I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law.
Also:
Step 1: Build mass surveillance to prevent the 'bad guys' from coming into political power (its ok, we're the good guys).
Step 2: Your political opponents capitalize on your genuinely horrific overreach, and legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public as fighting against tyranny (unfortunately for you they do have a point). They promise to dismantle the system if coming to power.
Step 3: They get elected.
Step 4: They don't dismantle the system, now the people you planned to use the system against are using it against you.
Simple. The UK is not a pro democracy, pro human rights state.
It might be uncomfortable to admit this, but if your government is a police state that's pretty much mutually exclusive with being a pro human rights state.
Yeah this applies to nearly all of Europe IMO. Recent events show that the American Bill of Rights is definitely not a panacea, but at least there's some legal standing to push back against Orwellian measure like those put in place by the UK or the EU.
It's not uncomfortable everyone knows it. The problem is with self righteous political activists masquerading as judges and civil servants who are so convinced of the justice of their cause that they feel no need to justify themselves to anyone and trample on dissent . And a class of elitist politicians with contempt for the people who voted them in.
It does seem culturally popular in UK to have rules and government hoop jumping for every small thing, to the point it's become a tired meme on the internet. The backlash on this one was likely because it happened very quickly and very broadly across the internet at once. They should have slowly expanded the scope as most governments do and maybe the backlash would have been lower.
The UK has never been a free speech state. Remember the extremely weird era when Gerry Adams MP could not be heard on TV and had to have his voice dubbed?
Few European countries have free speech in the way the US does because their legal frameworks explicitly recognise potential harms from speech and freedoms speech can inhibit and attempt to balance these competing freedoms.
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
The original intent was supposed to be that Adams and others would not be on TV at all. The TV broadcasters relatively quickly realised that there was a loophole which meant that as long as his voice wasn't broadcast they were within the rules. But what was weird was that the UK government didn't immediately close this loophole (especially given that the same loophole was not available in the Republic of Ireland where the same broadcast ban existed at the time).
Small nitpick: I don't think it's right to refer to him as "Gerry Adams MP", due to the policy he followed of refusing to swear the oath of allegiance and thus not taking up the seat.
IIRC, Gerry Adams was always performed by Stephen Rea, a moderately successful actor and heart-throb in certain circles. Adams said that SR “did me better than I do”.
> A political establishment that builds a "total surveillance police state" is not going to allow itself to be displaced by "elections".
Kier Starmer may be a wildly unpopular leader, even within his own party, and may have declared inconvenient protest groups to be terrorists so they can be banned, and may support a porn ban and an encryption ban, and an expansion of police facial recognition, and may back jailing people for misinformation posted on twitter that lead to riots, and may happily play lapdog to the wildly unpopular Trump government for little benefit.
But he will not call off the next elections, or refuse to step down. He is nowhere near popular enough to succeed at that, even if he tried. He can't even get his own party to pass his government's flagship spending reductions.
It's the direction the state is taking, not the political establishment. Elections are fine because they won't change anything in the way the state is run. If you want proof look at Israel. The moment the right wing, which has been continuously elected into power for the last 20 years or so, and have a clear and undeniable mandate tried to bring the institutions more in line with the people they suddenly found themselves innundated with protests and outright rebellion. Democracy has its limits apparently. I hate to see the UK sliding in that direction.
It's quite simple: European states require serious restrictions on liberty in order to do the incredibly unpopular but morally good things they feel they're doing.
One of the weirder ones was up until ~2021 it was illegal in Germany to display the YPG flag (that is you would get stopped by police but not necessarily prosecuted) but not to engage in YPG activities.
> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored
It’s not like this is new or unique to the UK, the US has been busted indiscriminately spying on all of its citizens multiple times - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
> allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government
The UK isn't any of that, it's always be an authoritarian country. The fact that British are amongst the most apathetic people on Earth fuels that, they just accept everything.
> I genuinely do not understand where how the idea of building a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored, can even as much as seriously be considered by an allegedly pro-democracy, pro-human rights government, much less make it into law.
Frank Zappa explained that long ago:
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Mass surveillance doesn’t seem very difficult to build if you have power. If you don’t build it, it seems like step 4 hit becomes “they build it and use it against you.” That’s not to say it’s a good idea to build such a thing, but the “your enemies will use it against you” argument doesn’t make much sense to me. The only real solution to bad guys gaining power is to either prevent them from gaining power or remove them if they already have.
But that is astonishingly idealistic in the best case.
What happens is generational shifts over longer periods of time mean that draconian law or feature has more and more chances to be used by someone with bad intentions. It's the law of large numbers or murphy's law in full effect, it's not just 1 or 2 people.
Both tories and labour are doing the same kind of politics and are not different at all. From their POV us, people, are the bad guys who has to be restricted.
It's honestly even dumber than this, because most of these countries are on the knife's edge of 50/50 popularity between the nominally progressive party and the nominally conservative party. So the odds that your opponents come into power within your lifetime are approaching 1.
I'm not a fan of the OSA but proponents of it will *keep winning* if you *keep misrepresenting it*.
You can, and should, argue about the effects but the core of the OSA and how it can be sold is this, at several different levels:
One, most detailed.
Sites that provide user to user services have some level of duty of care to their users, like physical sites and events.
They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
They should implement mitigations based on those risk assessments. Not to completely remove all possibility of harm, but to lower it.
For example, sites where kids can talk to each other in private chats should have ways of kids reporting adults and moderators to review those reports. Sites where you can share pictures should check for people sharing child porn (if you have a way of a userbase sharing encrypted images with each other anonymously, you're going to get child porn on there). Sites aimed at adults with public conversations like some hobby site with no history of issues and someone checking for spam/etc doesn't need to do much.
You should re-check things once a year.
That's the selling point - and as much as we can argue about second order effects (like having a list of IDs and what you've watched, overhead etc), those statements don't on the face of it seem objectionable.
Two, shorter.
Sites should be responsible about what they do just like shops and other spaces, with risk assessments and more focus when there are kids involved.
Three, shortest.
Facebook should make sure people aren't grooming your kids.
Now, the problem with talking about " a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored," is where does that fit into the explanations above? How do you explain that to even me, a highly technical, terminally online nerd who has read at least a decent chunk of the actual OFCOM guidelines?
