[HN Gopher] Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
___________________________________________________________________
Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
Author : phlummox
Score : 1039 points
Date : 2025-08-11 16:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| perihelions wrote:
| More HN comments here,
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44721403 ( _" Wikimedia
| Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations
| (wikimediafoundation.org)"_--189 comments)
| beejiu wrote:
| Worth noting that was before the High Court's further judgments
| today, and the article has been updated. The full judgment is
| here: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/08/Wikimedi...
| exasperaited wrote:
| _If Ofcom permissibly determines that Wikipedia is a Category
| 1 service, and if the practical effect of that is that
| Wikipedia cannot continue to operate, the Secretary of State
| may be obliged to consider whether to amend the regulations
| or to exempt categories of service from the Act. In doing so,
| he would have to act compatibly with the Convention. Any
| failure to do so could also be subject to further challenge.
| Such a challenge would not be prevented by the outcome of
| this claim._
|
| Seems pretty logical.
|
| Again I think people outside of the UK perceive Ofcom to be a
| censor with a ban hammer. It's an industry self-regulation
| authority -- backed by penalties, yes, but it favours self-
| regulation. And the implementation is a modifiable statutory
| instrument specifically so that issues like this can be
| addressed.
|
| In a perfect world would this all be handled with parental
| oversight and on-device controls? Yeah, maybe. But on-device
| parental controls are such a total mess, and devices
| available so readily, that UK PAYG mobile phone companies
| have already felt compelled (before the law changed) to block
| adult content by default.
|
| ETA: I am rate-limited so I will just add that I am in the UK
| too. Not that this is relevant to the discussion. There is no
| serious UK consensus for overturning this law; the only party
| that claims that as a position does not even have the support
| of the majority of its members. I do not observe this law to
| be censorship, because as an adult I can see what I want to
| see, I just have to prove I am an adult. Which is how it used
| to work with top shelf magazines (so I am told! ;-) )
|
| I suppose it's not really the done thing to say this, but if
| you disagree with me, say something, don't just downvote.
| vidarh wrote:
| As someone _in_ the UK: Ofcom _is_ a censor, that by
| leaving these things unclear are further having a _massive_
| chilling effect that is absolutely already being felt.
|
| The issue here is not parental oversight. It's the
| massively overly broad assault on speech.
|
| The UK PAYG block is a good example of a solution that
| would have had far less severe impact if extended.
| piltdownman wrote:
| Pretty sure the PAYG block is circumvented by simply
| changing the APN in the carrier settings using freely
| available information online - that's how 3Ireland works
| and VodafoneIRL IIRC. It also had the annoying
| consequence of blocking all 'adult' sites - which
| included sites of historic interest and things like the
| internet archive.
|
| The problem with 'child safety' in the UK has almost
| nothing to do with pornographers or 'toxic' influences as
| viewed through the lense of neo-Victorian morality
| anyway.
|
| Instead, it is a societal powderkeg of gang
| indoctrination and social deprivation leading to a
| culture of drug-dealing, violent robberies, and postcode
| gang intimidation. This bill is simply a cheap and easily
| supported deflection from the dereliction of duty of
| successive governments towards the youth of the country
| since Blair.
|
| In short, it is nothing but an electoral panacea for the
| incumbent intolerant conservative voting base; moral-
| hysteria disguised as a child safety measure.
|
| This is inherently obvious when you assess the new
| vocabulary of persecution and otherness - detailing 'ASBO
| Youth', 'Chavs', 'NEETs and NEDs' and their inevitable
| progression to 'Roadmen'.
|
| The Netflix series 'Top Boy' is the Sopranos equivalent
| of how this culture operates and how children are
| indoctrinated into a life of diminished expectations in a
| way that is often inescapable given their environment and
| cultural norms around their upbringing.
|
| Even with this plethora of evidence and cultural
| consciousness, the powers that be are smugly insistent
| that removing PornHub is more important than introducing
| Social Hubs and amenities - and those that argue
| otherwise are derided as 'Saville's in the new parlance.
|
| https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/online-
| saf...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgery3eeqzxo
| nemomarx wrote:
| Normalizing those mosquito devices and trying to drive
| teenagers out of public life, banning kitchen knives in
| some attempt to keep kids from getting used to blades...
|
| the UK strategy on kids is very very strange to me. I
| can't follow the logic at all. Do they expect them to
| silently sit at home, not using the Internet, not going
| anywhere with friends, and end up well adjusted adults
| anyway?
| piltdownman wrote:
| Because these trials and tribulations are designed to
| disenfranchise the lower classes - regardless of age, the
| protected classes tend to be unimpeded by societal
| measures in the UK.
|
| If teenagers Felicity or Joshua need to purchase a knife,
| or access questionable internet content, it'll be an
| assumed part of their privilege that they'll be able to
| do so. Similarly they are unimpacted by anti-social
| behaviour orders or restrictions on their entitlement to
| exist in public spaces unmolested, as this is the
| demographic insulated by their memberships to 3rd spaces
| such as Social and Sporting clubs - a fry cry from their
| lower-class urban peers resigned to hanging around the
| Tesco carpark.
| gambiting wrote:
| Basically yeah. Where I live virtually all kinds of
| community centres have closed down due to lack of
| funding, even a local library had to close because local
| council has no money to keep it running. As a teenager
| there is nothing to do around here, a town of 20k people
| next to a 300k city. And then I see people complaining
| that "oh there are teenagers around the park at night" -
| yeah, because they have literally nothing else to do. And
| they aren't even causing anyone any harm, they just sit
| there and chat most of the time. But I see local
| neighbours groups all being like "someone needs to do
| something about these youths!" - like yeah, no shit, but
| so far the only solution anyone has is to "silently sit
| at home, not using the Internet, not going anywhere with
| friends, and end up well adjusted adults anyway". 6th
| largest economy in the world and it can't even keep a
| library open.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Seems like It's just too dangerous for Wikipedia or many
| others to risk though - the potential penalties in the law
| are just too huge as far as I've seen.
|
| For a lot of sites, the safe response has just been
| cautious over-blocking as far as I can see (or smaller UK-
| based services just shutting down) but you can imagine why
| Wikipedia don't want to do that.
|
| But you're right that encouraging much better parental
| controls would have been better than passing this bad law -
| I'll give you that one.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| To me, that judgment reads like a fairly strong warning to
| Ofcom. The outcome section makes it clear that although the
| request for judicial review has been refused at present, that
| refusal is predicated on the fact that Ofcom has currently
| not ruled that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service. If Ofcom
| _were_ to rule that Wikipedia is a C1 service, the Wikimedia
| foundation would have grounds to request a review again --
| and, between the lines, that request might well succeed.
|
| So, _is_ Wikipedia really a Category 1 service? From
| https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2025/9780348267174, it
| seems to come down to whether Wikipedia is a site which uses
| a "content recommender system", where that term is defined
| as:
|
| > a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user
| service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service,
| that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or
| other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in
| which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether
| alone or with other content, may be encountered by other
| users of the service
|
| There's plenty of flexibility in that definition for Ofcom to
| interpret "content recommender system" in a way that catches
| Facebook without catching Wikipedia. For instance, Ofcom
| could simply take the viewpoint that any content
| recommendation that Wikipedia engages in is not "in respect
| of the user-to-user part of that service."
|
| After today's judgement, and perhaps even before, my own bet
| is that this is exactly the route Ofcom will take.
| cft wrote:
| If the UK orders a Wikipedia block to its ISPs, it would be a
| good thing, to raise public awareness of the OSA. Wikipedia
| should do nothing and wait.
| graemep wrote:
| Which is why they will not do it. Nothing popular will be
| blocked or shut down.
| corndoge wrote:
| Porn is popular!
| graemep wrote:
| True, but its not going to get blocked. AFAIK all the big
| porn sites are happily implementing age verification. Why
| not? Its an excuse to gather data, to increase numbers of
| registered users or some other form of tracking, and to
| raise a barrier to entry to smaller competitors.
|
| Other aspects of the OSA have similar effects on other
| types of sites such as forums vs social media.
| vidarh wrote:
| Some are not, an ironically, Ofcom's website now provides
| a handy list of websites you can visit without age
| verification (in their list of companies they are
| investigating)
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Why not?
|
| Because only 10% of visitors actually do it. It _might_
| not be as bad as this because probably anyone who was
| actually going to pay for the porn would be ok with
| giving them their credit card number anyway. Bad for
| advertising income though.
| filoleg wrote:
| > AFAIK all the big porn sites are happily implementing
| age verification
|
| I don't know what you had in mind by "big porn sites",
| but the biggest one I know of (Pornhub) is not doing
| that.
|
| They decided to voluntarily withdraw from the US markets
| where age verification became required (TX, GA, etc.),
| and wrote a pretty good blog post explaining their
| rationale (which revolved around the idea that letting
| third parties to just receive and process ID documents
| just so that users could watch porn was both not secure
| at all and absurd).
| wrboyce wrote:
| I just tried to visit pornhub and was prompted to verify
| my age.
|
| > Please verify your age > > To continue, we are required
| to verify that you are 18 or older, in line with the UK
| Online Safety Act. > To view your verification options,
| please visit our Age Verification Page. As part of this
| process, you will be asked to create a new account on
| Pornhub - this will automatically create a new account on
| AllpassTrust as well. > By proceeding, you acknowledge
| and agree to Pornhub's and AllpassTrust's Privacy Notices
| and Pornhub's and AllpassTrust's Terms & Conditions.
|
| > Pornhub is dedicated to developing state-of-the-art
| security features to protect its community. Pornhub is
| fully RTA compliant, which means that devices with
| appropriately configured parental controls will block
| access to our content. We encourage all platforms in the
| adult industry to use this technology, along with all
| available safety and security protocols. We also
| recommend that all parents and guardians use technology
| to prevent their children from accessing content not
| intended for minors.
|
| > Our parental controls page explains how you can easily
| block access to this site.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Only privately though. No politician is going to admit to
| watching porn. Any campaign to save porn isn't going to
| attract many public supporters.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| https://news.sky.com/story/neil-parish-mp-accused-of-
| watchin...
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12535038
| IshKebab wrote:
| Neither of those are relevant. One watched porn _at
| work_. Another had her husband _expense his porn_. _And_
| they were both caught rather than admitting it.
|
| We're talking about just watching porn in private,
| normally. Find me an MP that admits to that.
| graemep wrote:
| Not many people are going to say this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7yIlGlUZac
| jadamson wrote:
| I'm no longer convinced that nothing popular will be shut
| down, assuming that includes voluntarily withdrawing from the
| UK market. A couple of days ago, this popped up:
|
| > The Science Department, which oversees the legislation,
| told companies they could face fines if they failed to uphold
| free speech rules.
|
| > A spokesman said: "As well as legal duties to keep children
| safe, the very same law places clear and unequivocal duties
| on platforms to protect freedom of expression.
|
| > "Failure to meet either obligation can lead to severe
| penalties, including fines of up to 10 per cent of global
| revenue or PS18m, whichever is greater.
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/09/social-
| media...
|
| They seem to be putting social media platforms between a rock
| and a hard place, particularly as political debate in the UK
| is starting to heat up somewhat. I suppose the best to hope
| for at this point is that fines for infringing free
| expression never materialize.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| From about ten years ago, ISPs were required to block web sites
| which were unsuitable for children _by default_. Any ISP 's
| customer (the person paying for internet access, who would
| therefore be over 18) could ask for the block to be removed.
| Requiring individual web sites to block access was unnecessary
| if the intention was to prevent children accessing those sites.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >Requiring individual web sites to block access was
| unnecessary if the intention was to prevent children
| accessing those sites.
|
| Hmm. So Reddit, Youtube, etc. would be blocked by ISPs by
| default?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| My understanding is that the default "block" just worked
| through the ISP's _DNS servers_. So that only works if the
| parents know to restrict the ability of their kids to change
| their DNS servers on their local devices (which is _not_ set
| up by default) and the kids don 't know how to get around it.
| exasperaited wrote:
| It's an interesting thing but I think their _specific_ concerns
| are somewhat overcooked.
|
| As another commenter pointed out in the earlier thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44721712
|
| > The categorisation regulations are a statutory instrument
| rather than primary legislation, so they _are_ open to judicial
| review. But the Wikimedia foundation haven't presented an
| argument as to why the regulations are unlawful, just an argument
| for why they disagree with them.
|
| Ofcom's SI could simply be modified to exclude research texts,
| and it could even be modified to exclude Wikipedia _specifically_
| ; there's no obvious problem with that considering its scale and
| importance.
|
| If you go through Ofcom's checker:
|
| https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
|
| The answers are 1) yes, 2) yes, 3) no, 4) _probably_ "No,
| but...", 5) no, 6) no.
|
| But the answer to getting out of the problem entirely might be to
| change the answer to question 6 -- that is, register Wikipedia as
| an education provider in the UK (since it is already used in that
| capacity).
|
| I mean Wikipedia have actually exhibited at BETT, the main
| educational tech show here; Jimmy Wales did a keynote.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > And it could even be modified to exclude Wikipedia
| specifically;
|
| That's certainly a potential workaround. But carve outs often
| mean that similar communities become hard to create!
| exasperaited wrote:
| I don't doubt that. But again, it is secondary legislation.
| It's highly amenable to ministerial and parliamentary
| scrutiny, and it will be amended.
| vidarh wrote:
| That is exactly the problem. It's unpredictable, and in the
| hand of a government with a serious authoritarian and pro-
| censorship attitude.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I get the feeling that that's why Wikimedia UK is taking
| this particular course.
| varispeed wrote:
| Also creates system for brown envelopes, so only well
| connected to the establishment could get an exemption.
| layer8 wrote:
| The underlying issue remains unaddressed if only Wikipedia-scale
| sites of "significant value" get special exemption.
| sparsely wrote:
| Quite. Sites that have resources and influence will be fine -
| they can either comply with the rules or will be given soft
| exemptions. It's small and new communities that will suffer.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| The OSA is already written such that only very large sites are
| potentially caught by the most onerous rules (at least 7
| million MAU for Category 1; at least 3 million MAU for Category
| 2B). Smaller sites are automatically exempted.
|
| This isn't to say that the OSA is a universally good thing, or
| that smaller sites won't be affected by it. However, this
| request for judicial review wasn't looking to carve out any
| special cases for specific large sites in favour of smaller
| sites.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> Smaller sites are automatically exempted._
|
| No, they're not. I don't know why people keep repeating this
| "7 million active users limit" idea, it's nowhere to be found
| in the actual rules. Tiny forums have already had to close
| because they didn't want to deal with the legal risk:
|
| https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/
| owisd wrote:
| https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onl
| i...
|
| Page 64 defines a Large Service as "A service which has
| more than 7 million monthly active United Kingdom users".
|
| The first two forums in your "in memoriam" list I tried
| looking at (Sinclair QL Forum & Red Passion Forum) are both
| still up.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| The category thresholds are very clearly spelled out in a
| Statutory Instrument [1]. This is surely the "actual rules"
| by any definition. The thresholds are exactly as I stated.
|
| If some smaller sites have made the individual decision
| that the residual parts of the OSA expose them to
| sufficient legal risk that they must close, that's really a
| matter for them. I would hope that they actually checked
| [2] the level of risk before taking any decision.
|
| [1]
| https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2025/226/contents/made
|
| [2] https://ofcomlive.my.salesforce-
| sites.com/formentry/Regulati...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The whole idea that the UK government, or anyone, can
| distinguish between "worthy" and "unworthy" exceptions is
| absurd in itself. The fact that they recognize there are
| exceptions blows a hole in the whole thing.
| nickslaughter02 wrote:
| Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of
| media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
|
| Remember the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" petition? It has
| gotten over half a million signatures and the response from the
| government was a loud "no".
|
| > The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act,
| and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly
| and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from
| its protections.
|
| https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
| perihelions wrote:
| They did do that once,
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477966 ( _" Wikipedia
| blackout page (wikipedia.org)"_ (2012))
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative
| GeekyBear wrote:
| That was part of a widespread protest against proposed
| bipartisan internet legislation in America.
|
| On that occassion, it was very effective at getting the
| American government to back down.
| alt227 wrote:
| Sounds like a pretty much identical situation to this.
| Maybe it would cause the UK government to back down on this
| stupid law.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Yet this looks nothing like their reaction to SOPA and PIPA.
| They even explicitly state that Wikimedia is _not_ against
| the legislation on the whole.
|
| > The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government's
| commitment to promoting online environments where everyone
| can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a
| general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence
| of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal
| challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation
| Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA's
| most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
|
| ---
|
| I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is
| suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did
| their conscience go?
| t0lo wrote:
| The old generation of idealists grew up and we raised no
| one to replace them. I know because I'm in that emotionally
| and ideologically stunted generation.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Why did they raise no one to replace them?
| michaelt wrote:
| A lot of 1990s tech optimists thought that people with
| awful opinions were the unfortunate victims of a lack of
| access to books and education; and the strict gatekeeping
| of broadcast media by the powerful.
|
| This new multi-media technology was going to give
| everyone on the planet access to a complete free
| university education, thousands of books, and would
| prevent the likes of Chinese state-run media suppressing
| knowledge about Tienanmen Square.
|
| And after they receive this marvellous free education,
| all the communists and nazis and religious nutjobs will
| realise they were wrong and we were right. We won't need
| any censorship though, in our enlightenment-style
| marketplace of ideas, rational argument is all that's
| needed to send bad ideas packing, and the educated
| audience will have no trouble seeing through fallacies
| and trickery.
|
| Also the greater education will mean everyone can get
| better jobs and make more money, and with this trade with
| China we're just ramping up they'll see our brilliant
| democratic system, and peacefully adopt it. The recently
| fallen Soviet Union is of course going to do the same,
| and it's going to go really well. We'll all live happily
| ever after.
|
| This Bill Clinton chap has a federal budget surplus, now
| we're not spending all that money on the cold war, so
| we'll get that national debt paid off in no time too.
|
| You may be able to figure out why this particular brand
| of optimism isn't so fashionable these days.
| righthand wrote:
| I wouldn't say that optimism and idealism are no longer
| fashionable, but instead that original optimism (however
| true) was blinded by it's own lack of knowledge. We
| should still be perusing optimist/idealist outcomes but
| not the ones from another era.
| vladms wrote:
| To be fair, we have lots of things that people in the '90
| were just hoping for (in medicine, tech, average world
| wealth, etc), but sure we didn't get all the
| maximalist/idealist results.
|
| Also, I think tech optimists might have a tendency to
| ignore how slow changes actually happen (thinking of how
| many times we got promised self driving cars or fusion).
|
| My impression is that the covid pandemic had a huge
| psychological impact on everybody which resulted in anger
| and fear surfacing at all levels, with bad implications
| (emotion based decision making, aggressiveness,
| conflict). No clue if this is real or if it is how it
| will play out on the long term...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist
| results.
|
| Yes. The techis mostly there, and a few decades later
| it's readily available and cheap enough to be almost
| universally available. But you can't make a horse drink.
| The old guard may have underestimated the power of a cult
| and this attraction to authoritarianism. I didn't believe
| it either some decade ago. But seeing it before my eyes
| shows the folly of man.
|
| COVID was definitely an accelerator for all these bad
| traits to come out of the woodwork. It could have been
| any economic downfall, but a global pandemic requiring a
| simple behavior to not die really showed this odd. If
| "wear a mask or you'll die" can't convince some people,
| I'm not sure what can.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| were you one of those believers at the start?
| t0lo wrote:
| Economic infantilisation and the new productised and
| externalised way of being brought upon by social media.
| We were an autopilot society that thought it had no need
| to restate values or keep innovating. The things that
| used to matter like community bonds and values dont
| matter literally because we cant see them in an instagram
| post and they may as well not exist-
|
| plus the media and public sphere dysfunction we see
| through the fact that we haven't seen any new celebrities
| or public intellectuals elected in the past 10 years,
| telling people ideas don't get you anywhere.
|
| This will only get worse as we are at the end of
| progression of this culture and cultural consensus has
| split between educated legacy media and uneducated young
| new media which develops its own often incorrect
| assumptions about the world- like about mental illness
| assumptions. It's cultural ouroboros- we're destroying
| parts of ourselves because they've grown too different.
| We need a new way forward and a new culture of
| contentment that champions the human.
|
| If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news
| stories for the past couple of years you may have some
| idea why this is happening.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news
| stories for the past couple of years you may have some
| idea why this is happening.
|
| Maybe I'm a bit dramatic here, but the subtext I seem to
| get is that "legacy media is dying out and we're not
| going to cede power easily. Even if we burn the country
| down with us."
|
| There's no graceful transfer to the next generation like
| usual (or perhaps, there never was a graceful transfer to
| begin with). It has this apocalyptic feeling where the
| old guard wants to do any and everything they want and
| don't care what happens after they are gone. Not every
| boomer, but it's the generation with those people in
| power.
| t0lo wrote:
| It's a fire sale on american imperialism, capital and
| cultural dominance, and everyone wants in. American
| leadership is geriatric and asleep at the wheel and the
| dementia vote is dangerous. Everyone sees this as the
| free for all it is.
|
| There will always be those who seek to create order from
| chaos for their own benefit. We're seeing multiple groups
| trying to emotionally stunt this next generation and sow
| social discord. These are the same groups that have
| blackmail on the current sitting. China is more of a
| military threat but russia is far more of a cultural
| threat because they understand the west, which is nothing
| to joke about. Hungary is obviously also influential, due
| to their constant meetings in the us and hungary with the
| heritage foundation, and their help in formulating the
| presidential transition project. Our blue "friend" in the
| middle east is just as malicious, easily scorned and has
| a passion for retaliation.
|
| Apathy and fatalism is ascendant in western leadership,
| just look at the culture behind davos and modern american
| tech start ups. Mass hardcore group sex parties of the
| wealthy and influential(davos and openai), designer
| drugs, an underlying humour on selling out the world and
| killing it with climate change. They don't care about the
| atomization of the individual or the sancitity of him
| either.
|
| We need to identify the new poles of power to understand
| the currents that shape our world if we are to have any
| hope in fighting them.
| t0lo wrote:
| *Belaurus not hungary- always mix them up :)
| protocolture wrote:
| >I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is
| suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did
| their conscience go?
|
| I absolutely abhor the "Kids these days" sort of argument,
| but it does seem the case that we lowered the barrier of
| entry sufficiently in the tech sector that people who
| simply dont give a shit, or actively want to harm our
| values, now outnumber us greatly.
|
| What has happened previously was we would rally around
| corporations and institutions that would generally work in
| our best interests. But the people driving those social
| goods in those entities are now the villains.
|
| Not to mention all the mergers and acquisitions.
|
| In Australia, during the internet filter debate, we had
| both a not for profit entity spending money on advertising,
| but also decently sized ISP's like iiNet working publicly
| against the problem. The not for profit was funded by
| industry, something that never happened again. And iiNet is
| now owned by TPG who also used to have a social conscience
| but have been hammered into the dust by the (completely non
| technical, and completely asinine bane of the internets
| existence and literal satan) ACCC and have no fight left in
| them for anything. When Teoh leaves or sells TPG, it will
| probably never fight a good fight ever again.
|
| Its the same everywhere. We cant expect people to fight for
| freedom when the legislation just gets renamed and
| relaunched again after the next crisis comes out in the
| media. We lost internet filtration after christchurch, for
| absolutely no justifiable reason. And we lost the Access
| and Assistance fight despite having half the global tech
| industry tell our government to suck eggs.
|
| The only real solution is to prep the next generation to
| fight back as best as possible, to help them ignore the
| doomsayers and help the right humans into the right places
| to deal with this shit.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Hey hey hey.. hold on, wait a minuet. What did you just
| say about the ACCC. Those guys make sure we have good
| warranties and cracking down on scams. They are the good
| guys protecting us from the scammers and cooperate greed.
| protocolture wrote:
| They also worked tirelessly at the behest of the largest
| 4 ISPs to ensure that the NBN would be as expensive and
| anti competitive as possible.
| treyd wrote:
| > we lowered the barrier of entry sufficiently in the
| tech sector that people who simply dont give a shit, or
| actively want to harm our values, now outnumber us
| greatly.
|
| I don't think it's a matter of number but activity. There
| are numerous ways that entities with no morals can make
| huge amounts of money by exploiting people online (via
| weaknesses in human psychology adapted for hunting on a
| savannah), both children and adults. It's hard to make
| money doing the opposite.
| bbor wrote:
| I share your general frustration, but as an unabashed
| Wikimedia glazer, I have some potential answers:
|
| 1. They lost _this_ legal challenge, so perhaps their UK
| lawyers (barristers?) knew that much broader claim would be
| even less likely to work and advised them against it. Just
| because they didn 't challenge the overall law in court
| doesn't mean they wouldn't challenge it in a political
| sense.
|
| 2. The Protests against SOPA and PIPA[1] were in response
| to overreach by capitalists, and as such drew support from
| many capitalists with opposing interests (e.g. Google,
| Craigslist, Flickr, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress,
| etc.). Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns
| with having to implement ID systems as they did about
| policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact
| will be on minors, which AFAIK are far from the most
| popular advertising demo. Certainly some adult users will
| be put off by the hassle and/or insult, but how many, and
| for how long?
