Looks like https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/16/britains-ofcom-brings-tough-... has some background. Readers may want to look at both.
The UK has a thing called non-crime hate incidents (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-in...) where the police records alleged complaints about discrimination, even if they are not a crime (otherwise they would be hate crimes).
This could be used to direct policing resources sensibly ("lots of incidents recorded at such-and-such a place, maybe we should patrol there a bit more") or to build a dystopian database, or to waste police time. There's certainly a push by some of the media to stop the police spending time on this and focus on solving crimes instead.
Similarly, this regulation could be used to prosecute child abusers, or it could be used to suppress free speech, or it could mean that people start using properly secure messaging apps.
This is overblown.
The police are responsible for deciding how to classify a report. Their decisions need to be audited to avoid corruption.
Ergo they have to maintain a record of reports they decided were not hate crimes.
How long should police hold on to reports that they don't do anything with? If I make a complaint to the police about you, should an unrelated interaction you have with the police 5 years later bring up that report? Do you have a right to be forgotten if you haven't been convicted of a crime? Do I have a right to be forgotten if I've filed a report (or reports) that the police determine is/are frivolous?
I can think of plenty scenarios where these records should be destroyed permanently after some amount of time - namely, if the police decide not to refer to a prosecutor, or if the prosecutor decides not to press charges, or if the defendant is found not guilty.
>Their decisions need to be audited to avoid corruption.
And as we all know: corruption ends abruptly at the highest levels.
>waste police time.
I dont know if you intended it but "wasting police time" is a pretty good book on the subject of administrative detections.
We love our regulation, especially if the government can't easily tax it.
Yet, we still have gambling adverts on UK TV and on football shirts.
At the same time we've also banned adverts for "certain types" of porridge. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgrwzx8er9o
About banning ads for “certain types of porridge”:
> …the majority of porridge, muesli and granola products will not be affected by the advertising restrictions but some less healthy versions (with added sugar, chocolate, syrup) could be affected.
> Sometimes products may be marketed as, or perceived by consumers to be, healthy but in fact contain surprisingly high levels of saturated fat, salt or sugar.
Source: https://healthmedia.blog.gov.uk/2024/12/06/here-are-the-fact...
More details; the pdf in the last link has examples on how scoring (computing NPM score) is done for particular products: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/restricting-adver... , https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-nutrient-prof...
I know you think this is a gotcha but you're seriously advocating for the banning of advertisements of certain kinds of food? Based on the fact that what, some people aren't smart enough to read an ingredient label?
It is already quite popular to regulate ads about certain edible substances. Nicotine, alcohol and drugs are some examples. Looks like certain ratios of sugar, sodium and saturated fats will qualify too, at least in the UK.
Apparently not gambling though, because the gambling lobby has greased the correct pockets.
Unlikely to change as Gambling companies are major donors to the Labour Party.
https://theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/28/tory-bet...
Given that such porridges are only “unhealthy” to the extent that they increase risk factors for various diseases, perhaps eating them should be considered a form of gambling. Then government could tax it too.
First, they came for the crumpets.
Well "porridge" is not a synonym for "healthy", but i see your point in gambling ads...
Goldilocks aside, I’ve not seen a family ruined by porridge. I have seen it first hand with gambling.
Better alternative to first-party propaganda: https://www.eff.org/pages/uk-online-safety-bill-massive-thre...
Ofcom is an independent regulator; it's far from the "first-party" you're implying it is.
This is a press release, though. Whether or not Ofcom is independent, their press release writers are not independent, they are part of Ofcom's PR team, a team that absolutely exists.
there is no quango in the UK that is independent, they are all, without exception "independent" with an implied nudge and a wink.
The Q in Quango stands for Quasi.
Right, so calling it "3rd party" would be a stretch, but it's definitely not "1st party". I think "2nd party" would be a fair compromise.
Ofcom really isn't actually independent on Online Safety in any way.
It has to obey instructions on prioritisation from the secretary of state and has no real operational flexibility.
As with much of the (dire) UK legislation here, the government saying something is true until it is blue in the face does not make it true.
Well, that links to EFF's own "propaganda" - perpetuating privacy at all costs. Inevitably the place law and regulation should is somewhere in between, balancing risk and striving for an acceptable position all things considered within a democratic framework.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_ground_fallacy
It is never "inevitable" that the correct place for law and regulation is somewhere in the middle on every issue. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's never inevitable.
Assuming that it is makes it far too easy to move the Overton window: regulation proposes something stricter than the status quo, "compromise" moves in that direction, repeat.
> all things considered within a democratic framework
The UK has a very funny (literally ha-ha funny) notion of "democracy" -- with people just voting against the status quo most of the time and with "first past the post" resulting in leadership that doesn't have, and cannot even credibly claim, genuine popular support. It's a totally broken system.
If there is one political change I could make to the UK it'd be the adoption of the single transferable vote. There's massive amounts of political alienation in the UK which have complicated causes (often related to the 'managed decline' policies of governments past) but a big contributing factor in my opinion is how many votes are completely wasted under first past the post, if you're in a safe seat voting often feels completely futile. FPTP means there's a lot of seats where a donkey with the appropriate rosette would win easily and there's not a lot of competition to win these seats, and so these seats get taken for granted by politicians.
A move to STV wouldn't be a silver bullet but at the very least it'd eliminate the phenomenon of wasted votes and make safe seats less safe, forcing politicians to care about all the seats rather than just currently competitive ones. The problem is there's no incentive for either major party to end their duopoly in the national interest, it's the same sort of problem the 'rotten boroughs' of old faced in that the people who benefitted from them were the only people with the power to deal with them. Labour in particular are notorious on this subject, they'll promise electoral reform in opposition and change their tune instantly once in power.
are there term limits for these seats?
No, term limits aren't really a thing in the UK for elected officials in general and the longest-serving MPs today have been there since the early '80s. Even Prime Ministers can stay in their position for as long as they have the support of their party and can command the confidence of the House of Commons which in some cases will be for over a decade, although it's normal practice in the UK for a governing party to change their leader and therefore the Prime Minister mid term.
Some appointed positions have term limits (some 'machinery of government' kind of functions, some quangos and public bodies etc) but a few are for life or retirement such as members of the House of Lords.
There are no term limits. (I don't think there's any term limit for any elected position in the UK?)
how is it not popular support? or your point is that plurality is not enough? or that in a different voting system (alternate voting, ranked choice, etc..) the winner would be completely different?
Conservatives + Reform got more votes than Labour. More people voted against Labour than for them. In any other system they wouldn't have won, and at the very least wouldn't have a majority.
The other thing to consider is that the electorate basically moved to the right in 2024 (Tory voters moved to Reform), but parliament shifted hard to the left.
The same is true of many different pairs of parties! It's been a long time since any winner had over 50% of the popular vote.
2024: 33%
2019: 43.6%
2017: 42.3% (Lab: 40%!)
2015: 36.9%
2010: 36.1%
2005: 35.2%
2001: 40.7%
1997: 43.2%
1992: 41.9%
The last election where the winning party got over 50% of the popular vote was .. 1931.
