Staying ahead of censors in 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#331

Post by kolektiv » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 12:55 AM UTC

lukan wrote: post #298

graemep wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bviously a whole mob of people gathered around an abortion clinic and silently praying while you're trying to enter is intimidating and should qualify as harassment, but one person doing that clearly is not. The case I know of all involve individuals. Apart from silent prayer, a woman was arrested for holding up a sign saying that coercion was a crime and offering to talk to anyone who wanted to. Is that intimidati…

"Apart from silent prayer, a woman was arrested for holding up a sign saying that coercion was a crime and offering to talk to anyone who wanted to. Is that intimidating?" Depends on the context. Body language etc. But the main context is probably they were gathering in a place where it is forbidden to gather. Not arrested for praying or holding up signs.

Precisely this - it's the being there that was forbidden, not the act of praying - I'm not aware of any modern case where such a thing has been proscribed (at a guess, I would have said the last time was probably around the era of Cromwell, without checking).

Being there was forbidden for a specific group of people because they had a track record of harassing behaviour, much like a restraining order will likely be granted if someone has a track record of abusive behaviour towards another person. The praying thing is always mentioned as it makes it sound like some astonishing intervention in personal religion, while in reality, it's a complete red herring designed to rile people of a pre-existing viewpoint.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#332

Post by kolektiv » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 1:00 AM UTC

poszlem wrote: post #203

kolektiv wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, there's some context missing from those summaries though, no? In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity". They would have been arrested regardless of activity, it's effectively a restraining order and describing it as "for praying" is nonsense. In the second case, i…

Saying they were "just in an exclusion zone" is kind of a self-justifying excuse. It’s the same logic you see in authoritarian countries, like when Russian police arrest people for holding blank signs because they’re technically standing in a prohibited area. If the government can simply label certain places off-limits and turn ordinary, non-violent behaviour into a crime, then the rule of law stops being a protectio…

First of all, this is not, in any meaningful sense "the government" - the UK has an independent judiciary interpreting laws defined by parliament, but this was not at the behest of government in any reasonable sense.

Secondly, this is not the blanket labelling of a place as "off-limits" - it's off-limits to a specific group of people who have prior examples of harassing people in that location. It's no different in concept to a restraining order. A restraining order does not make the relevant locations unavailable to everyone, only those to whom the order applies, and the bar for one being granted is not, generally, negligible.

There are genuinely concerning cases where the right to protest has been curtailed (or is trying to be) in the UK at the moment. Some of the laws proposed around restriction of protest are illiberal and overreaching. This is not one of those instances though.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#333

Post by yanoleaf » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 3:28 AM UTC

Oh now you care, while conservatives were censored since 2020...

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#334

Post by 4bpp » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 10:58 AM UTC

Defletter wrote: post #326

4bpp wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that the people who made those remarks you cite considered them untrue themselves? If yes, you are suggesting bad faith (which should be grounds to extricate yourself from the discussion and/or call it out, not add fuel to the fire); if not, you are suggesting that factual disagreement is appropriately answered by childishness, which basically is saying that you think every discussion worth the name shou…

Do you also insist that we treat with proper decorum those who throw out assertions that jetfuel cannot melt steel beams? I notice you have yet to criticise them for posting what is at best misguided and unsubstantiated misinformation, and at worst disinformation. Hardly decorum on their part, is it? Instead, you are hyperfocusing on my "freeze peach", disregarding everything else I said in my comment. I find this to…

Well, I don't see anything obvious to criticise about what your interlocutors posted; their statements seem plausible enough to me, and if there is actually a knockout argument against them, I don't know it, because the person who seemed to disagree (you) was busy making childish noises instead of making it!

> jet fuel/steel beams

This debate was carried out sufficiently publicly that I got the sense people actually ran experiments confirming the pro-beam softening/structural failure/whatever case; certainly the "truther" case should have been taken seriously before that, and with decorum always because there is no situation in which any debate in a moderatable forum benefits from playground behaviour.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#335

Post by Defletter » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 11:58 AM UTC

4bpp wrote: post #334

Defletter wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also insist that we treat with proper decorum those who throw out assertions that jetfuel cannot melt steel beams? I notice you have yet to criticise them for posting what is at best misguided and unsubstantiated misinformation, and at worst disinformation. Hardly decorum on their part, is it? Instead, you are hyperfocusing on my "freeze peach", disregarding everything else I said in my comment. I find this to…