|
| 3. Wikimedia is a US-based organization, and the two major
| organizers of the 2012 protests--Fight for the Future[2]
| and the Electronic Frontier Foundation[3]--are US-focused
| as well. The EFF does have a blog post about these UK laws,
| but AFAICT no history of bringing legal and/or protest
| action there. This dovetails nicely with the previous
| point, while we're at it: the US spends $300B on digital
| ads every year, whereas the UK only spends $40B[4]. The
| per-capita spends are closer ($870/p v. $567/p), but the
| fact remains: the US is the lifeblood of these companies in
| a way that the UK is not.
|
| 4. More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big
| business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their
| property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big
| government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting
| children from adult content". We can call it fascism all we
| like, but at the end of the day, people _do_ seem concerned
| about children accessing adult content. IMHO YouTube
| brainrot content farms are a much bigger threat to children
| than porn, but I 'm not a parent.
|
| The final point is perhaps weakened by the ongoing AI
| debates, where there's suddenly a ton of support for the
| "we're protecting artists!" arguments employed in 2012.
| Still, I think the general shape of things is clear:
| Wikimedia stood in solidarity with many others in 2012, and
| now stands relatively alone.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and
| _PIPA
|
| [2] https://www.fightforthefuture.org/
|
| [3] https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-cases
|
| [4] https://www.salehoo.com/learn/digital-ad-spend-by-
| country
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > Just because they didn't challenge the overall law in
| court doesn't mean they wouldn't challenge it in a
| political sense.
|
| That's my point, though. This is the perfect opportunity
| to do so, and _they aren 't doing it_. Instead, they are
| picking the smallest possible battle they can. That
| decision alone makes waves.
|
| > Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns
| with having to implement ID systems as they did about
| policing content for IP violations, but the biggest
| impact will be on minors.
|
| That's ridiculous. ID systems endanger everyone,
| particularly the adults who participate. This issue isn't
| isolated from capitalism. These ID systems must be
| implemented and managed by corporations, whose greatest
| incentive is to collect and monetize data.
|
| > We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of
| the day, people do seem concerned about children
| accessing adult content.
|
| The think-of-the-children argument is the oldest trick in
| the book. You are seriously asking me to take it at face
| value? No thank you.
|
| > More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big
| business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their
| property" is an easier sell for the average voter than
| "big government is trying to ruin the internet by
| protecting children from adult content".
|
| If people really are blind to the change that has
| happened right in front of them, then we should be
| spelling it out at every opportunity. This is my biggest
| concern with how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a
| significant position politically, and are abdicating this
| crucial responsibility.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Some of it is probably about the scope of UK judicial
| review. Acts of Parliament are absolutely exempt from
| being struck down. The closest you can get is a
| "declaration of incompatibility" that a bill is
| _incapable of being read in such a way_ as complying with
| the European Convention on Human Rights. If at all
| possible the courts will gloss and /or interpret hard to
| come up with a compliant reading. And an incompatibility
| declaration just suggests Parliament looks again: it
| doesn't invalidate a law by itself.
|
| Executive acts, on the other hand, can be annulled or
| overturned reasonably straightforwardly, and this
| _includes_ the regulations that flesh out the details of
| Acts of Parliament (which are executive instruments even
| when they need Parliamentary approval).
|
| In short, judicial review is a practical remedy for a
| particular decision. "These regulations may unreasonably
| burden my speech" is potentially justiciable. "This Act
| could be used to do grave evil" isn't. If an act can be
| implemented in a Convention compatible way then the
| courts will assume it will until shown otherwise.
|
| The consequences can look something like the report of
| this judgement. Yes, it looks like the regulations could
| harm Wikipedia in ways that might not be Convention
| compatible. But because interpretation and enforcement is
| in the hands of Ofcom, it's not yet clear. If they are,
| Wikipedia have been (essentially) invited to come back.
| But the regulations are not void _ab inito_.
| bbor wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed answers! Again, I share at least
| some of your underlying concern, and don't want that to
| be overshadowed. That said, some responses:
| This is the perfect opportunity to do so, and they aren't
| doing it. Instead, they are picking the smallest possible
| battle they can.
|
| It looks like they've written three articles "strongly"
| opposing the "tremendous threat" posed by this bill: two
| when it was being considered[1,2] and another after it
| passed[3]. Yes, these articles are focused on the impact
| of the bill on Wikimedia's projects, but I think that's
| clearly a rhetorical strategy to garner some credibility
| from the notoriously-stuffy UK legislature. "Foreign
| nonprofit thinks your bill is bad in general" isn't
| exactly a position of authority to speak from (if you're
| thinking like a politician).
|
| More recently, they've proposed the "Wikipedia test" to
| the public and to lawmakers (such as at the 2024 UN
| General Assembly[6]) that pretty clearly implicates this
| bill. The test reads as such: _Before passing
| regulations, legislators should ask themselves whether
| their proposed laws would make it easier or harder for
| people to read, contribute to, and /or trust a project
| like Wikipedia._ That's ridiculous. ID
| systems endanger everyone, particularly the adults who
| participate.
|
| I was more making a point about why social media
| companies aren't involved than justifying that choice for
| them on a moral level. I suspect you have stronger
| beliefs than I about the relative danger of your name
| being tied to (small subsets of-)your online activity,
| but regardless, Wikimedia agrees, writing in 2023 that
| the bill _" only protects a select group of individuals,
| while likely exposing others to restrictions of their
| human rights, such as the right to privacy and freedom of
| expression."_ The think-of-the-children
| argument is the oldest trick in the book. You are
| seriously asking me to take it at face value? No thank
| you.
|
| It's still a valid argument. Again I wasn't really
| endorsing any position there, but I do think that in
| general the government should try to protect children.
| The only way I could imagine you disagreeing with that
| broad mandate is if you're a strong libertarian in
| general? This is my biggest concern with
| how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a significant
| position politically, and are abdicating this crucial
| responsibility.
|
| This, I think, is the fundamental disagreement: I just
| don't see them as being in that significant of a
| position. Given today's news I wouldn't be surprised to
| see them throw up a banner on the Wikipedia homepage
| and/or do a solo one-day blackout reminiscient of 2012,
| but even those drastic measures are pretty small beans.
|
| The real nuclear option--blocking the UK from accessing
| Wikimedia sites--would certainly garner some attention,
| but it would cost them greatly in terms of good will,
| energy, and raw output from their (presumably quite
| significant) UK editor base. And when would it end? If
| the UK government chooses to ignore them, wouldn't it
| feel weird for Wikipedia to be blocked for years in the
| UK but remain accessible in brutal autocracies worldwide?
|
| In the end, this feels like a job for UK voters, not
| international encyclopedias. I appreciate the solidarity
| they've shown already, but implying that they are weak
| for "abdicating [their] crucial responsibility" seems
| like a step too far.
|
| ...IMHO. As a wikimedia glazer ;)
|
| [1] March 2022: https://medium.com/wikimedia-
| policy/early-impressions-of-the...
|
| [2] November 2022: https://medium.com/wikimedia-
| policy/deep-dive-the-united-kin...
|
| [3] May 2023: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/05/11/good-
| intentions-bad-ef...
|
| [4] June 2023: https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-
| of-all-knowledge/p...
|
| [5] September 2023: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/
| 2023/09/19/wikimedia-fo...
|
| [6] September 2024 & June 2025:
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-
| wikipedi... //
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-
| wikipedi...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The UK spent the last weekend arresting hundreds of
| people for holding up signs with the words "Palestine
| Action" on them, while ignoring people marching around
| and giving Hitler salutes.
|
| Anyone expecting sanity from the UK on this topic is
| being somewhat optimistic.
|
| To reiterate - this is not about protecting kids. If it
| was about protecting kids it would be trivial to set up a
| blacklist of the most popular porn sites that need ID as
| a first step, and worry about other sites - like
| Wikipedia - later.
|
| This is about setting up a mechanism for mass
| surveillance of future dissent.
|
| The "think of the kids" argument is a Trojan horse - a
| standard and predictable populist appeal to protective
| emotions.
| terminalshort wrote:
| > The UK spent the last weekend arresting hundreds of
| people for holding up signs with the words "Palestine
| Action" on them
|
| Did they arrest them _for_ doing that or _while_ doing
| that? I suspect it 's the latter and it makes all the
| difference in the world.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > It's still a valid argument. Again I wasn't really
| endorsing any position there, but I do think that in
| general the government should try to protect children.
| The only way I could imagine you disagreeing with that
| broad mandate is if you're a strong libertarian in
| general?
|
| My point is that it is _not_ a strong argument. It isn 't
| an argument at all! Instead, "think of the children" is a
| thoughtless appeal to emotion. The irony is that my
| position comes from actually _thinking_ of the children.
| Censorship does not help children at all. Instead, it
| degrades well moderated platforms, which incentivizes
| children into interacting with poorly moderated
| platforms.
|
| > I just don't see them as being in that significant of a
| position.
|
| That's incredible to me. What website could possibly be
| more important to laypeople? Maybe YouTube or Facebook, I
| suppose, but neither of those could begin to replace
| Wikipedia.
|
| > The real nuclear option--blocking the UK from accessing
| Wikimedia sites--would certainly garner some attention.
|
| That's an understatement. _Everyone_ would notice. Even
| more interestingly, it would illustrate to everyone the
| absurdity of internet censorship: everyone would
| immediately learn a workaround, because it 's impossible
| to actually censor the internet.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > Where did their conscience go?
|
| Aaron Swartz is no longer with us.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Opposition_to_
| the...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Death
| Ray20 wrote:
| "suddenly"? Wikipedia has always supported fascist
| initiatives
| rawbot wrote:
| In the age of AI chatbots having consumed all of Wikipedia, its
| relevance has waned. So I don't think they have the same pull
| as they did before.
| clutch89 wrote:
| Its relevance has absolutely not waned, more relevant than
| ever. Models need continuous retraining to keep up to date
| with new information right?
| ktallett wrote:
| Despite having consumed all of Wikipedia, it still can't
| accurately answer many questions so I don't think it's
| relevance or value has waned. AI has not got anywhere near
| becoming an encyclopedia and it never will whilst it can't
| say I don't know something (which Wikipedia can do) and
| filter the fact from the fiction, which Wikipedia does uses
| volunteers.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Doesn't AI essentially use the concept of volunteers as
| well with RLHF?
| ktallett wrote:
| Good point, it's similar to some extent. Although clearly
| the quality of the work that the people doing RLHF on the
| major LLMs is rather low in comparison with those
| volunteering at Wikipedia.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There were no "good" volunteers qualifier used though.
| Obviously, some RLHF "volunteers" are better than others
| just like some used by Wiki are better than others. I
| wonder if there's edit battles between RLHF like we've
| seen on Wiki?
| layer8 wrote:
| In the recent ChatGPT 5 launch presentation, ChatGPT 5
| answered a question about how airplane wings produce uplift
| incorrectly, despite the corresponding Wikipedia page
| providing the correct explanation and pointing out ChatGPT's
| explanation as a common misconception.
|
| AI chatbots are only capable of outputting "vibe knowledge".
| briangriffinfan wrote:
| What is this corresponding Wikipedia page?
| jddj wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle
|
| Under the Misconceptions header
| layer8 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#False_explanat
| ion...
| panzi wrote:
| Yeah, but even so people use that nonsense, not checking if
| anything is correct. I suspect not enough people would
| notice that Wikipedia is inaccessible, sadly.
| yndoendo wrote:
| Wikipedia is a moving target. Content today is not the
| content of yesterday or tomorrow. This is like saying all
| knowledge that humanity can gain has already been
| accomplished.
|
| My personal test usage of AI is it will try to bull shit an
| answer even when you giving known bad questions with content
| that contradicts each other. Until AI can say there is no
| answer to bull shit questions it is not truly a viable
| product because the end user might not know they have a bull
| shit question and will accept a bull shit answer. AI at it's
| present state pushed to the masses is just an expensive miss-
| information bot.
|
| Also, AI that is not open from bottom to top with all
| training and rules publicly published is just a black box.
| That black box is just like Volkswagen emissions scandal
| waiting to happen. AI provider can create rules that override
| the actual answer with their desired answer which is not only
| a fallacy. They can also be designed to financially support
| their own company directly or third party product and
| services paying them. A question about "diapers" might always
| push and use the products by "Procter & Gamble".
| preisschild wrote:
| Besides the fact that LLMs still make up stuff?
|
| Yea great, make everyone even dumber by forcing them to use
| AI slop
| dkiebd wrote:
| I thought people here didn't like when American companies tried
| to strongarm democratic governments abroad?
| bee_rider wrote:
| 1) There are multiple posters on this site, they sometimes
| have contradictory opinions.
|
| 2) Lots of people like it when a company does an obviously
| good thing, and dislike it when a company does an obviously
| bad thing. I guess you've made a happy discovery: it turns
| out the underlying principle was something about what the
| companies were trying to accomplish, rather than some
| reflexive "American companies are bad" silliness.
| Levitz wrote:
| I'd like to add, it's fine and dandy to have the stance
| that huge corporations in general shouldn't throw their
| weight around to shape politics, that's still not the world
| we live in and that must be acknowledged.
|
| Even if I'd rather have Wikipedia stay put, it does matter
| to me if they push for something I support as opposed to
| something that I'm against.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres
| actually zero difference between good & bad things. you
| imbecile. you fucking moron"
| eszed wrote:
| Not to dismiss bee_rider's sibling comment, like _at all_ ,
| but: Wikimedia's nature and purpose might be distinguished
| from your generic "American" tech "company".
| Nicook wrote:
| one of the good ones right
| bbor wrote:
| Well, it's a non-profit. Technically still a company, but
| that's an essential difference, to say the least!
| tinktank wrote:
| There is more than one poster on this site; it's safe to
| assume there's more than one opinion.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| It turns out reductionism is stupid and people have different
| opinions
| entuno wrote:
| Those petitions aren't really worth anything - governments have
| ignored ones with over six million signatures before.
|
| And they also ignored this one a few years back that had just
| under 700,000 signatures to "make verified ID a requirement for
| opening a social media account":
|
| https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/575833
|
| Ironically, the primary reason they gave for rejecting it was:
|
| > However, restricting all users' right to anonymity, by
| introducing compulsory user verification for social media,
| could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to
| protect their identity. These users include young people
| exploring their gender or sexual identity, whistleblowers,
| journalists' sources and victims of abuse. Introducing a new
| legal requirement, whereby only verified users can access
| social media, would force these users to disclose their
| identity and increase a risk of harm to their personal safety.
| phpnode wrote:
| The other point is that recent polls suggest the British
| public are _overwhelmingly_ in support of this legislation
| [0], which is not reflected in most of the narrative we see
| online. Whether they support how it has been _implemented_ is
| a different matter, but the desire to do something is clear.
|
| [0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-
| results/daily/202...
| __oh_es wrote:
| Odd - they also believe it wont be effective
|
| https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-
| results/daily/202...
| ta1243 wrote:
| Yes it's quite possible for people to hold both those
| views.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The moment the Russia Ukraine war hit, the top 10 apps in
| Russia was half VPNs.
|
| As long as websites don't want to lock out any user
| without an account, and as long as vpns exist, it'll be
| hard to enforce any of this. At least for now, that's one
| line big tech won't let them cross easily.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It isn't a requirement to enforce this. All it does is to
| ensure that you will be more at risk of breaking the law
| and that little detail will show that you intended to
| evade the law so your presumption of innocence gets
| dinged: apparently you knew that what you were doing was
| wrong because you used a VPN so [insert minor offense or
| thought crime here] is now seen in a different light.
|
| Selective enforcement is _much_ more powerful as a tool
| than outright enforcement, before you know it double
| digit percentages of the populace are criminals, that
| might come in handy some day.
| type0 wrote:
| > top 10 apps in Russia was half VPNs... and as long as
| vpns exist, it'll be hard to enforce any of this.
|
| Russia found good way to enforce it, they changed the law
| and give out prison sentences for using VPNs
| codedokode wrote:
| Not yet - only for searching extremist and terrorist
| content, no matter using VPN or not. Oh, almost the same
| content that is regulated by Online Safety Act in UK.
| physarum_salad wrote:
| The curtain twitcher/nanny state impulse is pretty strong
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The Home Office is full of fascists, many of whom may -
| allegedly - have questionable personal habits and
| interests.
|
| None of this has anything to do protecting the public. If
| that was the goal there are any number of other ways to
| manage this.
| Ravus wrote:
| It's sadly an example of terrible leading question bias, to
| the point where I'm surprised that it even got a 22% oppose
| rate.
|
| The percentages would change dramatically were one to write
| it as, "From everything you have seen and heard, do you
| support or oppose the recent rules requiring adults to
| upload their id or a face photo before accessing any
| website that allows user to user interaction?"
|
| Both questions are factually accurate, but omit crucial
| aspects.
| andai wrote:
| Yeah. It's the "foot in the door technique." The same is
| being done with Chat Control.
|
| It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed
| to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily
| expanded to other things like scanning messages to
| prevent terrorism.
|
| See also:
|
| > Concern over mass migration is terrorist ideology, says
| Prevent
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/06/concern-
| over...
| nine_k wrote:
| The problem is that one of the most secure places in the
| world is a maximum security prison. Hence many measures
| that drag us closer to the prison state do genuinely
| improve security.
|
| It takes some balls for the society to say: No, we don't
| agree to yield an essential liberty in exchange to actual
| real increase of security. Yes, we accept that sometimes
| bad people will do evil things, because the only way to
| prevent that would inflict even more damage on everyone.
| Yes, we are willing to risk harm to stay free.
|
| There is always plenty of people who are ready to buy
| more comfort in exchange for limitations of liberty that,
| as they think, will not affect them, because they are
| honest, got nothing to hide, always follow the
| majority... until it does affect them, but it's too late.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed
| to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily
| expanded to other things like scanning messages to
| prevent terrorism.
|
| Oh, look, you did it in literally two sentences. It turns
| out it's pretty easy to to oppose such law. Only there's
| simply no need to do it when you're the main beneficiary.
| Iulioh wrote:
| "Do you want CHILDREN to be MURDERED by RAPEISTS online
| or are you a good person?
|
| Y/N
| mcny wrote:
| No
| luqtas wrote:
| then proceeds to the tea break and brainstorms on how to
| empower the monarchy and conquer the world
| scratcheee wrote:
| There's a classic yes minister skit on how dubious polls
| can be: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks&t=45s
| kieranmaine wrote:
| This doesn't quite cover what you're looking for but I
| think a previous survey led with a question that
| mentioned uploading ID -
| https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-
| results/daily/202....
|
| I can't find the survey it's entirety, but I think the
| above question was followed by (this is based on the
| number at the end of the URL, which I'm guessing is
| quesiton order) -
| https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-
| results/daily/202...
| simonw wrote:
| Are there _any_ credible surveys on this topic that don
| 't use the term "pornographic websites" in the survey
| question?
| Lerc wrote:
| I live in a country where 91.78% of the population voted
| for a referendum that bought back hard labour in prisons.
|
| As one of the few who voted against it I have yet to
| encounter a single person who voted for it who both
| supports hard labour and realised that was in the
| question being asked.
| lazide wrote:
| Let me guess - 'do you support violent prisoners being
| given work in proportion to their crimes' or something
| similar?
| Lerc wrote:
| Oh far more deceptive than that.
|
| _" Should there be a reform of our justice system
| placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims,
| providing restitution and compensation for them and
| imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all
| serious violent offenses?"_
|
| Now let's play tldr with the law!
|
| Luckily it was non binding and stands forever as an
| argument against binding referendums.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| If a new law mentions victims I assume they're trying to
| appeal to my emotions. The joke is on them because I am a
| robot in skin form.
| lazide wrote:
| Yeah, there are many terrible legal abortions in
| California with the referendum setup too.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'm not really seeing the deception here since it
| specifies hard labour and says it would apply to all
| serious violent offenses. How could you vote for this and
| not know you were voting for hard labour?
| Lerc wrote:
| I don't know how you could vote for it, I didn't and was
| astonished that people did.
|
| On the other hand.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44870087
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I would probably not vote for it on principle, but my
| specific question was how the text as quoted could be
| considered deceptive.
| Lerc wrote:
| In many respects I agree with you there, I almost went
| with softer language. The fact remains that it appears
| people were deceived. All of the advocacy pushing the
| referendum only focused on the first part. To this day I
| find people who are amazed that it mentioned hard labour
| and and that they voted for it.
|
| [edit]
|
| I guess think of it in terms of a vote that you had
| discussed and decided upon before you voted. Could you
| honestly say that you would read every word of the
| question or would you just look at the start of it to
| establish that it was the question under discussion and
| then trust that the discussion accurately represented
| what the question on the form would say. The length of
| the question, was I believe specifically designed to be
| long to prevent the frequency of its full publication.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Could you honestly say that you would read every word of
| the question_
|
| Yes?? It's not like a school exam where the questions are
| secret until you see it in the voting booth, and even if
| it were, you should still read the question carefully.
| I'm all for things being written as clearly as possible
| but at some point you have to acknowledge that voters
| have a responsibility to think about what they're voting
| for.
| jacobolus wrote:
| People read "greater emphasis on the needs of victims"
| and stop processing afterwards.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| No, we didn't. We knew what we were voting for. And I'd
| vote the same way today.
| Lerc wrote:
| Do you believe you are in the majority? I'm quite
| confident that being in favour of hard labour is a
| minority opinion in New Zealand.
|
| I guess it is at least consistent with your belief that
| there is a mandate for Project 2025.
| terminalshort wrote:
| I really don't understand how you can possibly believe
| that given your prior statement:
|
| > I live in a country where 91.78% of the population
| voted for a referendum that bought back hard labour in
| prisons.
| Lerc wrote:
| It is consistent with my experience that most people seem
| to not realise that they voted for hard labour.
|
| That is indeed the entire theme of this thread, That
| people can give an answer to a question that in some way
| does not reflect their honestly held opinion.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| idk, maybe they're actually in favor of hard labour
| (which was after all spelled out in the question) and
| they're just telling you what they think you want to hear
| so you don't bug them about it. A lot of people are happy
| to lie this way.
| terminalshort wrote:
| > most people seem to not realise that they voted for
| hard labour
|
| This is incredibly anecdotal, a major victim of selection
| bias, and also there are possibly effects of
| agreeableness here b/c it seems like you may be part of a
| vocal minority on this issue (and I mean that with
| absolutely no negative connotations). That said, I don't
| automatically reject vibes based determinations like this
| because often the high bandwidth of personal interaction
| can outweigh the problems with low bandwidth questioning
| in polls. But in this case, when 90% voted in favor, I
| have a hard time believing it. I think that what you can
| safely conclude from your experience is that a lot of
| people didn't know what they were voting for. If you
| wanted to say maybe it was really 75-25 I could go with
| that, but 91% in favor (in an actual vote and not a poll)
| is pretty convincing to me.
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, it's kind of the opposite for me. I've never seen any
| legitimate vote in a democracy > 90%. Even if you put 'we
| agree that puppies are cute and fluffy and deserve all
| the pets', > 10% will vote the other way purely out
| contrarian ness. Or because they're cat people. Or
| because fuck you, that's why.
|
| And there is no way you can convince me 91% of _New
| Zealand_ voters, where this is the common policy stance
| [https://www.mbie.govt.nz/business-and-
| employment/employment-...], had any clue they were voting
| for forced hard labor for prisoners. Especially
| considering how relatively cushy the current standards
| are for prisoners.
|
| I'm sure with enough lawyers and PR folks could also
| write (and pass) a CA popular thingy which calls for all
| males to be kicked in the groin too.
|
| That said, I'm also a big believer in voters getting what
| they voted for - only way they'll learn. Besides, a few
| kicks to the groin might teach them a lesson!
