- you are held responsible for other people's feelings, and for their feelings as a result of your words and actions, and:
- anything that causes anyone to feel bad, is looked down upon by the collective
Is tyranny by the emotionally stunted.
The fundamental problem with it, is it makes society more enmeshed (a pathological relationship dynamic). People start caring more about going with the grain, the mainstream opinion, and rejecting the troublemakers, because they don't want to be cast out too; and they self-censor more. Humans are beautiful in their diversity, their wildness, and their distrust of authority, and there's been a definite attempt to domesticate people on all fronts (funny, there was a discussion here days ago about domesticated animals having 15-35% smaller brains). Societal cohesion is the Borg, not a utopia. And I just watched Demolition Man yesterday (fantastic movie), this immediately reminds me of the "verbal morality fines" they hand out.
The most fundamental piece of applicable psychology is the idea that you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, period. You are responsible for making yourself happy, for asserting yourself, for setting any boundaries you choose. People on Twitter can just block, or mute, or turn off their DMs for people they don't follow. What's wrong with that? Now there's a human right to use Twitter unhindered? They just spent the last decade telling us there wasn't!
Besides it seems clear we've already swung far too far in the "style over content" direction. People hate on Nassim Taleb because he dares insult lobbyists and people he considers scientific frauds; would he be put in jail if he lived in the UK?
Big Tech is being used to engineer a new kind of society, and I don't like it. It seems Web 3.0 is the only thing able to fight this dynamic.
> The proposed law change will shift the focus on to the “harmful effect” of a message rather than if it contains “indecent” or “grossly offensive” content, which is the present basis for assessing its criminality.
I'm feeling very harmed after reading your comment. I realize the content's of your message are objectively harmless, but I "feel" harmed. So...off to jail you go.
---
But on a more serious note. Like you said I it's insane that we have come to the point where what you actually say, you intentions, are completely irrelevant, it's all about how your message is perceived. What are the guardrails here?
Harmful effect can be anything. I could plagiarize the top ShowHN post from yesterday, post it here and get called out. Then try to get all the commenters prosecuted because my feelings were hurt? Is this seriously how this law works?
Hell an even more extreme example could be "hey it's really nice and sunny outside today", and someone will comment "I identify as darkness, this is hurtful to my people". Am I headed to the slammer for saying that the weather was nice?
> you are held responsible for other people's feelings, and for their feelings as a result of your words and actions, and
It also makes it impossible to distinguish between those whose feelings are truly hurt and those who pretend their feelings got hurt. On social media there is an appealing incentive for this later group to be more vocal and to inflict more harm as there is more audience. It's also a form of trolling: "Wonder if I can pretend to be offended and ban/cancel/pile on so and so. I'd get soooo many likes/retweets/upvotes etc!". We'd like to believe only a tiny fraction of people would engage in the later, but with online visibility and with no way to distinguish the two, the later group I think will start to get larger and larger over time.
This is also a benchmark of totalitarian nightmare. Can I denounce my neighbor and tell the ruling party they made anti-governmental remarks and have their family deported to a labor camp, if I don't like the choice of flowers in their garden? If the answer is "yes" then I may be living a totalitarian nightmare.
> The most fundamental piece of applicable psychology is the idea that you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, period. You are responsible for making yourself happy, for asserting yourself, for setting any boundaries you choose. People on Twitter can just block, or mute, or turn off their DMs for people they don't follow. What's wrong with that? Now there's a human right to use Twitter unhindered? They just spent the last decade telling us there wasn't!
You should try telling this to those who get abused online. I think people who regularly get rape threats and racial abuse, many of whom are calling for such legislation ( recently there have been numerous cases with black footballers and also some with female journalists), have a slightly higher priority than people who just want to insult freely without fear of consequences. Considering people have committed suicide over online harassment, it's not as simple as "just block the baddies".
Is it morally appropriate to get together a group of your friends and pressure someone to commit suicide on social media? By your logic, it seems that it is; their suicidal reaction to malicious and intentional verbal abuse is not anyone else's problem but their own.
