against a hostile regime, you don't refuse to use the weapons available to you because they're not what will bring you final victory. You use whatever you can.

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

#176

Post by femiagbabiaka »

ziddoap wrote: post #15

Related post with a large discussion from someone who said: " Lfgss shutting down 16th March 2025 (day before Online Safety Act is enforced) [...] I run just over 300 forums, for a monthly audience of 275k active users. most of this is on Linode instances and Hetzner instances, a couple of the larger fora go via Cloudflare, but the rest just hits the server. and it's all being shut down [...] " For the same reasons.…

LFGSS was a legendary forum, sad to see it go.

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

#177

Post by mullingitover »

josephg wrote: post #157
mjburgess wrote: post #44

What is the meaning of "illegal content" given in the OSA? What will social media platforms be forced to censor (, remove, ..) ... let's take a look: Table 1.1: Priority offences by category ( https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli... ) Disucssion of offenses related to: prostitution, drugs, abuse & insults, suicide, "stiring up of racial/religious hatred", fraud and "foreign interference". So o…

> This free-thinking university student's entire online life seems to have been criminalised in mere discussion by the OSA There's nothing illegal about hosting a forum. The problem is that you as the site operator are legally required to take down certain kinds of content if and when it appears. Small sites with no money or staff don't have the resources to pay for a full time moderator. That cost scales with the nu…

This seems to be what the anti-Section 230 folks are going for. The UK just...went ahead and did it?

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

#178

Post by hexator »

gotoeleven wrote: post #89
hexator wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar laws are being written elsewhere, Section 230 may not last the next few years. It's not just the UK.

Well the attacks on section 230 from the right are about removing censorship not adding censorship so I'm not sure section 230 is a good comparison.

You mean moderation. People are freaking out because they were banned from places for saying awful shit. Removing section 230 removes the right to moderation, which would kill the internet as we know it. It would become like cable internet.

EFF summary on Section 230: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

choo-t wrote: post #125
aimazon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those things are buttons to click and ship with every piece of forum software from the last decade. No forum can survive without moderation because of spam so these tools and policies will already be in place on every website with user generated content.

Some forum use custom backend, and updating them for an asinine law may not be the maintainer priority. Having someone dedicated to contact with this authority is also a burden on hobbyist projects.

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by energy123 »

observationist wrote: post #73
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 p…

Hate speech is the thing that plays on the radio station that directly causes the mass graves of the Rwandan genocide. The physical call to violence is just the very last step in a long chain of escalating hate speech, but it is no more culpable than the preceding hate speech that created the environment where that physical call to violence is acted on.
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