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Modern slavery legislation passed in 2022 has abslutely
| no bearing on public opinion on crime and punishment for
| violent offenders in 1999. People in NZ have been fed up
| with soft on crime policies and short setences for
| violent repeat offenders for a long, long, long time (and
| continue to be today). Despite what the noisy left wing
| in this country might tell you.
|
| It baffles me that you people think we didn't know what
| we voted for in a referendum question expressed in a
| single sentence which included the words,
|
| > Should there be a reform of our justice system [...]
| imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all
| serious violent offences?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Wild stab in the dark - you live in Wellington.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't buy that, and even if they did that doesn't make
| it deceptive. I'm not arguing in favor of this increased
| punishment, it just seems to me that its stated plainly
| enough you can't seriously argue that people were
| tricked.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I can easily point to deception in two words
|
| 1) Hard 2) Words
|
| "Should there be a reform of our justice system" ->
| "should the law be passed"
|
| "emphasis", "restitution", "compensation" -> too hard to
| skim, brain is bailing out
|
| ---
|
| the only way to provide valid direct democracy is to
| provide more than enough explanations and rewordings from
| both sides of the debate *at the point of voting* to
| remove miscommunication
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I agree that it's unnecessarily wordy, but I still don't
| think it's deceptive. If your brain is bailing out that
| fast maybe it's better not to vote.
| xvector wrote:
| Hard disagree. Systems must be designed with typical
| human fallibilities in mind.
|
| Anyone that phrases a referendum like that ought to be
| sentenced to hard labor themselves for attempting to
| subvert democracy.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This isn't a system, it's a sentence. It's not that hard
| to read 13 more words.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is somewhat deceptive, or at least misleading, to
| bundle up the concepts of giving the victims
| compensation, and punishing the prisoners more
| aggressively.
|
| Unless the prison labor is providing the compensation,
| but that would be totally bizarre and dystopian, haha.
| Not really the sort of thing you'd see in a civilized
| country.
| account42 wrote:
| The deception is that it combines two largely unrelated
| questions into one vote - leading with one that most will
| agree and followed by one that is more questionable. By
| the time people will be reading the second question they
| will already have be primed with an opinion on the first.
| tiltowait wrote:
| "Hard labour for all serious violent offenses" seems
| almost refreshingly straightforward. Was there more in
| the actual referendum that was hidden? I grant that
| "serious violent offenses" is somewhat vague; was it
| overly broad?
| sczi wrote:
| That question clearly says hard labour. I'm sure some
| people didn't read it, but I think there also may be
| another effect there, where when talking to people in
| person, they realize you are morally opposed to forced
| hard labour, and don't want to seem like a bad person, so
| they pretend they didn't know. Sort of similar to the
| recent effect in the US where trump significantly
| underpolled as many voted for him but don't want to admit
| it.
| account42 wrote:
| Sounds more like an argument for requiring referendums to
| be about a single issue rather than bundling multiple
| ones into a single question.
| pnw wrote:
| Why do you claim the 1999 referendum reintroduced hard
| labor in NZ prisons? I've never seen anything to that
| effect. The reforms were related to bail, victims rights
| and parole.
| Lerc wrote:
| It did not reintroduce hard labour. People voted to
| reintroduce hard labour. The referendum was non binding,
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| > Whether they support how it has been implemented is a
| different matter, but the desire to do something is clear.
|
| Isn't this the whole story of government policy? The stated
| policy so rarely actually leads to the hoped-for result.
| extraisland wrote:
| They always name it the exact opposite of what it does.
|
| If they name something the "Protect Children Act". You
| can be sure that what it does is put Children in Danger.
|
| That means that on the face of it, it is difficult for
| someone to oppose.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| That's because the bedrock principle on which modern
| government is based is...
|
| _drum roll_
|
| Lie whenever it's convenient because the public are
| children anyway and won't or can't understand.
|
| Through this lens many things make more sense. They're
| comfortable with lying because there are zero
| repercussions for lying.
| GLdRH wrote:
| They are not only children, but also goldfish who forget
| everything after 5 minutes
| dboreham wrote:
| tbf it took from 1939 until about 5 years ago for people
| to forget that fascism is a bad idea.
| GLdRH wrote:
| Let me tell you as a german: that's not what fascism
| looks like. Get your TDS under control.
| account42 wrote:
| They don't forget, they get told what to believe -
| amongst other things by the government-controlled news.
| extraisland wrote:
| People constantly cite this poll as it is proof that
| British people want this.
|
| You cannot trust the YouGov polling. It is flawed.
|
| > Despite the sophisticated methodology, the main drawback
| faced by YouGov, Ashcroft, and other UK pollsters is their
| recruitment strategy: pollsters generally recruit potential
| respondents via self-selected internet panels. _The
| American Association of Public Opinion Research cautions
| that pollsters should avoid gathering panels like this
| because they can be unrepresentative of the electorate as a
| whole. The British Polling Council's inquiry into the
| industry's 2015 failings raised similar concerns._ Trying
| to deal with these sample biases is one of the motivations
| behind YouGov and Ashcroft's adoption of the modelling
| strategies discussed above.
|
| https://theconversation.com/its-sophisticated-but-can-you-
| be...
|
| Even if the aforementioned problems didn't exist with the
| polling. It has been known for quite a while that how you
| ask a question changes the results. The question you linked
| was the following.
|
| > From everything you have seen and heard, do you support
| or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to
| access websites that may contain pornographic material?
|
| Most people would think "age verification to view
| pornography". They won't think about all the other things
| that maybe caught in that net.
| cm2012 wrote:
| All polling has problems like this, but YouGov has the
| same methodology for everything and usually gets within a
| margin of error of +-8. Even if they have an especially
| bad sample, the UK probably really does support the law.
|
| Think about how many people are less comfortable with
| porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
| extraisland wrote:
| > All polling has problems like this, but YouGov has the
| same methodology for everything and usually gets within a
| margin of error of +-8.
|
| The way the very question was asked is a problem in
| itself. It is flawed and will lead to particular result.
|
| > if they have an especially bad sample, the UK probably
| really does support the law
|
| The issue is that the public often doesn't understand the
| scope of the law. Those that do are _almost_ always
| opposed to it.
|
| > Think about how many people are less comfortable with
| porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
|
| It isn't about the pornography. This is why conversations
| about this are frustrating.
|
| I am worried about the surveillance aspect of it. I go
| online because I am pseudo-anonymous and I can speak more
| frankly to people about things that I care about to
| people who share similar concerns.
|
| I don't like how the law came into place, the scope of
| the law, the privacy concerns and what the law does _in
| practice_.
|
| Even if you don't buy any of that. There is a whole slew
| of other issues with it. Especially identity theft.
| lazide wrote:
| Of course - control the question, and you guarantee the
| answers.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Think about how many people are less comfortable with
| porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40
|
| Are you suggesting that techies do not have any sexual
| appetite? That runs counter to many stereotypes I've
| encountered
| cm2012 wrote:
| No i awkwardly phrased it. Im saying that demographic
| (also the majority here on HN) loves porn more than any
| other demographic.
| abustamam wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what makes you say that the majority of
| HN loves porn? I've seen a few random references to it
| but nothing that would indicate that HN loves porn any
| more than any other community loves porn.
| cm2012 wrote:
| It's just a statistical correlation. Who loves porn
| demographically?
|
| 1) Men.
|
| 2) Men age 18-40 in particular.
|
| 3) No evidence for this but in my experience tech people
| tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
|
| So a survey of HN users would show more pro-porn
| respondents than a survey of the UK or the US or EU as a
| whole.
| msgodel wrote:
| In a number of recent polls in English speaking countries
| young men have been one of the strongest _anti-porn_
| demographics actually. I think HN being tech adjacent
| with the history and practical reality of how the
| internet works along with being more libertarian (or at
| least liberal) is going to bias that more than the gender
| distribution.
| autoexec wrote:
| I don't put much faith in polls generally, but I put even
| less faith in polls where people are asked how they feel
| about porn. I don't think you can come to any reasonable
| conclusion from data of such low quality as is typical of
| polling these days.
|
| Even in the absolute best circumstances where enough
| people are polled to be representative, and those people
| aren't asked any leading/misleading questions, and the
| identity of all those people are known, pre-selected
| without bias, and verified (preventing the same
| person/group of people voting 50 times or brigading some
| anonymous internet survey), and all of those people are
| 100% confident that their answers are private and won't
| be able to be used against them, you're still left with
| the fact that people lie. All the time. Especially about
| anything to do with sex. They also have terrible memories
| and their beliefs about themselves and their views often
| don't hold up when their actual behavior is observed.
| Self-reported data is pretty weak even when
| sex/shame/morality/fear of punishment don't come into
| play.
|
| Without really digging into the specifics to try to work
| out how seriously you can take a given survey's results
| at all, it's best to just not to treat them seriously.
| msgodel wrote:
| Sure but IIRC the statistics were relative to previous
| polls and the conversation was about how people talk
| about porn on the web not how they actually use it so I
| think in this case it actually works well.
| UnreachableCode wrote:
| Tech people? I have met utter goons obsessed with porn
| that barely understand how their phone actually works.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| A lot of them work in Westminster.
|
| Old news, but I suspect there hasn't been a sudden
| outbreak of puritanism.
|
| https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mps-peers-and-
| staff-...
| kelnos wrote:
| > _No evidence for this but in my experience tech people
| tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason._
|
| This does not jibe with my experience. I think perhaps
| your experience is not a representative sample of tech
| people. But mine probably isn't either. So it's pointless
| for either of us to state an opinion here based on our
| experience with our own slice of tech people.
|
| It's kinda funny how this is a subthread about how
| YouGov's polling on the Online Safety Act is flawed, but
| we're committing the same exact sins ourselves.
| extraisland wrote:
| He is trying to cast the illusion that anyone that
| doesn't believe the YouGov polling on here (e.g. me) is
| suffering from cognitive bias.
|
| While that is possible, it doesn't negate the fact I have
| good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations
| such as YouGov.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling
| organisations such as YouGov_
|
| You have secret reasons to suspect _all_ polling?
|
| If that is the case, and where suspicious means
| automatically rejecting anything that doesn't agree with
| your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and
| statistical illiteracy.
| extraisland wrote:
| It isn't about something not agreeing with my vibes. I
| don't appreciate when people put words in my mouth. I
| never said all. I obviously meant some.
|
| Firstly in my original post I stated why I don't believe
| YouGov to be accurate. It isn't just me that has an issue
| with thier polling.
|
| Secondly, It is well known that many people are swayed by
| peer pressure and/or what is perceived to be popular.
| Therefore if you can manipulate polling to show something
| is popular, then it can sway people that are more
| influenced by peer pressure/on the fence.
|
| Often in advertising they will site a stat about customer
| satisfaction. In the small print it will state the sample
| size or the methodology and it is often hilariously
| unrepresentative. Obviously they are relying on people
| not reading the fine print and being statistically
| illiterate.
|
| Politicians, governments and corporations have been using
| various tactics throughout the 20th and 21st century to
| sway public opinion, both home and abroad to their
| favour.
|
| This issue has divisive for years and has historically
| had a huge amount of push back. You can see this in the
| surge of VPN downloads (which is a form of protest
| against these laws), the popularity of content covering
| this issue.
| throwaway2489 wrote:
| Are you against any kind of content restriction
| whatsoever or just porn?
| tech2 wrote:
| They may not be against content restriction, instead they
| may be against removal of user privacy or anonymity. If
| the proof of age thing was some kind of zero knowledge
| proof such that the age verifying group has no knowledge
| of what you're accessing, and the site you're accessing
| has no knowledge of you as an individual (beyond tells
| like IP address etc.) then perhaps they'd be more open to
| it?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There isn't any technology that can prevent sharing of
| age verification with third parties without tying your
| uses to your identity. To unmask someone in order to
| uncover sharing, you would require the ability to do it
| in general, which is incompatible with privacy/anonymity.
| subscribed wrote:
| And yet homomorphic encryption is a thing. It's possible
| to process the encrypted request and be unable to see it.
|
| Similarly we could easily devise many solutions that can
| prove the age in the privacy - respecting ways (like
| inserting the age-confirming token inside the pack of
| cigarettes which an adult could then purchase with cash,
| etc)
|
| Many ways.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're not understanding the dichotomy. It doesn't matter
| what kind of encryption you use, the system you're asking
| for can be made much simpler than this: Just use the same
| token for everyone and only give it to adults. It needs
| no cryptography at all, it just needs to be a random
| string that children don't have. You don't need anything
| to do with cigarettes, just print it on the back of every
| adult's ID or allow any adult to show their ID at any
| government office.
|
| But then anyone can post the token on the internet where
| anyone can get it, the same as they could do with
| anything cryptographic that you put on the back of
| cigarettes or whatever. Unless you have a way of tracing
| it to the person who did it in order to impose penalties,
| which is precisely the thing that would make it not
| private/anonymous, which is why they're incompatible.
|
| If you're going to do one then do the first one -- just
| make it actually untraceable -- but understand that it
| won't work. It would never work anyway because there are
| sites outside of your jurisdiction that won't comply with
| whatever you're proposing regardless, so the thing that
| fails to work while not impacting privacy is better than
| the thing that fails to work while causing widespread
| harm, but then people are going to complain about it and
| try to impose the thing that _does_ cause widespread harm
| by removing privacy. Which is why the whole thing should
| be abandoned instead.
| extraisland wrote:
| I am generally against content restrictions. I am
| actually OK with restrictions on pornography.
|
| The UK government has engaged political censorship
| throughout my lifetime.
|
| e.g.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%931994_British_b
| roa...
|
| I still remember the stupid Irish dubbing on the news. I
| thought it was hilarious when I was 10.
|
| Some of it the public are often unaware of e.g super
| injunctions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-
| injunctions_in_English_l...
|
| The internet has made it much more difficult to censor.
| It is quite obvious to me that they wish to end online
| anonymity, which makes it easier for them to target
| people and thus easier to censor.
|
| I believe that this is the precursor before massive
| political censorship.
|
| As stated in my first reply on this subject. Even if you
| don't buy into that there are obvious problems with
| handing you ID over to third parties. There is no
| guarantee they can keep your data safe (and often
| haven't).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > If that is the case, and where suspicious means
| automatically rejecting anything that doesn't agree with
| your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and
| statistical illiteracy.
|
| What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of
| whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
|
| It's well-understood that leading questions and phrasing
| will get you any response to a poll that you want. That
| being the case, what good are any of them? They're only
| telling you something about how the issue was put rather
| than anything about the true preferences of the
| population.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What if you 're suspicious of all polling regardless
| of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?_
|
| I'd still call that statistical illiteracy. Polling, as a
| cohort, contains information. It's dispersed across polls
| and concentrated among quality pollsters.
|
| It's never definitive. But someone concluding that all
| polling is useless because the statistics are hard is
| sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because
| we haven't actually been to Andromeda.
|
| > _what good are any of them?_
|
| If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow
| and what policies they could pass that would be popular,
| polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can
| build a coalition around, and which to abandon because
| the people most passionate about them cannot bother to
| vote, polling is helpful.
|
| > _rather than anything about the true preferences of the
| population_
|
| They're telling you how people think when they
| communicate and act. What is in their heads is
| unknowable. At the end of the day, I care how they will
| vote (and if they will vote) and if they will call (or
| are even capable of calling) they're elected if pissed
| off or enthralled. Everything else is philosophical.
|
| At the end of the day, whether by poll or advert,
| information is introduced to a population in a biased
| form because it's promulgated by biased actors. Knowing
| which way that bias is trending and resonating is useful.
| extraisland wrote:
| > I'd still call that statistical illiteracy
|
| It am suspicious of polling because I have a decent
| understanding of statistics. That is the opposite of
| statistical illiteracy.
|
| > But someone concluding that all polling is useless
| because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to
| someone rejecting cosmology because we haven't actually
| been to Andromeda.
|
| That isn't the argument being made. Nobody said it is
| "useless". I said I was "suspicious of polling
| organisations". Polling can be and _has been_ used to
| manipulate public sentiment.
|
| Therefore it is _prudent_ to be suspicious of any
| polling.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow
| and what policies they could pass that would be popular,
| polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can
| build a coalition around, and which to abandon because
| the people most passionate about them cannot bother to
| vote, polling is helpful.
|
| That's fair in the context of, you're a political
| operative who is trying to enact specific policies as
| your occupation and you therefore have the time to go
| through and carefully inspect numerous polls to derive a
| well-rounded understanding. But that's also quite
| disconnected from how polls are typically used in the
| public discourse.
|
| Ordinary people don't have time to do that, so instead
| political operatives will commission a poll to get the
| result they want, or find one from a reputable pollster
| who unintentionally made a phrasing error in their favor,
| or just cherry pick like this: https://xkcd.com/882/
|
| And then use the result to try to convince people that
| the public is actually on their side and it would be
| ineffective or costly to oppose them. Which, unless you
| have the time to go carefully read a hundred different
| polls to see whether the result is legitimate, means that
| the sensible strategy is to give polls no weight.
|
| Or to put it another way, on any politically contentious
| issue there will always be at least one poll saying X and
| another saying not-X, which means that in the absence of
| a more thorough analysis that exceeds the resource
| availability of most members of the public (and even many
| legislators), neither has any information content because
| the probability of a poll existing with that result was
| already ~100%.
| lupusreal wrote:
| He didn't say the majority of HN loves porn. He said that
| male demographic likes porn more than any other, and that
| demographic is the majority of HN. It doesn't logically
| follow that the majority of HN supports porn.
|
| Fake statistics just to illustrate the difference. Males
| 18-40 support porn at 60%, which is higher than any other
| demographic. HN is 60% males 18-40. With these numbers,
| 36% of HN is males 18-40 who support porn, and if all
| other demographics on HN oppose it, then those 36% are
| the minority.
|
| (By the way, I have no idea what the real numbers are,
| and don't really care. I'm just responding to an evident
| confusion about what was actually said.)
| abustamam wrote:
| Statistics doesn't work that way, and if OP wanted to say
| that, they should have specified that, rather than saying
| the majority of HN is a demographic that likes porn. It
| may be true in a statistical sense, but that's not how it
| is read.
| throwaway2489 wrote:
| There is a couple of threads of people asking for help
| with porn addiction, you will find that the responses are
| in a funny way much like potheads, plenty of denialism.
|
| Also, if you post anything critical of porn; you get
| downvoted with little exceptions. Try it, if the topic
| ever comes up, say something critical and your comment
| gets flagged and removed.
|
| HN has a massive demographic overlap with problematic
| pornography consumers.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Re downvotes: I suspect there are different forces at
| play. I would downvote such a post, not because
| supporting porn is one of my agendas, but opposing
| puritanism is.
| lynx97 wrote:
| [Citation needed]
| TylerE wrote:
| Most questions you could guess a number somewhere vaguely
| near 50% and be right a substantial amount of the time
| given such massive error bars.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Thats a common fallacy because we tend to care about
| issues that are 50/50 or divisive. Most opinions are not
| divisive but thus dont get attention.
| TylerE wrote:
| That seems like an implied constraint? You don't run
| polls asking if the sky is blue.
| account42 wrote:
| Quite often the sky is in fact not blue.
| Metricon wrote:
| It seems like some things always remain the same:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
| quotemstr wrote:
| There is a Yes, {Prime Minister,Minister} for every
| occasion in tech.
| password321 wrote:
| A good reminder that certain circles are just the vocal
| minority and under the surface society is mostly just NPCs.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not a great lesson to take here.
|
| 1. Policy by default will always be planned and
| implemented by a minority. As well as those who comment
| to policy, or online.
|
| 2. You'll have some 20-30% of people who will say yes to
| anything if you phrase it the right way.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| As always, the devil is in the details. Very careful
| wording:
|
| >do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age
| verification to access websites that may contain
| pornographic material?
|
| "may" is doing the heavy lifting. Any website that hosts
| image "may" contain pornograohic content. So they don't
| associate this with "I need id to watch YouTube" it's "I
| need ID to watch pornhub". Even though this affects both.
|
| On top of that, the question was focused on peon to begin
| with. This block was focused more generally on social
| media. The popular ones of which do not allow pornography.
|
| Rephrase the question to "do you agree with requiring ID
| submission to access Facebook" and I'd love to see how that
| impacts responses.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| "Why yes I do either support or oppose those rules.
| Thanks for asking."
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| It's funny, I actually interpret it differently; by using
| "may" vs omitting it would actually imply to include
| sites like YouTube and Facebook. Without the "may", to me
| it would imply only sites that have a primary intent of
| pornographic material, not sites that could include it
| accidentally.
| matt-p wrote:
| Ok and how about if it was phrased;
|
| "Are you in favour of requiring ages verification for
| Wikipedia and other websites"
|
| "Are you in favour of uploading your ID card and selfie
| each time you visit a site that might contain porn"
| sdrinf wrote:
| Follow-up question is big lulz:
| https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-
| results/daily/202...
|
| "And how effective do you think the new rules will be at
| preventing those younger than 18 from gaining access to
| pornography?"
|
| -> 64% "not very effective / not at all effective"
| steve_taylor wrote:
| Why are we conflating pornography and Wikipedia?
| Aloisius wrote:
| Wikipedia hosts pornography.
| steve_taylor wrote:
| Are you referring to educational pictures of human
| anatomy? There's quite a difference between that and
| porn.
| Aloisius wrote:
| No. I mean actual pornography.
|
| For instance, a full copy of Debbie Does Dallas is on its
| Wikipedia article [NFSW, obviously].
| stackedinserte2 wrote:
| I had the misfortune of talking with a few potheads, and
| HN's reaction to porn addiction is the same of potheads,
| denialism, mental gymnastics, and everything but
| accepting that porn can actually be problematic.
|
| The only reason it doesn't have it's own DSM
| classification is a mere question of technicality,
| whatever it is a separate and distinct kind of addiction,
| or just a manifestation of other types of hyper-sexual
| disorder.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It's quite right that petitions are (mostly) ignored in
| Parliamentary matters, IMHO.
|
| MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their
| constituents. Bills are debated, revised, voted on multiple
| times. There are consultations and input from a board range
| of view points.
|
| A petition is in effect trying to shout over all that process
| from the street outside.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Is it quite right that the public gets ignored all the
| time?
|
| How do you force your representatives to actually represent
| their constituents?
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I have just described how the public drives the
| democratic process to ensure everyone gets a voice, not
| just whoever shouts the loudest. That's the opposite of
| ignoring the public.
| matt-p wrote:
| If the public truly drove the democratic process we'd
| have proportional representation or something other than
| the current system.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's the nice-sounding theory, but I don't see any
| metrics on how well it works in practice. MPs aren't
| required to share the input from the public or publish
| lists of how they voted on every issue prior to
| elections. Representative democracy really includes very
| little accountability for the legislators.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It certainly works better than to govern according to
| whoever shouts the louder.
|
| Petitions have a place, which is to inform of a point of
| view and of the opinion of a portion of the public.
| That's a form of lobbying. But that's it, we should
| certainly not expect that a law be repelled because of a
| petition, and rightly so.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Incumbents in a bad system always argue that it's better
| than their worst characterization of the alternative. The
| reality is that elected officials still have very little
| accountability. They're only subject to re-election once
| every few years and it's virtually impossible to get rid
| of one mid-term unless they get themselves arrested.
|
| I get your point about petitions and direct democracy
| being a form of who shouts louder (in the media,
| advertising, # of campaign events etc), but _this is
| equally true of regular elections_. It 's even more so in
| a first-past-the-post system like the UK, whose two major
| parties have no interest in shifting to a proportional
| representation system because it would advantage smaller
| parties at their expense, even though the result would
| more closely reflect public preference.
|
| In my view, parliamentary systems developed a few
| centuries ago have their advantages but also come with a
| great deal of historical baggage (systems that benefit a
| particular class of candidate and so forth), and they're
| buckling under the pressures of a real-time information
| society where people know transparency and timely
| publication of information are technically possible but
| such goods are systematically withheld from the public.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You vote for someone who says "I will create more jobs"
|
| They instead propose a bill that will cut jobs
|
| There's deliberation, but a lot of other people want to cut
| jobs
|
| Is you shouting "hey, that is not what I voted for!"
| yelling and disrupting process, or calling out the fact
| that you were lied to and your representative is in fact
| not representing you?
| michaelt wrote:
| It's a good deal more complicated than that.
|
| MPs belong to political parties - consider what happens if
| an MP's constituents and an MP's party disagree?
|
| They might be allowed to vote against the government, if
| their vote will have no effect on the bill's passage - but
| if they actually stop the bill's passage? They're kicked
| out of the party, which will make the next election
| extremely difficult for them.
|
| MPs are elected for reasonably long terms - and that means
| they regularly do things that weren't in their party
| manifesto. Nobody running for election in 2024 had a
| manifesto policy about 2025's strikes on Iran, after all!
|
| That flexibility means they can simply omit the unpopular
| policies during the election campaign. A party _could_ run
| an election campaign saying they 're going to introduce a
| national ID card, give everyone who drinks alcohol a hard
| time, cut benefits, raise taxes, raise university tuition,
| fail to deliver on any major infrastructure projects, have
| doctors go on strike, and so on.
|
| Or they can simply _not_ put those things in their
| manifesto, then do them anyway. It 's 100% legal, the
| system doing what it does.
| pram wrote:
| Yeah who do these peasants think they are?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Don't be ridiculous. MPs get their input from their party
| superiors, and their party superiors get their input from
| the people who buy them.
|
| It's been decades since the UK had any genuine bottom-up
| policy representation for ordinary people.
|
| Petitions are the only mechanism which produces some shadow
| of a memory of a that.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| I wish that we didn't always have to phrase things like this.
| Yes, it's true that the aforementioned folks may likely have
| more of a need for anonymity than I do as someone who isn't a
| member of any protected class; but that doesn't mean I don't
| have a legitimate right to it too. And, if this is the way we
| phrase things, when a government is in power that doesn't
| care about this (i.e. the present American regieme), the
| argument no longer has any power.
|
| We shouldn't have to hide behind our more vulnerable peers in
| order to have reasonable rights for online free speech and
| unfettered anonymous communication. It is a weak argument
| made by weak people who aren't brave enough to simply say,
| "F** you, stop spying on everyone, you haven't solved
| anything with the powers you have and there's no reason to
| believe it improves by shoving us all into a panopticon".
|
| Totalitarian neoliberalism sucks; your protest petition with
| six million signatures is filed as a Jira ticket and closed
| as WONTFIX, you can't get anyone on the phone to complain at,
| everyone in power is disposable and replaceable with another
| stooge who will do the same thing as their predecessor. Go
| ahead and march in the streets, the government and media will
| just declare your protest invalid and make the other half of
| the population hate you on demand.
| anthk wrote:
| Every totalitarian regime sucks, be it corporate, religious
| or socialistic.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| >These users include young people exploring their gender or
| sexual identity
|
| And who would they need to hide from?
| matt-p wrote:
| School bullys, parents, friends, community members, church
| leaders and many others I imagine. The idea was that it
| would have your real name and it was verified by your ID.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| >parents
|
| You do understand that there are creeps out there
| grooming children, right? Parents definitely do need to
| have oversight over their own kids.
|
| Children should absolutely not have privacy on the
| internet.
|
| The ID requirement is terrible, but saying that children
| need privacy to explore their sexuality on the internet
| is very problematic.
