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Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

bbc.com

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Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#481

Post by MSFT_Edging »

yupyupyups wrote: post #285
matt-p wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School bullys, parents, friends, community members, church leaders and many others I imagine. The idea was that it would have your real name and it was verified by your ID.

>parents You do understand that there are creeps out there grooming children, right? Parents definitely do need to have oversight over their own kids. Children should absolutely not have privacy on the internet. The ID requirement is terrible, but saying that children need privacy to explore their sexuality on the internet is very problematic. If this is the position the UK government holds then that brings into ques…

Minors are still humans who deserve rights. They should not be considered property of parents, regardless of fear mongering about grooming. Teenagers should have the right to access information without their parents knowing, as their parents can be just as, if not more dangerous to their health and well being as a hypothetical groomer. Many teens face real abuse from their parents over their sexuality. They should not be forced to live in the shadows or face abuse due to a "protect the kids" narrative.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#482

Post by popopo73 »

RobKohr wrote: post #187
vaylian wrote: post #182

Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information. But it's also Wikipedia's greatest strength that it has been so open to basically everyone and that gave us a wide range of really good articles that rivaled the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia is a product of the free internet. It is a product of a world that many politicians still…

I feel that the left and the right are tag teaming on this topic. Both sides want to track who says what on the internet for their own purposes.

I think it is a bit simpler than that.

People don't like their worldview challenged, no matter their ideology.

Politicians exploit this by offering ways to "help", but at the cost of transferring more power away from the people.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#483

Post by johnnyanmac »

vladms wrote: post #405
michaelt wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of 1990s tech optimists thought that people with awful opinions were the unfortunate victims of a lack of access to books and education; and the strict gatekeeping of broadcast media by the powerful. This new multi-media technology was going to give everyone on the planet access to a complete free university education, thousands of books, and would prevent the likes of Chinese state-run media suppressing knowle…

To be fair, we have lots of things that people in the '90 were just hoping for (in medicine, tech, average world wealth, etc), but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results. Also, I think tech optimists might have a tendency to ignore how slow changes actually happen (thinking of how many times we got promised self driving cars or fusion). My impression is that the covid pandemic had a huge psychological…

>but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.

Yes. The techis mostly there, and a few decades later it's readily available and cheap enough to be almost universally available. But you can't make a horse drink. The old guard may have underestimated the power of a cult and this attraction to authoritarianism. I didn't believe it either some decade ago. But seeing it before my eyes shows the folly of man.

COVID was definitely an accelerator for all these bad traits to come out of the woodwork. It could have been any economic downfall, but a global pandemic requiring a simple behavior to not die really showed this odd. If "wear a mask or you'll die" can't convince some people, I'm not sure what can.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#484

Post by panzi »

layer8 wrote: post #44
rawbot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the age of AI chatbots having consumed all of Wikipedia, its relevance has waned. So I don't think they have the same pull as they did before.

In the recent ChatGPT 5 launch presentation, ChatGPT 5 answered a question about how airplane wings produce uplift incorrectly, despite the corresponding Wikipedia page providing the correct explanation and pointing out ChatGPT’s explanation as a common misconception. AI chatbots are only capable of outputting “vibe knowledge”.

Yeah, but even so people use that nonsense, not checking if anything is correct. I suspect not enough people would notice that Wikipedia is inaccessible, sadly.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#485

Post by panzi »

andsoitis wrote: post #330
nickslaughter02 wrote: post #10

Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind. Remember the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" petition? It has gotten over half a million signatures and the response from the government was a loud "no". > The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and eff…

> Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind. It is a gamble. If people increasingly get their “encyclopedic” information via AI, then it might make almost no noise and then the govt will have even more leverage.

I commented basically the same and also got down voted. Do people just down vote comments that make them sad?

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#486

Post by johnnyanmac »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #409
johnnyanmac wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did they raise no one to replace them?