Yes it's been undemocratic for a long time. The 2024 one was just particularly egregious.
It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?
It's a series of (balanced) regional votes for elected representatives from equal-sized constituencies who are supposed to be responsive to that region.
Suddenly this is a massive problem for tories because it's red-faced angry right-wingers on the losing side. Whenever it contributed significantly to a tory win, it has not been a problem.
If you look at what actually happened you will see that, repeatedly, right-wing candidates lost out on a constituency-by-constituency level because the Conservatives were largely incumbents who had built up enough very personal bad reputation to be booted out, or inexperienced first-time candidates who are very rarely elected anyway and were parachuted at the last minute into seats where grandees were retiring, and the Reform candidates were a gaggle of weirdos, randoms, odd-bods, extremists and idiots who were lining up to stand for election for a party that had such a thin platform it ultimately resolves to "oooh we don' t like them", where "them" varied a little region by region but usually meant foreigners.
(And, of course, they split part of the vote between them.)
> It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?
You're talking with someone who thinks that it is egregious that a party that gets the minority of the vote runs the government, and the grandfather of your own comment points out that in 2024 it was with the lowest percentage vote in 30 years, which is particular.
The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.
The party that has got a plurality of the vote runs the government, in fact. Same as in the USA this time, eh?
But again, in case it is not clangingly obvious yet: we don't vote for parties to control government. We don't vote for party leaders. We vote for constituency MPs, and if there are enough of them who can agree to form a government, that is what they do. Political parties are not, particularly, even essential to the process. They just speed it up.
A big chunk of why we have a Labour government this time round is Tory constituencies deciding to tactically vote Lib Dem because a Labour candidate would be less likely to gain a majority, after all. One has to assume that the people who did that meant to do it.
> The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.
I dispute this concept; it's a convenient hopeful fiction being sold by hucksters and grifters. You only have to look, for example, at polls saying a majority of Leave voters would now support closer ties with Europe to resolve problems caused by Brexit. What happened is simple: people chose to have a functional government, which neither the Tories of 2024 or Reform could possibly offer. Reform is probably a generation or more away from being able to do that, and who knows if the Tories can reassemble around something mainstream before then.
What happens in practice is, parties do control the government. There are these things called "whips". Also, voters watch national media and mostly vote based on the leadership, stated manifesto etc of each party at the national level.
If you have more than two parties then the winning party may have less than 50% of the votes. That's just how the math works out.
Somewhat ironically, given your arguments, UK voters decisively rejected a plan to change the voting system to a more proportional one in a 2011 referendum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...
Yes, but: the winning party having less than 50% of the votes still feels incredibly undemocratic, as you get a situation where a majority of the voters picked a different choice.
Proportional systems give an outcome where a majority of voters voted for at least one of the parties in the winning coalition. Coalitions become explicit rather than internal to parties. The internationalist/isolationist split in the Conservative party that they were desperately trying to put off would have happened much earlier.
The referendum failed because only the LDs really supported it. I note that all sorts of devolved assemblies, councils, and (former) Euro elections used different systems.
Why does it feel undemocratic? I have always felt that party politics are undemocratic since my voting system (Sweden) translate to voting persons into seats in parliament. Political parties and coalitions are just systems added on top of that system that get translated into people in seats. Votes in parliament are counted per person, not per party or block, and people can vote against party line.
I would support a move to a more proportional system, but I think it's an exaggeration to describe the present system as 'incredibly undemocratic' (especially given that a clear majority of the voting population chose to keep this system in a democratic referendum not very long ago). There's plenty to criticise about the UK at present, but HN sometimes goes off the rails on this topic. I suspect that a post describing the USA as 'incredibly undemocratic' would get shorter shrift – even though the electoral college is arguably an order of magnitude more bonkers than the UK system.
Edit: I'd also add that the UK is astonishingly democratic in some respects. It is remarkable that Brexit was implemented merely because a majority voted for it. There are few countries where such important decisions of national policy would be put to a popular referendum in this way and then implemented faithfully. (I was very firmly opposed to Brexit, FWIW.)
Okay, but what kind of voting system can capture this well (and what does it mean)?
We don't know how people would have voted in this hypothetical. (Likely there would be a lot more parties, which generally is good.)
Also C+R could have formed a coalition. (Or merge into a new party ... or - I haven't looked up how R came to be, but I assume it's a spin-off of/from C - R could have merged back into C, right?)
Reform is a spinoff, yes, in the same way that UKIP is a spinoff: it's a party consisting of people who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't get selected as conservative MPs, plus on the odd occasion one or two who left (Lee Anderson, who is terrible, awful, self-serving and alarming, and before him for UKIP Douglas Carswell, who was largely better characterised as a nice enough bloke who was completely wrong)
The Scottish and Welsh assemblies use AMS. The NI assembly uses STV. You can see how this produces completely different results from the Westminster elections held in those areas.
Reform are, like UKIP and the Referendum party, Trumpist parties organized around a popular figure and external funding (Richard Tice). They're not really spin offs although a few MPs may cross over.
Why is it inevitable that we should continually erode one's right to privacy?
Related. Others?
Hash matching proposals for the Online Safety Act's implementation are dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38217439 - Nov 2023 (17 comments)
The UK's Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38048811 - Oct 2023 (159 comments)
King Charles III signs off on Online Safety Act with unenforceable spying clause - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38044973 - Oct 2023 (72 comments)
The UK is building their own digital gulag. Most social media companies are not going to institute these authoritarian measures for one small nation that wants to regulate the world. You are going to see yourselves cut off.
Australia is following suit with it's 'Social Media Minimum age bill' that will require ALL users to prove their age.
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...
I tell my kids to not share any personal information online, never use their real name or birth date, and don't trust random people on the internet. And they wouln't even think about posting images of themselves.
Ok
As a software engineer in the UK (and former schoolteacher) I'm supportive of the Online Safety Act. People prefer to interact with people who are similar to them, so they end up with a belief that most people are like them, but as a teacher, I had to grapple with the full distribution of human intelligence. It's wider than I'm comfortable with. Most people struggle to deal with the complexity of everyday life in the twenty-first century.
My grandparents used to fall for every scam phone call or email they received. It wasn't until I showed them a compilation[0] of the George Agdgdgwngo character from Fonejacker - and the rest of my extended family sat around laughing at the ridiculous scenarios - that my grandparents realised that giving their bank details to anyone claiming to be calling from Microsoft and then expecting the bank to refund them their money wasn't an acceptable way to handle their financial affairs. In the end, they disabled their Internet banking and now have to catch a bus to their nearest bank branch to do anything.
I'm sure there will be flurry of Americans along shortly to monotonously repeat that quote about not trading freedom for security. That's their political tradition, not ours. The people of Thetford in Norfolk don't give a flying fuck about the gold statue of Thomas Paine that the Federalist Society (or some other group, I'm not terribly interested in which it was) put up in their town, but they love the fact that a sitcom about the Second World War was filmed there.