|
| If this is the position the UK government holds then that
| brings into question their desire to protect children
| online in the first place.
| matt-p wrote:
| I do, of course. It's just worth considering that not
| every parent is how you or I might like or imagine them
| to be.
|
| For some children their parents finding out they're gay
| would cause a great deal of real world physical or
| phycological harm. It's a really tricky thing to
| navigate, but aside from saying 'no children should be
| allowed access to the internet unsupervised' it gets
| really difficult.
| kelipso wrote:
| Yep, I feel like there is a cognitive dissonance
| somewhere in there. On one thread about social media and
| internet affecting young people negatively, you have
| people saying parents should control their kids' exposure
| to the internet. And in another thread about ID laws, you
| have people saying kids should have privacy to roam the
| internet.
| watwut wrote:
| To be fair, those are not actually in opposition. Because
| they dont believe parents can actually do it.
|
| They just want to throw responsibility and blame on
| parents, so that government dont restrict porn access.
| Parents are just a tool and scapegoats.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Parents have plenty of capacity to exercise control over
| their children.
|
| For example, how about a law that says websites have to
| restrict access to pornographic content if the client's
| user agent sets an HTTP header indicating they don't want
| to see it? Now you don't have any privacy problems
| because the header contains no personally identifying
| information -- you don't even have to be under 18 to opt
| into it. But then parents can configure the kid's devices
| to send that header, without even impacting the _kid 's_
| privacy to view content that isn't designated as
| pornographic, since the header is an opt-in to censorship
| rather than the removal of anonymity.
|
| Also notice that an academic discussion of sexual
| identity isn't inherently pornographic but _is_ something
| that can require privacy /anonymity.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Porn peddlers would probably pinky-promise not to disobey
| the user-agent and expose the kids to the content (and
| get them while they're young).
|
| However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the
| HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn
| peddlers better target children. We also know from
| recorded interviews with these predetors that they don't
| seem to actually mind exposing kids to porn.
|
| https://x.com/arden_young_/status/1732422651950612937
| imtringued wrote:
| Your argument is bullshit. There is no content filter on
| this planet that will prevent children from seeing
| blocked content. The children that know how to circumvent
| the protections will circumvent them. The providers of
| blocked content will figure out a way around them too.
|
| Content filters only affect law abiding users and
| providers. The hallmark of an effective policy is to make
| it as easy as possible to comply with it. Setting a
| header is pretty damn easy to implement and enforce by
| the government. It also displays trust in law abiding
| citizen, who will comply with the law, because they know
| that it serves their best interests, rather than being
| shoved down their throats against their will.
|
| The alternative will have exactly the same or - far more
| likely - worse results, because the cost of verifying
| every user's age is far too high to be implemented by the
| vast majority of sites on the internet. It's more likely
| that when law abiding citizens are faced with laws that
| are impossible to implement that they just throw up their
| hands up and close up shop or move somewhere else.
|
| In the second scenario their services might still be
| accessible in the UK and need to be blocked by the UK
| government, the online safety act achieves essentially
| nothing in this scenario.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Porn peddlers would probably pinky-promise not to
| disobey the user-agent and expose the kids to the content
| (and get them while they're young).
|
| We're talking about a law. If you distribute pornography
| to someone who sent the header in that request, it would
| be a violation of the law. But _that_ law doesn 't have
| any ID requirements or privacy problems, unlike the
| proposed one.
|
| > However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the
| HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn
| peddlers better target children.
|
| To begin with, "targeting children" is preposterous. It
| assumes that they would not only not care but _prefer_ to
| have children as users than adults, even though children
| are less likely to have access to money to pay for
| content /subscriptions and purposely targeting children
| would get them into trouble even under longstanding
| existing laws.
|
| On top of that, the header isn't specifying that the user
| is under 18, it's specifying that the user agent is
| requesting not to be shown pornography. It's as likely to
| be set when the user is a 45 year old woman as a 14 year
| old boy, so using it to distinguish between them wouldn't
| work anyway.
| subscribed wrote:
| We're discussing Wikipedia here so unless you're calling
| them porn peddlers, it's getting more and more bizarre.
|
| This discussion started from the categorisation error.
| Technical means should be irrelevant here.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| We are discussing "young people exploring their gender or
| sexual identity on the internet". This does include
| pornography, because it's very accessible and not hard to
| come by if you search for sexual terms. It also includes
| social media and online games where predators, and again,
| pornography is present.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That's not cognitive dissonance unless it's the _same_
| people saying both.
| account42 wrote:
| Yes and even then only if the opinions stated are not
| more nuanced than implied here.
| account42 wrote:
| Don't assume that HN is a single person.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Shutting down the conversation by saying parents should
| have the last say is how we got these ridiculous laws in
| the first place.
|
| What happens when someone wants to explore their
| sexuality by finding someone other than the pre-approved
| person from the parents?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Shafilea_Ahmed
| autoexec wrote:
| I'm not sure how online privacy laws (or a lack of them)
| would spare a child who objected to marrying someone
| their parents wanted to force her to. Murdering your
| children is/was already illegal and the parents did that
| anyway. We can't worry about what the small number of
| psychopathic parents might do if kids don't have online
| privacy. We should instead try harder to make sure that
| kids are protected against their abusive parents
| regardless of the situation. There should have been
| places Shafilea could have gone to or reached out to for
| meaningful help and protection long before it got to the
| point of a murder.
|
| That said, I personally think good parenting means giving
| children privacy, even online, and doing so increasingly
| at ages set according to the maturity/capability of the
| child. That's the sort of thing a parent is in a better
| position to assess than the government. I also think that
| this particular law is garbage. I just don't think "We
| must protect children from their parents by allowing them
| to access the internet in secret and anonymity" is a very
| compelling argument.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Minors are still humans who deserve rights. They should
| not be considered property of parents, regardless of fear
| mongering about grooming. Teenagers should have the right
| to access information without their parents knowing, as
| their parents can be just as, if not more dangerous to
| their health and well being as a hypothetical groomer.
| Many teens face real abuse from their parents over their
| sexuality. They should not be forced to live in the
| shadows or face abuse due to a "protect the kids"
| narrative.
| account42 wrote:
| Minors can have unfettered access to the web once grown
| up and yes the parents should be able to decide when that
| is to some point (that point being the 18th birthday).
| There is really no reason kids need to be able to
| "explore their sexuality" any earlier than that.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| From people who would harm them?
|
| Oh you're that anti-games, anti-porn guy, best to ignore
| anything you say.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| I'm not anti-games.
|
| >From people who would harm them?
|
| Like who? I really hope you don't mean the kids' parents.
| bloqs wrote:
| this is coming across as intentionally obtuse
| questioning. Many people, including governments think
| that adopting specific sexual preferences and identities
| is wrong and worthy of criminal charges and harassment at
| a minimum.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Problem is, parents are literally the most likely people
| to do that
| account42 wrote:
| Only if you have a very biased definition of harm.
| terminalshort wrote:
| No, seriously, look up stats on who gets charged with
| hurting children and you'll see that it's mostly parents.
| Sure, once in a while there's a pedophile handing out
| candy from a van, but almost all of the time it's a
| parent or some other person trusted by the parents to
| watch the kid.
| account42 wrote:
| Would-be democratic countries should have petitions with
| actual teeth - that is ones that get enough signatures mean
| the issue is no longer up to the representatives but will be
| decided in a referendum.
| ndr wrote:
| Does WP do this anywhere else?
|
| I wonder what happens if they simply don't comply. Will the UK
| at any point ask ISPs to ban Wikipedia?
| Perz1val wrote:
| I think just getting blocked is no big deal, but they'll
| probably get fined as well, that is the problem
| kylec wrote:
| What mechanism does the UK government have to extract fines
| from Wikipedia?
| suslik wrote:
| "Pay this or we will concoct some criminal charges on
| your entire leadership team, append each of you to
| interpol lists and formally request your extradition" is
| probably a good start.
| account42 wrote:
| Good luck with that. The US has that power, the UK
| doesn't.
| suslik wrote:
| The UK might not have the power to force extradition
| (neither does US, in fact), but to make life very
| inconvenient for someone - for sure.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Probably, my understanding is theyve already implemented IP
| blocking to other sites.
| parasense wrote:
| As ridiculous or absurd as this idea might seem, it's probably
| the most succinct and likely effective response to this kind of
| situation. The UK is betting the rest of the world doesn't
| reciprocate.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Not ridiculous, the only way to stop injustice is to fight.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Yes. HTTP 451 "Unavailable For Legal Reasons" was made for this
| moment.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| No, they should block with a very visible message, tailored
| to the british public. I know what that status message means,
| you know it, but the general public doesn't. They need the
| black page with big letters they used before with
| sopa/pipa/etc.
| Mogzol wrote:
| You can return a 451 error with a descriptive page, same as
| how sites have custom 404 pages
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| We need new 6xx codes. "Requests that are fine, need no
| redirection and have no errors but are blocked because of
| politics, overbearing laws or regime"
| willglynn wrote:
| For example, "An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal
| Obstacles":
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7725
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's what 451 means.
|
| It's "user error, you are trying to access the site from
| some dystopian society that prohibits it".
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Yeah but I want to know if I should submit, protest or
| revolt. I need more codes :)
| Mogzol wrote:
| 451 is such a good reference though, other codes just
| wouldn't be the same :(
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's largely meaningless to anyone US-based sci-fi nerds,
| and by itself it tells the user nothing about which
| jurisdiction the legal issue is in.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| The 451 response's body will contain further
| instructions.
| owisd wrote:
| Problem with Wikipedia specifically going all-in on a UK block
| is, due to the licence, there's nothing to stop someone
| circumventing the block to make a OSA-compliant Britipedia
| mirror with minimal effort.
| saati wrote:
| Except the effort and money needed to be OSA compliant. As
| the whole enwiki is permissively licensed everyone is welcome
| to do it though.
| incompatible wrote:
| Fairly easy, just make it a read-only mirror.
| imtringued wrote:
| It can't be read only because you need infrastructure and
| editors that review and approve every single change by
| hand. Even a single accidental violation could get the
| mirror shut down.
| spauldo wrote:
| And Wikipedia continues on without having to worry about UK
| regulations. What's the downside for Wikipedia?
| owisd wrote:
| Anyone suggesting a block doesn't actually want Wikipedia
| to pull out of the UK, it's a negotiating position to
| extort concessions.
| spauldo wrote:
| Is it? If the law would prevent Wikipedia from operating
| in the UK without adding age verification, blocking the
| UK is just a method of compliance. Organizations like the
| EFF want to strike down laws like this, but Wikipedia
| exists to operate a freely editable encyclopedia.
|
| It's really down to whether Wikipedia feels that
| compliance would go against the organization's
| principles. If so, blocking the UK is a perfectly
| reasonable thing to do. If another organization steps in
| to mirror Wikipedia in a way that complies with UK law,
| there's no downside for Wikipedia - they maintain their
| principles and the UK continues to have at least some
| access to free information.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention
| of media and popularity contest politicians might change their
| mind.
|
| Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries
| they do business in?
|
| I'm quite critical of the implementation of this legislation
| but the idea of an American company throwing their weight
| around trying to influence policy decisions in the UK gives me
| the ick.
|
| Fair enough if the regulations mean they just don't want to do
| business there but please don't block access to try and strong
| arm the elected government of another nation.
| dizlexic wrote:
| Or they should not do business in them. To me this means
| block access. If you don't then they're supposed to block
| access to you anyway so who is strong arming who?
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| As I said in my first comment: if it makes doing business
| in the UK unpalatable then they are of course free to halt
| their operations. I was specifically responding to the
| suggestion above that they should do so as a bargaining
| move to force the government's hand.
| ahtcx wrote:
| The Wikimedia Foundation isn't "doing business" in the
| UK, they're a nonprofit. Their mission statement is "to
| empower and engage people around the world to collect and
| develop educational content under a free license or in
| the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and
| globally."
|
| Part of fulfilling that mission is opposing laws that
| restrict free knowledge and open access, so why should
| they not use their huge presence as a bargaining tool?
| Doing so directly aligns with their purpose.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Because there are legal avenues of protest awarded to
| them by the United Kingdom. They also definitely "do
| business" there even if they aren't in it for profit.
| ahtcx wrote:
| Restricting activism to exclusively "legal avenues" is
| what allows the slow erosion of our freedoms and rights.
| The rights you enjoy today would not exist if they
| weren't fought outside of the legal frameworks of their
| time. This law is the perfect example of how rights are
| not guaranteed and need to be constantly fought for.
|
| If they were to block the UK that would just be them no
| longer "doing business" in the UK, which you seem to
| agree is perfectly acceptable?
|
| You seem to think that the Wikimedia Foundation exists
| outside of a political context but the reality is their
| sheer existence is political and always will be.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Is it "democratic" when both parties agree on everything of
| substance and elections don't change anything no matter who
| wins? Because that's how "democracy" has worked in the UK for
| at least as long as I've been alive.
|
| Also, no-one asked for this bill, both parties support it, it
| received basically no debate or scrutiny and was presented as
| a fait accompli. Where's the democracy exactly?
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| There are any number of criticisms I would happily join you
| in directing at the British parliamentaey system but I
| don't think relying on American businesses to pressure the
| government would actually be the win for democracy you seem
| to suggest?
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I didn't say anything prescriptive, I'm just disputing
| your use of the word "democratic".
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| For all it's issues I think you would be hard pressed to
| argue that the United Kingdom isn't a democracy in the
| common sense of the term.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| For all it's issues, it's practically bad faith to argue
| that the UK is a democracy in the spirit of the term. I
| believe that's how the EU works with law?
|
| Oh yeah, they left that.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I have no idea what this means.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Representives not representing their constituents makes
| democracy a sham. If you think representatives as of late
| are acting in good faith, I question yours.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| None of this is responsive to the specific criticisms
| made, and nor are the follow-up replies.
| foldr wrote:
| The Brexit referendum ought to have shut up the "your vote
| doesn't make any difference" folks forever (regardless of
| whether or not they were in favor of Brexit). But they tend
| to have short memories.
| phatfish wrote:
| Someone doesn't know the difference between a simple
| majority referendum and a parliamentary election result.
| foldr wrote:
| >elections don't change anything no matter who wins [not
| you, but who I was responding to]
|
| The Brexit referendum was in the 2015 Conservative party
| manifesto [1]. If Labour had won the 2015 election then
| there would have been no referendum and the UK would
| still be in the EU. Or if people had voted differently in
| the referendum, the UK would still be in the EU.
|
| The person I was responding to suggests that elections
| have never changed anything in the UK within their
| lifetime. Unless they are less than 10 years old, this is
| clearly false.
|
| [1] https://www.theresavilliers.co.uk/files/conservativem
| anifest... (p. 30)
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the
| countries they do business in?
|
| Well, the OSA was put into law by the Tories in 2023. The
| democratic decision of the UK was that they resoundingly
| rejected what the Tories were doing in the landslide win for
| Labour in the 2024 GE. I'd quite like UKGOV to respect the
| democratic decisions of the country and if they won't, I'm
| quite happy for other people to push back via the courts,
| public opinion, etc.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| The bill had broad cross party support and passed without
| opposition from the Labour party.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| That's not how democracy works. When there's a change in
| government they don't just abandon all laws the previous
| one passed.
|
| The current government is more than able to use their
| democratic mandate to appeal or change the law.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >When there's a change in government they don't just
| abandon all laws the previous one passed.
|
| Tell that to the US please.
|
| >The current government is more than able to use their
| democratic mandate to appeal or change the law. deg
|
| Yes, but they probably a won't without a lot of push
| back. Here's the push back
| arrowsmith wrote:
| The Tories' loss had nothing to do with what anybody
| thought of the OSA, a bill which most people hadn't heard
| of until last week.
|
| But you already knew that.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| And which was supported by Labour.
| extraisland wrote:
| Your framing is misleading.
|
| Most people weren't aware of the Online Safety Act. I would
| argue it wasn't even any of the policies.
|
| The Tories were in power for 14 years previously. During
| that time we had 5 prime ministers all of which were seen
| as weak and ineffective. People were sick of the
| Conservative party. This includes some of their most ardent
| supporters.
|
| People were sick of the Conservative party, this includes
| people that had previously voted for the Conservatives.
|
| The election had low voter turn out. It wasn't that Labour
| won, it was more like the Conservatives lost and by default
| Labour took power because they were the only other choice.
| mhurron wrote:
| > Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the
| countries they do business in?
|
| Blocking, making it clear why your blocking and that you will
| continue to block until it changes is respecting the
| decision.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Well, that would be tricky, since Wikipedia is not a
| business, and is nor is it specifically American. (Other than
| a foundation in the US that runs the servers) . There are
| Wikipedias in many of the world's languages!
|
| If the UK effectively bans public wikis above a certain size
| (even if by accident), then it is the law of the land that
| Wikipedia is banned. Or at least the english wikipedia, which
| is indeed very large. And if it is banned, then it must block
| access for the uk, under those conditions. Depending on the
| exact rules, possibly the uk could make do with the Swahili
| wikipedia?
|
| That said, the problem here is that it is a public wiki of a
| certain size. One option might be for Wikipedia to implement
| quotas for the UK, so that they don't fall under category 1
| rules.
|
| Another option would be to talk with Ofcon and get things
| sorted that way.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| By Wikipedia I meant the foundation of course. I'm not sure
| localisation automatically makes them a multinational
| entity. Windows is available in Chinese but we both
| understand that Microsoft is not a Chinese company.
|
| It is fair to say it's not a business, but essentially
| there's no difference to my feeling that private entities
| from other countries shouldn't be throwing their weight
| around in local democracy.
|
| Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the
| letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it
| continuing to operate there?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| The Wikimedia Foundation is not in charge of the
| Wikipedias per se (though as always, once you have a
| central organization, it starts stretching its tentacles)
| .
|
| Wikipedias are not merely localized versions of each
| other, they're truly independent.
|
| If you happen to know two languages and want to quickly
| rack up edits (if that's your sport), arbitraging
| knowledge between two Wikipedias is one way to go.
|
| Wikipedia is not throwing their weight around. They are
| merely pointing out that the law happens to make their
| operating model illegal, and surely that can't be the
| intent. If they are illegal, they cannot operate. Is
| "very well, we disagree, but if you truly insist, we
| shall obey the law and leave" throwing your weight
| around?
|
| And yes, I get the impression that the UK's letter of the
| law could lead to a categorization with rules that (a)
| Wikipedia simply cannot comply with, and still be a
| Wikipedia. So in that case Wikipedia would be effectively
| banned.
|
| But we're not there yet. Hence the use of proper legal
| channels, including this court case. Ofcom is expected to
| make their first categorizations this summer, so this is
| timely.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| It's the foundation who are involved in this court action
| and who is the topic of this thread. The code uploaded to
| GitHub wouldn't change the geographic basis of Microsoft
| either...
|
| But that said I want to be clear that I have no issue
| with the Foundation's current actions or position in the
| court system. I was responding only very specifically to
| the suggestion above that they "should" block Wikipedia
| access immediately in order to force the hand off the
| British government.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I agree that wikipedia going dark in the uk would -as
| yet- be premature at this juncture.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Wikipedia should just continue to operate as normal in
| its U.S. jurisdiction. If the UK government want to block
| it, then so be it on their own head.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Exactly my point.
| skeaker wrote:
| > Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the
| letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it
| continuing to operate there?
|
| This isn't so much up to feeling as it is up to
| interpretation of the law. If there isn't a good way for
| Wikipedia to hide parts of itself and the law requires
| that it does, then it is effectively banned by the letter
| of the law.
|
| The question of it continuing to operate exists because
| it is an obvious good to society that the law is yet to
| act on shutting down themselves. Right now it continues
| to exist in the UK despite being illegal due to the good
| will (or incompetence if you're not feeling generous) of
| the UK government.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the
| letter of the law?_
|
| Wikipedia is certainly large enough, in terms of traffic.
| And as anyone can edit it, it would seem to be a user-to-
| user service, making it a Category 1 provider, equivalent
| to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.
|
| And their wiki page about 'breasts' certainly shows
| photographs of female nipples. Their pages on penises are
| likewise illustrated. They also have pages about suicide
| and self-harm.
|
| Wikipedia is also a website we could reasonably expect
| children to access.
|
| And Wikipedia _did_ lobby the government, before the act
| was passed, to make it clear they _weren 't_ subject to
| it, which the government opted not to do.
|
| So it would certainly appear they are subject to it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You call it strong arming, I call it malicious compliance.
| Wikipedia hosts images, it "may contain pornographic
| material". Make anyone trying to search up a top 5 website
| see it before their eyes on how this isn't just a way to
| affect pornhub.
|
| >respect the democratic decisions
|
| Let the peope have a say in the going ons instead of lying to
| get elected, and maybe we can call it democratic again.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Also, that won't necessarily do anything. Russia forked
| wikipedia into Ruwiki after the invasion of Ukraine and it
| worked out for them.
| betaby wrote:
| > Or they could respect
|
| Blocking is respecting the law!
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the
| countries they do business in?
|
| They do that by staying out of such countries. Many US
| companies don't want to work with EU GDPR and just block all
| european IPs, wikipedia has full right to leave UK. They are
| under no obligations to provide service to them in the same
| was as pornhub is under no obligation to provide services in
| eg. a country that would require them to disclose IP
| addresses of all viewers of gay porn, etc.
|
| Saying that it was a democratic decision without people
| actually being asked if they want that (referendum) is just
| weaseling out instead of directly pointing out that it's a
| bad policy that very few brits actually wanted. Somehow no
| one uses the same words when eg. trump does something
| (tarifs, defunding, etc.), no one is talking about democratic
| decisions of americans then.
|
| Wikipedia has the full right to say "nope, we're not playing
| that game" and pulling out, even if an actual majority of
| brits want that.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I know that and I've been clear about it several times. If
| business subs unpalatable they gave every right to
| withdraw. I was responding to the suggestion above that
| they should do so explicitly as a bargaining chip.
|
| And parliamentary representative democracy is still very
| much democratic even without referenda on every little
| issue.
| xnyan wrote:
| > Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the
| countries they do business in?
|
| In what way would blocking access from the UK be not
| respecting the law?
| NoGravitas wrote:
| As others have noted, blocking /is/ respecting the democratic
| decisions of the UK. It would bring them into full compliance
| with the law.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| This after the gaffe with the postal services, we are going to
| see some innocent folks being branded.
|
| In general, I think we need a shift in society to say "yea,
| screw those kids". We don't put 20km/h limits everywhere
| because there's a non-zero chance that we might kill a kid. Its
| the cost of doing business.
|
| Having privacy MEANS that it is difficult to catch bad people.
| That is just the price. Just swallow it and live with it.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > "yea, screw those kids".
|
| Well, at the very least, the American government is already
| aiming for that
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I wish all non-UK entities which may be affected by this law
| just dropped the UK. But unfortunately it seems they have too
| much money invested in not doing that.
|
| But I'm sure even if that happened, the public consensus would
| just be "good riddance".
|
| This is an absolutely bizarre country to live in.
| panzi wrote:
| Problem is that all that most people want out of Wikipedia is
| ingested in LLMs and for unfathomable reasons people now go to
| those first already. So the general public might not even
| notice Wikipedia being inaccessible.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention
| of media and popularity contest politicians might change their
| mind.
|
| It is a gamble. If people increasingly get their "encyclopedic"
| information via AI, then it might make almost no noise and then
| the govt will have even more leverage.
| panzi wrote:
| I commented basically the same and also got down voted. Do
| people just down vote comments that make them sad?
| profmonocle wrote:
| Possibly naive question, why should Wikimedia do anything at
| all? Do they have a legal presence in the UK?
|
| If not, why not just say "we aren't a UK based organization so
| we have no obligations under this law"
|
| Let the UK block Wikipedia.
| gundmc wrote:
| IANAL, but I assume this could open Wikimedia leadership to
| charges of contempt and eventually lead to needing to avoid
| visiting the UK or other extraditing countries and
| potentially pave the way for asset seizures. You generally
| don't want to antagonize world power governments.
| Aeolun wrote:
| That doesn't make any sense. It's not wikimedia's
| responsibility to ensure people from the UK don't hit their
| servers by typing wikipedia.org into the browser bar.
| alphager wrote:
| According to UK law, it is.
| djeastm wrote:
| Can you cite said law for us?
| callahad wrote:
| It's the Online Safety Act. As the government says about
| the OSA:
|
| _" Ofcom is the independent regulator for Online Safety.
| [...] Ofcom has strong enforcement powers"_
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/online-safety-
| act
|
| Okay, so what does Ofcom say?
|
| _" It doesn't matter where you or your business is
| based. The new rules will apply to you (or your business)
| if the service you provide has a significant number of
| users in the UK, or if the UK is a target market."_
|
| https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-
| harmful-c...
| Aeolun wrote:
| I'm sure that they can write that. But their actual
| enforcement mechanism is nonexistent. No country is going
| to work with the UK to arrest someone that does that when
| the same thing isn't illegal under their own law.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| That does make sense, but then that would mean that any
| business not doing business in UK would not have to
| follow the rule, which would make the rule worthless. But
| I hope I am wrong.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| The UK isn't a world power.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Jimmy Wales lives in London.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| They have nuclear weapons, are in the G7, are a permanent
| member of the UN Security Council, 6th highest GDP in the
| world. What are your criteria?
| Self-Perfection wrote:
| If Wikimedia blocks access from UK it has control over
| response page and can write there accurate description of the
| reasons why access is blocked.