Economic infantilisation and the new productised and externalised way of being brought upon by social media. We were an autopilot society that thought it had no need to restate values or keep innovating. The things that used to matter like community bonds and values dont matter literally because we cant see them in an instagram post and they may as well not exist- plus the media and public sphere dysfunction we see t…

>If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.

Maybe I'm a bit dramatic here, but the subtext I seem to get is that "legacy media is dying out and we're not going to cede power easily. Even if we burn the country down with us."

There's no graceful transfer to the next generation like usual (or perhaps, there never was a graceful transfer to begin with). It has this apocalyptic feeling where the old guard wants to do any and everything they want and don't care what happens after they are gone. Not every boomer, but it's the generation with those people in power.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#487

Post by autoexec »

msgodel wrote: post #346
cm2012 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a statistical correlation. Who loves porn demographically? 1) Men. 2) Men age 18-40 in particular. 3) No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason. So a survey of HN users would show more pro-porn respondents than a survey of the UK or the US or EU as a whole.

In a number of recent polls in English speaking countries young men have been one of the strongest anti-porn demographics actually. I think HN being tech adjacent with the history and practical reality of how the internet works along with being more libertarian (or at least liberal) is going to bias that more than the gender distribution.

I don't put much faith in polls generally, but I put even less faith in polls where people are asked how they feel about porn. I don't think you can come to any reasonable conclusion from data of such low quality as is typical of polling these days.

Even in the absolute best circumstances where enough people are polled to be representative, and those people aren't asked any leading/misleading questions, and the identity of all those people are known, pre-selected without bias, and verified (preventing the same person/group of people voting 50 times or brigading some anonymous internet survey), and all of those people are 100% confident that their answers are private and won't be able to be used against them, you're still left with the fact that people lie. All the time. Especially about anything to do with sex. They also have terrible memories and their beliefs about themselves and their views often don't hold up when their actual behavior is observed. Self-reported data is pretty weak even when sex/shame/morality/fear of punishment don't come into play.

Without really digging into the specifics to try to work out how seriously you can take a given survey's results at all, it's best to just not to treat them seriously.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#488

Post by FredPret »

denkmoon wrote: post #475
FredPret wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China only started doing great when they relaxed their ultra-centralized economic rules a little bit in the 1990s. Read business books and news from the 80's - 90's, and they almost never mention China - it's all Germany, UK, Japan, USA. The stats tell the same story - China spent half a century going nowhere fast. After liberalizing their economy, China spent the 90's quietly growing, and only started making real wa…

Economic liberalism isn't really relevant to the question of social authoritarianism. While an enterprising individual in guangzhou can sell whatever he wants to the world without much state involvement, he can't really go around discussing Tibetan sovereignty for example.

My current theory is that one leads to the other but we’ll see how that works out for our friend in Guangzhou.

My point is centralization doesn’t work, so maybe social authoritarianism has deleterious cultural effects that will show up generations from now.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#489

Post by autoexec »

drawfloat wrote: post #197
bArray wrote: post #194

> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone". Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some . > In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its c…

The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it. I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government (which, by the way, there is still a non zero chance could be Labour) will necessarily reverse this. Maybe Reform would tweak the topics, but I’m not convinced any party can be totally trusted to reverse this.

Governments do seem to hate weakening their power over the population.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#490

Post by msgodel »

autoexec wrote: post #487
msgodel wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a number of recent polls in English speaking countries young men have been one of the strongest anti-porn demographics actually. I think HN being tech adjacent with the history and practical reality of how the internet works along with being more libertarian (or at least liberal) is going to bias that more than the gender distribution.

I don't put much faith in polls generally, but I put even less faith in polls where people are asked how they feel about porn. I don't think you can come to any reasonable conclusion from data of such low quality as is typical of polling these days. Even in the absolute best circumstances where enough people are polled to be representative, and those people aren't asked any leading/misleading questions, and the ident…

Sure but IIRC the statistics were relative to previous polls and the conversation was about how people talk about porn on the web not how they actually use it so I think in this case it actually works well.
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