UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
petition.parliament.uk
UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
#2[deleted]
Re: UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
#3Interesting that you can watch p0rn directly on Google without any age verification (you don't need to be logged in or anything).
Re: UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
#4I always thought political parties were very sensitive to electoral issues and therefore played everything overly safe, in terms of attempting to avoid consequences for their potential electors. So this legislation actually getting to this point today was very surprising.
I think it speaks volumes of a strong bias in their analysis teams, as well as indictating they're even more out of touch than expected. What they've done is given direct negative consequence to millions of electors in exchange for indirect and mostly imperceivable positive consequence to concerned parents. Personally I don't see a way that ever makes electoral sense, especially given how close the last election was (in raw votes, not seats) and where opinion polls are today (Reform seemingly being considerably ahead, albeit opinion polls are _not_ reliable).
Obviously there's a lot to say about consequence, how the use-case of authentication is at odds with the desire of users to be incognito, how VPNs are considerably better UX; but their use undermines previous legislation like recording host names to help combat extremism, how encouraging users to dish out sensitive id documents online isn't the best habit, how id verifiers are not regulated and often are services hosted abroad. Obviously the biggest negative is that sketchy websites who don't care about being legal will gain considerable traffic, at the expense of websites who are trying to be legit. Children will still probably be able to access pornography and it may just be the case that the pornography is even "worse", yielding the most counter-intuitive outcome.
I'm particularly alarmed that many websites are responding by blanket age-verifying NSFW content. So now reddit resources on mental health, drugs, suicide, domestic abuse, etc are locked behind age verification.
Re: UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
#5Interesting that you can watch p0rn directly on Google without any age verification (you don't need to be logged in or anything).
I noticed that google and bing don't appear to return pron in obvious image searches but duckduckgo still does.
Re: UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
#6I always thought political parties were very sensitive to electoral issues and therefore played everything overly safe, in terms of attempting to avoid consequences for their potential electors. So this legislation actually getting to this point today was very surprising. I think it speaks volumes of a strong bias in their analysis teams, as well as indictating they're even more out of touch than expected. What they'…
I think you'd be surprised how many people are actually in favour of this bill. Mainstream press totally fell for the "think of the children" angle pushed by a mixture of legitimate children's safety organisations, anti-porn activists, and intelligence apparatus. Meanwhile the privacy argument got little to no lobbying or public discourse.
E.g.:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/15/digital-g...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/19/online-safety-ac...
It's how the (previous) government was able to look like it was doing something about the mental health crisis caused by social media, even though this bill won't fix that at all.
Re: UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
#7Interesting that you can watch p0rn directly on Google without any age verification (you don't need to be logged in or anything).
I noticed that google and bing don't appear to return pron in obvious image searches but duckduckgo still does.
If I turn Safe Search off it does (doesn't require age check).
Re: UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I noticed that google and bing don't appear to return pron in obvious image searches but duckduckgo still does.
If I turn Safe Search off it does (doesn't require age check).
for me, bing refuses to turn off safe search. Lowest it lets me go is "moderate". Google does but doesn't show me pron.
Re: UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
#9I always thought political parties were very sensitive to electoral issues and therefore played everything overly safe, in terms of attempting to avoid consequences for their potential electors. So this legislation actually getting to this point today was very surprising. I think it speaks volumes of a strong bias in their analysis teams, as well as indictating they're even more out of touch than expected. What they'…
I think you'd be surprised how many people are actually in favour of this bill. Mainstream press totally fell for the "think of the children" angle pushed by a mixture of legitimate children's safety organisations, anti-porn activists, and intelligence apparatus. Meanwhile the privacy argument got little to no lobbying or public discourse. E.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/15/digital-g... https://…
I appreciate that it has a lot of soft support, however concerned parents won't stop being concerned as a consequence. I struggle to see it as being a vote winner but its clear how its a vote loser to many. That the mainstream press have published many positive articles about it, just demonstrates the bias IMHO. Fleet street is become less and less of a proxy of public opinion over time but our political parties still treat the press like they did in the 90s, which I think can often be a mistake given how different the press is since the advent of the internet and how much more fragmented news now is, and how the electorate now receive it.
IMHO the argument for "doing something" is one of those things that people are noisy about but ultimately care little about at the ballot box. The risk is that the typically politically apathetic are driven to the ballot box as a consequence of disrupting their habit in order to protest. Most governments do very little that actually directly interfere with people and their habits, COVID was a very rare event and Boris Johnson fell in no small part due to circumventing the rules his own government imposed on the populace. There's huge electoral risk in giving so many people consequence.
Given the numbers at play, I just don't see how you can square the huge internet traffic for pron and the intrusion into their "workflows" against some presumed other number of electors that will suddenly vote for you because you allowed this bill to take effect. Irrespective of the ethics of the subject it just doesn't feel like good electoral statecraft in a democracy. This is particularly surprising given that most UK political parties generally veer away from doing things that might lose them any significant amount of votes.
Re: UK Gov Petition: Repeal the Online Safety Act
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I turn Safe Search off it does (doesn't require age check).
for me, bing refuses to turn off safe search. Lowest it lets me go is "moderate". Google does but doesn't show me pron.
Probably it depends on your geolocation? I'm not in UK and Google image search shows me everything in a Private Window, after I turn off Safe Search