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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

#181

Post by edoceo »

sva_ wrote: post #165
josephg wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Maybe an LLM can carry some of the load here for free forums like this to keep operating? It can't give you any guarantees, and it can't be held liable for those mistakes.

And it misses the point that the law seems to, or could be used to, criminalise the simple discussion of unpleasant (to some) topics.

Without free discourse...well, I think it'd be real bad

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

#182

Post by jlaporte »

I sympathize with the operators of these forums of course -- the UK Online Safety Act is poorly conceived.

HOWEVER.

Deleting their forums? "The act will require a vast amount of work to be done on behalf of the Forums and there is no-one left with the availability to do it." [1]

This is a false dichotomy. Put Cloudflare in front of the site, block UK traffic [2], and you're done. 5 minute job.

[1] https://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/426608-looks-like-end-he...

[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/custom-rules/use-cases...

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

#183

Post by atherton33 »

jlaporte wrote: post #182

I sympathize with the operators of these forums of course -- the UK Online Safety Act is poorly conceived. HOWEVER. Deleting their forums? "The act will require a vast amount of work to be done on behalf of the Forums and there is no-one left with the availability to do it." [1] This is a false dichotomy. Put Cloudflare in front of the site, block UK traffic [2], and you're done. 5 minute job. [1] https://forums.hexu…

I don't know the detail here, but in many of the discussions I've seen the operators themselves are based in the UK, and that changes the calculus.

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

#184

Post by CrossVR »

psunavy03 wrote: post #128
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…

> 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.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by csense »

Rather than shut it down, would it be possible to sell the forum to someone in the US for a little bit of money, like $20 or something?

Idea being the US-based owner migrates the DB with posts and user logins to servers hosted on US soil, then if the UK government comes knocking the former owners in the UK can say "Sorry it doesn't belong to us anymore, we sold it, here's the Paypal receipt." (Ideally they'd sell the domain too, but as long as you still have the DB you could always host the forum at a different domain.)

Any forum admins here willing to add another forum to their portfolio?

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

#187

Post by dinkumthinkum »

thrance wrote: post #130
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…

How would you feel about receiving daily credible death threats to you and your family? Should that be tolerated too in the name of the first amendment? Point is, we must draw the line somewhere. It's never "everything goes". Tolerating intolerance always ends up reducing freedom of expression. Look at the US, the government is doing everything it can to shove trans people back in the closet, their voices are silence…

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”. It’s madness.

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

#188

Post by david422 »

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…

> I see no reason why hate speech should be given the benefit of the doubt

Because a lot of speech people don't like gets relabeled as hate speech - which is's not. Or a lot of discussion/debate topics that are sensitive get relabeled as hate.

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

#189

Post by __float »

jameskraus wrote: post #155
thereisnospork wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iirc UC Berkeley(?) did exactly that to their YouTube library of recorded lectures due to an accessibility lawsuit.

I still remember some of the Berkeley genetics lectures as some of the best learning materials I could find for my upper-level courses. Later I tried to refer to them and found they were all gone. I wish there was any other option vs. just taking them down.

I mean, there was the obvious solution of paying the money to have it captioned, which was the original order.

Berkeley instead offered this alternative solution, because they did not want to pay.

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

#190

Post by ss64 »

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.

First they came for the British And I did not speak out Because I was not British...
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