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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

#551

Post by nickff »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #500
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win. As a rule of thumb, governments don't take actions which reduce their power.

The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I don't think they are accurate. Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.

Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as ‘the government’.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#552

Post by hilbert42 »

autoexec wrote: post #489
drawfloat wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Wiki had the guts it'd leave the UK. Nothing will happen unless there's a backlash from the citizenry.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#553

Post by verisimi »

hilbert42 wrote: post #552
autoexec wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If Wiki had the guts it'd leave the UK. Nothing will happen unless there's a backlash from the citizenry.

Wiki isn't the citizenry.

And no one voted for this.

When one votes in this so-called "democracy", one votes for a representative to represent 'you and thousands of others' on thousands of decisions.

And even then, if both parties want to do something, as in this case, there is nowhere to go.

This is force. If you can't say 'no', this is immoral, coercive force, even if the person or party doing the forcing says it isn't.

And no, the forcer (government) won't give back freedoms (the right to privacy) that it takes away.

In the end, the only moral, respectful and free way to proceed, without force, ie where people opt in. Individuals would opt in/out to paying tax for wars/schools/online safety, etc.

"But it is impossible that everyone should be allowed to only opt in to the decisions they like!" .. is only the case because we think it is normal to endlessly abused by governments and because so many citizens are dependent on its handouts.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#556

Post by Ray20 »

andai wrote: post #110
Ravus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sadly an example of terrible leading question bias, to the point where I'm surprised that it even got a 22% oppose rate. The percentages would change dramatically were one to write it as, "From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring adults to upload their id or a face photo before accessing any website that allows user to user interaction?" Both questions are fact…

Yeah. It's the "foot in the door technique." The same is being done with Chat Control. It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily expanded to other things like scanning messages to prevent terrorism. See also: > Concern over mass migration is terrorist ideology, says Prevent https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/06/concern-over...

> It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily expanded to other things like scanning messages to prevent terrorism.

Oh, look, you did it in literally two sentences. It turns out it's pretty easy to to oppose such law. Only there's simply no need to do it when you're the main beneficiary.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#557

Post by JumpCrisscross »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #390
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov You have secret reasons to suspect all polling? If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.

> If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy. What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not? It's well-understood that leading questions and phrasing will get you any response to a poll that you want. That being the case,…

> What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?

I’d still call that statistical illiteracy. Polling, as a cohort, contains information. It’s dispersed across polls and concentrated among quality pollsters.

It’s never definitive. But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because we haven’t actually been to Andromeda.

> what good are any of them?

If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow and what policies they could pass that would be popular, polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can build a coalition around, and which to abandon because the people most passionate about them cannot bother to vote, polling is helpful.

> rather than anything about the true preferences of the population

They’re telling you how people think when they communicate and act. What is in their heads is unknowable. At the end of the day, I care how they will vote (and if they will vote) and if they will call (or are even capable of calling) they’re elected if pissed off or enthralled. Everything else is philosophical.

At the end of the day, whether by poll or advert, information is introduced to a population in a biased form because it’s promulgated by biased actors. Knowing which way that bias is trending and resonating is useful.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#558

Post by ozim »

Jimmc414 wrote: post #517
monooso wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it. Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like: > I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side. It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in…

> The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage. I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes disengagement feel like the only moderate move.

Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#559

Post by pyuser583 »

mrandish wrote: post #302
drawfloat wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government will necessarily reverse this. Agreed. I think the supposed justifications for mass population-wide online surveillance, restrictions and de-anonymization are so strong most political parties in western democracies go along with what surveillance agencies push for once they get in power. Even in the U.S. where free speech & personal privacy rights are constitutionally…

A big problem is private entities do so much spying, it becomes hard to argue against.

We collect tons of data on people to sell ads. Why not to save children?

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#560

Post by OhioMan2943 »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #509
johnnyanmac wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 gracef…

It's a fire sale on american imperialism, capital and cultural dominance, and everyone wants in. American leadership is geriatric and asleep at the wheel and the dementia vote is dangerous. Everyone sees this as the free for all it is. There will always be those who seek to create order from chaos for their own benefit. We're seeing multiple groups trying to emotionally stunt this next generation and sow social disco…

*Belaurus not hungary- always mix them up :)
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