This isn't a new issue, and it predates the internet. There were publishers of magazines containing pornography (or anything else unsuitable for children). These were sold in shops. A publisher had to ensure that the material in the magazines was legal to print, but it wasn't their responsibility to prevent children from looking at their magazines, and it's difficult to see how that would even be possible. That was the responsibility of the people working in the shops: they had to put the magazines on the top shelf, and weren't allowed to sell them to children.
On the internet, people don't get porn videos directly from pornographic web sites, just as in the past they didn't buy porn directly from the publishers. The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops. So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs. And British ISPs are within the UK's jurisdiction.
And before anyone points out that there are workarounds that children could use to bypass controls, this was also the case with printed magazines.
This seems like a misrepresentation of OSA more so than the parent post. It prevents people accessing content they may well need. Look at some of the subreddits being blocked if you want to see how far they go. Subs about periods, sex education, stopping smoking, suicide prevention, lgbtq. Not sure how you justify that nobody under 18 would ever have a need to access these things.
When you have to prove you're a child you have to prove you're and adult. The privacy implications of that are why it's a police state problem. It eliminates the anonymity and allows for perfect personal tracking of any wrongthink you may do.
It's also not the only thing the UK government has done to become a police state by a long shot. UK is 1984 adjacent in quite a few ways.
This is mostly true. It fails to mention "is the user a kid" is unverifiable without imposing identify verification, which implies that all speech (which is already monitored) is now self-censored, effectively turning the state in a surveillance state. You don't need to be throwing people in jail for that, having a credible means of identifying anyone online is enough.
> They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
The problem is when one group wants to impose their definition of harm on everyone else, saying that everyone else shouldn't be allowed to be 'harmed' even if they don't consider it as such. In the UK this is not unique to the OSA discussion(see the UK's anti-trans turn), and but it is very relevant.
The West aren't good guys and have never been the good guys. We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to, but without that to contrast with, we look increasingly like the managed democracies you see out East.
What people don't get is the defining feature of the West (or more correctly advanced societies) isn't democracy, it's rule of law.
- It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
- It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
- It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
- It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
- It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
Places like China are finding out why you need these things, and are building these systems so their society can succeed.
Democracy's just an (Western) artifact of enforcing and maintaining rule of law.
While the West aren't really the good guy, I think there is an argument that could be made that the West is the better guy. Because while government outreach like those discussed are a scary possibility in the West nowadays, in the 'East' (more like Russia & China), it is a given and there are no recourse.
From what I witnessed over years is, European countries loved to point fingers to other countries to educate them about how their democracies shall look like.
Now they are doing the very same things they pointed fingers about and, now there's no structured information flow to hide this.
As I sometimes tend to say: "God has an interesting sense of humor".
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia all have fairly robust democracies. Yes, some of them probably look and feel different than those of NATO, but they are a great improvement over previous colonial administrations, monarchies, theocracies, and "single party democratic states" (Korea and Taiwan before late 1980s/early 1990s break-throughs).
> We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to
You can't think yourself a free thinker to realize the west is a force for evil in the world and simultaneously believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism is it makes for a very incoherent world view. "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time."
Small-c conservatism, think-of-the-children Think Tanks™ have long been a part of British politics and we go barely a week between legitimate studies and idle thought pieces where we introspect modern parenting and despair.
Like it or not, kids have access to the internet in a way that wasn't true 20, 25 years ago. Parents of teens are just realising the horrors of targeted online bullying, diet clubs, porn sharing (Snapchat and worse) and the many other small things that can just destroy kids before they've had a chance.
"But Oli," I hear you say... Yes. Parents should do better but criminalising parenting methods is hard and expensive and leaves you with a bunch of state-orphaned kids. So if we are to assume parents gonna parent, systems like this look tempting to people who don't understand the Internet.
I'm not defending the law, I just don't think this one has its roots in surveillance. It's a shitty reaction to a shitty situation.
That's assuming voting systems or checks and balances don't matter. If you made structural mistakes in how you choose politicians, you're going to have a worse time than if you use better systems.
Politicians are supposed to represent the country. Politicians who are looking on controlling the views of the public instead of letting the views of the public guide the government by definition do not.
The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives. It's a completely foreign paradigm to the average American, though alarming "progress" has been made on the American front as of late.
No. We were typically indifferent to our Government. Very much a case of 'go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.' But substitute 'tea'.
But in the last couple of decades, things have changed. Arguably, a public referendum in 2016, was very much a protest vote against several Parliaments that didn't listen to its citizens. And the last decade shows nothing has changed.
My friends and family, and myself included, were never very political, and very much a case of 'No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In', but now everyone is talking about the Government. Interesting times ahead.
See what is happening here in U.S. as an example; our government was rather easy to corrupt in less than a few months once all the pieces were in place (regardless of who put them in place and for what reason).
This is the first time in a long time on Hacker News that I've not seen universal disapproval to this measure. People are actually arguing for it, even as a devil's advocate? What the UK has been doing is wrong, it is disenfranchising and disempowering people.
The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore. It's always been ruled by a crowd of people who went to privately-funded schools that cost a fortune. Half the government's politicians and staffers can trace their relations back to the same historical personage.
They aren't afraid for their kids with these laws. They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break, and they will be out of a job with pitchfork-wielding crowds chasing them out of London.
I don't think anyone can assume that every comment on HN comes from a real human anymore. This law comes from the same nation that gave us Cambridge Analytica.
HN is a large enough forum that it would be included in any serious propaganda campaign.
Yes, the userbase changed quite a lot. Supporters of autocratic governments are in greater numbers, especially from EU based on what I see but also an increased number from SV. I have a passion for sociology, but I did not figure out completely this shift in a way I can prove it.
Hacker News users now profit from extensive invasion of privacy, from Facebook to LinkedIn, to every ad network, VPN, ISP, etc... They all trade in our private info daily. 20 years ago, the battle cry was around privacy and government monitoring of all traffic and how bad that was. Now people climb over one another to give away their data for free in exchange for mind-altering social media platforms and AI driven nonsense.