Someone else will make a joke about police officers investigating tweets. That practice - which was put to an end a couple of years ago - stemmed from a particular interpretation of a law that required police forces to investigate all threats of violence made by post, that was enacted in the 1980s during a period of increased religiously-motivated terrorism. The following decade brought the negotiations that put an end to that terrorism; negotiations that were the culmination of nearly five centuries of religious conflict. It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.
I shall leave it to others to make the usual accusations about who funded the aforementioned terrorism.
The Online Safety Act is vague and non-specific. Social media platforms differentiate themselves in the market on the bases of: with whom users can interact (people they know personally or the user base at large); and the ways in which they can interact (photos, videos, comments, likes, &c.). Each platform therefore poses its own unique set of risks to its user base, and so needs to have its own unique regulations. The Act acknowledges by empowering Ofcom to negotiate the specific policies that platforms will need to follow on a platform-by-platform basis. And if those policies should turn out to be too strict, and a few social media companies should find it no longer profitable to operate in the United Kingdom, that is not all that much of an issue for His Majesty's Government. They're not British companies, after all.
You can't talk about the Forbidden Meatballs[1] on Reddit or HN. In the 90s, AOL users from Scunthorpe and Penistone were banned from user forums for telling the community where they lived to help diagnose their connectivity issues. Americans have enforced - and continue to enforce - their cultural norms on the entire Anglophone web, and now the rest of the world has started to do the same. I have much greater faith in my government to protect my freedom of speech (no matter how much I may object to their policies) than some foreign company.
For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is? 'Maximum effect for minimum effort and cost' has been the guiding principle of all government in Britain for decades - it's how Britain ruled its Empire, it's what drove the Thirteen Colonies to rebel, it's why the East India Company was allowed to rule a subcontinent, it's why many of the former colonies were given independence despite not wanting it, it's why the roads are so consistently bad, it's why the water companies are dumping sewage into rivers, it's why there aren't enough police officers.
To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state, I suggest you watch Britons at a traffic-light-controlled pedestrian crossing. This isn't the end of the world; it's not going to lead to any social changes of any sort at all. The Act requires protections for free speech, after all. When it's all finally implemented, it'll just be enforcement of social norms that no one finds controversial.
NB: I read through the Act to see whether an idea for a social media platform was still a viable business idea, and apart from sending policy documents to Ofcom, it wouldn't require the business to do anything that wasn't already in that idea. If you want to argue about what the Act requires, I will expect you to have read the Act[2].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9biM_ZfIdo
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/282049626
> For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is?
The problem is that it's very easy to selectively enforce this sort of thing. Most people will never have an issue, but whoever manages to sufficiently annoy someone who has the ability to trigger an enforcement action could be screwed. That leads many of the people who might find themselves in that situation to stop annoying the government or stop running websites entirely.
That's called a chilling effect.
People would probably not be as concerned if the law only applied to large platforms.
The Online Safety Act is about content moderation. If Ofcom taps you on the shoulder, they're asking for your moderation policies, and proof you're enforcing them. Platforms can no longer wash their hands of responsibility by saying that some random user uploaded the content and an opaque algorithm showed it to hundreds of thousands of people: the platform allowed the content to remain, and it was the platform's algorithm that showed the content to hundreds of thousands of people.
The Web isn't the information superhighway in cyberspace that it was in the '90s. The muggles are here, and they're treating social media like another part of the physical world, and we just have to live with the consequences of that. Mandatory content moderation is just one of those consequences.
You're not entitled to run any business, let alone a social media platform. Every right has attendant responsibilities. Fulfil your obligations to society.
This comment talks about large platforms with opaque algorithms showing some content to hundreds of thousands of people. I will not debate the merits of this law in that context here. My objection addresses your example of a "small Mastodon instance", which I'll extend to include a hobbyist forum, a blog with a comment section, or any similar website that can be run by a single person or informal, noncommercial group of people.
By not exempting the latter, this legislation makes it unreasonably risky for an individual with sufficient connection to the UK to operate such a website. The moderation policy is "I run some open source spam filter software and if I happen to see anything heinous, I delete it". Such websites are usually not businesses and often represent a net cost to their operators. A universal duty to moderate will accelerate the disappearance of hobbyist websites and further entrench corporate social media. I think that's a bad thing.
Blog and news website comment sections are explicitly exempted from the Act.
> A universal duty to moderate will accelerate the disappearance of hobbyist websites and further entrench corporate social media. I think that's a bad thing.
I also mourn the loss of the lawless Internet, but it's spilling out into the real world, and that's where I happen to live. We have to make compromises.
When the English people decided that our flirtation with being a republic was a failure, the some of the puritans who supported that republic refused to compromise, and left to start a new country across the Atlantic Ocean. They called themselves... Pilgrims.
Do you think harmful behavior from anywhere online other than large platforms is spilling out into the real world in a way that the Online Safety Act will prevent? If so, can you offer examples?
> Do you think harmful behavior from anywhere online other than large platforms is spilling out into the real world in a way that the Online Safety Act will prevent?
I have no idea.
If you're thinking of how to protect the fediverse, my solution (which I intend to use if I am kicked off mainstream social media because of this or other regulations in the UK) is to run my own server, only allowing people I know personally to have accounts on that server, and federating with other servers. Federation may be a grey area in this law - it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, if it ever goes to court.
I wasn't thinking only of the Fediverse, but the same concern certainly would apply to a Fediverse server, an independent forum, a wiki, etc....
> Someone else will make a joke about police officers investigating tweets. That practice - which was put to an end a couple of years ago
This claim is 100% false. We’ve seen multiple people jailed for tweets this year alone.
> I have much greater faith in my government to protect my freedom of speech
You don’t have free speech. The U.K. has no such general right. That’s why people are in jail for tweets.
You're right - they have no free speech. They can't even speak freely about the horrible crimes being committed in their nation by grooming gangs.
Many US companies won't capitulate to these regulations. The UK is going to simply be cut off from many social media services.
> The UK is going to simply be cut off from many social media services.
Oh no! Anyway...
...jailed for inciting rioting.
That would land you in jail in the UK no matter what forum you said it in. No we have no right to incite people to riot in the UK. That is something I'm rather proud of.
In the Peoples Republic of China they call this 寻衅滋事, "starting a fight, provoking a dispute". A lot of them are very proud of their laws as well.
How is "I don't want my tax money going to immigrants" inciting rioting?
Oh wait, you're a liar.
Do you have a citation for that? People may have said words to that effect in addition to inciting rioting, but no one has been send to jail for saying that.
Okay upon further investigation it does appear I was incorrect about that case. I'm glad to have been, that was very concerning and scary. My mistake.
However there are still some concerning cases - a girl was punished for posting song lyrics:
A song lyric containing an offensive racial slur?
"She was given an eight-week community order, placed on an eight-week curfew and told to pay costs of £500 and an £85 victim surcharge."
Not really the same league of punishment as the jailing you made up in your earlier post
I am a software engineer in the UK. One of the reasons I want to move from the UK is because so many of our populace has attitudes such as yours. The online safety act won't solve the problems you think it will and will create a whole new host of issues.
What is amusing is that you even admit that you solved the problem of online scammers with your grandparents through education (I've seen the videos you mentioned as well). This is how people stay "safe" is to be educated on the dangers, not for overbearing regulation.
