Say what you will about the US, but the UK and Australia seem to be trying to competing in a speed run to see who can reach ridiculous authoritarianism faster.
I thought it would the the UK with the way they have literally arrested people for tweets... but then I saw the insane and petty corruption taking place in Aus and a journalist getting their house firebombed.
I'm Australian and this remark is lunatic-fringe hogwash. These governments are not firebombing domestic youtube-grade nonentities or anyone else, nor are they enabling it.
The notable corruption we saw recently was Scott Morrison making himself a secret minister of several portfolios, and for these and other sins the electorate severely rebuked his party at recent state and federal elections.
That is what democracy, not authoritarianism, looks like.
The folks you should be suspicious of are those spoonfeeding these garbage takes to the credulous.
You say "... the way they have literally arrested people for tweets", as if "tweets" is a special "thing" , but it's just communication. If something is illegal to say, it stands to reason that it would be illegal to say through the medium of a tweet. Is it less ridiculous to arrest people from what they write in a blog post or what they say on the street than what they say in a tweet?
It seems like one should either take free speech absolutist approach and say speech should never be illegal, or accept that some speech is illegal which would obviously mean that it's illegal even on Twitter. But you're not the first person I've seen who seemingly find it extra ridiculous to react to something someone tweeted, as if publishing a tweet or a series of tweets is not an act of speech, and I don't understand it.
> the decision of Justice Rothman of the Supreme Court of NSW in Voller v Nationwide News Pty Ltd, extended the reach of defamation law such that media outlets could be held liable as ‘publishers’ for defamatory Facebook comments made by third parties on the media outlets’ Facebook posts.
But it was a Judge, not the government. And it was the big media that as targeted, not Joe Citizen. Yet the net effect was a curtailment of Joe Citizen's ability to broadcast their thoughts on the news of the day, and how it was reported. The size of the penalty his honour handed out and the broadness of the ruling meant there was only one sane response from the media giants: heavy moderation of their comment sections, or shut them down. They mostly chose shut down. Heavy moderation is very expensive, so I don't blame them.
The end result has been a biggest reduction of internet speech, comment and civil discourse triggered by news events I've seen in 20 years. Yet it strangely goes mostly unmentioned. Instead we get these conspiracy theories. I guess a conspiracy theory is more titillating than gross incompetence by one powerful individual. If want to go for conspiracy theories try this: why the haven't the law makers drafted a new law to fix the judicial mistake?
As an Australian this true, but does vary a bit depending on each state.
Most Aussies want more government control in their lives and are rather apathetic.
Most first world countries do not really have freedom of speech. While the headlines are quite excessive from UK and Australia (for obvious reasons), there are a lot of countries where the simple existence of those laws are never talked about. Denial of the holocaust is illegal in a lot of countries, denial of historic events in a few less, insulting people in a few more.
Getting pulled through the legal system because you showed a middle finger to someone or because you said that some random war crime was not really that bad is a thing that just should not happen. But it is a thing that happened before.
Protests and speech being regulated has the effect of everyone just trying to not get jailed. Even if there are no big headlines about it. And that damage is arguably worse than media coverage, which pulls attention to the issue.
The whole bill is a clusterF**. Some potentially useful bits of regulation of Big Tech thrown together with some dangerously authoritarian attempts at criminalising encryption. Bits of the bill keep getting taken out, put back in and then taken out, sent in, sent out before being recycled as firelighters, depending on which way the political wind is blowing on any given day.
>"Companies can't just say 'yes we only allow children over 13 to join our >platform', then they allow 10-year-olds and actively promote it to them," she >told BBC radio. "We're stopping that from happening."
>She said companies could face fines of up to 10% of their turnover if they did >not have systems in place to restrict underage access.
So what does this mean? All social media websites have to check the passport of every UK user that registers? It will be illegal to post anything in a forum, without first uploading your passport?
The companies backing AVPA (age verification providers association) which include Experian, have been pushing for the child protection stuff, big time. Guess why.
The issue gets messier when you consider what just happened in Australia, when one of the largest medical insurance providers accidentally over-shared the Excel sheet with all their passwords in it (or something like that) and now all their customer's id documents are on the dark web.
I would imagine that some rando social media site that collects this stuff to prove someone is over age to be a whole lot less secure (if that is possible?).