I am convinced Libertarians do not exist. The current state of the US should drive them to utter insanity, and yet, they tend to be mostly silent on all of these corporate over reach issues. People who say they are Libertarian just don't want to pay parking tickets. If the real techno Libertarians existed, they'd be burning our current Valley to the ground. Anyone who cared about the 2nd amendment should be losing their minds over military deployments on US soil. Constitution huggers should be screaming bloody murder, daily. Instead, those types are super happy with their new dictator. Funny how all the performative anger goes away when it's their side that is performing the authoritarian actions. The NRA seems to LOVE this willing take over of the well armed militias by the federal government... But I digress.
Instead, the reigning philosophy here is now greed. Privacy, sovereignty, ownership, open source, all those things are forgotten in the backseat of the crypto and VC cash car.
It surprises me how little the newer generations care about ethics, morality, principles. Call them whatever you want, but it really feels like everyone screams about how righteous they are, how wrong everyone else is, and then they take the cash and stand up for nothing when the chips are down.
Remember when the big thing we were worried about was the NSA recording our phone calls? Now large corporations harvest our call info, chat texts, social media posts, and even the raw microphone input on our phones to strip every last piece of information about us and mine it for data to influence our lives, purchases, and even out thoughts. And what did we do in the last election? We put in the party that will remove even more roadblocks from this type of thing, and has deregulated crypto. Victory!
How did we get here? Where are the Cypherpunks? Where are the high ideals we used to have?
Clearly showcasing that the UK chose their target wisely. Use a disliked entity as the way in the door, and people will argue for it without realizing it's a trojan horse.
But "think about the children" has always been one of the tactics used to push this kind of legislation, along with "terrorism" and variants of the two. That doesn't explain why HN is now more willing to believe the ruse.
It’s not an accident that we just went through one of the biggest cultural revolutions in the software development world. Look at how we treated people like Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Brendan Eich, Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, and even John Carmack. One by one, they were sidelined, pushed out, or publicly flogged for being insufficiently “progressive,” for holding “outdated” views, or simply for the crime of being older white men who had the misfortune of building the foundations of the field before today’s ideological climate took over.
But the important part is that we never really replaced them with anyone of similar weight. There was no next generation of cultural or intellectual heavyweights ready to step in. Instead, the online crowd splintered into political factions, with one side demanding constant ideological purity and the other reacting by withdrawing, going independent, or outright rejecting the institutions they had once built.
In the meantime, corporations managed to capture the new generation of young hackers by presenting themselves as “woke.” Put up the right rainbow flag at the right time, make the right statements, and suddenly the deep distrust people had toward big tech in the 90s and 2000s started to fade.
> The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore.
What on earth are you on about?
The UK is certainly a democratic state, it holds free, fair and transparent elections. Governments change regularly in line with these. The current prime-minister went to a grammar school, the deputy PM went to various 'standard' state schools.
Yes, bad laws and authoritarian impulses can and likely will have far-reaching effects, but that's hardly new or unique to the UK, the US has a history of spying on its entire population as well, from room 641A (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) to the Snowden revelations and Palantir. It also has a load of states adding access restrictions and age checks of one sort or another to the internet.
The people of the UK are largely in favour of these sorts of rules, as they are in a bunch of other places. They may be wrong but that doesn't mean democracy is failing.
This "The sky is falling!" rhetoric is why geeks are very rarely taken seriously in these debates.
I'd assume those are just another symptoms of the Thielverse and where would be a better place to have it seeping into the younger, well fed tech scene than hn?
They know that they'll still be able to get around those "Inconveniences" or create their own elite places while the majority of the general public won't and we're not giving a damn about the general public anymore. That's woke and not trendy anymore.
I mean, this is so obviously wrong. People would be ashamed to argue for it back in the days.
Democracies can't survive with unfettered free speech. It's called the Paradox of tolerance [1] or sometimes the Popper paradox (after Karl Popper).
I don't know if you've ever seen some of the dark corners of the Internet. This includes 4chan, Kiwi Farms and, well, arguably Twitter at this point. Twitter has really become 4chan. But I digress.
We, as a society, are fine with suppressing certain kinds of speech. We always have. We can use CSAM as an obvious counterexample to free speech absolutism. There's no way to reconcile banning that and free speech absolutism. At some point it comes down to deciding certain kinds of expression is simply unacceptable.
Now is the UK government using 4chan (etc) as a stalking horse for a wider surveillance state? Almost certainly.
We saw a similar thing when Apple wanted to scan all private messages for CSAM. They faced a completely understandable backlash and reversed course.
But we don't have to defend 4chan or Kiwi Farms to oppose a surveillance state.
The Paradox of Tolerance has been first evoked in The Open Society and Its Enemies, and is just as "relevant" as the rest of the book as an handbook for human societies.
You should look into it, some time.
Besides -- If you don't tolerate intolerance, you're intolerant (of intolerance). So you shouldn't be tolerated. Right?
> They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break
And give way to what? You're making a lot of noise that sounds like you want liberation and freedom, but freedom from what? What is it you think the current system of democracy (which has always included intrusions into absolute personal freedom by the way) will give way to? An anarcho-capitalist state? A communist utopia? A breakdown in law and order?
The system WE built over the last 800 years is the most prosperous free society we have ever known. There is no absolute monarch, no forced labor. What do you want to replace it with?
You live in a society of surveillance. Google surveils every single action you take on the internet, as does Facebook, X, and whatever partners they share that information with. That's not a system built by the government "elites" that was built by for profit enterprise in a "free-market". Now the populous at large wants to make use of those same levers of power, and you make it sound like they're responsible for all of it.
The game Alpha Centauri had the most hard hitting quote that I think applies now.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
The only sources of information we currently see about protests happening across the US are by small broadcasters. There is plenty of news that is being systematically being suppressed by the top-down information chain because it is so effective in clamping down dissent.
IMO, free flowing information still remains the best safeguard against tyranny.
The individual isn't a broadcaster - the new broadcasters are YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and all the other platforms that choose which content to amplify.
The content recommendation algorithms are designed by humans, who are just following orders from the wealthiest, most powerful people on earth.
Not specifically related to this “child protection” thing, but you can’t deny that the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things, driven by actors such as states, magnified x1000 by social media, and now also AI.
Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I’m 100% for personal liberty and accountability, and admittedly I don’t have a solution for this.
I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.
Again just to be clear this has nothing to do with the UK thing which I strongly disagree with.