Many people seem to feel otherwise, and there are laws in place in various regions as a result. Are they wrong to choose to restrict your speech in favor of the collective good? If not, then what is the dividing line between "verbal abuse is okay" and "verbal abuse is not okay"? If it merely drives them to self-harm rather than suicide, is that morally acceptable, in some way that causing suicide is not?
Societies have a long-standing tradition of restricting individual behaviors for the collective good. Wishing that societies wouldn't this is hopeless, because it seems like every society that doesn't restrict individual behaviors to some degree ends up becoming a textbook example of how not run a society.
I read your moral position here as "if you are too frail to resist someone's words, you don't deserve protection from their verbal abuse with malicious intent". If I have misunderstood how your moral reasoning applies to the topic under discussion — trolls willfully causing psychological harm on the Internet — please help me understand where I've misapplied your logic.
We are reacting to a tweet that has very little content, notably how high is the bar for psychological harm. It is undoubtedly higher than making someone feel bad, but the question is: is it high enough?
Consider your words, "you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions". For the most part, that is true. On the other hand, we also consider some segments of society as vulnerable. In some of those cases they do not have full control of their thoughts, feelings, or actions. Sometimes it is due to a lack of understanding or experience (e.g. children and youth), sometimes it is due to psychological disorders. The question becomes, who is actually responsible in cases where trolls unintentionally or intentionally exploit that disorder?
The other thing must be considered is the magnitude of the infraction. A competent person may be able to handle a random death threat. The person would have to be considerably more resilient to endure an effectively anonymous person stalking them and threatening them. I would question the ability of anyone to handle that sort of behaviour for an extended period of time unless they have the means to prove the threat is not credible or to protect themselves. There is a reason why some people of means go around with bodyguards, and it isn't solely about their physical protection.
> The fundamental problem with it, is it makes society more enmeshed (a pathological relationship dynamic). People start caring more about going with the grain, the mainstream opinion, and rejecting the troublemakers, because they don't want to be cast out too; and they self-censor more.
This is by design.
Before social media, to have your voice heard you needed to get help from either: a billionaire-owned TV Station or Newspaper or the State Sponsored Approved truth Station (in this case, the BBC but CBC and whatever official news network the party maintains in your local dictatorship will do).
Now, all you have to do is simply post it online on a property owned by some billionaire who doesn't really care (as long as it's legal he'll pocket the add revenue) in faraway California. You can guess who's mad about loosing all that control over who gets to be in the news and who doesn't...
I'm not a fan of any law which could be potentially be misused to inhibit free speech, But the context of this law reminded me the row of Elon Musk calling the U.K diver Unsworth who played a major role in rescuing the Thai children struck in underwater cave - a 'Pedo Guy' on Twitter because Unsworth called the submarine supposedly fielded by Elon for the rescue as a P.R. stunt.
Elon did get acquitted in the U.S. court for the defamation suit on this as free speech laws in U.S. has very little riders, But I wonder if this supposed 'pychological harm' law could have delivered a verdict in favor of Unsworth in a U.K. court.
>Unsworth testified that “being branded a pedophile” had made him feel “humiliated, ashamed, dirty”. “I was effectively given a life sentence without parole,” he said. “It hurts to talk about it.”[1]
As a side note, Free speech laws in India has very specific riders when it comes to defamation, which of course are constantly abused[2]. But theoretically, Elon would have definitely been found guilty under that law; Theoretical because he's rich.
The problem is not with trolling per se (there is troll-like behaviour IRL, and we have learned to deal with it appropriately) but with scale and amplification of trolling by that oligopoly of a small handful of social platforms serving millions of locked-in users each with tailored content that their algorithms consider “engaging” for this particular person.
Big Social is in symbiosis with trolls and profits by giving them platform, and I suspect this will remain so for as long as their business model has the advertisers as primary paying customers and main source of revenue.
That said, targeted persistent trolling (I prefer to call it bullying though) is horrible, and I’m sure there are extreme cases where jail may actually be warranted.
In a world where we spend increasingly more time online, sociopaths and other bad actors have been handed far too much power/influence and that's net negative for society.
