Earlier quoted context omitted.
IANAL, but I assume this could open Wikimedia leadership to charges of contempt and eventually lead to needing to avoid visiting the UK or other extraditing countries and potentially pave the way for asset seizures. You generally don't want to antagonize world power governments.
That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not wikimedia’s responsibility to ensure people from the UK don’t hit their servers by typing wikipedia.org into the browser bar.
Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
441–450 of 887 posts
Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
#442The Online Safety Act is a hideous piece of legislation. I hope Wikipedia block the UK. (I am a UK citizen).
it will achieve absolutely nothing, except to destroy their "market share"
Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those petitions aren't really worth anything - governments have ignored ones with over six million signatures before. And they also ignored this one a few years back that had just under 700,000 signatures to "make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account": https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/575833 Ironically, the primary reason they gave for rejecting it was: > However, restricting…
It's quite right that petitions are (mostly) ignored in Parliamentary matters, IMHO. MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their constituents. Bills are debated, revised, voted on multiple times. There are consultations and input from a board range of view points. A petition is in effect trying to shout over all that process from the street outside.
It's been decades since the UK had any genuine bottom-up policy representation for ordinary people.
Petitions are the only mechanism which produces some shadow of a memory of a that.
Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
People read "greater emphasis on the needs of victims" and stop processing afterwards.
No, we didn't. We knew what we were voting for. And I'd vote the same way today.
I guess it is at least consistent with your belief that there is a mandate for Project 2025.
Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
#445Suppression of information is not safety, it’s control.
Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those petitions aren't really worth anything - governments have ignored ones with over six million signatures before. And they also ignored this one a few years back that had just under 700,000 signatures to "make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account": https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/575833 Ironically, the primary reason they gave for rejecting it was: > However, restricting…
The other point is that recent polls suggest the British public are overwhelmingly in support of this legislation [0], which is not reflected in most of the narrative we see online. Whether they support how it has been implemented is a different matter, but the desire to do something is clear. [0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other point is that recent polls suggest the British public are overwhelmingly in support of this legislation [0], which is not reflected in most of the narrative we see online. Whether they support how it has been implemented is a different matter, but the desire to do something is clear. [0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
As always, the devil is in the details. Very careful wording: >do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material? "may" is doing the heavy lifting. Any website that hosts image "may" contain pornograohic content. So they don't associate this with "I need id to watch YouTube" it's "I need ID to watch pornhub". Even though this affects both. O…
Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you against any kind of content restriction whatsoever or just porn?
I am generally against content restrictions. I am actually OK with restrictions on pornography. The UK government has engaged political censorship throughout my lifetime. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%931994_British_broa... I still remember the stupid Irish dubbing on the news. I thought it was hilarious when I was 10. Some of it the public are often unaware of e.g super injunctions. https://en.wikipe…
Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already have a constitution. It just isn't a written constitution: > The United Kingdom constitution is composed of the laws and rules that create the institutions of the state, regulate the relationships between those institutions, or regulate the relationship between the state and the individual. These laws and rules are not codified in a single, written document. Source for that quote is parliamentary: https://…
Right of course every state has a "constitution" but the contemporary connotation of the word means an enforceable law that meaningfully constrains the state's power.