The free flow of information isn't driving extremism, it's echo chambers. People have a tendency of surrounding themselves with only those who already agree with them on some topic, so that a heavily partisan position suddenly becomes 'moderate.' This is how you have people simultaneously claiming, for instance, that the US is becoming more liberal than ever, and that it's becoming more conservative than ever.
You can also see this with the perception gap [1]. Those who are most involved in politics tend to be the paradoxically least knowledgeable about what 'the other side' thinks and believes. Typical contemporary examples would be republicans thinking democrats want to defund the police, or democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.
When you have contrary ideas bouncing against each other, poor ideas are easily demonstrated to be such - and you get a more realistic view of what people 'on the other side' actually think and believe. It naturally tempers against radicalism. But when you start to control information, you get the opposite. This is made even worse by the sort of people that find themselves on a life trajectory to go work, let alone volunteer, for the 'Ministry of Truth'. They tend to be the exact sorts that want to create information bubbles and echo chambers.
----
In general I think the truth tends to trickle up, even if it might get a bit dirty on the way there. I'd appeal to places like the USSR on that. They not only directly controlled absolutely all published information, but strictly controlled migration in and out of the country, informers everywhere making people terrified of speaking their mind, and just generally had a rock solid grip on information. The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. There's a great series of jokes from the era here. [2] On of my favorites, "Why do we need two central newspapers, Truth (Pravda) and News (Izvestiya) if both are organs of the same Party? Because in Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth."
Knives help you cook delicious food, knives can also help you stab your partner to death. This doesn't mean knives should be banned (though, ironically enough, the UK believes otherwise).
Different technologies are in different places on the "societal usefullness versus danger" spectrum. Nuclear weapons are obviously on the "really fricking dangerous" side, no country lets a civilian own them. Forks are obviously on the "useful" side, even though you can technically use one to gouge somebody's eye out.
What's the right tradeoff for guns, printing presses, typewriters and social media companies is a matter of some debate.
> Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I remember what it was like before the internet, and misinformation and propaganda were just as pervasive and perverse, except you couldn't be sure about it unless you read a book, did actual research or talked to an expert, and you sure as shit weren't going to change anyone's mind or at least be able to say "you're wrong and here's why" when you hear obvious bullshit.
IMO, there was a big change in the nature of harmful misinformation once you could Google things like "did convenience store workers really celebrate on 9/11" when that particular urban myth spread in the aftermath of the attack.
I do agree that the nature and vector of misinformation and propaganda are different. The ways in which we're wrong and dumb changed, but we were just as wrong and dumb before the internet, and we were statistically more hateful and violent then, too.
Look at the positives: now you are aware that every channel is full of misinformation and propaganda and treat it all as such. That gives you better media literacy than previous generations who tended to trust everything that was given to them "from above" - it enables us to be more intellectually mature and honest with ourselves about the nature and history of news media, even if you might not actually find that pleasant or convenient to deal with.
I dont buy the misinformation/propaganda argument as the past was far far worse on all fronts in that regard than today. Additionally, most platforms are highly censored and curated being the exact opposite of free flow of information.
I think the let people decide for themselves is the best option as any alternative is by definition tyranny/control and why the parent quote is so spot on.
The main misinformation you see on the Internet is attention-grabbing women pretending to care about you and people trying to misrepresent mass-made white-label Chinese stuff as indie original designs.
Few people spread hate other than to say our society is a disaster and we'd be better off with communism or anarchy which has been typical discourse of young men since the dawn of the modern age.
In general I've found much higher quality of content on the Internet than elsewhere, with genuine testimonies, in-depth analyses, and a variety of opinions and experiences. Whenever I watch the news on TV I am appalled by how superficial and one-sided it is, sometimes misunderstanding the issue altogether, completely out of touch and misrepresenting reality.
The issue with social media isn't the free flow of information but the amplification of certain information — the information that tends to make you angry. The amplification is the cause of echo chambers, spreading of misinformation and disinformation, etc. It makes possible what in essence is a distributed denial of service attack on the human brain.
Sure, chain emails existed before, but they had a pretty low ceiling of how many it would reach. It didn't scale well.
In other words, you should regulate the amplification mechanism ("algorithm"), not what information is allowed to be said. I think forcing platforms to go back to subscribe+reverse chronological feeds would be a pretty good start.
> the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things
Being alive is a prerequisite to being able to suffer, die, etc. None of the things you listed are unique to free flows of information, in fact misinformation and propaganda are even worse in a closed loop of information.
Look at North Korea, and tell me that they'd be worse off propaganda-wise if they had unfettered access to internet.
> The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
No, the entities flooding social media have also flooded all the pre-internet, closed-loop media as well. Right-wing propaganda like Fox News, Alex Jones (first started his radio show in 1996), and literally the entire Cold War-era Red Scare propaganda, on radio and tv, all predated social media. And those were not free-flow channels, the information they put out was 100% controlled by the owners.
Do you think absolutely all content should be allowed to be accessible?
If you wouldn't allow child porn (which 4chan deletes/doesn't allow), where exactly do you draw the line between blocking sites with cp, and allowing sites like 4chan which host porn without consent (voyeur/spy/revenge)?
There's a difference between prosecuting a crime, and restricting people to prevent it from even happening. Both have a place but only the former retains your liberty.
The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
> It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of political opinions in public discourse and don't kill or imprison people who try to start an opposition party.
I'm not entirely sure this is true. At least in the west, this perspective seemed to rely on most "public discourse" not being visible to most of the public. Social media has destroyed this illusion.
I read on twitter, can't find the exact link, a chinese content site operating in .sg for many years, survived multiple "internet purges" by China, got banned by UK authorities last month.
I remember reading posts a decade or two ago on either Linode's forums or some other place like LinuxQuestions in broken English about tunneling through firewalls with ssh from I assume Chinese people.
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
They have done it, and the west (over half the US states, the UK and Australia at a bare minimum) have entirely ceded any moral high ground regarding it.
No one likes hearing hypocrisy from politicians, but it's one of their most dominant traits. That is, if you ascribe normal ethics and morals to them. But politicians' are a different breed, and the sooner we understand that, the better.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
I’m quite sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy. China censors the internet because they want to control everything about their citizens lives. But us? Oh, we’re censoring the internet to protect the children.