> To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state, I suggest you watch Britons at a traffic-light-controlled pedestrian crossing.
The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related offences (I guarantee it is more now). I've seen videos of the police arresting disabled pensioners over spicy tweets, journalists have their homes raided in the UK regularly if they criticise UK foreign policy over Israel (doesn't get reported on btw). We are already in a form of a soft totalitarianism. You just haven't noticed because you haven't been looking.
> (doesn't get reported on btw).
I wonder how it is that you know about it then?
I suspect he means it doesn't get reported in the main stream media. Independent media channels have reported this.
Cool, do you have a link to any of them?
Maybe it's this: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241018-uk-police-raid-ho...
Yes it was that. Thank you. I couldn't remember the name as it was an unusual name.
I found out about it via social media which is essentially modern "word of mouth".
OK, so you are just spreading rumours then?
I clearly didn't mean that (and I think you know that btw).
I said "found out about it via social media". I then did my own research to find the original post by the person that had their home raided. I have been duped before by social media and I like to find the actual source (if possible).
So I am not "spreading rumours".
So the original post was independently verifyable when you found it?
What other hoops to satisfy you do you want me to jump through?
They are very clearly commenting in bad faith.
I'm trying to give this comment a gracious reading. You can find videos on YouTube from the last couple months of police talking to people about comments they left online, and tweets, and FB posts, etc. So saying that practice "was put to an end a couple of years ago" is a complete fiction.
The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American? Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on them what does it matter whether or not a particular government acknowledges it? It's still an infringement and should be fought.
> It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.
Or maybe that's exactly the time you should make those assertions all the more loudly. Principles don't mean anything if you only hold them when it's easy, and we should all stop treating people who drop their principles at the slightest road bump as some kind of warrior for safety or whatever they'd like to frame it as, and treat them as they are - cowards and authoritarians.
This is the first I've heard about the Forbidden Meatballs, thank you for the chuckle.
> For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is?
Oh so the hope is just that the government is too ineffectual to prosecute something they're completely within their rights to prosecute? How is that not absolute madness?
Why in the world would you trust a government to enforce this fairly? What's to say your Conservative Party doesn't use this to target prominent supporters of Labour, or vice versa?
> The Act requires protections for free speech
As an American (the horror, I know, that I deign to comment on something British), I'd love to know where your freedom of speech is codified and what a government would have to do if they wanted to change what counts as speech, what doesn't, and what's protected and what isn't. I suspect that you and I have very different definitions of what qualifies as free speech.
At the end this seems like the same thing we see in the US a lot - this is something my side of the political divide supports, so I should support it, so I'm going to twist myself into a mental pretzel to support it, even if it solves no real problem, opens up a huge door for future government abuse, and further erodes the rights of everyone.
> The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American?
It's a quote from one of the American founding fathers. I don't remember which, and I don't remember the exact quote.
> Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on them what does it matter whether or not a particular government acknowledges it?
In British law, most of what we now call 'human rights' were granted as settlements following rebellions or civil wars, the most notable example being those in the Bill of Rights 1689[0]. It was the Americans who copied that piece of legislation and wrote God's name at the top. The Parliamentarians who first wrote that bill remembered the Second English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I on charges of Tyranny - he wanted to levy taxes that Parliament opposed. (Sound familiar?)
> It's still an infringement and should be fought.
We don't have absolute freedom of speech in this country and that's fine. Freedom in this country is about doing not speaking.
> Or maybe that's exactly the time you should make those assertions all the more loudly. Principles don't mean anything if you only hold them when it's easy, and we should all stop treating people who drop their principles at the slightest road bump as some kind of warrior for safety or whatever they'd like to frame it as, and treat them as they are - cowards and authoritarians.
We don't do abstract principles in Britain, we're all about 100% organic realpolitik. Our system of government has been slowly evolving for nearly one thousand years, and continues to evolve. One of our kings was a tyrant, so we killed him. The republic that replaced him was worse, so we restored the monarchy. We solve the problem in front of us - there's no need to solve every problem ever right now.
> Oh so the hope is just that the government is too ineffectual to prosecute something they're completely within their rights to prosecute? How is that not absolute madness?
This is how Britain has always been governed - with minimal effort. Yes, it's mad. With specific reference to prosecutions, the Crown Prosecution Service only prosecutes if it think it will get a guilty verdict.
> Why in the world would you trust a government to enforce this fairly? What's to say your Conservative Party doesn't use this to target prominent supporters of Labour, or vice versa?
The government (i.e., the Cabinet and other Ministers of the Crown) have no direct control over the implementation of this legislation; that is delegated to Ofcom, a regulatory body that answers to Parliament as a whole. Any attempt to seize control of Ofcom would require legislation, which would be heavily scrutinised by the House of Lords (which is not elected, and therefore is only weakly influenced by party whips) and would also have to gain Royal Assent, which would probably be refused if the legislation were seen to weaken British democracy.
> As an American (the horror, I know, that I deign to comment on something British), I'd love to know where your freedom of speech is codified and what a government would have to do if they wanted to change what counts as speech, what doesn't, and what's protected and what isn't. I suspect that you and I have very different definitions of what qualifies as free speech.
Absolute freedom of speech is only granted to parliamentarians when speaking in Parliament. The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law; Article 10 of the Convention provides for a general right to freedom of expression, but permits certain restrictions. Prior to the Human Rights Act, there was no general freedom of speech; instead everything that was not specifically prohibited was allowed.
I love your post, and not because I agree with all of it. It is the most original thing on this entire thread
> [1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/282049626
As an old Irishman once told me, it'll be the fags that kill you. A few years later, I quit them.
Seems like its not really possible to run an indie web site with a forum any more in the UK if you don't want to accept the risk of an 18 million pound fine -
>To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state
Ha-ha-ha. Writing from Russia.
No, seriously, it started with completely reasonable law mandating that internet providers block pages encouraging suicide or providing information on ways to do it.
And remember, Orwell was British.
I remember when Russia passed those first "anti-extremist" laws making it illegal to target "identifiable social groups" with "hate speech".
Then we found out that police is an "identifiable social group", and so are the MPs...
It is very difficult to see what your argument is here.
Initially you state that people are defrauded - indeed they are, very effectively and commonly, via phone calls. Ofcom has regulated the telephone system since their inception, and can charitably be said to have achieved zero percent operational effectiveness in that time.
The Act unquestionably causes harm - it makes it effectively impossible for open, anonymous APIs because of the age verification requirements. It requires the vast majority of operators (because the UK's definition of pornography is so impossibly wide it will catch almost anything) to collect a huge tranch of information for age verification, which will cost an astonishing amount of money and prevent many community initiatives from ever getting off the ground. It will lead to many sites simply blocking adult communities entirely for economic reasons, a part of society that is already subject to substantial discrimination from UK authorities.
The Act does not include meaningful provisions for free speech. The Ofcom guidance simply says that people should be mindful of it, with no enforcement whatsoever. It is still the case that, given the penalties for not taking down illegal speech, platforms are much safer taking down much more speech than previously. Ofcom's consultation responses on their "proportionality" show they have taken a view that the actions are proportional because Ofcom say they are proportional, and no actual work has been done to demonstrate that.
