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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

#191

Post by rsync »

Forgive me if I’m being dense…

I just read through the entire HN discussion about lobste.rs and continued down that rabbit hole to other discussions of forum, deletions, and the safety act, etc.

The part I don’t understand is: Why aren’t these operators placing the forum into a corporate or partnership entity, without personal liability, that would be the target of some eventual enforcement?

These very small forums Are almost certainly not going to be targeted for enforcement… The issue is simply the risk…

… So why not just incorporate, go on your merry way, and if enforcement goes very differently than we all assume then you walk away from a corporate entity And continue to vacation in London without fear of arrest.

What am I missing here?

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

#192

Post by potato3732842 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #79
mjburgess wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Clearly that's nonsense, but I do understand the underlying desire.

I wanna eat hamburgers like Peter Griffin in the stroke episode. But I don't because I'm an adult with logical thinking abilities and I know that there are consequences to my actions even if they are not immediate.

I have less, much less, than zero sympathy for people who advocate for doing things with law and government that the history textbooks are stuffed full of the horrific and nearly inevitable eventual consequences of.

Having benign motives doesn't absolve people for being stupid.

Not that any of this is in disagreement with your points.

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

#193

Post by will4274 »

energy123 wrote: post #180
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…

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.

During the Rwandan genocide, the radio stations played incitement to violence. While "hate speech" is inclusive of speech that incites violence, the types of hate speech which people have contemporary political disagreements about (including this thread) do not include such incitement.

More importantly, causality doesn't erase culpability. The step that immediately preceded the [Charlie Hebdo shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting) was publishing a cartoon in a newspaper. Those who create hateful environments may have some culpability, but those that act almost always have greater culpability than those who speak.

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

#194

Post by j8k99kuyr »

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…

[flagged]

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

#195

Post by energy123 »

will4274 wrote: post #193
energy123 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

During the Rwandan genocide, the radio stations played incitement to violence. While "hate speech" is inclusive of speech that incites violence, the types of hate speech which people have contemporary political disagreements about (including this thread) do not include such incitement. More importantly, causality doesn't erase culpability. The step that immediately preceded the [Charlie Hebdo shooting]( https://en.wi…

The incitement to violence came later, at the climax, after the hatred was distilled via the type of hate speech we are discussing here. This is the etiology of all internal genocides. They all follow the same pattern. Attempting to inderdict the genocide just as the calls to violence are happening is too late, because the population is too radicalized by that point.

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

#196

Post by eikenberry »

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…

> [..] as the highs of repressive christian moralism in the mid 20th C.

What makes you pick the mid-20th century as the high point of repressive christian moralism? That doesn't seem even close to the high point if you look back further in history.

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

#197

Post by kieranmaine »

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…

In the linked PDF, where does it say you can't discuss using drugs?

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

#198

Post by will4274 »

rsync wrote: post #191

Forgive me if I’m being dense… I just read through the entire HN discussion about lobste.rs and continued down that rabbit hole to other discussions of forum, deletions, and the safety act, etc. The part I don’t understand is: Why aren’t these operators placing the forum into a corporate or partnership entity, without personal liability, that would be the target of some eventual enforcement? These very small forums A…

The corporate veil can be pierced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil. From the Wikipedia page, it sounds like this is most common in the United Kingdom when a corporation "is established to avoid an existing obligation" - which is exactly what you're suggesting. I am not licensed to practice law anywhere, but particularly not in the United Kingdom, where I have never been.

To my understanding working at American non-profits, however, corporations are most helpful as a liability shield when they are clearly distinct entities, with distinct goals, and distinct decision making. In practice, that means having multiple people, writing some sort of charter / statement of purpose, and having quarterly meetings of a board of directors with quorums where notes are written and votes are taken. This can all be a fair bit of work, where before nothing was required.

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

#199

Post by londons_explore »

jacooper wrote: post #173
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.

gdpr compliance depends a lot on who you ask, and only a court can make the final decision.

Stripping all usernames out of a forum certainly makes it safer, but I don't think anyone can say there still won't be a few pissed off users who wrote things they now regret on there, and can be tracked back to individuals based on context/writing style alone.

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

#200

Post by jheriko »

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…

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