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
It's just a different version of the same thing. In chinas case, they aggressively locked down internet influence. In the wests case, they held off a bit and made up bullshit reasons like saving the children with age verification. I cant stand this version of the 'free' west where they promote totalitarian information control and demand real IDs. This is nazi shit.
The free internet might be gone in the next decade. Probably time to buy a few hard drives and do some archiving. I don't just mean piracy. Articles, blogs, anything you find precious.
It sounds just as unfair as including a levy on blank CDs paid to music copyright holders, regardless of how the CDs are used. But being unfair doesn't mean it can't happen in your country.
Back in another life (videography), I had acquaintances who would throw looks when they heard I’d purchased a single terabyte.
Seems that narrative might already be - at least mildly -pervasive.
I've been downloading YouTube videos for the past few years. Not randomly, from specific channels I select. Today I passed 12100 videos.
It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.
When I try to capture a few friends videos of events I had run from instagram stories with yt-dlp, I get nice friendly warning that to avoid my account being restricted or deleted i should stop using tools.
This has been brewing for years. The international network will not survive multiple independent governments all attempting to impose their own laws on it. It's bound to fracture into several regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
The free internet is mostly gone already. Most people already only browse the same 5-10 sites belonging to big tech, thus already part of the surveillance apparatus.
I think about the same. Right now we are at the normalizing the ID verification stage and banning specific content in certain countries/states, once we are desensitized, VPNs will come next, and then some government solution to track everything you do online.
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
I doubt it. As a Brit they "blocked" Pirate Bay and torrent sites about a decade ago and I've hardly had any problems accessing them and torrenting stuff. It's all very half arsed.
The Internet was philosophically designed to move information, and for every effort to prevent that there is a workaround. There will always be a free protocol.
Same as market; anything that does not use it will use less efficient alternatives like politics. Sadly market like tao and politics has no moral either.
This is really important. It's time to take history into our own hands given the penchant for erasure by the elites and how dumb the elites have become.
And notice it’s not being destroyed by the (largely fantastical) “fascist threats” constantly being whined about; rather, this is all the direct act of a decidedly left-wing government. Shocking to no one who has even a passing familiarity with the history of the 20th century…
It's almost like an uneducated public is easier to control..
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
> This is not an ask from or concern of the general population.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
Anyone who asks that is arguing in bad faith and using children as political weapons to achieve their ends. It's gotten to the point I outright dismiss anything the politicians say the second I hear the words "children" and "terrorists".
Worse, Governments seem to have gotten the idea that it's their place to tell the population what to do and want when it should be the other way around.
It is more a long the lines that large document leaks have allowed people to see how NGOs have become vehicles for State Intelligence and corporate/political power.
It depends what you consider a “serious NGO,” but the NSPCC, the Molly Rose Foundation, the Breck Foundation, the End Violence Against Women Coalition, and other NGOs actively campaigned for and supported it.
There are a lot of extra steps the UK government can take beyond the fines:
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
Unfortunately the government is winning, Apple’s ADP encryption is no longer available in the UK. The Online Safety Act was finally forced through after over 10 years.
They’ll eventually get what they want in any case the same way a chisel can eventually dig through a mountain.
eSafety is a joke. However, the Human Rights Commission has the funding to launch multi-year investigations into YouTubers that make people cry and poop their pants. That's power, although they do admit the investigations cannot currently proceed beyond investigations due to there aren't any punishments or remedies in the statute. But that's a clerical error that should be remedied some day.
>a stand-off has been engineered between UK censorship measures nobody asked for, and the constitutional rights of all Americans.
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
>Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children
More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.
Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?
Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.
Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..
These laws weren't created by Ofcom. They were passed as primary legislation by the previous government (and enthusiatically implemented by the current one).
Already underway in several states. Bills in Texas and Utah have already been approved, with several other states entertaining such proposals, although none have moved out of committee as yet.
It's all so tiresome.
If this were really about protecting the children they could've solved the matter with the equivalent of a mandate on device manufacturers and website operators to respect a DO-NOT-SERVICE-I-AM-A-CHILD (or whatever) header in HTTP. Hell, if it were really about protecting children, parents would get access to dumbed down versions of the kind of tools corporate IT has for managing business phones ... so they can lock them down, limit how they're used, right down to what apps can be installed.... but that would deprive advertisers of a golden ticket for knowing what views are legit, put parents back in control, and actually work... so can't have that. :D
Readit News
Also:
Step 1: Build mass surveillance to prevent the 'bad guys' from coming into political power (its ok, we're the good guys).
Step 2: Your political opponents capitalize on your genuinely horrific overreach, and legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public as fighting against tyranny (unfortunately for you they do have a point). They promise to dismantle the system if coming to power.
Step 3: They get elected.
Step 4: They don't dismantle the system, now the people you planned to use the system against are using it against you.
Sounds brilliant, lets do this.
It might be uncomfortable to admit this, but if your government is a police state that's pretty much mutually exclusive with being a pro human rights state.
I don’t think that makes us ‘not a free speech state’ — although the suppression of the IRA spokesmen was weird and criticised at the time.
Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media…
Small nitpick: I don't think it's right to refer to him as "Gerry Adams MP", due to the policy he followed of refusing to swear the oath of allegiance and thus not taking up the seat.
The actions and words of the United Kingdom are vastly different.
Kier Starmer may be a wildly unpopular leader, even within his own party, and may have declared inconvenient protest groups to be terrorists so they can be banned, and may support a porn ban and an encryption ban, and an expansion of police facial recognition, and may back jailing people for misinformation posted on twitter that lead to riots, and may happily play lapdog to the wildly unpopular Trump government for little benefit.
But he will not call off the next elections, or refuse to step down. He is nowhere near popular enough to succeed at that, even if he tried. He can't even get his own party to pass his government's flagship spending reductions.
https://anfenglishmobile.com/news/german-court-rules-that-yp...
Who is electing the leaders of those states if the things they do are incredibly unpopular?
It’s not like this is new or unique to the UK, the US has been busted indiscriminately spying on all of its citizens multiple times - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Nobody really cared and nothing changed.
The UK isn't any of that, it's always be an authoritarian country. The fact that British are amongst the most apathetic people on Earth fuels that, they just accept everything.
