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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

#691

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

monooso wrote: post #501
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.

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…

Ugh, that quote is a disgusting way to argue. It's akin to saying that all vegetarians are nazis because Hitler was a vegetarian.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#692

Post by [deleted] »

ChrisKnott wrote: post #627
Lio wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ludicrous to call William Perrin “the founder” of Ofcom or refer to it as “his” quango From his own Carnegie UK webpage linked above: > William was instrumental in creating Ofcom, reforming the regulatory regimes of several sectors and kicking off the UK government’s interest in open data. William was awarded an OBE for his highly influential work at Carnegie UK with Prof Lorna Woods that underpinned the UK governm…

Both the use of “founder” and “the” are inaccurate and misleading (I notice you’ve switched to “a” without comment). He was a government adviser 20 years ago that was central to the work of creating Ofcom. How is he closely related to the running of Ofcom, today? The conspiracy theory is your suggestion he is deriving some kind of financial benefit to Carnegie via Yoti - what is the basis for this? (I agree it would…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#693

Post by 71bw »

entuno wrote: post #74
miroljub wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK entirely. No visitors, no editors. No, it should remove servers, employees and legal presence from the UK. It's not their job to block UK people from accessing it just because the UK regime want them to. Let the regime censors actually put an effort to block them. Let them make a Great Firewall of the UK, why make it easy for them?

They don't need to make anything - that capability has been there for years. It was mostly used to block sites with IIoC, but they also blocked access to various piracy related sites and things like that.

What does IIoC stand for?

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#694

Post by Ray20 »

account42 wrote: post #668
Ray20 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think politicians are idiots? Yes, many of them are really stupid people. But they are not idiots. I think 95 percent of them are perfectly aware of why the laws they pass are really needed. And they pass them EXACTLY FOR THIS, and not at all for protecting children and internet safety.

Why do you think politicians look out for what is "really needed" rather than what is beneficial to themselves.

What do you mean "why"? They do not.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#695

Post by account42 »

callc wrote: post #524
jimbob45 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information. But the top articles are always perma-locked and under curation. Considering how much traffic those articles receive relative to the more esoteric articles, the surface area of vandalizable articles that a user is exposed to is relatively low. Also to that end, vandalism has a low effo…

n=1 I’ve used Wikipedia for many years with no immediately noticeable false information. And of course all the “citation needed” marks are there. I trust Wikipedia to be correct, I expect it to be correct, and Wikipedia has earned my trust. Maybe I don’t read it enough to see any vandalism. Compared to LLMs, it’s extremely striking to see the relative trust / faith people have in it. It’s pretty sad to see how little…

No false information doesn't mean there isn't any bias. The same facts can be used to come to wildly different conclusions and can also just be omitted when inconvenient.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#696

Post by eru »

ozim wrote: post #558
Jimmc414 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Vote with your feet (and wallet).

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#697

Post by eru »

account42 wrote: post #645
Jolter wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”The lesser evil” is the essence of any two-party system. Which I would somewhat facetiously classify the UK system as. Abolish ”first past the post” and introduce proportional representation now!

It's the essence of any representative democracy - you'd need as many parties as there are citizens for everyone to be able to vote for one that truly represents their views on all relevant topics.

That might be true in some theory, in practice you can find reasonably good alignment for most people at five or six viable parties.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#698

Post by ifwinterco »

bigfudge wrote: post #670
ifwinterco wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was true until recently, but in the last 12 months it's all cracked wide open. Reform are leading in the polls, the lib dems are picking up disaffected tory wets, new left wing parties are threatening labour from the left on gaza etc. A long time until the next election but right now it's all to play for

But this essentially has to collapse down to 2 or 3 parties unless these preferences are for graphically concentrated. Which they don’t seem to be. Reform might wipe out the tories with Lib Dem’s cleaning up the scraps, but that doesn’t really move us forward. In fact it’s likely to entrench the moderate left into holding their nose and voting labour?

Yes, with first past the post it will probably get pretty messy. Right now Reform are polling so well they would get a majority, but I'm not sure they'll sustain that until 2029, and whether they'll actually fix anything is questionable.

My gut sense is labour have pissed off people (including or perhaps especially the left) so badly that they are toast at this point. Those left wing votes are up for grabs by anyone who makes a decent case for them

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#699

Post by [deleted] »

Palmik wrote: post #682

I think UK OSA in its current state is bad, but I also think Wikipedia losing this case is good. Here is Wikipedia's original case: > The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#700

Post by account42 »

entuno wrote: post #71
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…

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…

Would-be democratic countries should have petitions with actual teeth - that is ones that get enough signatures mean the issue is no longer up to the representatives but will be decided in a referendum.
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