The 'remote' aspect is the complicating factor but the basis of this is no different to other services.
At the shop cash tills I noticed recently a sign that said "if you're purchasing alcohol and are fortunate enough to look under 25 we will need to age check you" (or some very similar words).
Same goes for anyone buying solvents and glues, or knives and blades, vapes, etc.
The aim is good - the challenge is the implementation.
Only feasible way seems to be prove you're older than the minimum (which feels like persecuting those that are old enough) rather than prove you're too young!
Yes. It's being passed to a regulator who have suggested that you could make everyone take a selfie and use AI or something, but yes, that's the jist of it.
that is one way of looking at it, and it's a perfectionist view.
I'm sure that everybody knows that one simply can't filter out 100% of underage access, but there are things that CAN be done to reduce it.
"Legal but harmful" is the logical expansion to "non-crime hate incident," which is when the police detain and interview you in order to create permanent records of hate non-crimes based solely on someone else's offense without any indication or claim the offense constituted a crime. It eventually devolved even farther into a somewhat milder form of SWATing utilized by twitter trolls.
Imagine if SWATing didn't have much of a chance of getting you hurt, but had a 100% chance of putting you on what is essentially a domestic terrorist watchlist.
Uk ditches nothing, this is still going through parliament.
Reuters didn't bother to name the bill by it's a name but here's a link to where it's at. https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137
I think we really need to take a step back and appreciate that to some extent the UK governmental system is kind of working here. The UK government has an 80 seat majority, and it has advanced some really shonky legislation (this was an example, but the UK Bill of Rights was just as absurd), it's been quite impressive to see how successfully parliament has delayed, derailed and modified these attempts to blunder through legislation. The UK cabinet at this point has descended into a total farce, but the parts of our parliament outside of government - the committee stages, the Lords, amendments have all had great stabilizing effects and slowly forced the government into a fairly reasonable position.
>The opposition Labour Party said replacing the "prevention of harm" with an emphasis on free speech undermined the bill's purpose.
I mean... they're not wrong. The original intention behind this bill was insane, and it no longer does what it wnated. The fundamental problem that the government is facing is that there's behavior they want to discourage but can't functionally ban. Legally you have a choice, you either get ambiguous and open it up to abuse, or you go narrow and fail to really address the issue. I think this approach is fine, but we may have to revisit it.
The UK parliament has been a farce since at least the indicative votes. Then the Tory party got purged to “get brexit done”
This is a sign that the government is so dysfunctional that not even the military/intelligence industrial complex can get them to pass a bill - they’re no strangers to unenforceable nonsense.
The thing about democracies is they are resilient but appear resilient. Autocracies are fragile but appear resilient. This is because democracies have open debate about policy, and criticism is an integral part of the system. This disagreement appears chaotic but actually helps the end product of things like legislation work better. Autocracies, on the other hand, discourage open discussion of policy, which creates a veneer of unity, but makes the end product worse.
They will hopefully ditch the entire bill eventually, but I don't have much hope. The 'legal but harmful' part was just one of many horrible parts of the bill. It's depressing that the main opposition party is criticizing the government, not for proposing censorship, but for proposing too little censorship. I hope we be able to move to decentralized censorship-resistant alternatives before the government destroys what remains of free speech on the internet.
Cynically, I doubt this decision is driven by the principles of free speech. Like a lot of people & organisations, the Conservative Party is only interested in protecting the freedom of speech that they approve of.
I think it is more likely that this new minister had it explained to them how impossible this was to enforce or take action against, given the difficulty of proving mental harm.
Either way, it's the correct decision. Content policies should be based on clear cut laws in addition to a platform's self authored content moderation policy.
The latest changes, of which there have been many iterations, are generally well-intentioned but biased to those who have the ear of Government. Child safety advocates, celebrities, age-verification providers, newspaper publishers and Big Tech are the ones the many Ministers have listened to. The turnover of Ministers has been high but not those lobbying. Privacy and human rights advocates and innovators have not had a fair hearing.
Child safety folks are happy for now, but naive. Celebrities are fountains of wisdom so that's all good. The age-verification and trust-washing industry are waiting for their payback. "Recognised" journalism gets protected. And Big Tech is all for it; compliance falls much hard on challengers.