Frank Zappa explained that long ago:
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
What happens is generational shifts over longer periods of time mean that draconian law or feature has more and more chances to be used by someone with bad intentions. It's the law of large numbers or murphy's law in full effect, it's not just 1 or 2 people.
are on the same "side" with you. A country is not divided into two (or more) political sides. A country is divided into classes.
It was even how modern voting system originated. See: Estates-General, Prussian three-class franchise, etc.
See also: both parties of the US didn't release Epstein files.
You can, and should, argue about the effects but the core of the OSA and how it can be sold is this, at several different levels:
One, most detailed.
Sites that provide user to user services have some level of duty of care to their users, like physical sites and events.
They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.
They should implement mitigations based on those risk assessments. Not to completely remove all possibility of harm, but to lower it.
For example, sites where kids can talk to each other in private chats should have ways of kids reporting adults and moderators to review those reports. Sites where you can share pictures should check for people sharing child porn (if you have a way of a userbase sharing encrypted images with each other anonymously, you're going to get child porn on there). Sites aimed at adults with public conversations like some hobby site with no history of issues and someone checking for spam/etc doesn't need to do much.
You should re-check things once a year.
That's the selling point - and as much as we can argue about second order effects (like having a list of IDs and what you've watched, overhead etc), those statements don't on the face of it seem objectionable.
Two, shorter.
Sites should be responsible about what they do just like shops and other spaces, with risk assessments and more focus when there are kids involved.
Three, shortest.
Facebook should make sure people aren't grooming your kids.
Now, the problem with talking about " a total surveillance police state, where all speech is monitored," is where does that fit into the explanations above? How do you explain that to even me, a highly technical, terminally online nerd who has read at least a decent chunk of the actual OFCOM guidelines?
On the internet, people don't get porn videos directly from pornographic web sites, just as in the past they didn't buy porn directly from the publishers. The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops. So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs. And British ISPs are within the UK's jurisdiction.
And before anyone points out that there are workarounds that children could use to bypass controls, this was also the case with printed magazines.
When you have to prove you're a child you have to prove you're and adult. The privacy implications of that are why it's a police state problem. It eliminates the anonymity and allows for perfect personal tracking of any wrongthink you may do.
It's also not the only thing the UK government has done to become a police state by a long shot. UK is 1984 adjacent in quite a few ways.
If I put you in a bottle and told you that it was “the fascists” that proposed and implemented this exact law you would be raging.
I personally, would appreciate the intellectual honesty on this. Thank you.
The problem is when one group wants to impose their definition of harm on everyone else, saying that everyone else shouldn't be allowed to be 'harmed' even if they don't consider it as such. In the UK this is not unique to the OSA discussion(see the UK's anti-trans turn), and but it is very relevant.
- It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
- It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
- It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
- It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
- It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
Places like China are finding out why you need these things, and are building these systems so their society can succeed.
Democracy's just an (Western) artifact of enforcing and maintaining rule of law.
Now they are doing the very same things they pointed fingers about and, now there's no structured information flow to hide this.
As I sometimes tend to say: "God has an interesting sense of humor".
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia all have fairly robust democracies. Yes, some of them probably look and feel different than those of NATO, but they are a great improvement over previous colonial administrations, monarchies, theocracies, and "single party democratic states" (Korea and Taiwan before late 1980s/early 1990s break-throughs).
You can't think yourself a free thinker to realize the west is a force for evil in the world and simultaneously believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism is it makes for a very incoherent world view. "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time."
Small-c conservatism, think-of-the-children Think Tanks™ have long been a part of British politics and we go barely a week between legitimate studies and idle thought pieces where we introspect modern parenting and despair.
Like it or not, kids have access to the internet in a way that wasn't true 20, 25 years ago. Parents of teens are just realising the horrors of targeted online bullying, diet clubs, porn sharing (Snapchat and worse) and the many other small things that can just destroy kids before they've had a chance.
"But Oli," I hear you say... Yes. Parents should do better but criminalising parenting methods is hard and expensive and leaves you with a bunch of state-orphaned kids. So if we are to assume parents gonna parent, systems like this look tempting to people who don't understand the Internet.
I'm not defending the law, I just don't think this one has its roots in surveillance. It's a shitty reaction to a shitty situation.
But in the last couple of decades, things have changed. Arguably, a public referendum in 2016, was very much a protest vote against several Parliaments that didn't listen to its citizens. And the last decade shows nothing has changed.
My friends and family, and myself included, were never very political, and very much a case of 'No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In', but now everyone is talking about the Government. Interesting times ahead.
But I think you are, maybe to a large extent, misattributing political apathy.
The OSA is the first time people may actually notice, because their porn habits will be disrupted.
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And there are now openly right wing Christians in government...
The UK is not a democratic or even liberty-focused state anymore. It's always been ruled by a crowd of people who went to privately-funded schools that cost a fortune. Half the government's politicians and staffers can trace their relations back to the same historical personage.
They aren't afraid for their kids with these laws. They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break, and they will be out of a job with pitchfork-wielding crowds chasing them out of London.
Has the userbase changed so much? If this is hackernews, what about the general population of developers?
HN is a large enough forum that it would be included in any serious propaganda campaign.
I wish there was a refund for all the wasted time on propaganda.
I am convinced Libertarians do not exist. The current state of the US should drive them to utter insanity, and yet, they tend to be mostly silent on all of these corporate over reach issues. People who say they are Libertarian just don't want to pay parking tickets. If the real techno Libertarians existed, they'd be burning our current Valley to the ground. Anyone who cared about the 2nd amendment should be losing their minds over military deployments on US soil. Constitution huggers should be screaming bloody murder, daily. Instead, those types are super happy with their new dictator. Funny how all the performative anger goes away when it's their side that is performing the authoritarian actions. The NRA seems to LOVE this willing take over of the well armed militias by the federal government... But I digress.
Instead, the reigning philosophy here is now greed. Privacy, sovereignty, ownership, open source, all those things are forgotten in the backseat of the crypto and VC cash car.
It surprises me how little the newer generations care about ethics, morality, principles. Call them whatever you want, but it really feels like everyone screams about how righteous they are, how wrong everyone else is, and then they take the cash and stand up for nothing when the chips are down.
