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

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

#291

Post by TeaBrain »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #129
TeaBrain wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then how come the UK has left the European Union? This is a common misunderstanding, but a misunderstanding nonetheless. Any country in the EU has full sovereignty and chooses to exercise it by combining forces with other countries in order to strengthen their combined influence in the wider world.

>Then how come the UK has left the European Union?

Are you suggesting that if the European Union were post-Westphalian that the UK wouldn't be able to leave? Not sure how that follows. That the EU is a post-Westphalian system is not a new idea.

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

#292

Post by mjburgess »

notatty wrote: post #207
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…

I mean, is it impossible that the commodified web is a sufficient but not necessary condition for atrocities? "But we had the Holocaust without it!" Okay, nobody said the internet was THE cause of ALL atrocities, just that it's actively contributing to today's atrocities. I think your logic is a bit... wrong.

That's not quite my argument. A little more formally:

There's a base rate of human malevolence running in each society. We do not know this base rate, and we can only sample malevolence via mass media (, police reports, etc.). If the mass media (including internet) were a neutral measurement device then we could say for sure that what we're seeing is just the background conditions of society leading to eg., riots, etc.

Because our measuring device isnt neutral we have a problem: are the things we see caused by our measuring? Do we cause more malevolence by participating in social media, which also makes us aware of it?

My argument is that we are presently significantly over-estimating the effect of our participation in the internet as a cause. My view is that its effects at reducing bad-stuff are likely more potent than its effects at causing it, and the vast majority of what we see isn't caused by the internet at all.

One argument for this is that it seems baseline malevolence (violence, etc.) is significantly decreasing, is historically very high, and that nothing we see via the internet is suprisingly above this historical case.

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

#293

Post by dinkumthinkum »

thrance wrote: post #288
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death threats are not protected by free speech. I know you are trying to make a hyperventilating political point but it’s just not a genuine thing. I am a little surprised at the anoint of those on HN that are against free speech. I mean, don’t you realize that without it, a government you don’t like could imprison you for “denying basic facts oh biology” just as another country does for “denying historical events”.…

Yes, death threats are not protected by your free speech, that was my entire point that you completely missed. Why then not allow them but allow flurries of racial slurs? Or harassment? Or foreign propaganda? The line is never "anything goes", we have to draw it somewhere . So, why act like anything other than "anything goes" is "literally 1984". In Europe, it's "La liberté des uns s'arrête là où commence celle des a…

No that’s just nonsense. The line is drawn at actual death threats. Anything else does lead to 1984.

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

#294

Post by psunavy03 »

CrossVR wrote: post #184
psunavy03 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Liberal gun laws mean lots of people have them, logically leading to more people being shot. Explain Czechia and Switzerland, then, please.

Switzerland has a strong permit system allowing the government to control who can purchase a firearm. Automatic firearms and concealed carry permits are given sparingly and only for a good reason. Basically unlike the U.S. Switzerland doesn't view background checks and permits as a slippery slope to a dictatorship and implements them effectively.

You don't seem to understand US gun laws . . . especially in the bluest of blue states, which have restrictions which make Switzerland and Czechia look like Somalia in comparison.

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

#295

Post by hexator »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #238
hexator wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Moderation wouldn't disappear, it would just become controlled by the user.

Yes, it would. Any site offering moderation capabilities of any kind would be open to legal attack. That is enough to make it infeasible for any smaller site to have moderation, unless they're big tech of course (which is why they're OK with this)

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

#296

Post by _Wintermute »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #176
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.

Looks like it's staying: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401988/#comment17640529

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

#297

Post by senorrib »

crimsoneer wrote: post #255
DarkmSparks wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not a slippery slope, its carte blanche for a police force with a reputation for e.g. beating elderly people to death because they looked at them wrong (most famous being Ian Tomlison, but its fairly regular) to not have to hold back just simply because they run into a locked door. And that is before you get into the court system, which if you need a quick primer, just look at the treatment of Julian Assange - an…

I'm sorry, are you accusing the UK police of killing more innocent old people than the US police? Because if so that's a funny joke.

I'm here wondering in which part of that statement there's a comparison to the US police.

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

#299

Post by a_dabbler »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #258
rorylawless wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kier Starmer is (pretty much) to the UK what JD Vance is to the US. Appointed by the head of state. Meets the head of state regularly to be told what to do (wednesdays iirc). Think about what it has taken for you to say what you just said despite those facts. We are also talking about what is still the richest, most most powerful family on the planet. You think Elon musk is rich for owning Tesla and Twitter, these gu…

To say the British monarchy "owns" Canada and Australia is comical

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

#300

Post by stainablesteel »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #249
stainablesteel wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aggress…

> 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 That post only works if you use an absolutely ridiculous definition of hate speech. It does not show a flaw in the opposing argument. It's not an example of a rule being applied arbitrarily. It's an example of falsely claiming a rule applies when it objective…

Nope, it makes sense and you're the only one here whose lacking an example. Any definition of hate speech is ridiculous because grown adults who try to control the speech of others are all ridiculous.
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