| EasyMark wrote:
| they should indeed. The rest of the world should not have to
| suffer for draconian & fascist laws in the UK
| amiga386 wrote:
| > If Ofcom permissibly determines that Wikipedia is a Category 1
| service, and if the practical effect of that is that Wikipedia
| cannot continue to operate, the Secretary of State may be obliged
| to consider whether to amend the regulations or to exempt
| categories of service from the Act. In doing so, he would have to
| act compatibly with the Convention. Any failure to do so could
| also be subject to further challenge. Such a challenge would not
| be prevented by the outcome of this claim.
|
| Basically, DENIED, DENIED, DENIED. Ofcom can keep the loaded gun
| pointed in Wikipedia's face, forever, and make as many threats as
| it likes. Only if it pulls the trigger does Wikipedia have a
| case.
|
| Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK entirely.
| No visitors, no editors.
| exasperaited wrote:
| But this is how the law works? Even in the USA, the Supreme
| Court doesn't act on hypotheticals. They wait until someone
| brings an actual case.
|
| Ofcom haven't ruled Wikipedia is Category 1. They haven't
| announced the intention to rule it Category 1. The Category 1
| rules are not yet in effect and _aren 't even finalised_. They
| aren't pointing any gun.
|
| Wikipedia have a case that they shouldn't be Category 1 if that
| happens. But they went fishing in advance (or to use an
| alternative metaphor, they got out over their skis).
|
| What else is the court to do but give a reassurance that the
| process will absolutely be amenable to review if the
| hypothetical circumstance comes to pass? That is what the
| section you are quoted says.
|
| First, it's a statutory instrument that ministers _will_ amend
| if it has unintended, severe consequences.
|
| Second, the rules in question have not been written yet and
| they are being written in conjunction with industry (which will
| include Wikipedia). Because Ofcom is an industry self-
| regulation body.
| amiga386 wrote:
| That's not how lawmaking works in the UK.
|
| I remember an example where the UK Government decided it's OK
| to rip CDs you own (no, really, it wasn't legal until then),
| and codified that in law. The parasites that run the UK Music
| trade organisation appealed and found that the UK had not
| sufficiently consulted _them_ before deciding to make the
| law.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933
|
| So - ripping is completely illegal in the UK. Always has
| been, always will be. Never rip a CD, not even once. Keep
| paying all your fucking money to the UK Music member
| corporations and never think you own anything, not even once.
|
| But it illustrates that the UK's law-making is subject to
| judicial review, and government cannot make laws or
| regulations without consulting those affected by them how
| much of a hardship it constitutes to them. The judge here is
| merely saying we haven't seen the harm _yet_ , and Ofcom can
| keep threatening indefinitely to cause harm, Wikipedia only
| have a case when they _do_ cause harm. By contrast, passing
| the law making CD ripping legal, UK Music argued, using an
| absolute load of bollocks they made up, that it immediately
| caused them harm.
| jadamson wrote:
| It's not that simple. The law the BBC article is referring
| to[1] was a regulation, i.e. secondary legislation, passed
| by resolution. Had it been primary legislation, the courts
| wouldn't have been able to overturn it (Parliament is
| sovereign).
|
| [1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2014/9780111112700
| Quarrel wrote:
| > government cannot make laws or regulations without
| consulting those affected by them how much of a hardship it
| constitutes to them
|
| This is at best disingenuous.
|
| There is no general requirement on government to consult.
| It is often referred to in various Acts, which are binding.
| There is a common law expectation that if the government
| has made a clear promise to consult that they have to.
|
| But since the Glorious Revolution, parliament has proved to
| be supreme. It may have to be explicit in the laws it
| passes, but it can literally overrule itself as needed.
| Pesky EU human rights legislation is just a mere vote away
| from being destroyed.
| chippiewill wrote:
| > But it illustrates that the UK's law-making is subject to
| judicial review
|
| This is misleading. Actual primary legislation isn't
| subject to judicial review. The only exception to that is a
| Judge can declare legislation incompatible with the ECHR -
| but even then that doesn't actually nullify the law, it
| only tells the government/parliament they need to fix it.
|
| The bit that is subject to review is _secondary_
| legislation, which is more of an executive action than
| lawmaking. It's mostly a historical quirk that statutory
| instruments count as legislation in the UK.
| flipbrad wrote:
| A lot of what you are posting is not true. Take for instance
| your claim that "Ofcom is an industry self-regulation body"
| exasperaited wrote:
| Ofcom is a _government-approved_ industry regulator,
| strictly speaking.
|
| It is what in the UK gets called a Quango. A quasi-non-
| government-organisation.
|
| It is not a government body. It is not under direct
| ministerial control.
|
| It gets some funds from government (but mostly through fees
| levied on industry):
|
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c8eec40f0
| b...
|
| But it operates within industry as the industry's
| regulator, and its approach has always been to operate that
| way (just as the other Of- quangos do).
|
| Here is what appears to be their own take on it.
|
| https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/con
| s...
|
| This seems pretty consistent with what I said -- it is
| essentially a self-regulation body, promoting self-
| regulation but backed by statutory powers/penalties.
|
| Now what else is untrue?
|
| ETA: rate-limited so I am not able to properly respond to
| the below. Bye for now.
| handelaar wrote:
| Your claim that Ofcom is in any way a "self-regulation
| body" is untrue. And frankly also a _straight-up insane_
| thing to say, sorry.
|
| Ofcom was created by the UK government for the sole
| purpose of enforcing laws passed by the UK government
| [and sometimes interpreting those laws]. It acts on
| behalf of the State at all times, and is not empowered to
| do otherwise under any circumstances EVER.
|
| You appear to be confused about what being a "quango"
| actually means in this case. "Quasi-NGO" means that while
| it appears to be a non-governmental organisation, it is
| _not one_. Ofcom 's at arm's length because the majority
| of its daily legal obligations are closer to judicial
| than administrative, and it is UK custom (rightly) to not
| put judicial functions inside government departments.
| Quarrel wrote:
| While you're correct about Ofcom, the real distinction
| isn't really to the objective, but to the classification
| of its employees.
|
| Ofcom, Gambling Commission, and the rest of the quangos
| are independent statutory bodies, and (this is a big
| distinction!) their employees are not civil servants.
|
| Quangos include judicial tribunals and places like the
| BBC, or the Committee on Climate Change- it is a broad
| umbrella.
| timthorn wrote:
| Quasi-autonomous, to be completely accurate. They consult
| regularly with the industry and ministers but the Office
| of Communications Act established Ofcom to be independent
| of both Government and industry. They're accountable to
| Parliament.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Even in the USA, the Supreme Court doesn't act on
| hypotheticals.
|
| Yes. To rephrase it, they cannot act until it's already too
| late, and the damage has already been done.And we wonder why
| things are so broken.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| What alternative would you propose? How much additional
| workload would it create for the court system and how would
| you manage it considering their existing responsibilities?
| amiga386 wrote:
| I'd propose that Parliament bind itself and say "UK
| Government cannot create THESE types of law".
|
| The courts can then adjudicate on whether Government did
| or didn't stray into self-prohibited territory.
|
| This already exists in the Scottish Parliament, which has
| the power to legislate on _devolved matters_ , but not
| _reserved matters_ and _excluded matters_. If it _does_
| legislate in these latter areas, or the UK Government
| _thinks_ it has legislated in these areas, off to the
| Supreme Court they go.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| The issue being that if the concept of Parliamentary
| supremacy as currently understood is maintained then
| current Parliament cannot bind future Parliament.
|
| The best that Parliament can do under the current
| definition is things like passing an interpretation law
| that includes various rules, and which permit courts to
| strike down other laws that violate these rules, _unless
| said other law amends this one_. Then Parliament could
| propose rules not allowing the government to propose such
| legislation unless (some conditions), etc. This would be
| with the intention of future Parliments keeping the rule.
|
| That is all technically fine as long as future Parliament
| can simply drop the rule by majority vote, and can modify
| the law by sinple majority vote. But that means this is
| not really binding, just a relatively modern tradition.
|
| If they tried anyway, a future Parliament (led by a
| different government) would likely just ignore it citing
| Parliamentary supremacy, and the courts would almost
| certainly concur if challenges arise.
| miroljub wrote:
| > Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK
| entirely. No visitors, no editors.
|
| No, it should remove servers, employees and legal presence from
| the UK. It's not their job to block UK people from accessing it
| just because the UK regime want them to. Let the regime censors
| actually put an effort to block them. Let them make a Great
| Firewall of the UK, why make it easy for them?
| amenhotep wrote:
| Because, as someone living in the UK, the only way people
| here are going to realise what's going on and apply
| meaningful pressure to the government is if these
| organisations force us to. And because once they've given up
| on one country, they'll give up on the rest just as easily.
| freedomben wrote:
| Is there backlash for this sort of thing? When they did
| their blackout thing some years back, a lot of people who
| were sympathetic to the cause were also highly annoyed at
| the disruption to their workflows, to the point that if it
| had gone on much longer it might have backfired on Wiki.
| I've seen similar affects with protesters blocking roads
| and such. I always wonder if it's just a small minority or
| if it happens more widespread
| righthand wrote:
| What would the backlash possibly be? Someone in the UK
| starting their own censored Wikipedia would be a good
| thing in the long and short run.
|
| Backlash but positive backlash.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > Someone in the UK starting their own censored Wikipedia
| would be a good thing in the long and short run.
|
| I'm seeing that playing out with a Russian Wikipedia
| (forked as Ruwiki and heavily edited to be in line with
| Kremlin propaganda), and I don't like it one bit. There's
| not much you can do as it's free/open content, but it
| still sucks.
| wiml wrote:
| Reminds me of Conservapedia, which was a Wikipedia fork
| with everything that the US religious right disliked
| removed.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Present tense; it's still around. Near the top of their
| list of popular articles is "Counterexamples to
| Relativity" which gives a good flavor of what it's all
| about.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Backlash? What are they gonna do - not look at the
| Wikipedia they don't have access to?
|
| It's not funded by ads or anything, this literally is
| _easier_ and _cheaper_ for them, and Britain loses an
| enormous trove of knowledge.
| contravariant wrote:
| Sure, but letting the UK government block wikipedia makes
| things _much_ clearer for everyone.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It'll only bring more clicks to Google's AI summary. The
| people who care about Wikipedia itself probably already
| know about the government plans.
| entuno wrote:
| They don't need to make anything - that capability has been
| there for years. It was mostly used to block sites with IIoC,
| but they also blocked access to various piracy related sites
| and things like that.
| 71bw wrote:
| What does IIoC stand for?
| bdcravens wrote:
| It's a lot harder to uproot people than servers.
|
| https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Staff
| account42 wrote:
| The ways things are gong in the world they will need to
| bite that bullet sooner or later, and not just for the UK.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I generally agreed but this depends entirely on the US's
| willingness to cooperate with UK authorities. This would be
| the DOJ, FTC, etc. I dont think it would go straight the
| judiciary although someone can correct me on that if I'm
| wrong.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| If they don't geoblock UK visitors then every person known to
| be involved with the operation of wikipedia potentially
| becomes an international fugitive and if they ever land on UK
| soil (or perhaps even Commonwealth soil), they could be
| jailed.
|
| Not a fun way to live.
| account42 wrote:
| The UK would only get away with such an arrest if the US
| would allow it, in which case Wikipedia is already fucked.
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| [citation needed] because that's not how the OSA works.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| IANAL, but international law precedent has allowed countries
| to prosecute web services for providing services to a country
| where that service is illegal. A French NGO successfully sued
| Yahoo! for selling Nazi memorabilia, a crime in France,
| despite Yahoo! being a US company [0], and this was upheld by
| US courts.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!
| jedberg wrote:
| > and this was upheld by US courts.
|
| No it wasn't. It was overturned on appeal. But Yahoo
| stopped selling Nazi memorabilia anyway.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but that's not how I read it. The
| appeal by Yahoo! was dismissed according to the wikipedia
| article, as I read it. How did you read it?
| indecisive_user wrote:
| The first court ruled in Yahoo's favor and the appeals
| court ruled that neither it nor any lower court in the US
| had the power to adjudicate the matter altogether, which
| was kind of a loss for both yahoo and the French
| organization.
| fulafel wrote:
| Nitpick: International law is treaties between countries,
| the UN, customs like diplomatic immunity, etc. Here it was
| just about US and French domestic law.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| thanks for the clarification :)
| pcrh wrote:
| This is the part that gets me intrigued. It's quite difficult
| to parse, having so many conditionals... ifs, mays, woulds,
| "subject to further challenge", etc
|
| It doesn't seem (to me) as definitive as some claim.
|
| _Hopefully_ , this ambiguous language opens the door for
| further challenges that may provide case law against the
| draconian Online Safety Act.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| Pulling Wikipedia out of the UK would make a statement, but
| it'd also hand the government an easy win, I think
| account42 wrote:
| Better would be to pull operations out of the UK but keep
| serving UK citizens without restrictions until the UK itself
| moves to block it.
| kebman wrote:
| It's sad, but let's hope the UK blocks it. Perhaps someone
| finally understands the severity of this "law".
| andiareso wrote:
| All US companies should boycott the UK in solidarity. See how
| fast the regulators walk back the bill.
| cft wrote:
| why would they? This is great for the large media corps:
|
| - Increases barrier to entry for smaller competitors
|
| - Reliable user data (age, race, who knows what else) derived
| from video age verification
|
| Anecdote:
|
| My mom recently visited Spain. The process of buying a local
| SIM card was as follows:
|
| * Show your US passport at a major local cellular provider's
| store (Movistar) to have its number associated with the SIM.
|
| * During SIM activation, open a browser page that accesses the
| phone's camera.
|
| * Scan the first page of your passport.
|
| * Point the selfie camera at your face, then close your eyes
| and smile when prompted.
| joemi wrote:
| > then close your eyes and smile when prompted
|
| I was about to ask about this, but then I realized it must so
| that you can't just point it at a photo of someone.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| The UK law is significantly less stringent and better thought
| out than equivalent age verification laws already in place in a
| bunch of US states....
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Ah yes, what about the US.
|
| Which law are you talking about by the way?
|
| I was mostly familiar with laws that required porn companies
| to verify their user's age. That is a lot more targeted and
| less offensive than UK Online Safety Act Regulations IMO. I
| mean it's already illegal to distribute porn to minors -
| that's just requiring them to enforce it at the expense of
| porn watcher's anonymity. Whereas the UK Online Safety Act is
| more like a backdoor for content moderation across the
| internet.
| ectospheno wrote:
| The online safety act being a more well thought out step on
| this slippery slope doesn't mean it isn't leading to the
| same horrible end. We are just rearranging deck chairs on
| the titanic.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I think those age verification laws don't target as many
| sites though, right? not Wikipedia at least
| platevoltage wrote:
| We can't even get American companies to take a stand against
| authoritarianism in their own country.
| rvba wrote:
| Wikipedia is so bad at simplest PR.
|
| It should close itself before elections to burn the politicians
| that try to screw it.
| Levitz wrote:
| It's a dangerous game to play, spending credibility to
| influence stuff.
|
| Not that it's unthinkable or anything, but my impression is
| that people are not quite aware that it ain't free.
| rvba wrote:
| If wikipedia can show the Jimmy Wales banners, then sure it
| can go for the throat of some politicians.
|
| It allready collects few hubdred million per year, spends
| like 10 on wikipedia itself and rest goes for political
| projects. They could do something useful for once.
|
| (On a side note: all those money and they dont use it to
| track the cliques / country level actors across admins...)
| tux1968 wrote:
| The UK is spearheading this charge, but if they are successful it
| will have paved the way for many more governments to embrace
| these policies. How this plays out is important for people living
| in every western country.
| devmor wrote:
| The US has been implementing similar bans sporadically as well.
| It's being done on a state-by-state basis due to the limited
| federal power structure of our government making it more
| difficult for minority power groups like fascists to push
| legislation.
|
| I do believe the social factors leading to support for these
| bans are quite a bit different, but the core minds behind them
| are of the same creed.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Don't know why you are being downvoted. It is a literal fact
| that many states in the US have implemented this type of
| legislation.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Could it be that the massive Wikipedia war chest of money can
| actually be used for something now?
| arduanika wrote:
| If the incessant banner ads said, "Hello, this is a special
| plea from Jimmy Wales, get in, we're saving the Brits from
| themselves", then maybe I'd actually donate.
| acka wrote:
| Just leaving this here, in case things really start going south
| and people realize they need to stack up on knowledge supplies
| (note: I am not affiliated with them, I just think that
| Wikipedia, among other resources, is too valuable to let it fall
| through the cracks):
|
| > When there is No Internet, there is Kiwix Access vital
| information anywhere. Use our apps for offline reading on the go
| or the Hotspot in every place you want to call home. Ideal for
| remote areas, emergencies, or independent knowledge access.
|
| https://kiwix.org/en/
| hliyan wrote:
| On a slightly related note, has anyone else noticed an increase
| in social media attacks on Wikipedia, kind of like this?
| https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1954276775560966156
|
| Post reads: "Periodic reminder that Wikipedia has a squillion
| times more money than they need to operate the actual website,
| and all marginal donations go to the fake paper-shuffling NGO
| that attached itself to the organization for the purpose of
| feeding on donations from rubes."
|
| Quoted post reads: "I have no interest in giving Wikipedia money
| to blow on fake jobs for ovecredentialed paper-pushers, but if
| the banner said "Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia and he'd like to
| buy a yacht" then I'd pull out my wallet immediately."
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| I've contributed content to Wikipedia and broadly agree with
| the sentiment. Users are guilted into thinking donations go
| towards the cost of serving the encyclopedia, which is not
| really where the money goes.
| daedrdev wrote:
| This has been a criticism for a decade or more
| wiredpancake wrote:
| Correct, it is especially of note given the publicity of
| Wikimedias funding and balances.
|
| There is a million more greedy companies than Wikimedia,
| there is also other places that could use your money though,
| i.e Internet Archive, which is always desperate for
| donations.
| account42 wrote:
| > There is a million more greedy companies than Wikimedia
|
| How many of them are asking for donations under the guise
| of an open encyclopedia?
|
| For-profit corporations aren't even relevant when
| discussing badly-behaving non-profits.
| emberfiend wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
|
| Long-time WP contributor and apologist here. I still think
| Wikipedia does more good than bad (for all its sins), is the
| greatest collaborative human work of our time, and there is
| some merit to the idea of having a giant pile of money to be
| able to fight government-scale battles like this one. But the
| story of the bureaucrats settling in and leeching donations at
| scale is basically accurate.
| isatty wrote:
| I happened to come across some of this recently and after an
| independent review, decided to stop donating to them.
|
| There's just no way to donate to just Wikipedia (to specially
| only the server costs or upkeep) but ignore whatever else the
| organization is up to.
|
| Same story with Mozilla, there's no way to donate to just the
| development of Firefox.
|
| It's all good though, there's loads of other charities that I
| can donate to.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Donating to your local chapter might still work! (It's what I
| do at least)
| cmcaleer wrote:
| "Wikipedia is one of the best resources humanity has ever
| produced" and "The Wikimedia Foundation spends money
| frivolously while soliciting donations with messages that make
| users think their money is going towards the project they
| actually care about" are not statements which are incompatible
| with each other.
|
| Wikimedia does by and large an OK job (the endowment they set
| up in particular was a great move), but it's incredibly bloated
| in ways that should be curtailed before it gets worse. It's
| reasonable to want better for a resource as important as
| Wikipedia.
|
| We don't want another Mozilla.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I'm really confused about what would realistically happen if
| Wikimedia just decided to ignore those regulations.
|
| They have surely ignored demands to censor Wikipedia in more
| authoritarian countries. What makes the UK different? Extradition
| treaties? Do they even apply here?
|
| I have the same confusion about Signal's willingness to leave
| Europe if chat control is imposed[1], while still providing anti-
| censorship tools for countries like Iran and China. What makes
| the European laws they're unwilling to respect different from the
| Iranian laws they're unwilling to respect?
| AlgebraFox wrote:
| They might ban the CEO and employees from entering their
| country or arrest them when they travel.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Having moved out of the uk many years ago, being banned from
| there, may not be such a bad thing.
|
| The worst thing is, people will vote out the labour
| government, and the tory bastards (who will say they are 'the
| party of freedom) will tell the country "Well, it wasnt us".
| vizzier wrote:
| Its worth noting of course, that this is Tory law which was
| given a grace period before implementation. Labour have
| chosen to continue its implementation and not repeal it.
| chippiewill wrote:
| A variety of things could happen:
|
| - Employees become accountable for their company's actions -
| Wikimedia could be blocked - Other kinds of sanctions (e.g.
| financial ones) could be levied somehow
|
| In practice what will likely happen is Wikimedia will comply:
| either by blocking the UK entirely, making adjustments to be
| compliant with UK legislation (e.g. by making their sites read-
| only for UK-users - probably the most extreme outcome that's
| likely to occur), or the as-yet unannounced Ofcom regulations
| they've preemptively appealed actually won't apply to Wikimedia
| anyway (or will be very light touch).
| deadbabe wrote:
| What if they simply don't pay any sanctions?
| impossiblefork wrote:
| They don't apply. Delivering this kind of thing is obviously
| allowed in the US, so there's presumably no mutual criminality.
| EasyMark wrote:
| .... so far it is. Current politicians are certainly working
| at the state level to stop anonymous internet usage.
| Currently limited to pr0n sites, but you can bet that's just
| the first notch of increased heat on that poor frog in the
| cooking pot
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm reasonably sure several articles and uploaded artworks
| violate various US state regulations on adult content, though
| the states would be idiots trying to enforce them against
| Wikipedia; that'd only increase the risk of some kind of
| higher court declaring the law unconstitutional.
|
| Geographically speaking, about half the US has "think of the
| kids" laws that are similar to the UK's.
| Jigsy wrote:
| > They have surely ignored demands to censor Wikipedia in more
| authoritarian countries. What makes the UK different?
| Extradition treaties? Do they even apply here?
|
| The UK has the authority to arrest them (anyone who owns a
| website) if they ever set foot in the UK if they feel they
| either haven't censored it adequately enough or refuse to do
| so.
|
| It's one of the reasons why Civitai geoblocked the country.
| caturopath wrote:
| Yes, there are unilateral policies and treaties that let the US
| and the UK collaborate in legal action (going through US
| institutions to judge them), some of them referenced in
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal/Legal_Policies -- a
| keyword might be letters rogatory
|
| Wikimedia also seems to have a presence in the UK
| https://wikimedia.org.uk/ that presumably would be affected.
|
| In most cases they might have enough pull to get folks
| blacklisted by payment processors, but wikimedia in particular
| might win that one.
| knorker wrote:
| What I hate most about this latest push is that people in their
| 30s are trying to convince us all that blocking children's access
| to porn and such is the issue. As if most people don't agree with
| that in the abstract.
|
| Not only people in their 30s, but it's who I see making a fuss
| about it. Presumably because they are now parents of children
| newly reaching this age.
|
| They are completely ignoring that they are entering a debate
| that's been going on for longer than they have been alive, and
| are just arguing from a source of "common sense" gut feelings.
| They are literally a third of a century behind on this issue, but
| it doesn't stop them talking about it.
|
| They are incompetent on this issue (nothing bad about that. I'm
| incompetent in most things), but they are also _stupid_ because
| they don 't let that incompetence stop them.
|
| They are too incompetent to understand that they just did the
| equivalent of entering a room full of mathematicians with a
| collective thousands of years of math knowledge, and saying "how
| about just making 2+2=5? You could make 2+2=4, so you smart
| people should be able to do it". How do you even start with
| someone this ignorant? They don't even understand what math _is_.
|
| "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures,
| will the right answers come out?" -- "I am not able rightly to
| apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such
| a question."