Remember when the big thing we were worried about was the NSA recording our phone calls? Now large corporations harvest our call info, chat texts, social media posts, and even the raw microphone input on our phones to strip every last piece of information about us and mine it for data to influence our lives, purchases, and even out thoughts. And what did we do in the last election? We put in the party that will remove even more roadblocks from this type of thing, and has deregulated crypto. Victory!
How did we get here? Where are the Cypherpunks? Where are the high ideals we used to have?
All burned alive at the altar of money.
But the important part is that we never really replaced them with anyone of similar weight. There was no next generation of cultural or intellectual heavyweights ready to step in. Instead, the online crowd splintered into political factions, with one side demanding constant ideological purity and the other reacting by withdrawing, going independent, or outright rejecting the institutions they had once built.
In the meantime, corporations managed to capture the new generation of young hackers by presenting themselves as “woke.” Put up the right rainbow flag at the right time, make the right statements, and suddenly the deep distrust people had toward big tech in the 90s and 2000s started to fade.
https://stallmansupport.org/#intro
and a bunch of HN pages:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3417033
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20989696
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21103133
but can you perhaps post links to text about the other figures?
What on earth are you on about?
The UK is certainly a democratic state, it holds free, fair and transparent elections. Governments change regularly in line with these. The current prime-minister went to a grammar school, the deputy PM went to various 'standard' state schools.
Yes, bad laws and authoritarian impulses can and likely will have far-reaching effects, but that's hardly new or unique to the UK, the US has a history of spying on its entire population as well, from room 641A (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) to the Snowden revelations and Palantir. It also has a load of states adding access restrictions and age checks of one sort or another to the internet.
The people of the UK are largely in favour of these sorts of rules, as they are in a bunch of other places. They may be wrong but that doesn't mean democracy is failing.
This "The sky is falling!" rhetoric is why geeks are very rarely taken seriously in these debates.
They know that they'll still be able to get around those "Inconveniences" or create their own elite places while the majority of the general public won't and we're not giving a damn about the general public anymore. That's woke and not trendy anymore.
I mean, this is so obviously wrong. People would be ashamed to argue for it back in the days.
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I don't know if you've ever seen some of the dark corners of the Internet. This includes 4chan, Kiwi Farms and, well, arguably Twitter at this point. Twitter has really become 4chan. But I digress.
We, as a society, are fine with suppressing certain kinds of speech. We always have. We can use CSAM as an obvious counterexample to free speech absolutism. There's no way to reconcile banning that and free speech absolutism. At some point it comes down to deciding certain kinds of expression is simply unacceptable.
Now is the UK government using 4chan (etc) as a stalking horse for a wider surveillance state? Almost certainly.
We saw a similar thing when Apple wanted to scan all private messages for CSAM. They faced a completely understandable backlash and reversed course.
But we don't have to defend 4chan or Kiwi Farms to oppose a surveillance state.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
You should look into it, some time.
Besides -- If you don't tolerate intolerance, you're intolerant (of intolerance). So you shouldn't be tolerated. Right?
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And give way to what? You're making a lot of noise that sounds like you want liberation and freedom, but freedom from what? What is it you think the current system of democracy (which has always included intrusions into absolute personal freedom by the way) will give way to? An anarcho-capitalist state? A communist utopia? A breakdown in law and order?
The system WE built over the last 800 years is the most prosperous free society we have ever known. There is no absolute monarch, no forced labor. What do you want to replace it with?
You live in a society of surveillance. Google surveils every single action you take on the internet, as does Facebook, X, and whatever partners they share that information with. That's not a system built by the government "elites" that was built by for profit enterprise in a "free-market". Now the populous at large wants to make use of those same levers of power, and you make it sound like they're responsible for all of it.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny...Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. Commissioner Pravin Lal, 'U.N. Declaration of Rights' "
This had until recently been only tested for top-down information. Nowadays, everyone can be a broadcaster and we're seeing quite different results.
IMO, free flowing information still remains the best safeguard against tyranny.
The individual isn't a broadcaster - the new broadcasters are YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and all the other platforms that choose which content to amplify.
The content recommendation algorithms are designed by humans, who are just following orders from the wealthiest, most powerful people on earth.
Doesn’t mean a locked down system is better though. With that they don’t have to bother.
Not specifically related to this “child protection” thing, but you can’t deny that the free flow of information also leads to some pretty terrible things, driven by actors such as states, magnified x1000 by social media, and now also AI.
Every platform these days is full to the brim with misinformation and propaganda (which ends up in mainstream media as well), deliberately making many of us hateful and sometimes violent. The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
I’m 100% for personal liberty and accountability, and admittedly I don’t have a solution for this.
I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.
Again just to be clear this has nothing to do with the UK thing which I strongly disagree with.
You can also see this with the perception gap [1]. Those who are most involved in politics tend to be the paradoxically least knowledgeable about what 'the other side' thinks and believes. Typical contemporary examples would be republicans thinking democrats want to defund the police, or democrats thinking republicans are against immigration.
When you have contrary ideas bouncing against each other, poor ideas are easily demonstrated to be such - and you get a more realistic view of what people 'on the other side' actually think and believe. It naturally tempers against radicalism. But when you start to control information, you get the opposite. This is made even worse by the sort of people that find themselves on a life trajectory to go work, let alone volunteer, for the 'Ministry of Truth'. They tend to be the exact sorts that want to create information bubbles and echo chambers.
----
In general I think the truth tends to trickle up, even if it might get a bit dirty on the way there. I'd appeal to places like the USSR on that. They not only directly controlled absolutely all published information, but strictly controlled migration in and out of the country, informers everywhere making people terrified of speaking their mind, and just generally had a rock solid grip on information. The result? People still knew they were all full of shit. There's a great series of jokes from the era here. [2] On of my favorites, "Why do we need two central newspapers, Truth (Pravda) and News (Izvestiya) if both are organs of the same Party? Because in Truth there is no news, and in News there is no truth."
[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/
[2] - https://johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm
Different technologies are in different places on the "societal usefullness versus danger" spectrum. Nuclear weapons are obviously on the "really fricking dangerous" side, no country lets a civilian own them. Forks are obviously on the "useful" side, even though you can technically use one to gouge somebody's eye out.
What's the right tradeoff for guns, printing presses, typewriters and social media companies is a matter of some debate.
I thought the Elon Musk approach was to control the algorithm and decide for his users what they see. Or just ban journalists he dislikes.