You say that the UK is not a totalitarian state because it's half assed. And it's certainly true that enforcement will be capricious and arbitrary. But that is hardly a defence of the act - it will still have a remarkable chilling effect because you never know if it's you that will be targeted. Meanwhile, it will probably have very little effect on any of the things it is supposed to prohibit.
You talk in your first paragraph about how HN posters are in a bubble, but remain remarkably unaware of your own. Many communities are already discriminated against by payment providers, banks and online services, and this legislation will make those effects significantly worse, but at the same time, achieve none of it's goals.
> It is very difficult to see what your argument is here.
My arguments are:
* free speech is not a cornerstone of our national identity (despite John Milton's attempts to make it one);
* social media causes genuine harm (but does not do so inherently);
* the Act imposes a legal responsibility on social media platforms to limit harm caused by those platforms; and
* while members of the HN community may have a personal capacity to use social media in such a way that minimises harm to them, the majority of people do not.
> The Act unquestionably causes harm - it makes it effectively impossible for open, anonymous APIs because of the age verification requirements. It requires the vast majority of operators (because the UK's definition of pornography is so impossibly wide it will catch almost anything) to collect a huge tranch of information for age verification, which will cost an astonishing amount of money and prevent many community initiatives from ever getting off the ground. It will lead to many sites simply blocking adult communities entirely for economic reasons, a part of society that is already subject to substantial discrimination from UK authorities.
Alternatively, social media platforms can ban pornography. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok (amongst others) already do this; the problem is they don't enforce these bans. My perspective on this is that if you can't effectively moderate your social media platform in accordance with the social norms of your users' surrounding social context, then you shouldn't be operating a social media platform, and if you strongly disagree with your users' social context (e.g., users in, say, Iran), then you shouldn't offer your platform to them.
Also, commercial social media platforms are increasingly disinterested in providing open APIs, anyway.
> You say that the UK is not a totalitarian state because it's half assed. And it's certainly true that enforcement will be capricious and arbitrary. But that is hardly a defence of the act - it will still have a remarkable chilling effect because you never know if it's you that will be targeted.
This is how offensive speech is policed in meatspace. On a more general note, having the right to say something doesn't mean that saying that thing doesn't make you an arsehole.
> Meanwhile, it will probably have very little effect on any of the things it is supposed to prohibit.
Maybe. Let's wait and see, shall we?
> Many communities are already discriminated against by payment providers, banks and online services, and this legislation will make those effects significantly worse, but at the same time, achieve none of it's goals.
I don't recall the Online Safety Act regulating the financial industry - could you point out which parts of the legislation relate to that? I do, however, agree that we do have excessive restrictions on access to certain financial services.
Social media does not cause harm in of itself. People can use social media in a way that can be harmful, but you can say that about absolutely anything. Plenty of people that are not tech people manage to use social media to promote themselves, their business etc. People use it as a place of business. It is a mixed bag, like most things are. You are (like the government) pre-supposing that is the case and basing your whole argument upon that.
As for Offense speech/Free speech. What constitutes what is and isn't offensive is subjective. That is why people argue for a free speech standard. Pretending that it is right to restrict unpopular speech (this is what is really meant by offensive) because the majority agree is completely asinine, as things that were offensive in the past may not be offensive in the future and vice versa.
The reason we don't have a decent tech industry in the UK (the tech industry here sucks) is because we don't have things like a Section 230 protections. Imposing legal responsibility will make it more difficult for anyone to make anything interesting in the UK.
> I don't recall the Online Safety Act regulating the financial industry - could you point out which parts of the legislation relate to that? I do, however, agree that we do have excessive restrictions on access to certain financial services.
You completely misunderstood the point. The point is that we can predict from similar laws in another industry (somewhat related industry) what the effect maybe.
The best cultural difference analogy I’ve heard — two ends of “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument. One side genuinely believes that statement, the other thinks without guns there would be less death.
Same applies to social media and web as well. Yes, it is people ruining each other’s lives, but using an intermediary tool. Whether you think that way will depend on your preexisting conceptions and beliefs. I don’t think there is a wrong way of thinking of this, and every government will handle it differently depended on their goals and needs.
I had an issue with alcohol for many years. That doesn't mean that drinking is inherently bad. There are plenty of people that can enjoy a few drinks responsibly. I am not one of those people. Therefore I abstain from alcohol as a result. I don't ask that alcohol to be banned.
Alcohol sales and laws are fairly draconian in North America, compared to equivalents in Europe and Asia. Once again, I don't think there is right or wrong approach to it, and all the discussions will stem from cultural beliefs and predispositions. Your "freedom" and my "freedom" will always be conceptually different as well, the interpretation of the idea and making policies around it is the job of the government. By the way, I'm actually on your side when it comes to this specific topic, but growing up in different continents, I can understand why different policy makers approach it through different lenses.
‘No section 230’ might be the reason why there’s no social media tech scene. I’d like to think that HN cares about things other than social media too - maybe Brits could do something that actually adds some value.
But in any case, original point also brings up the question: why is the UK allowing foreign companies to violate laws that it would prosecute British businesses for violating?
If you allow a foreign domiciled business to break laws in your country, then how the heck do you expect to ever have domestic industry? It’s strictly less risky to always be foreign domiciled.
This bill aims to stop that regulatory arbitrage and as such is hopefully a leveling of the playing field for the UK tech scene.
I don't really understand how many people on here (I've been lurking for a while), essentially pretend everything is backwards. You don't level the playing field by making it more difficult to do business, you make it easier.
BTW, I get btw a threat letter from another UK quango (I forget the name), which basically says "if you have any user data you need to pay us £60 a year". Yes you need to pay a levy for a database in the UK. It is basically a TV license for a database. I did work as a freelancer in the UK (made impossible now because of IR-35 regulation) and have a dormant company because freelance/contract is dead, so I have to inform them I don't have user data. It is just another thing to worry about when creating an online app.
> But in any case, original point also brings up the question: why is the UK allowing foreign companies to violate laws that it would prosecute British businesses for violating?
Because then we don't have any alternatives and people already use it. I also don't think the laws should exist in the first place, so I don't care if a US company is violating them.
I would love the UK to actually require IP blocks of twitter/Facebook etc, because it might actually force people to think about the issues.
> If you allow a foreign domiciled business to break laws in your country, then how the heck do you expect to ever have domestic industry? It’s strictly less risky to always be foreign domiciled.
You don't make it more difficult to do business. Many of the US tech successes were people starting up in a garage. The UK micro business did extremely well (until PC/Macs came on the scene) and that had almost no regulation or gov interference (other than standard stuff for electronics).
> This bill aims to stop that regulatory arbitrage and as such is hopefully a leveling of the playing field for the UK tech scene.
No. It is to try to censor the internet. It been going in this direction for ages. I am quite honestly fed up of people telling me that it is nothing to worry about. The UK politicians complained about replies to their tweets, after one of their colleagues had been stabbed to death. I found it honestly sickening. There is no crisis they won't use as an opportunity.