To be fair the dropping yesterday of the "legal but harmful" provisions for adults is finally showing there is some hope for sanity. Although paradoxically this will likely speed and increase the prevalence of a gated UK splinternet; as it will be become required to age-gate children across all (user-to-user and search) services.
When they left the EU they left a steaming pile of dung in form of the new copyright "guidelines", essentially making copyright a mess for anyone trying to run free services, since now they liability is on the hoster's side for content the user uploads to the hoster's platform.
At the same time they retain liberal laws in that regard.
The new iteration goes further to protect free speech by stopping companies, such as Facebook-owner Meta and Twitter, removing content or suspending or banning users where there is no breach of their terms of service or the law.
If true this is the bigger story here. Illegal speech in the UK already encompassed a goodly chunk of anything "harmful" or likely to cause hurt feewings. Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary. Even forcing platforms to disclose to each banned user what part of the ToS they violated and how would rock the digital landscape.
> Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary.
The platforms write their own terms of service. I'm sure they're pretty broad to give them license to do basically whatever they want. Are there many examples of platform moderation decisions that are unequivocally out of touch from their terms of service?
Facebook could say "you can't post harmful content" and then it's up to Facebook (moderators) to define what "harmful content" is.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
That would not protect free speech, it would infringe on it. Forcing someone to host someone else's speech is both an infringement on their right to free speech and on the free speech rights of users who want a well-moderated community, which you cannot have if the government is overriding moderator discretion. It's also quite dangerous, as the government will likely use that power to promote speech it likes and drown out speech it doesn't like.
I wonder if I will have to use a VPN to access Hacker News from the UK in the future, as this site will surely not let the UK government prevent it from moderating itself.
> Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary.
People going to court to unblock a twitter account is a reasonably common thing in Germany at least. Even having a lawyer fax a letter will often be sufficient.
> Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary.
It really isn't, all terms of service contain a line that effectively allows them to take down anything they like under the guise of distasteful et al.
That sounds horrible and like a recipe for both politically motivated censorship and ineffective moderation. I don't want the government involved in at all.
The same people who created the environment where the police was knocking on the doors for tweets and wanted to restrict the speech significantly suddenly decided to restrict platforms from restricting speech? This doesn't sound right to me, even if right doesn't sound stable to me.
IMHO no content should be removed unless the existence of content creates tangible issues. For example hosting copyrighted material creates the issue of copyright holders not getting paid for their work, therefore removable but the record of someone saying saying something bigoted doesn't actually harm anyone(if there's a harm it has been done at the moment of expressing it) therefore should not be removed and kept as an evidence of the character and actions of the person. Any content is a historical record, thanks to that we can look what Hitler said and we can reason over it and know why he is despised. This gives fidelity and understanding of the situation. We don't say Hitler was bad because he violated rule 4.1 in the TOS, the same must be true for everyone.
If UK does something like that, it can be a huge win.
The exact same UK government supports making more speech illegal (see my other comment). Experts have warned that the bill threatens E2E encryption. It also seems to require KYC for all social media activity, killing online pseudonymity.
They'll try to pander to conservatives by appearing to "protect free speech!" (fuck Reuters) but I really hope people don't fall for it.
I was checking out one of the UK firms providing “age assurance”, turns out the directors also had a PPE firm now disbanded of course. That’s all you need to know about this bill…
What ends up happening is the political bias of the censors leaks into the decisions. You end up creating echo chambers; which are tremendously unhealthy for society.
Canada is going through the same type of censorship, but under the guise of promoting "Canadian content" As if our culture is in danger of disappearing if we cant watch "Canadian" movies and "Canadian" news. The dangerous side is that the gov wants content providers to manipulate their algorithms to promote some deemed "Canadian" content and demote others. Dangerously close to state controlled media with a prettier veneer so it doesnt look like authoritarian play it is. So far there's enough pushback to keep the bill from passing but that doesnt stop the gov from continuing to push.
I don't care about offense. What I care about is lying. If someone distributes provable untruths, that should be legally actionable -- if not by government, then in civil court by the people harmed by the lies.
[+] [-] robswc|3 years ago|reply
I thought it would the the UK with the way they have literally arrested people for tweets... but then I saw the insane and petty corruption taking place in Aus and a journalist getting their house firebombed.