I remember what it was like before the internet, and misinformation and propaganda were just as pervasive and perverse, except you couldn't be sure about it unless you read a book, did actual research or talked to an expert, and you sure as shit weren't going to change anyone's mind or at least be able to say "you're wrong and here's why" when you hear obvious bullshit.
IMO, there was a big change in the nature of harmful misinformation once you could Google things like "did convenience store workers really celebrate on 9/11" when that particular urban myth spread in the aftermath of the attack.
I do agree that the nature and vector of misinformation and propaganda are different. The ways in which we're wrong and dumb changed, but we were just as wrong and dumb before the internet, and we were statistically more hateful and violent then, too.
I can and I will.
The free flow of information doesn't get people to do bad things, teaching people to blindly trust information from authorities does.
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I think the let people decide for themselves is the best option as any alternative is by definition tyranny/control and why the parent quote is so spot on.
The main misinformation you see on the Internet is attention-grabbing women pretending to care about you and people trying to misrepresent mass-made white-label Chinese stuff as indie original designs.
Few people spread hate other than to say our society is a disaster and we'd be better off with communism or anarchy which has been typical discourse of young men since the dawn of the modern age.
In general I've found much higher quality of content on the Internet than elsewhere, with genuine testimonies, in-depth analyses, and a variety of opinions and experiences. Whenever I watch the news on TV I am appalled by how superficial and one-sided it is, sometimes misunderstanding the issue altogether, completely out of touch and misrepresenting reality.
Sure, chain emails existed before, but they had a pretty low ceiling of how many it would reach. It didn't scale well.
In other words, you should regulate the amplification mechanism ("algorithm"), not what information is allowed to be said. I think forcing platforms to go back to subscribe+reverse chronological feeds would be a pretty good start.
Being alive is a prerequisite to being able to suffer, die, etc. None of the things you listed are unique to free flows of information, in fact misinformation and propaganda are even worse in a closed loop of information.
Look at North Korea, and tell me that they'd be worse off propaganda-wise if they had unfettered access to internet.
> The free flow of information is undoubtedly being used for harm.
No, the entities flooding social media have also flooded all the pre-internet, closed-loop media as well. Right-wing propaganda like Fox News, Alex Jones (first started his radio show in 1996), and literally the entire Cold War-era Red Scare propaganda, on radio and tv, all predated social media. And those were not free-flow channels, the information they put out was 100% controlled by the owners.
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If you wouldn't allow child porn (which 4chan deletes/doesn't allow), where exactly do you draw the line between blocking sites with cp, and allowing sites like 4chan which host porn without consent (voyeur/spy/revenge)?
I think we can agree that the UK is moving in the wrong direction without drawing parallels to a place where dissidents are disappeared, both off the internet and in real life.
This is also why it's so crucial for the UK not to let bad laws pass.
I'm not entirely sure this is true. At least in the west, this perspective seemed to rely on most "public discourse" not being visible to most of the public. Social media has destroyed this illusion.
> UK
...
I've started seeing posts like that from British people now. Absolutely wild. So much for the birthplace of common law.
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The UK is morally hollow by design.
They will say, and do, whatever they perceive as being the most politically expedient thing to do. The ones that took moral stances in the actual best interest of the populace usually suffered politically for that. The ones that side with power tend to keep their power. This is the folly of political systems in general short of tyrannies, dictatorships, and kingdoms. And now we are seeing how democracies can be stretched into the same quality of life as so-called "lesser" systems but people don't like hearing that argument because the alternative is made out to be so scary.
It's not so much that democracy is the problem, but that it's too easy to sway people when it's so easy for money and power to be leveraged to manufacture consent. So now it's the people electing their own tyrants who will enrich and entrench themselves and being grateful for the privilege to be used for that purpose.
steps down off of soap box and stops yelling at clouds
Cambridge Analytica showed politicians in real time that on a population scale, hypocrisy doesn't make any difference. In fact people will bend themselves around to square the circle.
Politicians finally knowing for a demonstrable, data-backed, evidence-based fact that they can do basically whatever they want and keep their support as long as they just say they right things is what has brought us from 2016 to now.
Always has been. What has changed is they now have the power to force their constituency to live with their hypocrisy and lies. Any effort to challenge the "leader" results in claims that you are now a "terrorist."
The internet was supposed to empower the citizenry. It's been captured and is now a tool used to suppress them. So now we see leaders completely unchallenged when their darker habits are exposed.
You’re clearly not paying attention to American politics.
I really wonder if true
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"Only a criminal would need 10 terabytes of storage!"
Something stupid like that.
“Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfully. I think he thought I was joking.
Pretty soon it’ll only be hyperscalers or large enterprises that have data storage. You’ll have the 4TB max in your phone or laptop and that’ll be it.
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It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.
I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.
I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
Edit: this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44335065
They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
It isn’t, but when asked in a “Do you support saving children?” way a lot of people do support it. You might say that’s idiotic, and you’re right, but any campaign to reverse this stuff has to reckon with it.
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Afaik not a single serious ngo support this.
> In the most extreme cases, with the agreement of the courts, Ofcom will be able to require payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, preventing it from generating money or being accessed from the UK.
They’ve done this before (various piracy websites are blocked by ISPs).
The criminal liability of senior managers could cause travel headaches too.
This is going to fizzle out, like the Australian eSafety team trying to remove content off X globally.
Or get Apple to poke holes in it's crypto. Just not going to happen.
They’ll eventually get what they want in any case the same way a chisel can eventually dig through a mountain.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg2kz9kn93o
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
This is probably my favorite line in the entire piece. Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children, and now they are being pitted against the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
Truly incredible work from the UK government. I imagine the United States will not be happy..
More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.
Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?
Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.
Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..
It's all so tiresome.
If this were really about protecting the children they could've solved the matter with the equivalent of a mandate on device manufacturers and website operators to respect a DO-NOT-SERVICE-I-AM-A-CHILD (or whatever) header in HTTP. Hell, if it were really about protecting children, parents would get access to dumbed down versions of the kind of tools corporate IT has for managing business phones ... so they can lock them down, limit how they're used, right down to what apps can be installed.... but that would deprive advertisers of a golden ticket for knowing what views are legit, put parents back in control, and actually work... so can't have that. :D
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