>I get btw a threat letter from another UK quango (I forget the name), which basically says "if you have any user data you need to pay us £60 a year".
The Information Commissioners Office. Just tell them you are not storing any data and they will go away.
> I did work as a freelancer in the UK (made impossible now because of IR-35 regulation)
Freelancers were never covered by IR35. IR35 covers employees masquerading as contractors. If you work for multiple companies on specific projects that won't cover you
My comment around IR-35 is that it has caused a lot of confusion and thus made contracting a lot more difficult as a result. A lot of freelancers and contractors have been affected by this.
Contracting made a bit more difficult, freelancing totally unaffected. It was always pretty easy to check at below. Every contractor I have ever met seems to know about umbrella companies...
It was not a great regulation, and seemed to affect government contractors the most, which was a bit of an own goal. But it never affected Freelancers
> Contracting made a bit more difficult, freelancing totally unaffected.
That isn't true. It has made contracting a lot more difficult. I am in a number of freelancer groups and it has affected them. I have heard the same from recruiters, from freelancers, from people that run job boards.
> Every contractor I have ever met seems to know about umbrella companies
Most contractors run their own private LTD (like I did). They don't use umbrella companies because you are put on PAYE and you end up paying through the nose in tax.
Typically you get a third party to check a contract for you to see whether it falls under IR-35. I could do it myself, but I would rather pay someone to check it for me.
Many contracts will require you to have IR-35 "insurance" which feels like a scam, but it is required a lot of the time by the contract. This is in addition to PL and PI insurances.
Stop conflating freelancers and contractors! Totally different rules.
I am not. There is no official government distinction between contracting/freelancing/consultant, see here:
https://www.gov.uk/contract-types-and-employer-responsibilit...
Thank you, Ministry of Safety.
I wonder what happens with these sorts of regulations if an entirely decentralized social media platform becomes popular. Who do the authorities go after if there's no owner or server?
The steady march towards authoritarianism continues.
Is there any way that we can overwhelm them?
I’m not sure you’re going to find a lot of sympathy for SoMe platforms in many European countries. Maybe you would have before Twitter was bought and a lot of the “media elite” used it. Today I think you’d mostly find a lot of happy parents applauding you if you were the first politician to manage to ban something like Tik-Tok, Facebook or similar. Not that I’m trying to justify it. I both think the way that it’s being done is wrong and that a lot of people will miss the open web more than they think.
Not holding big tech companies responsible for the content which is housed on their platforms was always a one way street into heavy regulation here in the EU. As with everything EU it takes decades, but I fully expect us to eventually ban many social media products. Or get left by them because it will not be possible for them to make money if they actually have to be custodians of their content.
We can support projects like Autonomi [1] (the rebranded MaidSafe [2]). It should create what (I feel) the internet was always ment to be. Peer to peer communications.
I think the only solution to this is to stop the centralised mess the internet has become.
I looked at all three website sites but no docs, it's a rough start with no headline app, or docs to create an app.
Thanks demarq. I agree the marketing needs some improvements. They recently did a rebrand and it's added a lot of confusion.
The problem for you is that the majority of the public support this.
Because there is plenty of scientific evidence that social media is bad for children with many parents having first hand experiences with grooming, deep fakes, bullying etc.
And I think almost everyone can agree that companies like Meta, TikTok, X have major problems with their algorithms pushing people into ideological extremes, allowing rogue actors to manipulate at scale and not taking privacy or security seriously enough.
So finding people who want to defend them will be hard.
You are absolutely right, and you have indavertebtly hit the nail on the head. This legilsation is supported by parents who would like their children to be able to use the internet, all of it, without any effort on their part to police their children's online habits. There are many parents who give their kids smartphones at 10 years old, or younger, and create Google and Facebook/Insta accounts with fake ages for their kids to use, and let them at it. No supervision, no discussion, no parental controls. This renders any action on the part of the tech companies moot, as parents are proving that their pre-teen kids are adults by providing false information. Kids then go online, go into Snapchat or whatever, cue torrent of DPs and grooming. Quelle surprise!
Schools in the UK spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with this, and in almost every case it turns out parents have no idea what their kids are sending/seeing online.
So the result is that bad parents demand bad legislation so that they can, in their minds, transfer responsibility for parenting their kids to the state. The state, well meaning rather than malicious, massively overreaches in its attempt to provide an answer. As a result everyone else suffers. And the 'majority of the public' think parents should parent, rather than making it the government's problem, and butt out of their internet.
> As a result everyone else suffers
Welcome to life in a society. We pick winners which by extension creates losers.
So you would be arguing that we shouldn't protect children from social media which is causing significant harm to them because it might inconvenience a minority of adults.
A liberal society should be the polar opposite of “stupid people can’t handle _______ so nobody gets ________”
I think it’s perfectly acceptable, even laudable, that people with superior intelligence have better outcomes than people with lower intelligence
Vote.
People say as a pithy answer and it is very frustrating. Unfortunately it is utterly unrealistic that voting will solve this situation.
1) The majority of the UK's populace are onboard with the vast majority of these laws. Even if all the people that opposed this voted for another party, due to how the constituencies work, your vote will be effectively made moot.
2) Both major UK parties essentially agree that these laws should be implemented. The only solution to any problem that UK government can envisage is banning something. You can look into the Lotus Carlton ram raids of 40RR, they were singing the same tune back in the late 80s/early 90s.
3) There is no realistic pro-liberty / anti-censorship movement at all in the UK
This has been going for longer than I have been alive in the UK (I am now in my early 40s). I am not an anarchist, but I've heard the phrase repeated by anarchists of "You cannot vote yourself free". The only way to resist such laws is to subvert them via technology.
This legislation was created by the Conservative party, but wasn't opposed by any major political party in the UK.
What a joke. Every single political party that will ever be in power will want this sort of bills to be passed. It benefits them directly.
> Is there any way that we can overwhelm them?
Yes: leave the UK.
I and a lot of high earners are thinking about leaving the UK because it's simply a punishing country where you have high taxes like others in Europe but nothing to show for them. It's also by far the most authoritarian western country, as exemplified by measures like this one.
The way to overwhelm them is to sink the UK by having most of the people it relies on to function (high earners) leave and let the country collapse.
I left the UK earlier this year and went to the USA for exactly this reason. Sick of giving half my paycheque to not receive anything in return except more boot on my neck. Mother freedom etc etc
I left and came back because I was homesick. I deeply regret it. Thinking of moving away again but I miss my family enough as it is living in another part of the country. I was hoping for some positive change (even though unlikely), but that isn’t going to happen.
The country doesn't need high earners per se, it needs people that contribute effectively. There are plenty of "high earners" that are parasites, contributing little and extracting much. It all makes much more sense once you realise that governments spend before they tax and so what really matters is real resources.
> There are plenty of "high earners" that are parasites, contributing little and extracting much.
No, not at all.
There may be a few (0.01%) rich people that don't contribute much, but high __earners__ are paying extremely high amounts of taxes with nothing in return.
The "parasites", as you call them, are low-income workers that get the extreme majority of benefits while essentially contributing nothing.