Well, I don't see anything obvious to criticise about what your interlocutors posted; their statements seem plausible enough to me, and if there is actually a knockout argument against them, I don't know it, because the person who seemed to disagree (you) was busy making childish noises instead of making it! > jet fuel/steel beams This debate was carried out sufficiently publicly that I got the sense people actually…

Alas, the distraction continues.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#336

Post by wartywhoa23 » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 12:00 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #324

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or else you'd be rallying just as hard to allow children to drink alcohol Why? I don't have a threshold at 127 in my luminance channel. Just a reminder - what children are allowed or not is not any government's business, it's parents' one. Which requires tearing their asses off from sofas and their eyes from screens and actually talk to their children and be in the know of their circles and activities.

I'm glad you agree that if a child happens to be born to parents who aren't very good at parenting, they deserve to suffer. Basically if a child's parents smoke around them and give them lung cancer, all we should do is yell at them and moan on the internet, not actually do anything (via the government) to prevent it. Nothing you've said contradicts that you think the government should not forbid children from buying…

I recommend you studying some history, especially that of Germany since 1920 till 1945, to help yourself part with the illusion that the government's overreaching care has anything to do with actual care, and to finally grok the essense of the saying:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#337

Post by wizzwizz4 » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #253

TacticalCoder wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been hearing lots of crazy things about people getting arrested in the UK for posting "memes" or things like that. Several (christians) people in the UK have been arrested for "praying in their heads" outside of an abortion facility. I don't find it classy to go pray for unborn babies that are getting "killed" but that's being arrested for a thought crime and it's not OK. But then hundreds of muslims regularly…

The first part of what you say is true. You can be arrested for what silent prayer with no outward sign - in other words for what was going in in your head. It is a thought crime. There are also arrests for reasonable free speech - for example holding up a placard offering to talk to women who were coerced into having an abortion. The second part is nonsense. Anyone of any religion or none doing the same thing would…

If there's no outward sign, then there's no evidence. I don't know what actually happened in this situation, but I know that's a misrepresentation.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#338

Post by stefantalpalaru » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 10:08 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #141

lukan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

I've been hearing lots of crazy things about people getting arrested in the UK for posting "memes" or things like that. So I decided to look for examples. All the examples I can find are clearly hate speech, policed more strongly than I would prefer but not that much more strongly, if I'm honest. The most egregious case I could find was someone arrested for a meme of a pride flag morphing into a swastika. Probably no…

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Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#339

Post by naasking » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 10:17 PM UTC

Defletter wrote: post #304

naasking wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the law explicitly specify that dry facts would be excluded? Or is it sufficiently broad that dry facts could be included if some over-zealous bureaucrats get it in their head that some speech or people are problematic? I am interested in the letter of the law, because that's what matters, not how it's being applied while the winds are blowing in a particular direction.

Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted under hate speech laws for stating facts in the 40-odd years since its passage? Why is this not just concern trolling? As to the general question, no, a statement being true does not immunise it from an accusation of it being used to stir up or incite hatred, or at the very least such a defence is not defined within the Public…

> Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted

To be clear, I haven't even looked, but being a recent topic of debate, it seems important to clearly establish the letter of the law.

> Why is this not just concern trolling?

Because the law-as-written is what matters, like I said, not the law-as-it-has-been-exercised-so-far. Unless you think people inclined to abuse the law will never be elected.

> I've attempted my own searches but have only encountered the usual suspects: holocaust deniers and their ilk

Depending on the specifics, that already seems problematic. There are also chilling effects that are not clearly visible until after the fact. How long have some people wanted to discuss the over representation of some ethnicities in sexual assault clusters, but couldn't because of these laws?

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#340

Post by Defletter » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 3:25 AM UTC

naasking wrote: post #339

Defletter wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted under hate speech laws for stating facts in the 40-odd years since its passage? Why is this not just concern trolling? As to the general question, no, a statement being true does not immunise it from an accusation of it being used to stir up or incite hatred, or at the very least such a defence is not defined within the Public…

> Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted To be clear, I haven't even looked, but being a recent topic of debate, it seems important to clearly establish the letter of the law. > Why is this not just concern trolling? Because the law-as-written is what matters, like I said, not the law-as-it-has-been-exercised-so-far. Unless you think people inclined to abuse the la…

> How long have some people wanted to discuss the over representation of some ethnicities in sexual assault clusters, but couldn't because of these laws?

I don't know, perhaps you should give some examples of this actually happening rather than relying solely on implication.