[+] [-] inopinatus|3 years ago|reply
The notable corruption we saw recently was Scott Morrison making himself a secret minister of several portfolios, and for these and other sins the electorate severely rebuked his party at recent state and federal elections.
That is what democracy, not authoritarianism, looks like.
The folks you should be suspicious of are those spoonfeeding these garbage takes to the credulous.
[+] [-] mort96|3 years ago|reply
It seems like one should either take free speech absolutist approach and say speech should never be illegal, or accept that some speech is illegal which would obviously mean that it's illegal even on Twitter. But you're not the first person I've seen who seemingly find it extra ridiculous to react to something someone tweeted, as if publishing a tweet or a series of tweets is not an act of speech, and I don't understand it.
[+] [-] rstuart4133|3 years ago|reply
> the decision of Justice Rothman of the Supreme Court of NSW in Voller v Nationwide News Pty Ltd, extended the reach of defamation law such that media outlets could be held liable as ‘publishers’ for defamatory Facebook comments made by third parties on the media outlets’ Facebook posts.
But it was a Judge, not the government. And it was the big media that as targeted, not Joe Citizen. Yet the net effect was a curtailment of Joe Citizen's ability to broadcast their thoughts on the news of the day, and how it was reported. The size of the penalty his honour handed out and the broadness of the ruling meant there was only one sane response from the media giants: heavy moderation of their comment sections, or shut them down. They mostly chose shut down. Heavy moderation is very expensive, so I don't blame them.
The end result has been a biggest reduction of internet speech, comment and civil discourse triggered by news events I've seen in 20 years. Yet it strangely goes mostly unmentioned. Instead we get these conspiracy theories. I guess a conspiracy theory is more titillating than gross incompetence by one powerful individual. If want to go for conspiracy theories try this: why the haven't the law makers drafted a new law to fix the judicial mistake?
[+] [-] ellrob88|3 years ago|reply
Love the guy, but it sounds like you're implying this is an example of an attack on independent journalism, and think the government is involved?
Perhaps worth reviewing the reliability /agenda of your news sources?
[+] [-] freefruit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yarg|3 years ago|reply
We're pushing legislation that moves the country away from democracy, and hate crimes laws that prohibit mocking religion.
[+] [-] Laarlf|3 years ago|reply
Getting pulled through the legal system because you showed a middle finger to someone or because you said that some random war crime was not really that bad is a thing that just should not happen. But it is a thing that happened before.
Protests and speech being regulated has the effect of everyone just trying to not get jailed. Even if there are no big headlines about it. And that damage is arguably worse than media coverage, which pulls attention to the issue.
[+] [-] cyanydeez|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] spzb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macrolime|3 years ago|reply
>She said companies could face fines of up to 10% of their turnover if they did >not have systems in place to restrict underage access.
So what does this mean? All social media websites have to check the passport of every UK user that registers? It will be illegal to post anything in a forum, without first uploading your passport?
[+] [-] flipbrad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mianos|3 years ago|reply
I would imagine that some rando social media site that collects this stuff to prove someone is over age to be a whole lot less secure (if that is possible?).
[+] [-] shapefrog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iam-TJ|3 years ago|reply
At the shop cash tills I noticed recently a sign that said "if you're purchasing alcohol and are fortunate enough to look under 25 we will need to age check you" (or some very similar words).
Same goes for anyone buying solvents and glues, or knives and blades, vapes, etc.
The aim is good - the challenge is the implementation.
Only feasible way seems to be prove you're older than the minimum (which feels like persecuting those that are old enough) rather than prove you're too young!
[+] [-] Mindwipe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmlx|3 years ago|reply
credit card?
[+] [-] dorwi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|3 years ago|reply
Imagine if SWATing didn't have much of a chance of getting you hurt, but had a 100% chance of putting you on what is essentially a domestic terrorist watchlist.
[+] [-] stainablesteel|3 years ago|reply
the nazis soviets and chinese all had lists of undesirables, the lists only functioned to define the targets
[+] [-] pacifika|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SilverBirch|3 years ago|reply
>The opposition Labour Party said replacing the "prevention of harm" with an emphasis on free speech undermined the bill's purpose.