Like it or not, the online world has become a public space--The Public Space. And, now we're talking about metaverses that will further immerse us.
If someone were to follow a person down a public street, screaming obscenities and generally harassing them, of course we'd want the rightful laws on the books against such a thing to be enforced. Why should this be any different in the online world?
> You are responsible for making yourself happy, for asserting yourself, for setting any boundaries you choose. People on Twitter can just block, or mute, or turn off their DMs for people they don't follow.
This solution does not account for the following ways a troll can harass you:
* sockpuppets pinging you,
* sockpuppets impersonating you,
* sockpuppets mass reporting you, thereby suspending your accounts
* finding people you are friends/family with and sending them rape/death/bomb threats or doing the above,
* finding where you work and sending your workplace similar threats,
* putting up websites involving your legal name and face to make allegations you're a child predator/criminal optimized for search engines.
I call BS. We already have about 100 times more laws than we have the capacity to prosecute so it's just noise. We already have laws about malicious communications but yet social media is still swimming with incredibly malicious content.
Insulate Britain had a number of injunctions taken against them to not block main roads and when they do, they get arrested - 1 of them saying they had been arrested 11 times. Now regardless of whether you agree with them or not, the enforcement of these headline grabbers is terrible.
Once we have enough police enforcing things consistently and as strictly as necessary then I will worry about a dystopia, until then, it's just more attempts to win votes and is just noise.
Inconsistent application of unjust laws is maybe even worse than them being applied to everyone, now you have a great reason to discount the people being abused if they don't agree with your politics.
And this is why I'm never going to move to Europe. My jokes would be considered "obscene" or "indecent" or something and I'd be thrown in prison. At least here in the States, for now, the government is letting the private companies perform the censorship, and not imprisoning people for tasteless humor.
>Back in my day it was just a given people said mean things on the internet.
Isn't this indicative of a serious problem though? If there were places IRL where the average person is subjected to a constant barrage of callousness it wouldn't continue to exist, would it?
Can we have free speech without accountability? In the past accountability seemed like a major factor.
Back in my day it was a given that nerds would get their asses kicked by jocks. While I'm not in favor of this bill, your argument is extremely flimsy.
Thankfully, psychological harm is incredibly easy to establish, and therefore this could never be misused. All you have to do is ask someone, "were your feelings hurt?" and there you have it.
Plus the investigating authority has discretion as to whether or not the complaint is credible and should be pursued. Of course these decisions won't be simple minded reflections the prevailing moral panics. Perish the thought.
<Two hard looking men are in a jail cell. Covered with scars and tattoos>
What are you in for?
Grand theft auto. You?
Bank robbery.
<They look over to the unassuming third man in the the cell>
New guy. What are you in for?
Er, <visible hesitation> I suggested that the UK's new social media harassment law was a satirical publication. Apparently it hurt one of the author's feelings.
<The first two men share a quick glance and then move away from the third one quickly>
It feels like this is at least one destination under harm prevention rhetoric. I'm all for holding mobs accountable, but I don't think this is the thing. If you are on social media doing bullying or participating in mobs while calling it activism, what you need isn't jail time it's help. I suspect a lot of these folks are just lonely.
rule of subjectivity is, at the end of the day, rule of the powerful: when two parties disagree and the situation can be defined in primarily subjective terms, the most powerful party wins
by hiding behind outcast, oppressed or unpopular groups with often legitimate (though perhaps subjective, to an extent) grievances, the powerful are able to push through the subjective zeitgeist, which is then used to their advantage
Stopping one from expressing their true feelings in a way is a form of torture. I want to live in a world where I can get to experience the true behavior of people (whether bad or good). Then of course have the possibility to remove them from my life. But I still want to be able to filter them myself!
So does this mean if you participate in a twitter mob while in the UK you could be sent to jail? The way the law it written it sounds pretty board - an errant like or retweet (which is not necessarily any endorsement) could land you in hot water.
This isn’t that surprising a development for the UK. You can think of it as a philosophically consistent extension of the UK interpretation of libel.
