[HN Gopher] UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
___________________________________________________________________
UK's Online Safety Act comes into force
Author : AndrewDucker
Score : 124 points
Date : 2024-12-16 08:23 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ofcom.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ofcom.org.uk)
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Better alternative to first-party propaganda:
| https://www.eff.org/pages/uk-online-safety-bill-massive-thre...
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Ofcom is an independent regulator; it's far from the "first-
| party" you're implying it is.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| 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.
| randomcarbloke wrote:
| there is no quango in the UK that is independent, they are
| all, without exception "independent" with an implied nudge
| and a wink.
| nohuck13 wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The Q in Quango stands for Quasi.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| krisbolton wrote:
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| 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.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| > _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.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| 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.
| pas wrote:
| are there term limits for these seats?
| pjc50 wrote:
| There are no term limits. (I don't think there's any term
| limit for any elected position in the UK?)
| pas wrote:
| 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?
| HPsquared wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Yes it's been undemocratic for a long time. The 2024 one
| was just particularly egregious.
| foldr wrote:
| 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...
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| foldr wrote:
| 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.)
| belorn wrote:
| 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.
| throw646577 wrote:
| 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.)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| throw646577 wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| 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.
| pas wrote:
| 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?)
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| throw646577 wrote:
| 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)
| pc86 wrote:
| Why is it inevitable that we should continually erode one's
| right to privacy?
| collyw wrote:
| The steady march towards authoritarianism continues.
|
| Is there any way that we can overwhelm them?
| turblety wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://autonomi.com/
|
| 2. https://maidsafe.net/
| demarq wrote:
| 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.
| turblety wrote:
| Thanks demarq. I agree the marketing needs some
| improvements. They recently did a rebrand and it's added a
| lot of confusion.
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Vote.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| amoe_ wrote:
| This legislation was created by the Conservative party, but
| wasn't opposed by any major political party in the UK.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| 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.
| contracertainty wrote:
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| > 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.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > 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.
| eru wrote:
| > 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.
| frikskit wrote:
| 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.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > 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.
| jbu wrote:
| Bye.
| alexandercannon wrote:
| 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
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| hgomersall wrote:
| 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.
| devjab wrote:
| 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.
| briandear wrote:
| 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."
| est wrote:
| 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?
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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"
| zo1 wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| If that's why they were banning TikTok, then sure. But
| that's not why they're banning TikTok.
| foldr wrote:
| 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.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| > 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.
| scott_w wrote:
| Can you provide examples in UK law?
| wesselbindt wrote:
| No sorry, that causes me too much psychological harm,
| amounting to at least serious distress.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Infamously the Nazi dog salute case:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-
| west-43478925
| foldr wrote:
| That was a hate crime case under existing legislation.
| It's not relevant to the interpretation of 'psychological
| harm' in this new legislation.
| zarzavat wrote:
| 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.
| foldr wrote:
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| 1984 was not an instruction manual.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| It may not have been but it seems that any dystopian piece of
| literature will be used as one.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| 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.
| red_admiral wrote:
| 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.
| bratbag wrote:
| 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.
| phero_cnstrcts wrote:
| >Their decisions need to be audited to avoid corruption.
|
| And as we all know: corruption ends abruptly at the highest
| levels.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| >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.
| DrBazza wrote:
| 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
| AJRF wrote:
| Unlikely to change as Gambling companies are major donors to
| the Labour Party.
|
| https://theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/28/tory-bet...
| shreddit wrote:
| Well "porridge" is not a synonym for "healthy", but i see your
| point in gambling ads...
| DrBazza wrote:
| Goldilocks aside, I've not seen a family ruined by porridge.
| I have seen it first hand with gambling.
| thih9 wrote:
| 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...
| pc86 wrote:
| 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?
| thih9 wrote:
| 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.
| jahewson wrote:
| 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.
| projektfu wrote:
| First, they came for the crumpets.
| benfrain wrote:
| 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.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| ccozan wrote:
| 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.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| > 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?
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| It wouldn't be anonymous then if it was in my work place.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yes, so no one will comment on their employer because
| they'd risk trouble.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| There are so many issues with stripping anonymity. TBH I
| will probably end up 100% either using a VPN or the
| darknet.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| > 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.
| herghost wrote:
| >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.
| w4der wrote:
| 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.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| owisd wrote:
| 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.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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).
| frikskit wrote:
| 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.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| 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.
| frikskit wrote:
| 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.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| 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...
| Zak wrote:
| 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.
| csmattryder wrote:
| > 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.
| z3t4 wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| Ok
| cjs_ac wrote:
| 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
|
| [2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/contents
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| > (doesn't get reported on btw).
|
| I wonder how it is that you know about it then?
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| I found out about it via social media which is essentially
| modern "word of mouth".
| jimnotgym wrote:
| OK, so you are just spreading rumours then?
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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".
| pc86 wrote:
| They are very clearly commenting in bad faith.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| So the original post was independently verifyable when
| you found it?
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| What other hoops to satisfy you do you want me to jump
| through?
| swiss_steve wrote:
| I suspect he means it doesn't get reported in the main
| stream media. Independent media channels have reported
| this.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Cool, do you have a link to any of them?
| UberFly wrote:
| Maybe it's this:
| https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241018-uk-police-
| raid-ho...
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| Yes it was that. Thank you. I couldn't remember the name
| as it was an unusual name.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| 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.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| > 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.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| frikskit wrote:
| '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.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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 PS60 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| >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 PS60 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
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| 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
|
| https://www.gov.uk/guidance/check-employment-status-for-
| tax
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| > 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Stop conflating freelancers and contractors! Totally
| different rules.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| I am not. There is no official government distinction
| between contracting/freelancing/consultant, see here:
|
| https://www.gov.uk/contract-types-and-employer-
| responsibilit...
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 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.
| EpicQuest_246 wrote:
| 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.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 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.
| Zak wrote:
| > _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.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| 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.
| Zak wrote:
| 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.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| 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_.
| Zak wrote:
| 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?
| cjs_ac wrote:
| > 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.
| protomolecule wrote:
| >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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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...
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I love your post, and not because I agree with all of it. It is
| the most original thing on this entire thread
| jahewson wrote:
| > 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| ...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.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| How is "I don't want my tax money going to immigrants"
| inciting rioting?
|
| Oh wait, you're a liar.
| notreallyauser wrote:
| 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.
| systemstops wrote:
| 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.
| projektfu wrote:
| > [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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
| stuaxo wrote:
| 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 -
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044
| highcountess wrote:
| Thank you, Ministry of Safety.
| dang wrote:
| Looks like https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/16/britains-ofcom-brings-
| tough-... has some background. Readers may want to look at both.
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| jimnotgym wrote:
| The furore below reminds me of the GDPR apocalypse
| predictions...none of which came true.
| archagon wrote:
| 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?
| systemstops wrote:
| 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.
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