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UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

bbc.co.uk

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Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#51

Post by gnode »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #38
gnode wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this argument similar to: regulating the construction of buildings will just lead to seasteading. The issue isn't really about silencing people, but removing their access to a mainstream audience.

> The issue isn't really about silencing people, but removing their access to a mainstream audience. Those sound approximately like the same thing to me. What about the difference do you see as relevant?

In the scenario of forcing speakers underground, those speakers have not been silenced (they may still speak to a large audience) but they will not speak to an audience which has not elected to listen to them.

Conversely, if you're popular on Youtube, you will be suggested to people who are not looking for your speech.

The difference is subtle, and that was my original point. Such acts of government will indeed not silence speakers, but it may as well do, because it stifles their ability to reach a greater audience.

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#53

Post by rgbrenner »

Someone1234 wrote: post #30
rgbrenner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact. In the run up to the war, perhaps questioning the sources and information provided by the government would have been labeled fake news.

> Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact. What? 100,000+ people marched in the street against it[0]. We knew the UK Government stole a student's essay for their "Dodgy Dossier" and tried to re-package it as intelligence before too[1]. We knew full well it was false before invasion. It didn't stop them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War [1] ht…

I’m not going to rehash the Iraq war timeline.. you’ve clearly missed my point. Just replace Iraq with gulf of Tonkin. That deception lasted a lot longer.

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#54

Post by ttctciyf »

rgbrenner wrote: post #28
zyxzevn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This child-porn and terrorism is the propaganda catch-phrase to make people agree with it. Like the UK porn-filter. While it never will happen, this rule would mean that the BBC should be banned too. It published fake news that started the Iraq war, and one of the famous hosts was a child molester. Instead they will ban sites that disclose the military propaganda that is published by the government media. Will they n…

Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact. In the run up to the war, perhaps questioning the sources and information provided by the government would have been labeled fake news.

> we only found out it was false after the fact

The correct information was available, but largely ignored by mass media. For example:

> 13 March 2003

> The Blair Government has known, almost from the day it came to office in 1997, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were almost certainly destroyed following the Gulf War.

> Of all the pro-war propaganda of Blair and Bush, and their current threats giving Saddam Hussein yet another deadline to disarm, what may be their biggest lie is exposed by this revelation.

> Two weeks ago, a transcript of a United Nations debriefing of Iraqi general Hussein Kamel was obtained by the American magazine, Newsweek, and by Cambridge University analyst, Glen Rangwala (who last month revealed that Blair's "intelligence dossier" on Iraq was lifted, word for word, from an American student's thesis).

> General Kamel was the West's "star witness" in its case against Saddam Hussein. He was no ordinary defector. A son-in-law of the Iraqi dictator, he had immense power in Iraq; and when he defected, he took with him crates of secret documents on Iraq's weapons programme.

[...]

> In 1995, General Kamel was debriefed by senior officials of the United Nations inspections team, then known as UNSCOM, and by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The complete transcript, now disclosed for the first time, contradicts almost everything Bush and Blair have said about the threat of Iraqi weapons.

> For example, General Kamel says categorically: "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed." All that remains, he says, are the blueprints, computer disks and microfiches.

Read the full article: http://johnpilger.com/articles/iraq-s-weapons-of-mass-destru...

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#55

Post by speeq »

Here's the white-paper (pdf):

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Also, the published code of practice:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Statement and parliamentary discussion:

https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/4576d30e-52ad-42d9-b5c...

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#56

Post by FakeComments »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #39
usub98 wrote: post #17

It's funny how this is such a popular topic on sites like HN who heavily censor users themselves based on their political opinion. HN put shadow bans on hundreds of users for non-conforming posts. It seems like anyone who had a wrong stance on the whole "NPC meme" is affected, even if they only found it mildly amusing. Source: I found it amusing, openly said so and I'm shadow banned on this IP.

My impression is that HN moderators mostly focus on civility. IME stance-related silencing occurs only via downvotes by regular users.

There’s a strong, intentional skew in their enforcement:

dang has previously said that they’re more critical of people who perturb the groupthink, and take action against them for things people supporting popular opinions would be excused for.

That’s what it means when they say they censor to keep “civility”: if the groupthink finds you disruptive, you will be silenced by arbitrary application of rules others (who subscribe to groupthink) are excused for — and in this way, an insistence on civility always favors groupthink.

The pretense of censoring for civility here is merely dishonest gaslighting about their ideological policing, in favor of groupthink.

It’s precisely the same kind of dishonesty you see in YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook’s censoring of conservative voices: hyperpartisans screech, and complicit moderates use that as a pretense to enact their biases.

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#57

Post by Someone1234 »

mc32 wrote: post #40
Someone1234 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact. What? 100,000+ people marched in the street against it[0]. We knew the UK Government stole a student's essay for their "Dodgy Dossier" and tried to re-package it as intelligence before too[1]. We knew full well it was false before invasion. It didn't stop them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War [1] ht…

As someone who was against the war, I would say I didn’t know they didn’t have WMDs. What I did think was that even if they did, there were other options on the table and that those had not been pursued to their full extent. Yes Saddam was playing 3-card Monty, but never the less we had time at our disposal we also didn’t pursue corroborating evidence and it all seemed like making up a reason for war rather than an a…

The UN Weapons inspectors debunked the WMDs before troops even entered the country.

> In January 2003, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that they had found no indication that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons or an active program.

So we knew.

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#58

Post by Someone1234 »

okmokmz wrote: post #42
Someone1234 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iraq is an interesting example because we only found out it was false after the fact. What? 100,000+ people marched in the street against it[0]. We knew the UK Government stole a student's essay for their "Dodgy Dossier" and tried to re-package it as intelligence before too[1]. We knew full well it was false before invasion. It didn't stop them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War [1] ht…

>100,000+ people marched in the street against it[0] >[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War These just seem to be anti-war protests. I'm not seeing anything that suggests they knew it was false, or that that was the reason for the protests

I was part of the protests. It was widely reported in the media that WMDs weren't found, that Iraq was cooperating with the UN, and that the government's evidence was debunked.

The "anti-war" thing was just a big-tent message that most of those against the war could agree to (with each group having their own reason for being against it).

Re: UK government proposes fine or block if website fails to tackle “online harms”

#59

Post by FakeComments »

Throwway32 wrote: post #26
ilovecaching wrote: post #21

America is founded on the idea that personal determination and defending individual liberties are paramount to a moral society. But now it seems we’re taking our new digital plane of existence and giving up a lot of that self determination for convienience and protection from exposure to things we don’t like. I’m not sure how this will shake out in America versus Europe, but this seems as paradigm shifting as the civ…

America is founded on the idea that personal determination and defending individual liberators are paramount to a moral society I wonder what US citizen Anwar Al Awlaki would have said to that argument. The truth is that political free speech has limits, even for the United States. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-a...

This seems a strange response, since the extra-judicial killing of an American by the Obama administration was widely regarded as a serious breakdown in American norms — precisely by the same crowd who says things like GP.

Your link then would be support for their point, not a refutation.

Generally speaking, point out something in the past few years that’s an example of what the person is talking about isn’t a way to refute that things are changed — that you can only point to recent ones is evidence that things have changed.

Of course, Obama has no respect for American traditions, broadly: he’s the first president in history not to leave the capital and to continue to be politically active during his successor’s term.

His actions certainly aren’t what I’d put forward to someone claiming that American values used to be something, but have recently changed — Obama in general is an example of that collapse in principles.

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