“In American courts, the burden of proof rests with the person who brings a claim of libel. In British courts, the author or journalist has the burden of proof, and typically loses.”
I didn't read all of it, because it's 145 pages, but the most relevant section seems to be on page 52, section 46 "Meaning of “content that is harmful to adults” etc"
> A “knowingly false communication” offence will be created that will criminalise those who send or post a message they know to be false with the intention to cause “emotional, psychological, or physical harm to the likely audience”. Government sources gave the example of antivaxers spreading false information that they know to be untrue.
One sinister side: how does one prove something is «know[n] to be untrue»? Whose side has the burden of proof?
Since free will doesnt exist, you can check that out. Anything that I make anytime of my day, like a thought, will unstoppably affect you all... That's why education is tremendously important, because you have to anckowledge that we either cooperate or kill each other. So this is so stupid to start with, that I won't try to make a point further that making people realize, how fucked up we are
The BBC used to nationally broadcast Monty Python doing Nazi satire replete with costumes and salutes. But a few years ago the British government opted to prosecute a man who uploaded to YouTube a satirical video training his Pug to do a Nazi salute.
British tolerance for Swiftian expression seems to be regressing lately.
[+] [-] FundementalBrit|4 years ago|reply
https://archive.md/IPga5
[+] [-] concinds|4 years ago|reply
- you are held responsible for other people's feelings, and for their feelings as a result of your words and actions, and:
- anything that causes anyone to feel bad, is looked down upon by the collective
Is tyranny by the emotionally stunted.
The fundamental problem with it, is it makes society more enmeshed (a pathological relationship dynamic). People start caring more about going with the grain, the mainstream opinion, and rejecting the troublemakers, because they don't want to be cast out too; and they self-censor more. Humans are beautiful in their diversity, their wildness, and their distrust of authority, and there's been a definite attempt to domesticate people on all fronts (funny, there was a discussion here days ago about domesticated animals having 15-35% smaller brains). Societal cohesion is the Borg, not a utopia. And I just watched Demolition Man yesterday (fantastic movie), this immediately reminds me of the "verbal morality fines" they hand out.
The most fundamental piece of applicable psychology is the idea that you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, period. You are responsible for making yourself happy, for asserting yourself, for setting any boundaries you choose. People on Twitter can just block, or mute, or turn off their DMs for people they don't follow. What's wrong with that? Now there's a human right to use Twitter unhindered? They just spent the last decade telling us there wasn't!
Besides it seems clear we've already swung far too far in the "style over content" direction. People hate on Nassim Taleb because he dares insult lobbyists and people he considers scientific frauds; would he be put in jail if he lived in the UK?
Big Tech is being used to engineer a new kind of society, and I don't like it. It seems Web 3.0 is the only thing able to fight this dynamic.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|4 years ago|reply
I'm feeling very harmed after reading your comment. I realize the content's of your message are objectively harmless, but I "feel" harmed. So...off to jail you go.
---
But on a more serious note. Like you said I it's insane that we have come to the point where what you actually say, you intentions, are completely irrelevant, it's all about how your message is perceived. What are the guardrails here?
Harmful effect can be anything. I could plagiarize the top ShowHN post from yesterday, post it here and get called out. Then try to get all the commenters prosecuted because my feelings were hurt? Is this seriously how this law works?
Hell an even more extreme example could be "hey it's really nice and sunny outside today", and someone will comment "I identify as darkness, this is hurtful to my people". Am I headed to the slammer for saying that the weather was nice?
[+] [-] rdtsc|4 years ago|reply
It also makes it impossible to distinguish between those whose feelings are truly hurt and those who pretend their feelings got hurt. On social media there is an appealing incentive for this later group to be more vocal and to inflict more harm as there is more audience. It's also a form of trolling: "Wonder if I can pretend to be offended and ban/cancel/pile on so and so. I'd get soooo many likes/retweets/upvotes etc!". We'd like to believe only a tiny fraction of people would engage in the later, but with online visibility and with no way to distinguish the two, the later group I think will start to get larger and larger over time.