I mean... they're not wrong. The original intention behind this bill was insane, and it no longer does what it wnated. The fundamental problem that the government is facing is that there's behavior they want to discourage but can't functionally ban. Legally you have a choice, you either get ambiguous and open it up to abuse, or you go narrow and fail to really address the issue. I think this approach is fine, but we may have to revisit it.
[+] [-] akiselev|3 years ago|reply
This is a sign that the government is so dysfunctional that not even the military/intelligence industrial complex can get them to pass a bill - they’re no strangers to unenforceable nonsense.
[+] [-] enkid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9864250|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altacc|3 years ago|reply
I think it is more likely that this new minister had it explained to them how impossible this was to enforce or take action against, given the difficulty of proving mental harm.
Either way, it's the correct decision. Content policies should be based on clear cut laws in addition to a platform's self authored content moderation policy.
[+] [-] ColinHayhurst|3 years ago|reply
Child safety folks are happy for now, but naive. Celebrities are fountains of wisdom so that's all good. The age-verification and trust-washing industry are waiting for their payback. "Recognised" journalism gets protected. And Big Tech is all for it; compliance falls much hard on challengers.
To be fair the dropping yesterday of the "legal but harmful" provisions for adults is finally showing there is some hope for sanity. Although paradoxically this will likely speed and increase the prevalence of a gated UK splinternet; as it will be become required to age-gate children across all (user-to-user and search) services.
[+] [-] lakomen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flipbrad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HPsquared|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] causality0|3 years ago|reply
If true this is the bigger story here. Illegal speech in the UK already encompassed a goodly chunk of anything "harmful" or likely to cause hurt feewings. Forcing platforms to actually follow their terms of service, however, is revolutionary. Even forcing platforms to disclose to each banned user what part of the ToS they violated and how would rock the digital landscape.
[+] [-] madeofpalk|3 years ago|reply
The platforms write their own terms of service. I'm sure they're pretty broad to give them license to do basically whatever they want. Are there many examples of platform moderation decisions that are unequivocally out of touch from their terms of service?
Facebook could say "you can't post harmful content" and then it's up to Facebook (moderators) to define what "harmful content" is.
The YCombinator/Hacker News Terms of Use https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is quite broad and gives them license to remove basically whatever they want (as it should - it's their website, they should be able to run it as they see fit)
[+] [-] 9864250|3 years ago|reply
I wonder if I will have to use a VPN to access Hacker News from the UK in the future, as this site will surely not let the UK government prevent it from moderating itself.
[+] [-] Xylakant|3 years ago|reply
People going to court to unblock a twitter account is a reasonably common thing in Germany at least. Even having a lawyer fax a letter will often be sufficient.
[+] [-] matkoniecz|3 years ago|reply
How it would change anything? Any ToS that I bothered to look at had some form "we reserve right to ban/delete stuff for any reason at all"
[+] [-] ColinHayhurst|3 years ago|reply
Except the Bill doesn't have such provisions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33786707
[+] [-] Mindwipe|3 years ago|reply
It really isn't, all terms of service contain a line that effectively allows them to take down anything they like under the guise of distasteful et al.
The bill is nonsense.
[+] [-] throwarayy42521|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|3 years ago|reply
IMHO no content should be removed unless the existence of content creates tangible issues. For example hosting copyrighted material creates the issue of copyright holders not getting paid for their work, therefore removable but the record of someone saying saying something bigoted doesn't actually harm anyone(if there's a harm it has been done at the moment of expressing it) therefore should not be removed and kept as an evidence of the character and actions of the person. Any content is a historical record, thanks to that we can look what Hitler said and we can reason over it and know why he is despised. This gives fidelity and understanding of the situation. We don't say Hitler was bad because he violated rule 4.1 in the TOS, the same must be true for everyone.
If UK does something like that, it can be a huge win.
[+] [-] concinds|3 years ago|reply
They'll try to pander to conservatives by appearing to "protect free speech!" (fuck Reuters) but I really hope people don't fall for it.
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] muteor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incomingpain|3 years ago|reply
What ends up happening is the political bias of the censors leaks into the decisions. You end up creating echo chambers; which are tremendously unhealthy for society.
[+] [-] RocketOne|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jensson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epgui|3 years ago|reply
If you ban it, then it becomes illegal.
If you don’t ban it, then it stays legal.
It’s pretty much that simple.