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Staying ahead of censors in 2025

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Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#101

Post by XorNot »

lugu wrote: post #97
throwfaraway135 wrote: post #17

Considering the staggering number of arrest for online/offensive communications in England & Wales, we should add Britain to the list of Russia and Iran 2017: ~5,500 arrests 2019: ~7,734 arrests 2023: ~12,183 arrests

Am I living in a parallel universe or are you just a troll. In Iran you criticize the government on social media and you get arrested. In the UK you promote Nazi ideology and you get arrested. Is that really the same thing for you? Are you not seeing it?

He's a troll because those also aren't the real numbers. The UK law categorizes arrests under this category in the same bucket as domestic violence arrests.

The people talking about this never make the distinction.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#102

Post by OtherShrezzing »

throwfaraway135 wrote: post #17

Considering the staggering number of arrest for online/offensive communications in England & Wales, we should add Britain to the list of Russia and Iran 2017: ~5,500 arrests 2019: ~7,734 arrests 2023: ~12,183 arrests

>2023: ~12,183 arrests

These numbers are for _all_ arrests under the Malicious Communications Act in that year. So while that category includes arrests for tweets, it also includes all arrests for any offensive communications via an internet-enabled device. So it'd include arrests for domestic abuse where at least one component of the abuse was through WhatsApp. Similarly, it can include just about any arrest where the crime was planned on an internet enabled device.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#103

Post by eloisius »

curtisblaine wrote: post #68
Defletter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is It can be, but free speech types like to pretend it's nigh impossible. The UK has had modern hate-speech laws (for want of a better term) since the Public Order Act 1986, which made it an offence to stir up or incite racial hatred. Amendments in 2006 and 2008 expanded that to religious and homophobic hatred respectively. This exists in stark c…

Norwood vs UK was about Norwood displaying an "Islam out of Britain" sign. Samuel Melia was jailed 2 years for publishing downloadable stickers saying "Mass immigration is white genocide," "Second-generation? Third? Fourth? You have to go back," and "Labour loves Muslim r pe gangs". Are those messages controversial? For sure. Should originator of these messages be prosecuted? I don't think so. Are anti-christian, "de…

If you want to spell rape on HackerNews you can just spell it. There’s nothing wrong with using the word in its proper context, or in quotations. There’s no algorithm censoring the word, and you’re not shielding someone from “getting triggered” by replacing the vowels with an underscore.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#104

Post by aetherson »

llmslave2 wrote: post #89
earthnail wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d much rather get arrested in Britain than Russia or Iran. And I certainly wouldn’t put the UK in the same bucket as Russia and Iran. Not even close. Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms? It’s a direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus. I don’t think we’ve found the right, effective way to deal with this problem yet, but I applaud any democ…

I'd rather get arrested in the UK too, but that's completely irrelevant. > Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms? Non-sequitur. The existence of troll farms doesn’t mean it's such a big problem that we should give up our rights surrounding speech and communication that we fought hard for.

I don't think it's completely irrelevant. Can we admit some nuance where the UK's fast ramp up of arrests for previously legal speech is genuinely concerning, but also that raw number of arrests (not even convictions!) is not the only basis for comparison?

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#105

Post by jmnicolas »

widdershins wrote: post #99
nomilk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also surprised the post focusses on Rus/Iran when Australia, UK, and many more countries (Malaysia, Thailand) have/are introducing laws to prevent large swaths of free speech (banning mediums by age, banning conversation by topic, or by making speaking one's mind online too risky, as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech').

> almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech' I only know about the UK, but this is not really true there. Your speech has to be obviously threatening or abusive, and obviously motivated by prejudice towards one of a few categories (disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation are the main ones). If you don't make threatening or abusive remarks towards these groups, you…

"Abusive" and "threatening" is "in the eye of the beholder".

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#106

Post by dmm »

earthnail wrote: post #22
throwfaraway135 wrote: post #17

Considering the staggering number of arrest for online/offensive communications in England & Wales, we should add Britain to the list of Russia and Iran 2017: ~5,500 arrests 2019: ~7,734 arrests 2023: ~12,183 arrests

I’d much rather get arrested in Britain than Russia or Iran. And I certainly wouldn’t put the UK in the same bucket as Russia and Iran. Not even close. Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms? It’s a direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus. I don’t think we’ve found the right, effective way to deal with this problem yet, but I applaud any democ…

> Hate speech is a problem.

I agree, 100%. Donald Trump should have the power to jail people for things they say online.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#107

Post by lukan »

nomilk wrote: post #18
throwfaraway135 wrote: post #17

Considering the staggering number of arrest for online/offensive communications in England & Wales, we should add Britain to the list of Russia and Iran 2017: ~5,500 arrests 2019: ~7,734 arrests 2023: ~12,183 arrests

I was also surprised the post focusses on Rus/Iran when Australia, UK, and many more countries (Malaysia, Thailand) have/are introducing laws to prevent large swaths of free speech (banning mediums by age, banning conversation by topic, or by making speaking one's mind online too risky, as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech').

"as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech'"

Are you serious here?

In russia you get problems for calling a war a war and worse problems if you say it is a bad war.

In UK you certainly can call a war a war and you can critize the government or other people all day long. What you cannot do is calling for violence against them. Or do you have counterexamples?

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#108

Post by phkx »

n4r9 wrote: post #88
phkx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking into the situation in the UK specifically, I found a description of the potentially underlying issues [1] and those are indeed worrisome. I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post. Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), p…

> I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post. It's started cropping up in almost any thread related to free speech or censorship, and comes directly from the mouth of right-wing darling Tommy Robinson [0]. [0] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...

I‘m acting a bit naïve of course ;) The comments are simply dominated by the root comment, which does not even try to put it into context of the linked post. On top, it‘s a comment riding the outrage wave. There’s no contextualization (a number is only the beginning of a story, not the end). Not a substantiated starting point for an exchange on the matter. I‘d just like to see better on HN.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#109

Post by mlrtime »

mrtksn wrote: post #69
RobotToaster wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put that into perspective, the number arrested in Russia was 3,253 in 2023.

Sounds like Russians learned their lesson. There's similar phenomenon in safety stats. In the stats Istanbul appears to be vastly safer than London but having lived in both, I can tell you why Istanbul is safer: Because public spaces don't exist and private spaces are guarded with bars and steel doors. In London, there's pubs etc. everywhere, in Istanbul you are limited to few centers to be outside after 10. The plac…

I say the exact same thing about living in NYC. It is statistically safe if you look at murders per capita compared to a rural area. But that one statistic tells you nothing about what kind of random crap you have to put up with on a day to day basis taking a 45 minute subway commute daily that isn't collected in any statistic.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#110

Post by mlrtime »

mmsc wrote: post #2

Does anybody know what the situation is like in China these days? What's the most commonly used tool for proxying now? Does basically all network leaving China still get ratelimited at a few megabytes per second?

Nothing to add other than I have no idea what the list of tech in the replies are here, and I consider myself somewhat up to date on most tech... strange world.
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