This is also a benchmark of totalitarian nightmare. Can I denounce my neighbor and tell the ruling party they made anti-governmental remarks and have their family deported to a labor camp, if I don't like the choice of flowers in their garden? If the answer is "yes" then I may be living a totalitarian nightmare.
[+] [-] sofixa|4 years ago|reply
You should try telling this to those who get abused online. I think people who regularly get rape threats and racial abuse, many of whom are calling for such legislation ( recently there have been numerous cases with black footballers and also some with female journalists), have a slightly higher priority than people who just want to insult freely without fear of consequences. Considering people have committed suicide over online harassment, it's not as simple as "just block the baddies".
[+] [-] floatingatoll|4 years ago|reply
Many people seem to feel otherwise, and there are laws in place in various regions as a result. Are they wrong to choose to restrict your speech in favor of the collective good? If not, then what is the dividing line between "verbal abuse is okay" and "verbal abuse is not okay"? If it merely drives them to self-harm rather than suicide, is that morally acceptable, in some way that causing suicide is not?
Societies have a long-standing tradition of restricting individual behaviors for the collective good. Wishing that societies wouldn't this is hopeless, because it seems like every society that doesn't restrict individual behaviors to some degree ends up becoming a textbook example of how not run a society.
I read your moral position here as "if you are too frail to resist someone's words, you don't deserve protection from their verbal abuse with malicious intent". If I have misunderstood how your moral reasoning applies to the topic under discussion — trolls willfully causing psychological harm on the Internet — please help me understand where I've misapplied your logic.
[+] [-] II2II|4 years ago|reply
Consider your words, "you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions". For the most part, that is true. On the other hand, we also consider some segments of society as vulnerable. In some of those cases they do not have full control of their thoughts, feelings, or actions. Sometimes it is due to a lack of understanding or experience (e.g. children and youth), sometimes it is due to psychological disorders. The question becomes, who is actually responsible in cases where trolls unintentionally or intentionally exploit that disorder?
The other thing must be considered is the magnitude of the infraction. A competent person may be able to handle a random death threat. The person would have to be considerably more resilient to endure an effectively anonymous person stalking them and threatening them. I would question the ability of anyone to handle that sort of behaviour for an extended period of time unless they have the means to prove the threat is not credible or to protect themselves. There is a reason why some people of means go around with bodyguards, and it isn't solely about their physical protection.
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 908B64B197|4 years ago|reply
This is by design.
Before social media, to have your voice heard you needed to get help from either: a billionaire-owned TV Station or Newspaper or the State Sponsored Approved truth Station (in this case, the BBC but CBC and whatever official news network the party maintains in your local dictatorship will do).
Now, all you have to do is simply post it online on a property owned by some billionaire who doesn't really care (as long as it's legal he'll pocket the add revenue) in faraway California. You can guess who's mad about loosing all that control over who gets to be in the news and who doesn't...
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago|reply
Elon did get acquitted in the U.S. court for the defamation suit on this as free speech laws in U.S. has very little riders, But I wonder if this supposed 'pychological harm' law could have delivered a verdict in favor of Unsworth in a U.K. court.
>Unsworth testified that “being branded a pedophile” had made him feel “humiliated, ashamed, dirty”. “I was effectively given a life sentence without parole,” he said. “It hurts to talk about it.”[1]
As a side note, Free speech laws in India has very specific riders when it comes to defamation, which of course are constantly abused[2]. But theoretically, Elon would have definitely been found guilty under that law; Theoretical because he's rich.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/06/elon-musk...
[2] https://blog.ipleaders.in/right-to-freedom-of-speech/
[+] [-] strogonoff|4 years ago|reply
Big Social is in symbiosis with trolls and profits by giving them platform, and I suspect this will remain so for as long as their business model has the advertisers as primary paying customers and main source of revenue.
That said, targeted persistent trolling (I prefer to call it bullying though) is horrible, and I’m sure there are extreme cases where jail may actually be warranted.
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|4 years ago|reply
In a world where we spend increasingly more time online, sociopaths and other bad actors have been handed far too much power/influence and that's net negative for society.