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I wish I could agree with you, but this is not how things work.
| My experience says that if there's enough people wishing for
| 2+2 to equal 5, that will become the socially accepted
| standard, and the whole society will get organized around
| 2+2=5. Will it be less efficient? Yes. Will people care? No.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| UK Online Safety Act has a much bigger scope than porn.
|
| In fact you've picked probably the least offensive, which is
| not to say uncontroversial, part of the law to argue with. Its
| illegal to distribute porn to minors just like its illegal to
| let underage people gamble on your poker app.
|
| Yet people in factor of age verification laws for porn still
| have concerns with this because it's just a totally open-ended
| backdoor into content moderation across the internet.
| StopVibeCoding wrote:
| "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not
| interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in
| power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand
| presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in
| that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who
| resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German
| Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their
| methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own
| motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they
| had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that
| just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings
| would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no
| one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
| Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a
| dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the
| revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object
| of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is
| torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to
| understand me." -1984
| throw7 wrote:
| If UK really believes in their ideology then they just need to
| copy China and implement the China Firewall(tm) for the UK.
|
| FYI, Wikimedia Foundation just wants a carve out/exception to be
| able to opt out of category 1 duties.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| How would they collect fines in this scenario?
|
| To be clear I totally agree with you. But they are playing a
| game.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Wikipedia loses court challenge
|
| https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/wikipe...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| This is about the duties of a "category 1 service" under the
| Online Safety Act. Wikipedia is one mostly because of their size,
| I believe. These duties are quite onerous, and over the top
| (someone might say that the government is seeing adults are real
| "snowflakes" these days):
|
| _Large user-to-user services, known as Category 1 services, will
| be required to offer adult users tools which, if they choose to
| use, will give them greater control over the kinds of content
| they see and who they engage with online.
|
| Adult users of such services will be able to verify their
| identity and access tools which enable them to reduce the
| likelihood that they see content from non-verified users and
| prevent non-verified users from interacting with their content.
| This will help stop anonymous trolls from contacting them.
|
| Following the publication of guidance by Ofcom, Category 1
| services will also need to proactively offer adult users optional
| tools, at the first opportunity, to help them reduce the
| likelihood that they will encounter certain types of legal
| content. These categories of content are set out in the Act and
| include content that does not meet a criminal threshold but
| encourages, promotes or provides instructions for suicide, self-
| harm or eating disorders. These tools also apply to abusive or
| hate content including where such content is racist, antisemitic,
| homophobic, or misogynist. The tools must be effective and easy
| to access._ [1]
|
| [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-
| act...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Conducting risk assessments and impact assessments regularly.
| Providing transparency reports and cooperating fully with
| Ofcom.
|
| This is the sort of regulatory compliance that has stifled
| European businesses for decades. Useless overhead.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Only editors engage with each other on Wikipedia, right? Can
| they just ban sign up and edits by/from the UK?
| jchw wrote:
| The correct time for major service providers to shift their
| weight and start pulling out of any jurisdiction necessary to get
| their point across has already come and gone. The second best
| time would be as soon as possible.
|
| Unfortunately, the Internet world we live in today isn't the one
| I grew up in, so I'm sure things will just go according to plan.
| Apparently a majority of Britons polled _support_ these rules,
| even though a (smaller) majority of Britons also believe they are
| ineffective at their goals[1]. I think that really says a lot
| about what people _really_ want here, and it would be hard to
| believe anyone without a serious dent in their head really though
| this had anything at all to do with protecting children. People
| will do literally anything to protect children, so as long as it
| only inconveniences and infringes on the rights of the rest of
| society. They don 't even have to believe it will work.
|
| And so maybe we will finally burn the house to roast the pig.
|
| [1]: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-
| brit...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I think this is actually a better place to draw the line than
| the EU's Digital Services Act, for example. It's just the UK.
| Blacking out service for EU would be a more bitter pill to
| swallow.
| lxe wrote:
| This is how we should have stopped the cookie banners
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Its easy to solve cookie banners, its not the laws fault
| websites are fucking incompetent.
| shit_game wrote:
| I remember my mother watching a news segment on TV about the
| subject of online identity verification several months ago, and
| she commented that she supported it because "kids shouldn't be
| looking at these things." I asked her if she believed it's a
| parents responsibility to parent their children and block
| childrens' access to unsavory things, or if she felt it might
| be dangerous to tie a persons legal identity to what they do on
| the internet, and her face kind of glazed over and she said
| "no?"
|
| The average person is not thinking about the ways in which
| legislation can be abused, or in how it oversteps its "stated
| purpose", or how it can lead to unintended consequences. I
| remember the news segment saying something to the tune of "new
| legislation aims to prevent children from viewing pornography",
| which is a deliberately misinformative take on these kinds of
| legislation.
|
| The current political atmosphere of the western world is edging
| towards technofascism at an alarming rate - correlating online
| activities to real-world identities (more than they already are
| via the advertisement death cult (read: industry)) is
| dangerous. A persons political beliefs, national status, health
| status, personal associations, interests, activities, etc. are
| all potential means of persecution. Eventually, the western
| world will see (more) TLAs knocking on doors and asking for
| papers and stepping inside homes. They're going to forensically
| analyse computers belonging to average people (which government
| agencies are already doing at border checkpoints in the US) to
| weed out political dissidents or people targetted for
| persecution.
|
| Things are going to get exponentially worse for everyone, and
| nobody is trying to stop it because the average person is
| uninformed, uninterested, and - worst of all - an absolute
| fucking idiot.
| alt227 wrote:
| Exactly, this is why the 'think of the children' argument
| always wins when it comes to democracy. People who do not
| have the knowledge are easy to scare.
| zkmon wrote:
| Is Wikimedia Foundation a UK entity? Otherwise why should it
| concern itself with some country's regulation? USA does not have
| a global jurisdiction. But it has global leverages.
| advisedwang wrote:
| It has UK based editors and users. Employees of the foundation
| surely travel to the UK. They take donations from UK users.
| Their network peers with UK based ISPs.
|
| They have enough touch points with the UK that complying not
| complying with UK law could cause significant problem.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I wonder why Wikipedia does not ban access from the UK due to
| this ruling ? I think doing that will get them an exemption
| rather quickly.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Do they even need to? Seems like they can just eliminate all
| the jobs in the UK and let the ISPs ban them when the time
| comes.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Right - in terms of liability there is nothing the UK can do
| to them if they aren't operating there. Up to the UK to block
| them with the Great British Firewall if they still aren't
| happy.
|
| Having said that, if Wikipedia geo blocked the UK it would
| send a powerful message to everyone living here.
| dmoy wrote:
| My read of the article is that it's still an ongoing legal
| battle, even after this one judgement.
|
| So maybe yes, but maybe no, depending on how things pan out in
| subsequent rulings?
| coryrc wrote:
| I don't think any movement like that has worked yet.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >I think doing that will get them an exemption rather quickly.
|
| Some of us prefer civilization, though.
| Lio wrote:
| One of the most interesting things about this legislation is
| where it comes from.
|
| Primarily it was drafted and lobbied for by William Perrin OBE
| and Prof Lorna Woods at Carnegie UK[1], billed as an "independent
| foundation".
|
| William Perrin is also the founder of Ofcom. So he's been using
| the foundation's money to lobby for the expansion of his
| unelected quango.
|
| It has also been suggested that one of the largest beneficiaries
| of this law, an age verification company called Yoti, also has
| financial ties to Carnegie UK.
|
| It's difficult to verify that because Yoti is privately held and
| its backers are secret.
|
| It's not as if anyone was surprised that teenagers can get round
| age blocks in seconds so there's something going on and it
| stinks.
|
| 1. https://carnegieuk.org/team/william-perrin-obe/
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| Another source to back up the first claim
| https://carnegieuk.org/blog/online-safety-and-carnegie-uk/
|
| I would like to see much more thorough journalism on the origin
| of these laws
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > It has also been suggested that one of the largest
| beneficiaries of this law, an age verification company called
| Yoti, also has financial ties to Carnegie UK.
|
| Do you have any sources for this?
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| Ludicrous to call William Perrin "the founder" of Ofcom or
| refer to it as "his" quango.
|
| Passive voice, evidence free conspiracy nonsense that flatters
| HN biases? Updoots to the left!
| Lio wrote:
| > _Ludicrous to call William Perrin "the founder" of Ofcom or
| refer to it as "his" quango_
|
| From his own Carnegie UK webpage linked above:
|
| > _William was_ instrumental in creating Ofcom, _reforming
| the regulatory regimes of several sectors and kicking off the
| UK government's interest in open data._
|
| _William was awarded an OBE for his highly influential work
| at Carnegie UK with Prof Lorna Woods that underpinned the UK
| government's approach to regulating online services._
|
| How is he not a founder of Ofcom?
|
| That's not a conspiracy theory, that's just a verifiable
| statement of fact.
|
| Or is it the use of the word founder you object to? If you
| prefer, "was instrumental in setting up and is closely
| related to the running of Ofcom".
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| Both the use of "founder" and "the" are inaccurate and
| misleading (I notice you've switched to "a" without
| comment). He was a government adviser 20 years ago that was
| central to the work of creating Ofcom. How is he closely
| related to the running of Ofcom, today?
|
| The conspiracy theory is your suggestion he is deriving
| some kind of financial benefit to Carnegie via Yoti - what
| is the basis for this? (I agree it would be a conflict of
| interest, though not hypocritical).
| johneth wrote:
| > It's difficult to verify that because Yoti is privately held
| and its backers are secret.
|
| You can see some of these things on Companies House. This is
| Yoti Holding Ltd., but you'd have to look at its subsidiaries,
| too:
|
| https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
|
| (I'm not defending Yoti/similar, just mentioning in case you
| weren't aware of CH)
| klelatti wrote:
| So you're saying that someone who worked in government on
| online regulation has carried on that interest outside at a
| charitable foundation and has had some influence in drafting
| this legislation?
|
| Not that surprising really is it? And all that is advertised on
| the individual's bio online.
|
| The only dubious thing you allude to are 'financial ties' to
| Yoti which are completely unsubstantiated. In fact I took the
| trouble of looking at the Carnegie Foundation's accounts [1]
| and for the last two years at least they have had virtually no
| donor income at all so they are certainly not being funded by
| Yoti. Perhaps you would like to be more specific about these
| ties?
|
| I don't like this legislation much but creating a controversy
| when there isn't one isn't going to get it changed.
|
| Edit: Just to add that the Carnegie Foundation seems to be
| about as independent and transparent as you can get which might
| be why it's been influential. If you don't think Google, Meta
| et all have all been lobbying furiously behind the scenes then
| I don't know what to say.
|
| Happy to take downvotes for calling out a fake conspiracy
| theory ('there's something going on').
|
| [1] https://carnegieuk.org/publication/annual-report-and-
| account...
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I don't understand why Wikipedia would fall under Category 1. Am
| I looking at the wrong thing, or does the definition in 3.(1) not
| require the service to use an algorithmic recommendation system
| (which Wikipedia does not do)?
|
| https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2025/9780348267174
| betaby wrote:
| Because laws are not interpreted in a logical way. Especially
| the laws with a 'safety' aspects.
| buzer wrote:
| I'm not sure if this Wikipedia's official policy but at
| https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/wikipedias-nonprofit-hos...
| they do say:
|
| > Definition of content recommender systems: Having any
| "algorithm" on the site that "affects" what content someone
| might "encounter", is seemingly enough to qualify popular
| websites for Category 1. As written, this could even cover
| tools that are used to combat harmful content. We, and many
| other stakeholders, have failed to convince UK rulemakers to
| clarify that features that help keep services free of bad
| content -- like the New Pages Feed used by Wikipedia article
| reviewers--should not trigger Category 1 status. Other rarely-
| used features, like Wikipedia's Translation Recommendations,
| are also at risk.
|
| > Content forwarding or sharing functionality: If a popular app
| or website also has content "forwarding or sharing" features,
| its chances of ending up in Category 1 are dramatically
| increased. The Regulations fail to define what they mean by
| "forwarding or sharing functionality": features on Wikipedia
| (like the one allowing users to choose Wikipedia's daily
| "Featured Picture") could be caught.
| Sephr wrote:
| "Content forwarding or sharing functionality" seems like it
| would cover any website with a URL.
| miohtama wrote:
| So it means every website is Category 1. How convenient.
| oconnore wrote:
| Wikipedia is based in San Francisco. Why can't they just tell
| the UK to pound sand?
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Because some of Wikipedia's editors are based in the UK.
| nemomarx wrote:
| They presumably have editors in the UK, foundation members
| who live or work or travel there
|
| they would at least want to block the UK from accessing it
| first?
| integralid wrote:
| Adding to what others said, they can just let UK block
| Wikipedia, but as a foundation that tries to share knowledge
| I think they're obliged to try avoid that. So they're doing
| just that right now, by challenging the law.
| netsharc wrote:
| Wikipedia's "gone black" before: https://en.wikipedia.org/w
| iki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA..., IMO blocking access
| to the whole of UK would've been a big move that could've
| been effective.
| riffraff wrote:
| As I understand it, they refer to some of the moderation tools
| and the likes, which are not part of the typical Wikipedia
| experience.
|
| Everybody including the judges seem to agree this is dumb but
| it's the current law.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I agree, it does seem odd. They do promote bits of their
| content on the main page, I assume with an algorithm, but it's
| hardly like a social media feed.
| kibwen wrote:
| Last time I checked, many many years ago, the front page was
| just an ordinary wiki page like any other, and its content
| was manually added.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Could well be manually added.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Take a look!
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&ac
| tion=...
|
| It's a large number of templates doing transclusions.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Transclusion
|
| You can have snippets like this
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Today%27s_featu
| red_a...
|
| Which shows up on the main page under featured article,
| and these pages are prepared by humans Just In Time:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:To
| day%2...
|
| A website where everything happens in public -including
| all the editing- is still kind of cool and relatively
| unique, even in 2025!.
|
| And most pages are a bit less complicated to handle than
| this. But the main page obviously gets a lot of
| attention.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| The random article button uses algorithms to decide what
| content to show to the user.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Were it my decision to make... I'd ban the UK. If they wants to
| live in the dark ages, let them.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| The Online Safety Act is a hideous piece of legislation. I hope
| Wikipedia block the UK.
|
| (I am a UK citizen).
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| Act like an authoritarian regime, get treated like other
| authoritarian regimes.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| For the record, I'm not actually against age verification for
| certain content. But it would have to be:
|
| 1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access)
| and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated
| requests or is the same user on other services).
|
| 2) widely available and extremely easy to register and
| integrate.
|
| The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or
| cheap to integrate. And the measures they say they will
| accept are trivially easy to bypass - so what's the point?
|
| I worked in a startup that satisfied point 1 back in 2015.
| The widely available bit didn't come off though when we ran
| out of runway.
| nemomarx wrote:
| there's some irony that the EU is set to have a fairly
| anonymous solution like next year. they could have waited
| or tried to use similar tech for this, in theory
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Interesting - do you have a link to it?
| nemomarx wrote:
| https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-
| policy/priorities-...
|
| It's anonymous to the sites or companies you use it with
| and not to the government, but that would still be more
| robust than the uks checks so far. it's only end of 26
| though, I thought it was at the end of this year instead.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| And that really shows the difference in how the EU
| operates Vs the UK.
|
| They see a general need which the market cannot easily
| satisfy on its own - it needs standardisation to be cheap
| and interoperable, and it needs an identity backed by a
| trusted authority. So they establish a framework and
| legislation to make that possible.
|
| The UK instead just states it's illegal not to do it, but
| without any private and not-trivially bypassed services
| available.
|
| Proactive vs reactive.
|
| It is often said that legislation tends to lag behind
| technology. At last, the UK is beating the world by
| legislating ahead of it!
| flipbrad wrote:
| This is about the Category 1 duties arriving by 2027, not
| this year's tranche of rules (such as age gating).
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| Important to note: Their anonymous solution is reported
| to be temporary until their digital ID system is
| released[1], which does not offer that same anonymity,
| but rather functions as a server-side OpenID-based
| authentication system.[2] While you can share only your
| age with an online service, it still creates an
| authorization token, which appears to remain persistent
| until manually removed by the user in the eID app. This
| would give the host of that authentication system (EU
| and/or governments) the ability to see which services you
| have shared data with, as well as a token linked to your
| account/session at that service. There is also no
| guarantee that removing an authorization will actually
| delete all that data in a non-recoverable way from the
| authentication system's servers.
|
| [1] https://itdaily.com/news/security/eu-temporary-app-
| age-verif...
|
| [2] https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-
| presentations-1...
| nemomarx wrote:
| Good catch, that does seem a lot worse. :/
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Add to that 3) Verifiable to a lay person that the system
| _truly_ has those properties, with no possibility of
| suddenly being altered to no longer have those properties
| without it exceedingly obvious.
|
| This whole concept runs into similar issues as digital
| voting systems. You don't need to just be anonymous, but it
| must be verifiably and obviously so -- even to a lay person
| (read your grandma with dementia who has never touched a
| computer in her life). It must be impossible to make
| changes to the system that remove these properties without
| users immediately notice.
|
| The only reason why paper identification has close to
| anonymous properties is the fallibility of human memory.
| You won't make a computer with those properties.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| It's easy to demonstrate (3) for an age verification
| system - practical experience will amply demonstrate it
| to everyone.
|
| Voting is very different - you do need to be able to
| demonstrate the fairness of the process verifiably to
| everyone - not just crypto nerds. Age verification -
| well, some people might get around it, but if it
| generally seems to work that is good enough.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >It's easy to demonstrate (3) for an age verification
| system - practical experience will amply demonstrate it
| to everyone.
|
| No. Absence of evidence that I am _not_ anonymous does
| not constitute evidence that I _am_ anonymous. Verifiable
| unlinkability is also difficult to prove.
|
| It may be possible to create a system like this
| technically, but all social and economic incentives that
| exist are directed against it:
|
| - An anonymous system is likely more expensive.
|
| - The public generally does not care about privacy, until
| they are personally affected.
|
| - You have no idea as a user whether the server
| components do what they say they are doing. Even if
| audited, it could change tomorrow.
|
| - Once in place its purpose can change. Can you guarantee
| that the next government will not want to modify this
| system to make identification of dissenters, protestors
| or journalists easier?
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Any well designed privacy system does not rely on the
| server components doing the right thing. Servers and
| providers and governments are the main threat actors to
| be defended against. There should be no way for third
| parties to compromise that, by design. Almost certainly
| involving advanced cryptography.
|
| Unlinkabilty and anonymity is not that hard to
| demonstrate in the design. At it's core it just means
| each proof or token is unique each time it is presented,
| and having no mathematical relation to others (and
| therefore not tied to any persistent identity either).
|
| Client implementations may need auditing of course to
| make sure they are doing the right thing. But this is not
| really different to any other advanced technical system
| which we rely on every day (e.g. TLS).
|
| As you say though, most of the public don't massively
| care about privacy (unless you mean their visits to porn
| sites I guess). But they do seem happy to accept crypto
| coin security assurances without being crypto experts.
|
| As for "the purpose can change" well - so? That is also
| true or anything else, it does not seem like a reason to
| avoid having good protection now. Any change that could
| compromise that would not be undetectable - the
| fundamental crypto should not allow it. We would know if
| it happened.
| codedokode wrote:
| Age verification should be done at the point of buying a
| laptop or a SIM card, the same way as when you buy alcohol.
| And there would be no need to send your ID to a company so
| that it ends up on the black market eventually.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| China is doing great. Not saying the UK will do well, just
| that authoritarian regimes _can_ be successful as states
| although not great for the commoners.
| FredPret wrote:
| China only started doing great when they relaxed their
| ultra-centralized economic rules a little bit in the 1990s.
|
| Read business books and news from the 80's - 90's, and they
| almost never mention China - it's all Germany, UK, Japan,
| USA. The stats tell the same story - China spent half a
| century going nowhere fast.
|
| After liberalizing their economy, China spent the 90's
| quietly growing, and only started making real waves in the
| news around 2000.
|
| All this to say that economic authoritarianism has never
| worked and there's no reason to suppose that the social
| kind is going to fare any better for anyone either.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Economic liberalism isn't really relevant to the question
| of social authoritarianism. While an enterprising
| individual in guangzhou can sell whatever he wants to the
| world without much state involvement, he can't really go
| around discussing Tibetan sovereignty for example.
| FredPret wrote:
| My current theory is that one leads to the other but
| we'll see how that works out for our friend in Guangzhou.
|
| My point is centralization doesn't work, so maybe social
| authoritarianism has deleterious cultural effects that
| will show up generations from now.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Success of authoritarian regimes depends on the competence
| (and alignment) of the leadership. Not something we have
| much of here.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| You mean have companies and organization comply with
| regulations and having their complaints ignored? I think
| that's what's happening right now.
| codedokode wrote:
| Leaving the market never works - in Russia, once another
| Western site or app gets blocked, several local competitors
| instantly pop out. That's how the market works, there are
| always people hungry for money.
| ronsor wrote:
| The Russian market is artificially distorted.
| codedokode wrote:
| China has the same story - all Western companies are
| successfully replaced with no issues (except for CPU and
| GPU vendors).
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Then let them? And the UK gets a dogshit ripoff Wikipedia.
| Authoritarian supporters suffer, that's the hard lesson
| people need to understand.
|
| This costs Wikipedia nothing - they are not funded by ads.
| And, in exchange, they don't get sued or any of their
| employees arrested.
| asah wrote:
| Won't users just go to AI summaries ?
| EasyMark wrote:
| I think the better option is wikipedia to pull all operations
| out of the UK that might be there and NOT block UK IP
| addresses. Stand up for the British people, thumb their nose at
| the British government. Let the UK put up a "Great Firewall of
| Great Britain" so the British people understand how close their
| government is flirting with fascism, while they still have time
| to remove the fascist leaning politicians.
| alt227 wrote:
| Unfortunately, pretty much all politicians from all parties
| supported this law. They are as easy to scare with the 'think
| of the children' argument as the rest of the population are.
| blibble wrote:
| if they block the UK, 20 UK specific copies will spring up
| overnight
|
| it will achieve absolutely nothing, except to destroy their
| "market share"
| Aloisius wrote:
| It would shield them from legal liability which is more than
| nothing.
|
| That is the primary reason to ban UK visitors.
|
| They do seem to be considering banning only users after the 7
| millionth - 1 visitor every month to avoid being classified
| as category 1 instead. That would let them avoid some of the
| most onerous parts of the OSA that would require stripping
| anonymity from editors and censoring whatever Ofcom says is
| "misinformation" and "disinformation."
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Kind of funny after the authors of the law complained service
| providers were interpreting it overzealously.
|
| No, if Wikipedia falls under it anything meaningful does. You
| have once again failed to understand the internet.
| tzs wrote:
| Many sites were overzealously interpreting it.
|
| The difficulty of compliance depends on both how big the size
| is and the kind of site it is. Many small site overlooked both
| of those factors.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Again if it has to be applied to Wikipedia there's nothing
| meaningful beyond a static informational site it wouldn't
| apply to.
| tzs wrote:
| The overzealous interpretations where not over whether or
| not it applied. They were over what the providers would
| have to do to comply. That depends greatly on the amount of
| traffic the site gets and the type of content that is on
| the site.
| foldr wrote:
| We don't yet know how OFCOM will categorize Wikipedia. This
| was a preemptive legal action.
| vaylian wrote:
| Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can
| edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false
| information. But it's also Wikipedia's greatest strength that it
| has been so open to basically everyone and that gave us a wide
| range of really good articles that rivaled the Encyclopedia
| Britannica.
|
| Wikipedia is a product of the free internet. It is a product of a
| world that many politicians still don't understand. But those
| politicians still make laws that do not make sense, because they
| believe that something has to be done against those information
| crimes. And they also do it to score brownie points with their
| conservative voting base.
|
| The internet has it's problems, no doubt about that. But what
| these laws do is to throw the baby out with the bath water.
| Actually, the water probably stays in, because it's not like
| those laws solve anything.
| RobKohr wrote:
| I feel that the left and the right are tag teaming on this
| topic. Both sides want to track who says what on the internet
| for their own purposes.
| taraindara wrote:
| I'll add to this, no politician is on your side unless it
| means getting your vote to keep them in power. It's hard to
| be an actual good person and get too far up in politics,
| especially in today's environment.
|
| So, yes, I believe they both want tracking to exist, because
| they both benefit massively from it.
| yndoendo wrote:
| I would add, some politicians are on your side on select
| matters, most are not.
|
| Sad thing is people ignore a politician's actions and keep
| applying Yes or No to their marketing statements. They use
| social engineering wording just to get votes and then they
| will ignore that standing to support their own action of
| legislation crafting and voting.
|
| By block and limiting access to information, such as
| Wikipedia, they are advocating for a dumb populous. Irony
| is that in order to have a strong national security, an
| educated populous is needed. They are the ones see beyond
| the easily deployed social engineering tactics and are
| better at filtering out misinformation.
| popopo73 wrote:
| I think it is a bit simpler than that.
|
| People don't like their worldview challenged, no matter their
| ideology.
|
| Politicians exploit this by offering ways to "help", but at
| the cost of transferring more power away from the people.
| qcnguy wrote:
| At the moments at least, it's Labour who are defending this
| law and implementing it, and Reform who are against it. So
| very much not a tag team.
| bakugo wrote:
| > And they also do it to score brownie points with their
| conservative voting base.
|
| Care to remind me what side of the political spectrum was
| desperately trying to silence all health-related discourse that
| did not match the government's agenda just a few years ago?
| vaylian wrote:
| By "conservative" I mean less digitally-minded people who are
| typically older. You have these people on the left, in the
| center and on the right along the classical political axis.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone
| can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false
| information._
|
| But the top articles are always perma-locked and under
| curation. Considering how much traffic those articles receive
| relative to the more esoteric articles, the surface area of
| vandalizable articles that a user is exposed to is relatively
| low. Also to that end, vandalism has a low effort-to-impact
| ratio.
| callc wrote:
| n=1 I've used Wikipedia for many years with no immediately
| noticeable false information. And of course all the "citation
| needed" marks are there. I trust Wikipedia to be correct, I
| expect it to be correct, and Wikipedia has earned my trust.
| Maybe I don't read it enough to see any vandalism.
|
| Compared to LLMs, it's extremely striking to see the relative
| trust / faith people have in it. It's pretty sad to see how
| little the average person values truth and correctness in
| these systems, how untrusted Wikipedia is to some, and how
| overly-trusted LLMs are in producing factually correct
| information to others.
| account42 wrote:
| No false information doesn't mean there isn't any bias. The
| same facts can be used to come to wildly different
| conclusions and can also just be omitted when inconvenient.
| simplyluke wrote:
| Attributing the actions being taken by the UK (and much of the
| EU) to a lack of understanding is a quite generous
| interpretation. That may have been true a generation ago, but
| it's not now.
|
| Many of us think that they understand a free internet very
| well, specifically the threats it places on their uses (and
| abuses) of power, and that the laws are quite well designed to
| curtail that. The UK currently, without identity verification,
| arrests 30 people per day for things they say online.
| tommica wrote:
| > world that many politicians still don't understand. But those
| politicians still make laws that do not make sense,
|
| Nah, politicians understand it, they just understand it
| differently than us do - and they make laws in accordance to
| that understanding.
|
| Don't give them the same excuse you give to children, they are
| adults.
| p3rls wrote:
| i run a pretty large wiki, few mill users a month, and will be
| ignoring these laws. i'm from the US for reference.
| bArray wrote:
| > The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's
| judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the
| Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".
|
| Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for _some_.
|
| > In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties
| required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it
| would have to verify the identity of its contributors,
| undermining their privacy and safety.
|
| Some of the articles, which contain factual information, are
| damning for the UK government. It lists, for example, political
| scandals [1] [2]. Or information regarding hot topics such as
| immigration [3], information that the UK government want to
| strictly control (abstracting away from whether this is
| rightfully or wrongfully).
|
| I can tell you what will (and has already) happened as a result:
|
| 1. People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid
| restrictions placed on them.
|
| 2. The next government will take great delight in removing this
| law as an easy win.
|
| 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which
| would somewhat bind future parliaments.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_in_...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Labour_Party_(UK)_sca...