Take a look at https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-.... The bottom 50% only contribute 9.5% of total income taxes while the top 10% of earners contributes a whopping 60% of then.
The middle-class is being drained. The downfall of the UK will be inevitable once the top 10% realizes that they're better of in literally any other country.
Where do you want to go, I’m curious?! I wonder what panacea you see out there that’s less authoritarian and where you could keep your “high earner” social status.
It’s a shame that Britain gave one of its “high earner” jobs to someone who’d enjoy seeing it collapse.
> I wonder what panacea you see out there that’s less authoritarian and where you could keep your “high earner” social status.
Throw a dart on a world map and chances are you'll land somewhere suitable. Any other first world country would be better for example.
> It’s a shame that Britain gave one of its “high earner” jobs to someone who’d enjoy seeing it collapse.
Britain didn't give me anything. They were unable to supply qualified individuals for a role that requires them, so they had to import a skilled worker on a visa that makes me ineligible to any public money, forces me to leave the country within 2 months should I lose my job, yet forces me to give the equivalent of 5 minimum wages of salary to taxes all the while having no benefits compared to said minimum wage workers and "enjoying" the same public services, such as a one year waiting list for a procedure that I got done for free in a day in the country where I used to live.
I also didn't say I would enjoy to see it collapse, I said that the solution to push back against those authoritarian measures, and other anti-middle-class policies is to vote with the only vote we are given: our wallet.
> The way to overwhelm them is to sink the UK by having most of the people in relies on to function (high earners) leave and let the country collapse.
Leaving is useful, if it improves your personal well-being.
No need to be spiteful about it.
Bye.
The furore below reminds me of the GDPR apocalypse predictions...none of which came true.
My problem with all of these sorts of things is the idea of who determines “harmful.” Because that’s a term of such ambiguity that it could literally mean anything.
“Covid came from a Chinese lab” — “harmful because it causes ‘racism’”
“Pakistani grooming gangs in Rotherham are targeting young British girls” — harmful because it could promote social unrest.
“Eating meat can improve metabolic health” — harmful because it promotes behaviors that contribute heavily to climate change.
“Young motorcycle racers should be allowed to train on big tracks before the age of 16” — harmful because it promotes a ‘dangerous’ sport to kids.
I could go on and you could replace whatever I said to whatever you want to say and depending on who is the arbiter of “harmful,” that speech could be regulated in a way that creates criminals out of simply stating facts or opinions.
If the lead up to WW2 were today, if these regulations existed, then suggesting that a Germans in the U.K. were a national security risk could get you in trouble for “promoting harmful stereotypes about German people.”
In my mind, if we are to regulate speech at all, it should have a very very strict standard as to what speech is demonstrably harmful rather than politically uncomfortable. I’m not an Alex Jones fan at all, but for example, nobody died from anything he said, people have been offended and perhaps disgusted, but the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist aren’t causing anyone actual harm. In the US, we have libel and slander laws, we also have laws against speech that cause an imminent threat of danger — but we should never have laws that protect people from being offended, or even misinformed. We have websites supporting Chinese Traditional Medicine despite some practices in that field being demonstrably harmful and contrary to modern medical science — should those be banned? I would think most people would say not.
This online “safety” regulation is really a regulation to regulate political speech under the guise of “protecting the children.”
> In the US
Wrong thread, you should be posting in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42427132 "US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from app stores Jan. 19"
Side note. But if they're banning TikTok, they totally need to ban Youtube and Instagram as both of them have what TikTok has. I.e. The never-ending slot-machine of dopamine known as Shorts and Reels.
If that's why they were banning TikTok, then sure. But that's not why they're banning TikTok.
Such a trend can only be stopped by reciprocity: if the "harmfuls" were mis-judged, who is responsible to pay for the damage? Tax-payers?
There's a lot not to like about this legislation, but you're way off the mark here. The legislation doesn't impose a generic ban on anything that someone or other considers 'harmful'. It's a raft of quite specific regulatory requirements relating to specific kinds of content. There are certainly arguments to be made against it, but your examples are quite irrelevant.
> psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress
Has shown itself to be vague enough to be a perfect stand in for "harmful" in everything the parent comment says.
Can you provide examples in UK law?
No sorry, that causes me too much psychological harm, amounting to at least serious distress.
Infamously the Nazi dog salute case: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925
That was a hate crime case under existing legislation. It's not relevant to the interpretation of 'psychological harm' in this new legislation.
What's your point? There's no examples of psychological harm under the new legislation because it's new. We can however infer from how the old legislation has been enforced.
It’s not a very specific point of comparison to serve as a response to scott_w’s question. You can infer that legislation is sometimes badly interpreted and badly enforced. I’m sure this new legislation will be badly interpreted and badly enforced in some instances. That doesn't lead us to the sort of over-the-top scenario that briandear was painting.
> crisis response protocols for emergency events (such as last summer’s riots).
Or maybe the proles organising mass protests at the government. No, surely not.
1984 was not an instruction manual.
It may not have been but it seems that any dystopian piece of literature will be used as one.
It was more like a discovery of underlying structures of anthropods. Especially the part about positive, negative, and transmutive nationalism.
Hit the nail on the head with that one.
I’d like to see all social media sites require proper age verification, much like any gambling sites in the UK have to. No under 18 needs social media. Feel, especially for children, they are a net negative.
Which kills any sort of online anonymity as all social media posts will be directly linked to your ID. This will make it much easier to go after anyone that is a dissident in the UK.
Many these awful laws such as one being discussed are sold to us under the guise of protecting the children. The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related crimes in the UK (and I checked a while ago).
Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's social media usage.
It's not that hard to create privacy friendly age verification. Have a system like Sign in with Apple vouch that you're over 18. Go to Apple store to flash your ID and they just set a flag on your account. Apple doesn't give the site any personal info when you use Sign in with Apple. Apple isn't giving the government any of your details without a warrant. No Apple store nearby? It doesn't have to be Apple, licence it out to a few companies.
I don't want to use Apple anything, or Google anything anymore. I want to be able to make an account with my email and not give my ID to any third party. I've spent the last 8 years removing my dependence on big-tech (I self host, run a Linux desktop and use Graphene OS).
>Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's social media usage.
I guess we should stop checking age when buying alcohol in pubs (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's alcohol purchases_)
And stop checking age when buying cigarettes (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's tobacco purchases_)
etc.
It's illuminating that your post is both "tech can't solve it" and so brazenly pro-tech with manifestations of its laziest arguments each way.
Of course tech can solve the ID problem. It could solve it in a way that doesn't need to give ground to your slippery slope argument too. It just doesn't have the incentive model to do so. Any "control" in this space would reduce the marketable headcount and so it's not in tech's interests to solve - without government intervention.
But when I go and buy booze, I just show my ID and that's it, it isn't stored in a database with what I bought and then leaked on the internet.
The card you might have paid with is though. I can’t remember any instances of a card hack revealing transactions of customers though (I might be wrong, just doesn’t ring a bell).
It’s not a given that digital record must lead to compromise.