Like it or not, the online world has become a public space--The Public Space. And, now we're talking about metaverses that will further immerse us.
If someone were to follow a person down a public street, screaming obscenities and generally harassing them, of course we'd want the rightful laws on the books against such a thing to be enforced. Why should this be any different in the online world?
[+] [-] moss2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sky_rw|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] KittenInABox|4 years ago|reply
This solution does not account for the following ways a troll can harass you:
* sockpuppets pinging you,
* sockpuppets impersonating you,
* sockpuppets mass reporting you, thereby suspending your accounts
* finding people you are friends/family with and sending them rape/death/bomb threats or doing the above,
* finding where you work and sending your workplace similar threats,
* putting up websites involving your legal name and face to make allegations you're a child predator/criminal optimized for search engines.
[+] [-] lgleason|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbriner|4 years ago|reply
Insulate Britain had a number of injunctions taken against them to not block main roads and when they do, they get arrested - 1 of them saying they had been arrested 11 times. Now regardless of whether you agree with them or not, the enforcement of these headline grabbers is terrible.
Once we have enough police enforcing things consistently and as strictly as necessary then I will worry about a dystopia, until then, it's just more attempts to win votes and is just noise.
[+] [-] batch12|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zpalmtree|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apatters|4 years ago|reply
Statistically I doubt I will be the first.
[+] [-] Subsentient|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FundementalBrit|4 years ago|reply
Back in my day it was just a given people said mean things on the internet.
[+] [-] micromacrofoot|4 years ago|reply
Isn't this indicative of a serious problem though? If there were places IRL where the average person is subjected to a constant barrage of callousness it wouldn't continue to exist, would it?
Can we have free speech without accountability? In the past accountability seemed like a major factor.
[+] [-] klyrs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everyone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LordAtlas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topspin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod775|4 years ago|reply
I was laughing until I realized it's The Times, did a double take, and continued laughing.
[+] [-] Verdex|4 years ago|reply
What are you in for?
Grand theft auto. You?
Bank robbery.
<They look over to the unassuming third man in the the cell>
New guy. What are you in for?
Er, <visible hesitation> I suggested that the UK's new social media harassment law was a satirical publication. Apparently it hurt one of the author's feelings.
<The first two men share a quick glance and then move away from the third one quickly>
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|4 years ago|reply
People need to read 1984 and Gulag Archipelago.
[+] [-] bruce511|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batch12|4 years ago|reply
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5cdadf7c-3a85-11ec-9bef-a...
[+] [-] recursivedoubts|4 years ago|reply
rule of subjectivity is, at the end of the day, rule of the powerful: when two parties disagree and the situation can be defined in primarily subjective terms, the most powerful party wins
by hiding behind outcast, oppressed or unpopular groups with often legitimate (though perhaps subjective, to an extent) grievances, the powerful are able to push through the subjective zeitgeist, which is then used to their advantage
[+] [-] antihero|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sktrdie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spamizbad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onecommentman|4 years ago|reply
This isn’t that surprising a development for the UK. You can think of it as a philosophically consistent extension of the UK interpretation of libel.
“In American courts, the burden of proof rests with the person who brings a claim of libel. In British courts, the author or journalist has the burden of proof, and typically loses.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/03/21/394273902/...
[+] [-] arp242|4 years ago|reply
I didn't read all of it, because it's 145 pages, but the most relevant section seems to be on page 52, section 46 "Meaning of “content that is harmful to adults” etc"
[+] [-] mdp2021|4 years ago|reply
> A “knowingly false communication” offence will be created that will criminalise those who send or post a message they know to be false with the intention to cause “emotional, psychological, or physical harm to the likely audience”. Government sources gave the example of antivaxers spreading false information that they know to be untrue.
One sinister side: how does one prove something is «know[n] to be untrue»? Whose side has the burden of proof?
[+] [-] Zigurd|4 years ago|reply
The law is not self-executing. That's why we have judges and trials.
[+] [-] dazag|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|4 years ago|reply
I have to find my way back to reality.
[+] [-] drak0n1c|4 years ago|reply
British tolerance for Swiftian expression seems to be regressing lately.