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...
| drawfloat wrote:
| The law was passed by the previous government and everyone
| assumed the next government would take great delight in
| reversing it.
|
| I wouldn't be so sure that any next government (which, by the
| way, there is still a non zero chance could be Labour) will
| necessarily reverse this. Maybe Reform would tweak the topics,
| but I'm not convinced any party can be totally trusted to
| reverse this.
| adamm255 wrote:
| If the current government reversed it, the 'oh think of the
| children' angle from the Tories/Reform against them would be
| relentless. I cant say they have been amazing at messaging as
| it is.
| weavejester wrote:
| The current leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform
| are on record as being against the Act. While this doesn't
| preclude them changing their mind, it does make it more
| difficult for them to reverse course.
| petre wrote:
| They will reverse it when politicians visiting pron sites
| are exposed through a leak or something. Everybody else
| uses VPNs.
| tomkarho wrote:
| Politicians already use VPN and even expense it. They've
| got their ducks in a row.
| mrandish wrote:
| > I wouldn't be so sure that any next government will
| necessarily reverse this.
|
| Agreed. I think the supposed justifications for mass
| population-wide online surveillance, restrictions and de-
| anonymization are so strong most political parties in western
| democracies go along with what surveillance agencies push for
| once they get in power. Even in the U.S. where free speech &
| personal privacy rights are constitutionally and culturally
| stronger, both major parties are virtually identical in what
| they actually permit the surveillance state to do once they
| get in office (despite sometimes talking differently while
| campaigning).
|
| The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten
| extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of
| supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone",
| or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't
| spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings. They
| keep these presentations secret from public and press
| scrutiny by claiming it's necessary to keep "sources and
| methods" secret from adversaries. Of course, this is
| ridiculous because adversary spy agencies are certainly
| already aware of the broad capabilities of our electronic
| surveillance - it's their job after all and they do the same
| things to their own populations. The intelligence community
| rarely briefs politicians on individual operations or the
| exact details of the sources and methods which adversarial
| intelligence agencies would care about anyway. The vast
| majority of these secret briefings could be public without
| revealing anything of real value to major adversaries. At
| most it would only confirm we're doing the things adversaries
| already assume we're doing (and already take steps to
| counter). The real reason they hide the politician briefings
| from the public is because voters would be creeped out by the
| pervasive surveillance and domain experts would call bullshit
| on the incomplete facts and fallacious reasoning used to
| justify it to politicians.
|
| Even if a politician sincerely intended to preserve privacy
| and freedom before getting in office, they aren't domain
| experts and when confronted with seemingly overwhelming (but
| secret) evidence of preventing "big bad" presented
| unanimously by intelligence community experts, the majority
| of elected officials go along. If that's not enough for the
| anti-privacy agencies (intel & law enforcement) to get what
| they want, there's always the "think of the children"
| arguments. It's the rare politician who's clear-thinking and
| principled enough to apply appropriate skepticism and
| measured nuance when faced with horrendous examples of child
| porn and abuse which the law enforcement/intelligence agency
| lobby has ready in ample supply and deploys behind closed
| doors for maximum effect. The anti-privacy lobby has figured
| out how to hack representative democracy to circumvent
| protections and because it's done away from public scrutiny,
| there's currently no way to stop them and it's only going to
| keep getting worse. IMHO, it's a disaster and even in the
| U.S. (where I am) it's only slightly better than the UK,
| Australia, EU and elsewhere.
| autoexec wrote:
| > The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten
| extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples
| of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on
| everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because
| we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public
| briefings.
|
| Those politicians who are vocal against mass surveillance
| tend to change their tune the moment they're in office and
| I doubt they were all intending to go back on their
| campaign promises from the start or that they were really
| convinced by horror stories of terrorists told over
| powerpoint in closed door briefings.
|
| I wouldn't doubt if they were also giving politicians
| examples of the kind of dirt they already have on them and
| their families. This is one of the biggest risks of the
| surveillance state. Endless blackmail material made up of
| actual skeletons, as well as the resources to install new
| ones into anyone's closets whenever needed.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Do what we say or we might get a warrant and find that
| stash of CP that we installed on your hard drive. How do
| you even defend against planted digital evidence? It
| would be easy to fake and very difficult to disprove.
|
| But when it comes to politicians and people with power, I
| think it's even worse than all of that. It's kind of
| obvious what Mr Epstein was getting up to with regard to
| blackmail.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > How do you even defend against planted digital
| evidence?
|
| With your good name. In the end, it is not important what
| the politician had or did not have on the disk, but who
| the public will believe more, the secret services, who
| claim that there was something there, or the politician,
| who claims that he is being set up and groundlessly
| persecuted for the purpose of political pressure.
|
| And as long as public opinion about the special services
| is what it is, politicians can safely stash CP on their
| disks without fear that they will be charged with
| anything even if they are found.
| hopelite wrote:
| You're dismissing something way more complicated. Many
| people with good names have supposedly had CP hoards. How
| would you even go about checking out confirming that it
| even is CP? You can't, and would you even want to look
| into that? No, of course not.
|
| Frankly, it could even just be made up. How would you
| know? I'm sure in most cases it is true and correct, but
| with as much corruption in every and all aspects of
| policing and justice, there is absolutely zero chance
| that when it involves something with such huge and hidden
| levers as CP, that there would be zero corruption. Cops
| still plant drugs on people even though they know they
| are on body cam and they still shoot people to death for
| no reason and are simply absolved by the system that
| protects itself; you don't think that the black box of CP
| accusation that no one wants to or can look into is not
| used for corrupt reasons?
|
| The whole system is rotten and corrupt, why wouldn't it
| be corrupt in this case where there is a huge lever and
| no one dares look into it?
| account42 wrote:
| I bet you have never witnessed someone being accused of
| even a much less severe social taboo. They won't even be
| given the chance to defend themselves.
| Ray20 wrote:
| I don't think it's blackmailing. Total surveillance by
| itself is just a great tool (when you have it in your
| hands). Why give it up?
| john01dav wrote:
| If these claims are accurate, then the solution is obvious:
| elected officials who are themselves domain experts in
| this. They can then explain to their colleagues why these
| arguments are bullshit.
|
| But, I expect that that won't help because your claims
| don't tell the while story. Most representatives don't act
| in good faith and like the government that they're a part
| of having such power.
| Ray20 wrote:
| Why do you think politicians are idiots?
|
| Yes, many of them are really stupid people. But they are
| not idiots. I think 95 percent of them are perfectly aware
| of why the laws they pass are really needed. And they pass
| them EXACTLY FOR THIS, and not at all for protecting
| children and internet safety.
| hopelite wrote:
| There irony is that people who call politicians stupid
| are generally not very smart people themselves in my
| experience, regardless of various forms of advanced
| degrees they believe disproves that.
|
| They may be puppets, they may be manipulators, they may
| be con-artists, they may be liars; but what does it say
| about oneself if an "idiot" managed to become one of a
| few hundred most powerful humans on this planet and in
| all of human history (in the case of an American
| politician) and you did not?
| imtringued wrote:
| Considering the average age and net worth of American
| politicians. I certainly know that it is almost exclusive
| to rich old men.
| account42 wrote:
| Why do you think politicians look out for what is "really
| needed" rather than what is beneficial to themselves.
| Ray20 wrote:
| What do you mean "why"? They do not.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| A big problem is private entities do so much spying, it
| becomes hard to argue against.
|
| We collect tons of data on people to sell ads. Why not to
| save children?
| autoexec wrote:
| Governments do seem to hate weakening their power over the
| population.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| If Wiki had the guts it'd leave the UK. Nothing will happen
| unless there's a backlash from the citizenry.
| verisimi wrote:
| Wiki isn't the citizenry.
|
| And no one voted for this.
|
| When one votes in this so-called "democracy", one votes
| for a representative to represent 'you and thousands of
| others' on thousands of decisions.
|
| And even then, if both parties want to do something, as
| in this case, there is nowhere to go.
|
| This is force. If you can't say 'no', this is immoral,
| coercive force, even if the person or party doing the
| forcing says it isn't.
|
| And no, the forcer (government) won't give back freedoms
| (the right to privacy) that it takes away.
|
| In the end, the only moral, respectful and free way to
| proceed, without force, ie where people opt in.
| Individuals would opt in/out to paying tax for
| wars/schools/online safety, etc.
|
| "But it is impossible that everyone should be allowed to
| only opt in to the decisions they like!" .. is only the
| case because we think it is normal to endlessly abused by
| governments and because so many citizens are dependent on
| its handouts.
| novok wrote:
| They are not, but they are central resource that the
| citizenry uses. If enough of the internet enters an
| embargo with the UK, they will probably capitulate
| because more and more of the citizenry will realize what
| is happening, be greatly inconvenienced, reduce the UK's
| GDP and complain. IMO I hope more big websites do block
| the UK.
| bratbag wrote:
| The libertarian fantasy where its possible to exist
| without the choices of others impacting you, doesn't work
| in the real world.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| True, but in the UK (and many other so-called
| democracies) it's not fellow citizens/voters who impact
| our lives the most.
|
| Rather, it's vested and sectional interests who control
| power and or have the most effective means to bring the
| citizenry around to their way of thinking.
|
| As Chomsky would put it, these few have the means to
| manufacture consent.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Wiki isn't the citizenry."_
|
| I never said or implied it was. If Wiki packed up and
| deserted the UK we'd have an actual measure of the
| opposition. At the moment we don't.
|
| _" When one votes in this so-called "democracy", one
| votes for a representative to represent 'you and
| thousands of others' on thousands of decisions."_
|
| I'm well aware of that. Also the argument that a
| politician when in government gets to see a broader
| picture than his or her constituency and thus may vote
| against its (narrower/sectional) wishes.
|
| I'd also remind you of the perils of voting against the
| wishes of one's constituency. The famous case of the
| conservative Edmund Burke the Member for Bristol
| illustrates the point. He was summarily booted out at the
| following election for voting against the wishes of his
| voters.
|
| If Wiki leaves it'll polarize the electorate, we'll then
| see what happens. If Wiki stays with some mushy
| compromise the issue won't be resolved.
|
| At the moment democracy isn't working properly which
| allows vested and sectional interests to slip in and rule
| (and in this respect the UK is arguably the worst).
|
| The other point is nothing frightens government more than
| truly angry voters. Trouble is, UK voters are so under
| the thumb of government they're frightened to show who is
| actually in charge in a democracy. De facto, the gnomes
| and bureaucrats rule.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| The way this works is that the backlash would be directed
| at Wikipedia.
|
| Your average citizen neither knows nor cares about the
| legislative landscape - they just know that the daily
| mail says Wikipedia hates the U.K. and is staffed by
| communists.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Can't they make it so that anyone from that geographical
| location is required to prove their identity and log in
| to view the articles? That seems like it'd be sufficient
| and sure I'd be annoyed at Wikipedia but if they linked
| to the law I feel like people would get it.
|
| Of course now no one needs to visit Wikipedia because
| Google has already scraped them with AI so you can just
| see the maybe accurate summary. Seems risky, as if you
| should have to log in to use Google since the AI might
| have forbidden information.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Given the size of Google, I'm not sure if/how they're
| excluded from this and may actually ask for real
| identities of UK users they don't already "know" via
| other means of Google Wallet, etc.
| monooso wrote:
| Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted
| _against_ it.
|
| Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements
| like:
|
| > I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he's going
| to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there
| who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling
| violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.
|
| It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me
| in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| > The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the
| position of defending Nigel Farage.
|
| I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to
| choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes
| disengagement feel like the only moderate move.
| ozim wrote:
| Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for
| lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better
| for the future.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| > Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for
| lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better
| for the future.
|
| Always go for your gut feeling, not for what people are
| blaring. Especially populists will, as the name suggest,
| crave for people's attention and a cheap "Yeah, they are
| totally right!". That's how they win elections. And three
| months into the new period, they will show their real
| intentions.
| bigfudge wrote:
| Surely gut feelings are how we get populists voted in?
| I'd prefer people sat and thought carefully for a while
| than trusted their gut!
| MrGilbert wrote:
| I directly addressed the "feelings" OP was having.
|
| Besides, the past has shown that facts are opinions for
| some folks, so even that would not work.
|
| My advice assumes a mentally stable person with somewhat
| modest reasoning.
| Jolter wrote:
| "The lesser evil" is the essence of any two-party system.
| Which I would somewhat facetiously classify the UK system
| as. Abolish "first past the post" and introduce
| proportional representation now!
| bell-cot wrote:
| Disagree. _If_ the society is essentially "broken", with
| little sense of everyone working together to build and
| secure a positive future, _then_ two-party systems can
| degenerate into "but they're even worse!" races to the
| bottom.
|
| But in better circumstances, there is enormous social
| pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much
| higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the
| nation toward a positive future.
|
| (Yes, I think that political reform could be of some use
| in the UK. Some. The underlying problems would mostly
| remain.)
| Jolter wrote:
| I would say that what you wrote in the first two
| paragraphs is all equally true of a system with
| proportional representation. But you'd avoid a lot of
| problems:
|
| - people in "safe" constituencies being permanently
| represented by an MP from an opposing party, with no
| recourse except for moving
|
| - policies that constantly pander to voters in "swing"
| constituencies
|
| - the two major parties constantly triangulating their
| policies around the center, rather than voters moving
| their votes to the party representing their opinions,
| which ensures that government is always centrist or near-
| centrist
|
| Etc -- these are just my pet peeves about the US and UK
| systems, I know there are more.
|
| Plus, I think it's good if a system is more robust
| against loss of trust that you mentioned. You could argue
| that in the UK, society hasn't yet been broken, but
| looking at the US, don't you think it's better not to
| have that vulnerability?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But in better circumstances, there is enormous social
| pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much
| higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the
| nation toward a positive future.
|
| No, there isn't, and comparative study of democracies has
| shown that there is a pretty direct relationship between
| effective degree of proportionality and a wide range of
| positive democratic outcome measures, as well as
| producing a richer national dialogue.
|
| A two-party system doesn't just break down into an us-v-
| them negative dialogue in bad conditions (it pretty much
| gets permanently stuck there because _it works_ in a two-
| party system, and it is consistently easier than deepe
| discussion of issues), it also narrows the space of of
| potential solution sets that are even available for
| discussion to an approximation of a one-dimensional
| space. Multiparty proportional systems leader to a search
| space with greater dimensionality, as well as making
| "well, they are worse" politicking generally ineffective.
| mrmlz wrote:
| Sweden has more parties than two and it's the lesser evil
| here as well - in what world would a party perfectly
| align to every single thing you like?
| Jolter wrote:
| It is far, far more likely that you can get most of your
| opinions represented in a parliament with 8 parties than
| one with 2 or 3.
|
| In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with "new" or
| fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and
| won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on
| these issues:
|
| - Christianity - Environmentalism - Racism/populism -
| Internet freedom/privacy - Feminism - Racism/populism,
| again
|
| Most of these have had their issues adopted by larger
| parties through triangulation, and thus shrunk away to
| nothing, while others persist to this day (christianity,
| environmentalism, racism).
|
| I think if you tried to start a new labor party in the UK
| today, you should not expect to win any seats. Likewise
| if you attempted what the Swedish Feminist Initiative
| did. But I hope I'm about to be proven wrong on the first
| point.
| pastage wrote:
| The christianity party in Sweden could have been
| classified as "rascist" because that is how they voted
| many times, but they also had a humanist streak which
| took over in a lot of issues they engaged in.
|
| I find these changes in tides between parties
| interesting. Populism is only applicable on specific
| takes issues not parties.
| Jolter wrote:
| I agree regarding the Christian Democrats.
|
| But wouldn't you agree that both NYD and SD were both
| founded on populist principles? Apart from racism,
| neither had any clear cut policies when they started, yet
| they both got pretty massive boosts from their populist
| streaks. I think the populist label on them is pretty
| well established by policy researchers. It's in the first
| sentence on both parties' Swedish Wikipedia pages.
| mongol wrote:
| I don't think the racist label applied to Ny Demokrati is
| clear cut. It turned out that some of their elected
| representatives acted this way, but it was not part of
| their message or program as they won their seats. I see
| it as more a side effect of quickly populating a party
| with members without proper wetting.
|
| As background, this party was founded about 8 months
| before the election in 1991, almost like a fluke. It was
| not a grass roots movement, but by charismatic founders
| that quickly had to build an organisation around some
| hollow ideas about less bureaucracy and lower taxes.
| Jolter wrote:
| You're right! And you've written up a very good
| description of the concept of a fundamentally populist
| party.
| mongol wrote:
| Yes, Ny Demokrati was textbook populist. Can't think of a
| better example
| mrmlz wrote:
| My point being - i might agree with SDs migration policy
| and not much else. I might agree on Ms taxcuts etc. etc.
| But I still have to pick and chose the lesser evil.
|
| Maybe 8 parties narrows the lesser evil down a bit.. But
| they all end up in coalition anyway so I'm pretty sure i
| get the same amount of evil as in a 2-party system.
| account42 wrote:
| It's the essence of any representative democracy - you'd
| need as many parties as there are citizens for everyone
| to be able to vote for one that truly represents their
| views on all relevant topics.
| Jolter wrote:
| True, but please see my reply to the sibling comment.
|
| I suppose when choosing between electoral systems, the
| choice is indeed a matter of the lesser of two evils!
| eru wrote:
| That might be true in some theory, in practice you can
| find reasonably good alignment for most people at five or
| six viable parties.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Kier Starmer seems to be doing everything an
| establishment plant would - an establishment that really
| doesn't like the idea of a Labour government.
| eru wrote:
| Are you somehow suggesting that Labour isn't (or shoudn't
| be) part of the establishment?
|
| Labour has been part of the reigning duopoly in British
| politics for most of the last 100 years. How could they
| not be part of the establishment?
| johnisgood wrote:
| http://anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm still gets
| down-voted here, but perhaps we will finally see more
| people realizing that it is true, as it always has been.
|
| You talk about the lesser evil here, well, it is exactly
| what is written there.
|
| Some parts quoted:
|
| > Democracy suffers from many more inherent
| contradictions as well. Thus, democratic voting may have
| either one of these two functions: to determine
| governmental policy or to select rulers. According to the
| former, what Schumpeter termed the "classical" theory of
| democracy, the majority will is supposed to rule on
| issues.[23] According to the latter theory, majority rule
| is supposed to be confined to choosing rulers, who in
| turn decide policy. While most political scientists
| support the latter version, democracy means the former
| version to most people, and we shall therefore discuss
| the classical theory first.
|
| > According to the "will of the people" theory, direct
| democracy--voting on each issue by all the citizens, as
| in New England town meetings--is the ideal political
| arrangement. Modern civilization and the complexities of
| society, however, are supposed to have outmoded direct
| democracy, so that _we must settle for the less perfect_
| "representative democracy" (in olden days often called a
| "republic"), where the people select representatives to
| give effect to their will on political issues. Logical
| problems arise almost immediately. One is that different
| forms of electoral arrangements, different delimitations
| of geographical districts, all equally arbitrary, will
| often greatly alter the picture of the "majority will."
| [...]
|
| See the italic bit ("we must settle for the less
| perfect").
|
| He talks about IMO the greatest contradictions after this
| part:
|
| > But even proportional representation would not be as
| good--according to the classical view of democracy--as
| direct democracy, and here we come to another important
| and neglected consideration: modern technology does make
| it possible to have direct democracy. Certainly, each man
| could easily vote on issues several times per week by
| recording his choice on a device attached to his
| television set. This would not be difficult to achieve.
| And yet, why has no one seriously suggested a return to
| direct democracy, now that it may be feasible?
|
| The whole thing is worth a read with an open mind.
| Gormo wrote:
| One of the biggest problems with a lot of the modern
| theory of democracy is that it sees democratic mechanisms
| as being not just necessary but _sufficient_ to justify
| any action undertaken by the state.
|
| Another major problem is the lack of clear bounding
| principles to distinguish public questions from private
| ones (or _universal_ public questions from public
| questions particular to a localized context).
|
| Together these problems result in political processes
| that (a) treats every question as global problem
| affecting society an undifferentiated mass, and (b) uses
| majoritarianism applied to arbitrary, large-scale
| aggregations of people as means of answering those
| questions.
|
| This leads to concepts like "one man, one vote" implying
| that everyone should have an equal say on every question
| regardless of the _stake_ any given individual might have
| in the outcome of that question.
|
| And that, in turn, leads to the dominant influence on
| every question -- in either mode of democracy Rothbard
| refers to -- being not the people who face the greatest
| impact from the answer, nor the people who understand its
| details the best, but rather vast numbers of people who
| really have no basis for any meaningful opinions in the
| first place.
|
| _Every_ question comes down to opposing parties trying
| to win over uninformed, disinterested voters through
| spurious arguments and vague appeals to emotion. Public
| choice theory hits the nail on the head here, and this is
| why the policy equilibrium in every modern political
| state is a dysfunctional mess of special-interest causes
| advanced at everyone else 's expense.
|
| Democracy is necessary, but not sufficient. And I think
| the particular genius of the American approach has been
| to embed democracy within a constitutional framework that
| attempts to define clear lines regarding what is a public
| question open to political answers and what is not. The
| more we erode that framework, the more the reliability of
| our institutions will fray.
| eru wrote:
| Vote with your feet (and wallet).
| Roark66 wrote:
| And that is exactly how someone like Trump could win
| (there are worse people than Nigel Farage). I'm amazed
| people have not thrown out these two parties in the UK
| already. Yes, the voting system makes it hard, but not
| impossible. It happened before.
|
| However, I think the key reason why Conservatives and
| Labour are so entrenched is that people make their voting
| habits a part of their identity. I had a number of face
| to face conversations about politics with people born and
| raised in the UK. Every single one agreed with me about
| many stupid things the back then conservative govt pushed
| (the idea to ban encryption and more). And every single
| one of them said they will continue voting Conservative.
| Why? Because this is who they are. It's a part of their
| family identity (being quite well off financially, having
| expensive education etc). And they only see two choices,
| with the other being much worse.
|
| This is how democracies die. They even agreed with this
| being far from optimal, but they see no other option.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| That was true until recently, but in the last 12 months
| it's all cracked wide open.
|
| Reform are leading in the polls, the lib dems are picking
| up disaffected tory wets, new left wing parties are
| threatening labour from the left on gaza etc.
|
| A long time until the next election but right now it's
| all to play for
| bigfudge wrote:
| But this essentially has to collapse down to 2 or 3
| parties unless these preferences are for graphically
| concentrated. Which they don't seem to be. Reform might
| wipe out the tories with Lib Dem's cleaning up the
| scraps, but that doesn't really move us forward. In fact
| it's likely to entrench the moderate left into holding
| their nose and voting labour?
| ifwinterco wrote:
| Yes, with first past the post it will probably get pretty
| messy. Right now Reform are polling so well they would
| get a majority, but I'm not sure they'll sustain that
| until 2029, and whether they'll actually fix anything is
| questionable.
|
| My gut sense is labour have pissed off people (including
| or perhaps especially the left) so badly that they are
| toast at this point. Those left wing votes are up for
| grabs by anyone who makes a decent case for them
| account42 wrote:
| Oh no not Trump. We wouldn't want that, better vote for
| the other extreme who will end up passing largely the
| same kind of laws but with slightly different excuses.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Why? People make all kinds of empty promises to get into
| power.
| Lio wrote:
| True but all the other parties are currently saying that
| they 100% will not reconsider this stupid law[1].
|
| I don't like Farrage. At all.
|
| He's also currently the only MP questioning this law and
| he's making fair points about it.
|
| The government response is not a clever rebuttal but Jess
| Philips and Peter Kyle making ad hominem arguments
| comparing him to one of the nastiest people in our
| country's history.
|
| This is government overreach and they know it.
|
| 1. It's stupid not because of its goals but because it
| doesn't protect kids but does expose vast numbers of
| adults to identity fraud just to access Spotify or
| wikipedia.
| vixen99 wrote:
| > Don't like Farage. At all I love the way folk feel they
| have to apologize to HN users (guess which way the
| majority lean) when they recognize someone like Farage
| has a point.
| phatfish wrote:
| Spotify has my PI already. Wikipedia I was using today as
| normal.
|
| The only people moaning about this are the ones ashamed
| of jerking off. Just own it, and this issue goes away.
| Who cares if a random company has your mug shot to do an
| age estimation, they know you jerk off, so what?
|
| Just keep porn away from your kids please and let's hope
| we do better for the next generation.
| Lio wrote:
| > _The only people moaning about this are the ones
| ashamed of jerking off. Just own it, and this issue goes
| away. Who cares if a random company has your mug shot to
| do an age estimation, they know you jerk off, so what?_
|
| Sorry but that misses the point. This isn't about porn or
| being embarrased about it. It's about having to present
| identification to gain access many different types of
| site.
|
| We now have the situation where a site, any kind doesn't
| have to be porn, can look legitimate and ask for required
| personal identifcation but actually be a run fraudsters.
|
| You might personally have an issue identifying sites like
| that many adults will and once they're handed over a copy
| of their passport or drivers licence they are in for a
| lot of trouble.
| globular-toast wrote:
| They're all using it to virtue signal their hatred of child
| porn. It's basically religious at this point. You stray
| from the line and someone just shouts infidel and you get
| stoned to death.
|
| Unfortunately the atheism movement of a about ten years ago
| didn't go far enough in making people aware that religion
| isn't just about big men in the sky who are the same colour
| as you. What it actually is is a deficiency in human
| ability, a bypass for the logical centres of the brain and
| a way to access the animal areas that can get people to do
| terrible things to each other. Some of them, like Hitchens,
| definitely understood this, but nobody seems to be talking
| about it any more and we didn't learn to be vigilant of
| this deficiency.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > Some of them, like Hitchens, definitely understood this
|
| He seemed pretty fixated on "monotheism" being a
| particular problem, as though two gods were fine.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Did it occur to you they only voted against it because they
| knew it would pass anyway, so they could afford scoring
| some brownie points?
| c16 wrote:
| That's not necessarily a position you have to fight. You
| can also take the standpoint that if the UK government
| can't protect your private data, then how can a data
| provider. There are many such cases:
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-06/h
| acker...