They could have paid with a cash, crypto, store credit. You are trying to salami slice the point being made.
If I choose to buy alcohol or cigarettes and I look over 25 in the UK I do not have to show any ID. If I do need to show ID, it doesn't get tracked by the government. It is only seen by the whoever is serving me at the checkout. I don't honestly believe that you don't understand how this is different.
> It's illuminating that your post is both "tech can't solve it" and so brazenly pro-tech with manifestations of its laziest arguments each way.
I believe that the only way to stop enforcement is to make it impossible to enforce. This would require new software that is easy to use by the majority of people. I don't see this happening in the near term.
> Of course tech can solve the ID problem. It could solve it in a way that doesn't need to give ground to your slippery slope argument too. It just doesn't have the incentive model to do so. Any "control" in this space would reduce the marketable headcount and so it's not in tech's interests to solve - without government intervention.
I am not sure what you are trying to say here. The fact is that some sort of government ID will be required or a credit card and that would be directly linked to any accounts you may have. Simply this is a bad idea for my own security, I don't want to be giving my government ID to some social media company in the first place or a third party that I maybe unfamiliar with. That before we get into any other wider reaching concerns.
The problem is you’re simultaneously arguing two points and relying on whichever point gives you the most leverage at each juncture.
If .gov == bad guy then you’re screwed whether or not you leave a digital trail on social media because you’re already leaving one anyway (unless you’re a marginal outlier that isn’t worth considering for this “problem”). If that’s your threat model then you’re either super-important or I worry you’ve been sold a scary story by social media algorithms.
On the other hand, the idea that this is an impossible tech problem to solve is also disingenuous. My point is that it could be solved. And quickly and easily too. If the incentive model were there. And whilst I’ve not given the solution a huge amount of thought (I’m not actually that interested in solving it) I’m certain that an authenticated assertion could be made that wasn’t directly attributable to an individual - i.e., a mechanism could be developed that would solve for both problems.
Which brings us back to the fundamental point here: the people who would need to implement the solution have no incentive model in place to motivate them to do so.
> This will make it much easier to go after anyone that is a dissident in the UK.
No need to go there. What about commenting anonymously on your work place?
It wouldn't be anonymous then if it was in my work place.
Yes, so no one will comment on their employer because they'd risk trouble.
There are so many issues with stripping anonymity. TBH I will probably end up 100% either using a VPN or the darknet.
I think laws and regulations can be put in place that, while imperfect, would highly discourage the use of social media by minors.
I wouldn't want every user to validate their age with government ID.
But we can say schools should ban kids from using phones. We can say that large social media platforms need to whitelist content/creators that children are allowed to access. We can insist that social media companies throttle the ability for minors to scroll through videos at a dopamine addiction pace.
More generally and more applicable to the discussion, I think regulations for social media need to be applied proportional to the userbase and centralization of a platform, and target viral algorithms.
Old school message boards should be safe from government interference, broadly.
It may be time to research simpleX chat and Briar if we will maintain the ability to communicate without government filtering.
> I wouldn't want every user to validate their age with government ID.
Well that is what will be required or a credit card.
> But we can say schools should ban kids from using phones. We can say that large social media platforms need to whitelist content/creators that children are allowed to access. We can insist that social media companies throttle the ability for minors to scroll through videos at a dopamine addiction pace.
Every argument around regulation around social media to protect children ignores that fact that parents are the ones closest to their children and their children is their responsibility. Some parents inability to control their children shouldn't infringe my rights as an adult.
> More generally and more applicable to the discussion, I think regulations for social media need to be applied proportional to the userbase and centralization of a platform, and target viral algorithms.
If I don't like how particular algorithms act on social media, I can simply opt out of using it. As an adult I have agency. I found that I was spending a disproportionate of my time using Twitter/X and as a result I deleted my account. I had problem with alcohol years ago, I stopped drinking after I accepted I had a problem. I have my own agency.
> It may be time to research simpleX chat and Briar if we will maintain the ability to communicate without government filtering.
The issue is that the vast majority of people I wish to talk to aren't tech savvy and are unwilling to use anything other than mainstream platforms. So you end up essentially walling yourself from everyone else. That isn't ideal.
Ok but UK is not an oppresive regime, so that we talk about "dissidents" in UK. As anywhere, the freedom of speech is regulated. But even if you spout racist or other nonsense, you are not a dissident, you are just breaking the law, to which I agree, hate speech, racism should not be openly promoted.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/11/britain-...
Certain types of demonstrator get very heavily cracked down on, and it's not usually the anti-immigrant ones.
The definition of hate speech used to be centered around terrorism and was initially sold to the UK public as stopping "Islamic hate preachers and stopping terrorism". This has now expanded far past that and people are being investigated and arrested for simply opposing immigration (which is often conflated with racism disingenuously), or criticising the actions of Israel, teenagers posting rap lyrics on facebook, and numerous others that I have forgotten about.
If you are not bothered by the expansion of these powers because some people have said things you disapprove of there is nothing I can say to convince you.
Agree with you. I’m not sure why people believe that only the physical world and not the virtual one should have some amount of regulation. I think a good portion of HN has drunk the kool aid of their employers/industry and is almost religiously unwilling to consider an alternative viewpoint without resorting to shouting ‘fascist’ and ‘1984’. Maybe someone needs to write a book called 2024 about the hellscape we currently live in and folks could circle jerk around this new shibboleth.
Why would it be the "kool aid of their employers"? My employers would surely love to track every single click I make on the work and even personal PC. If the government tracks it that's also fine. Still less risk for them if I'm a nutter and the checks get outsourced to the government. Once the data leaks they can check what I was doing anyway.
Social media companies don’t want any kind of regulation because it adds cost to them. Their PR bangs the drum of free speech and people economically tied to the industry gobble it up while trying to ignore the self serving nature of their new beliefs.
The online communities don't exist within the borders of a nation state. They have their own social norms and rules. You can see this on forums, message boards, online games etc. Therefore a nation state trying to enforce its will on those communities is completely asinine.
I don't like that it that American companies enforces it language policing on UK residents, I also don't like that fact that the UK wants to force it language policing world wide (the UK state acts as if it has an empire).
The reason people are unwilling to consider an alternative viewpoint, is that in the past they have been more moderate and what has happened has been a complete erosion of civil liberties under the guise of "stopping the terrorists". I was arguing the same thing I am arguing essentially over 20 years ago.
Ironically many of those groups that we went to war to stop (Al-queda/ISIS) are now being presented as moderate because foreign policy has shifted again.
At least in the US, legislation for age verification already exists and it actually far predates social media: COPPA[1].
It is, however, seldom actually enforced due largely to the impracticality and inconvenience of the matter. The law also doesn't regulate the presentation of content to children, rather the collection of information from children.
I think the most recent enforcement of COPPA that had actual tangible effect was when Youtube was ordered to stop collecting information (eg: comments) from videos marked as for kids.
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/privacy-security/child...
COPPA does not appear to require age verification. It actually appears to have the opposite effect, only coming into effect when the service provider has actual knowledge of the user's age. Actively avoiding collecting the user's age or clues to it is safer for the service provider.