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/nov/21/immigr
| ation...
|
| [3]
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/britains-
| nh...
| ChrisRR wrote:
| I genuinely thought that Farage would finally fuck off
| after brexit happened. I hadn't really figured that he's in
| it for the attention rather than the politics
| philipallstar wrote:
| He did. He came back about 6 years later because
| immigration was up not down.
| fakedang wrote:
| UKIP was dead when BoJo was in power. But of course, the
| Tories under May, BoJo and Sunak amped up immigration to
| record levels, so now there's a stronger case for Farage
| to contest. While UKIP was largely about Euroscepticism,
| Reform has openly racist undertones in their pitch to
| voters.
| toyg wrote:
| _> UKIP was largely about Euroscepticism_
|
| Or rather euroscepticism was the dog-whistling for racist
| arguments that, since Brexit happened, don't need to
| camouflage anymore.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the
| position of defending Nigel Farage.
|
| It's the UK's Stop Making Me Defend Trump[0].
|
| [0] https://pjmedia.com/charlie-martin/2017/01/20/stop-
| making-me...
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| Ugh, that quote is a disgusting way to argue. It's akin to
| saying that all vegetarians are nazis because Hitler was a
| vegetarian.
| bratbag wrote:
| They voted against it because they thought it didn't go far
| enough.
| monooso wrote:
| Do you have any sources for that? I'm genuinely
| interested. I've heard it mentioned before as fact, but a
| quick search of Hansard[1][2] only turned up one very
| vocal Labour politician (Alex Davies-Jones).
|
| [1] https://hansard.parliament.uk/ [2] It was a _very_
| quick search.
| lambdas wrote:
| The only time a labour majority voted against this bill was
| when an amendment to make category 1 sites have optional
| controls for users (something that would have prevented
| this).
|
| I'm going to guess that our MP's are tech illiterate enough
| as it is, that when an opaque term like "what is a category
| 1" came up, someone hand waved over it and said "think
| Facebook or Twitter"
| stephen_g wrote:
| What? I can't imagine _anybody_ who was paying attention
| through any of this would have expected that Starmer 's
| Labour would reverse this...
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > The law was passed by the previous government and everyone
| assumed the next government would take great delight in
| reversing it.
|
| Unless a law is a mortal threat to the current party in
| power, it will not be repelled. Even so most likely they will
| try to wash it down instead of actually abolishing it.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Unless a law is a mortal threat to the current party in
| power, it will not be repelled."_
|
| Trouble is, like the frog in warming water, the UK is by a
| series of steps falling into ever-increasing irrelevancy on
| the world stage. By the time it wakes up to the fact it'll
| be too late.
| gpderetta wrote:
| They voted against it because they thought it was not strong
| enough [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-
| pl...
| captainbland wrote:
| I think something like reversing it in one specific domain
| (e.g. softcore porn or static images). Then retooling it so
| it applies to e.g. people viewing info on immigration rights
| etc. is likely on the cards.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| A British constitution makes no sense, power is delegated from
| the king not from the member states like in the US or Canada.
| The only way the UK could end up with a constitution that's
| meaningful and not performative would be after a civil war.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Reboot doesn't mean improvement.
| Y_Y wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin.
| ..
|
| It may not make sense to you, but they've been arguing
| constitutional law there for hundreds of years.
|
| Plenty of monarchies also have modern single-document
| constitutions, like Norway, Spain and Thailand.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| And a significant part of the Canadian constitution is now
| codified and entrenched in ways that no single one of the
| federal or provincial parliaments across Canada can freely
| amend, albeit not in a single document, even though Canada
| shares the same King as the UK. No reason the UK couldn't
| do it - the UK Parliament itself even enacted the
| fundamental constitutional structure that Canada now has,
| at Canada's request, and in the same act removed its own
| power to legislate for Canada going forward.
|
| (Canada had previously deferred its assumption of the power
| to amend its own constitution without asking the UK to do
| it until it figured out what replacement arrangement it
| wanted, which took half a century and the requesting
| Canadian government still very controversially did not win
| the assent of or even consult Quebec before proceeding.)
|
| With that said, there is an important structural
| difference: Canada is a true federal state rather than a
| unitary one like the UK which merely has some nonexclusive
| and constrained devolution to three subordinate parliaments
| within specific scopes. Every single bit of the Canadian
| constitution is indeed freely amendable by enough of the
| eleven Canadian federal or provincial parliaments working
| together. Certain specific parts can indeed be amended
| unilaterally by one parliament, but many parts need a much
| larger level of consensus, up to and including unanimity.
|
| This means that the Canadian situation is not really a
| counterexample to the claim that the UK parliament would
| necessarily retain full amendment rights if it did codify a
| constitution, since the UK parliament is most similar in
| authority not to the Canadian federal parliament but to all
| eleven federal or provincial Canadian parliaments combined,
| which collectively do retain full amendment flexibility if
| they can all agree as required.
|
| However, some provinces refuse to ratify amendments without
| a referendum, and the country has a lot of trauma from past
| failed attempts to make major constitutional amendments
| such that they mostly don't attempt them any more, so the
| eleven parliaments have de facto lost some of their
| collective parliamentary supremacy even if they have not
| lost it de jure.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| The Thai monarch actually has power though which makes the
| constitution meaningful. A constitution between two parties
| where one has no power is meaningless.
| fmbb wrote:
| It is the British monarchy that is performative, not their
| democracy.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Ironically, while I am absolutely not a monarchist, it
| provides a kind of stability to British democracy, because
| it mostly transcends party politics, unlike other
| presidential systems.
|
| Indeed, the founding fathers of the US identified political
| parties as a threat to their republic.
| zdragnar wrote:
| And yet, there were defacto political parties in the
| delightfully misnamed federalist and anti-federalists. It
| was this divide that led to the first political parties.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Oh, they cannot be avoided really, except by a system
| where party allegiance cannot influence the choice (like
| hereditary power).
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Arrow's theorem would cause them to emerge even then.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _this divide that led to the first political parties_
|
| Maybe in Britain. Parties were definitely a thing going
| back to Roman politics.
| zdragnar wrote:
| No, I meant in the newborn US. The OP founding fathers
| reference is Hamilton and the Federalists who feared the
| harms of political parties, but ultimately couldn't
| reconcile with the anti-federalists who ultimately formed
| the democratic-republican party.
| speerer wrote:
| We already have a constitution. It just isn't a written
| constitution:
|
| > The United Kingdom constitution is composed of the laws and
| rules that create the institutions of the state, regulate the
| relationships between those institutions, or regulate the
| relationship between the state and the individual. These laws
| and rules are not codified in a single, written document.
|
| Source for that quote is parliamentary:
| https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-
| com... - a publication from 2015 which considered and
| proposed a written constitution. But other definitions
| include unwritten things like customs and conventions. For
| example:
|
| > It is often noted that the UK does not have a 'written' or
| 'codified' constitution. It is true that most countries have
| a document with special legal status that contains some of
| the key features of their constitution. This text is usually
| upheld by the courts and cannot be changed except through an
| especially demanding process. The UK, however, does not
| possess a single constitutional document of this nature.
| Nevertheless, it does have a constitution. The UK's
| constitution is spread across a number of places. This
| dispersal can make it more difficult to identify and
| understand. It is found in places including some specific
| Acts of Parliament; particular understandings of how the
| system should operate (known as constitutional conventions);
| and various decisions made by judges that help determine how
| the system works.
|
| https://consoc.org.uk/the-constitution-explained/the-uk-
| cons...
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Right of course every state has a "constitution" but the
| contemporary connotation of the word means an enforceable
| law that meaningfully constrains the state's power.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| The Bill of Rights or the Habeus Corpus meaningfully
| constrains the states power, and are cited in court
| proceedings.
|
| Just because it isn't 1 document like in the US, it
| doesn't mean it's not a constitution.
|
| I think what you mean by "contemporary connotation" with
| "American connotation".
| speerer wrote:
| Do you mean in the USA, perhaps? It's used more
| prevalently there, I think it's more likely for an
| average citizen to refer to a document than a collection
| of laws and customs. But I don't think that contex
| overtakes the original meaning.
| vinay427 wrote:
| The GP comment specifically refers to the contemporary
| connotation, and at least in English there is some
| consensus around constitutional governments in this
| modern sense (e.g. Ireland, India, Germany, etc.) as
| opposed to those that aren't.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| In the UK that would probably be the Magna Carta [0]
| which is a written document that constrains the monarch's
| power, and the monarch was the state at that time (1215).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| That's my point though. The monarch has so little power
| now it's irrelevant and the democratic government is out
| of control.
| qcnguy wrote:
| The UK has had many such laws and still does. During its
| time of EU membership the British constitution
| effectively gave up most of its power to a foreign
| government. The echr still binds parliament and the
| courts, again to rulings of a foreign Court.
|
| The most likely outcome by far at this point is the
| continuation of disconnection from European institutions
| by leaving the echr. In effect this would mean the
| rolling back of parts of the British constitution. It
| would be a good thing because the equivalents of the
| American Constitution are much more vaguely written, and
| in practice do nothing to protect anybody's rights whilst
| allowing left-wing judges to rampantly abuse their
| position by issuing nonsensical judgments that advance
| left-wing priorities. That's why reform and Nigel farage
| have been pushing for many years on leaving the European
| institutions, which is in effect a rollback of the
| Constitution. And this position is very popular.
| gambiting wrote:
| >> During its time of EU membership the British
| constitution effectively gave up most of its power to a
| foreign government
|
| It's nonsensical statements like this that lead to
| brexit.
|
| Some(very very very few) rules were delegated to EU
| institutions. UK retained full autonomy in almost every
| area, it could have always limited immigration or how
| bananas are shaped if it wanted to. To say that "most of
| the power" was given to a foreign government borders on
| Russian trolling, it's just so extremely untrue.
|
| >>And this position is very popular.
|
| Which one? And with whom?
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > UK retained full autonomy in almost every area, it
| could have always limited immigration or how bananas are
| shaped if it wanted to.
|
| And not only that, but within the EU it is no secret that
| the UK had the very best seat at the table.
|
| The UK had so many carve-outs and exemptions, far more
| than any other member.
| qcnguy wrote:
| If the best thing you can say about the EU membership is
| there were lots of exceptions, that is an argument for
| leaving, not staying.
|
| In reality the exceptions were mostly a work of fiction.
| For example, the UK was originally assured that the human
| rights principles they'd originally proposed as a vague
| set of aspirations would never be made into law, because
| they weren't suited to be law. Then the EU did that
| anyway, so the UK got a "carve out" written into the
| treaties, and it was reported as such to the public. Then
| the ECJ ruled that it wasn't allowed to have such a
| carveout and would have to enforce ECHR and ECJ rulings
| on human rights anyway.
|
| In other words: people were lied to. There was no
| carveout, not even when every country signed a treaty
| that spelled out one clear as day. This is how the EU
| rolls.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>If the best thing you can say about the EU membership
| is there were lots of exceptions, that is an argument for
| leaving, not staying.
|
| Having the best deal out of all members states in a union
| is a reason to leave that union? Are you even listening
| to what you say, or do you just say it so quickly it
| doesn't process? If you negotiate with your employer to
| have the best working conditions of everyone at your
| company, according to you that's the reason to leave -
| why? You tell me.
|
| >>For example, the UK was originally assured that the
| human rights principles they'd originally proposed as a
| vague set of aspirations would never be made into law,
| because they weren't suited to be law.
|
| Can you give a specific example of a human right
| principle that wasn't suited to be a law please?
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Yes if the best thing you can say about the deal is that
| you don't have to have much of it that's an argument for
| not doing the deal.
| phatfish wrote:
| The UK "didn't have much" of all the things it didn't
| want. But plenty of the things it did want. That is a
| great deal, Trump would be proud. Plenty of Brits too
| dumb to understand that though.
| qcnguy wrote:
| The UK didn't want unlimited immigration from the EU, and
| the EU refused to even consider the possibility of an
| exception, so the UK left.
|
| It's not complicated, it's old history, and the fact that
| people are still describing this as "brits dumb hurhur"
| is racist and abusive. The idea that it could have got an
| exception, by the way, is yet more federalist lying.
| Cameron did a tour around Europe directly visiting member
| states, begging them to grant such an exception, and they
| refused. He returned with his "deal", presented it to the
| country and never mentioned it again during his campaign
| because it was an insult to the concerns of the voters.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>The UK didn't want unlimited immigration from the EU,
|
| It was never unlimited and it's yet another lie peddled
| by Farage and the Brexit campaign.
|
| UK could have always at the very least enforced the basic
| of the EU free movement principles in terms of
| limitations - namely that anyone without a job or means
| to provide for themselves for over 3 months can be kicked
| out. That would have solved most of the discontent around
| the issue. Similarily, UK not being in the schoengen zone
| could have interviewed everyone arriving from the EU -
| why are they coming here, do they have funds, do they
| have a job and turn around people it suspected are coming
| for benefits etc. It chose not to do that. It was
| entirely legal at the time and it could have been done.
| But instead politicians lied about UK being "forced" to
| accept unlimited immigration, which was never true.
|
| It's not even about exceptions - it could have just used
| the existing laws that were there.
|
| >>Cameron did a tour around Europe directly visiting
| member states, begging them to grant such an exception
|
| You and I have a very different understanding of how that
| visit worked.
|
| >> it was an insult to the concerns of the voters.
|
| It's just really funny to me how after Brexit yes,
| migration from EU has gone down but it was replaced
| entirely by migration from former British Empire instead.
| So I'm not sure if the "concerns of voters" was really
| respected here either way.
| qcnguy wrote:
| The concerns of voters were absolutely not respected, you
| are completely right about that. The political class is
| completely bought into mass migration being a moral good,
| which is why getting it under control requires a complete
| replacement of that political class.
|
| There were lots of things the UK could have done in
| theory which wouldn't have had any impact in reality. You
| can interview people and ask, do you have funds? Do you
| have a job? They say yes and go in, that's the end of it.
| There isn't a way under EU law to just say no there are
| too many people already, you can't come.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>You can interview people and ask, do you have funds? Do
| you have a job? They say yes and go in, that's the end of
| it.
|
| How do you think this works now then? Or how it worked
| with non-EU people before Brexit? You asked them and they
| had to provide proof. If they couldn't they were turned
| around. It's not rocket science.
|
| >>There isn't a way under EU law to just say no there are
| too many people already, you can't come.
|
| And again, the existing legal ways of removing EU
| immigrants would have helped with that, but it was easier
| to take the entire country of the EU than just use them.
|
| >>The political class is completely bought into mass
| migration being a moral good
|
| Which political class? Tories which have been in power
| for forever? the same Tories who ran the "hostile
| environment" company against immigrants? Or Labour, which
| is now making it much harder and more expensive to both
| get in and stay in this country legally?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > the UK had the very best seat at the table.
|
| > The UK had so many carve-outs and exemptions
|
| The EU had many things that didn't benefit the UK, which
| happens when you don't share a mainland with the rest of
| Europe. e.g. Schengen area didn't make as much sense for
| UK,
|
| The UK got to _not_ adopt the euro, but then it 's
| currency was particularly strong in the first place. The
| Rebate is usually what is spin as the great advantage
| given to the UK, but was mostly justified by the fact
| that the UK didn't benefit as much from agricultural
| subsidies.
| foldr wrote:
| The Schengen area is only loosely connected to the EU.
| Not all EU member states are in the Schengen area, and
| not all Schengen area member states are in the EU.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| 25 of the 27 EU members are also in the SA, I disagree
| that it has nothing to do with it.
| foldr wrote:
| Mostly just for geographical reasons, no? If you have a
| free travel area covering a large swathe of continental
| Europe then it's inevitably going to include mostly EU
| member states. AFAIK there has never been any substantial
| objection to Ireland and (formerly) the UK opting out of
| Schengen, which obviously wouldn't make sense for those
| countries given where they're located.
| qcnguy wrote:
| Both Eurosceptics and pro-federalists routinely claim
| that 80% of all European law originates at the EU
| Commission - the exact number surely depends on the
| precise definition of law, but if both sides of this
| argument agree on a number as high as 80% then
| summarizing it as "most" is the right wording.
|
| And if 80% of your law is coming from the EU Commission,
| then it's correct to say most power was given up to a
| foreign government. Because the EU is a government,
| according to its own fiercest proponents.
|
| _> > That's why reform and Nigel farage have been
| pushing for many years on leaving the European
| institutions.
|
| > Which one? And with whom?_
|
| All of them. You may have noticed he won the referendum
| to leave the EU and now his party is the most popular
| party in Britain according to the polls, largely due to
| his policy of leaving the ECHR too.
|
| The European institutions are captured by an ideology
| that there can be no compromises on mass migration ever.
| This position is insane so they can't win votes on this
| platform, and therefore their strategy is to abuse
| various supra-national institutions that were sold to the
| public as doing other things and then written into the
| constitution so their decisions can't be overruled.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>And if 80% of your law is coming from the EU
| Commission, then it's correct to say most power was given
| up to a foreign government. Because the EU is a
| government, according to its own fiercest proponents.
|
| The crucial part you are missing here is that EU
| Commission doesn't set laws in any EU member country.
| They set directives, which if approved by the elected EU
| Parliment every member country should implement as they
| see fit - or not implement at all, the penalty for not
| doing so is so laughable even smaller newer EU members
| routinely ignore it. UK has always had that power - if it
| chose to implement EU laws within its own legislative
| framework then it was by choice and it wasn't forced upon
| it. So no, no power was given away to any foreign
| government here, just like British parliment isn't giving
| away any power to anyone when it uses one of its own many
| comissions to draft legislation. This is the lie that
| people like Farage kept peddling here - that anything has
| been forced on the UK in this relationship, when it
| couldn't be further from the truth.
|
| >> largely due to his policy of leaving the ECHR too.
|
| Citation needed, seriously. To me it seems it's largely
| due to Tory party self imploding(finally) and Labour
| being completely incompetent and walking back on most of
| their own promises which angered a lot of people. I bet
| most Reform supporters wouldn't even know what ECHR is,
| nor do I see why it should matter to them - in all of
| 2024 ECHR has issued exactly one rulling against the UK,
| and it was about Daily Mail _winning_ a case against the
| UK government. If anything they should love it, but of
| course there 's still some idiotic propaganda about ECHR
| blocking deportations and such when in reality the UK
| government is just simply incompetent on that front and
| cannot agree a simplest deal with France on that topic.
|
| >>The European institutions are captured by an ideology
| that there can be no compromises on mass migration ever.
|
| Which is why this is such a debated topic within the EU
| all the time and countries are implementing their own
| laws around it, right? You say it like there's some dogma
| that has to be obeyed - which anyone can see is not true,
| with major fractures along this exact point within the EU
| itself.
|
| >>and then written into the constitution
|
| Which consitution? EU doesn't have one, and I don't
| recall anything being added to the consitution of my
| native country for a very long time now - where exactly
| are these things you speak of written into?
|
| >>so their decisions can't be overruled.
|
| EU doesn't have any insitution that "cannot be
| overruled". Every member state retained full legislative
| and judiciary independence from every EU institution.
| ECHR is a sole exception to this, but it's not an EU
| insitution, and again, there are no real penalties for
| ignoring it nor does it have any impact on a country like
| the UK.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| You mean like a civil war between the Crown and Parliament?
| varispeed wrote:
| > It creates a safer online world for some.
|
| The thieves no longer have to hack servers in order to obtain
| sensitive data, they can just set up an age-check company and
| lure businesses with attractive fees.
|
| In that sense it is safer (for criminals).
| Ntrails wrote:
| > 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing,
| which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
|
| It would be an extraordinary amount of work for a government
| that can barely keep up with the fires of its own making let
| alone the many the world is imposing upon them. Along with
| that, watching the horse trading going on over every change
| they make - I don't see how they ever get a meaningful final
| text over the line.
|
| It's not a mainstream political priority at all to my
| knowledge, so I'm mostly curious why you disagree!
| llbbdd wrote:
| They should just do the same thing many governments the world
| over have done - adopt a version of the US constitution.
| Easy, clean, and only massively ironic.
| gargan wrote:
| Biggest mistake the Americans did was codify their
| constitution. I'll probably be pilloried for that but look
| at the evidence:
|
| - US is about to have military on the streets during
| peacetime with no terror threat within a codified
| constitution
|
| - UK has had military on the streets in response to
| terrorism in Northern Ireland (a real threat) and not for
| decades. The UK constitution is uncodified and spread over
| many (10+?) documents ranging from Magna Carta in the 1200s
| to the Bill of Rights in the 1600s to documents written in
| the 1800s and then more modern Acts of Parliament.
|
| Importantly the UK constitution can slowly change which
| means the UK has never had a revolution and never will do.
| Whereas the US constitution is rigid which achieves the
| opposite: when it does change it'll be dramatic and as a
| result of another violent revolution.
| Saline9515 wrote:
| Political systems do not exist in a vacuum, but integrate
| into a specific ethnic, cultural and geographic
| landscape. In a nation of immigrants with frequent
| demographic changes, having a written constitution
| anchors the country and prevents some capture of the
| government.
| gargan wrote:
| The UK and US are both equally nations of immigrants in
| 2025 at about 16% of the population being born abroad.
| The UK constitution is written but uncodified and unites
| the country under the King. The constitution can slowly
| change to deal with immigration, but in the US they're
| stuck with either what you have or violent revolution...
| danlitt wrote:
| Why do you think that the UK having an unwritten
| constitution means that revolution cannot happen? Of
| course putting aside the fact we did have a revolution in
| the 1600s, and the almost constant revolution happening
| in Ireland until the 1930s. A fluid constitution is no
| use when the government is intransigent, and very little
| can protect a democracy from half the voters voting for a
| coup.
|
| A written constitution only really protects (or affects
| at all) the things it very specifically enumerates. And
| when I look at the judicial tools we have that _do_ bind
| the government (the ECHR for instance) they seem on the
| whole to make a good difference. A UK constitution that
| enshrined certain rights (healthcare, free speech, and so
| on) would make _me_ feel a lot more secure about what
| future governments could do. It might also provide a
| better example than the American constitution in the
| respects it is lacking.
| gargan wrote:
| The revolution in the 1600s was reversed - as far as I
| know the UK is the only country in the world to have
| reversed a revolution.
|
| If you want more healthcare security you're more likely
| to get that in an uncodified system like the UK. Yes your
| healthcare rights can be reversed but better that, than
| never happening at all like in the US.
|
| A codified system also hands vast power to lawyers. The
| US is a lawyer's paradise of everyone suing everyone,
| rising political violence due to inflexibility, and more
| risk of revolution.
| danlitt wrote:
| > Yes your healthcare rights can be reversed but better
| that, than never happening at all like in the US.
|
| Do you really think that the thing standing in the way of
| universal healthcare in the US is its codified
| constitution? When I look at the constitutional cases
| that result in lawsuits in the US, they are _almost
| universally_ cases that move the dial in favour of people
| 's freedoms. Liberally interpreted, the US has been
| dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century in
| many respects. The undermining of civil liberties we see
| in the US right now are _in spite_ of the constitution,
| not because of it (and you can tell, because everyone
| opposing it is appealing to the constitution, and
| everyone supporting the coup is ignoring it).
| pastage wrote:
| While the US consitition is not agile a like a git log of
| a popular js project it does have over 10k declined PRs,
| I think the record is 100 years waiting for review. It
| does change, it has to change.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| If it were a public repo it would have been forked a long
| time ago.
| 3acctforcom wrote:
| It was, repeatedly. It's a very important historical
| document that defined negative rights (congress shall
| pass no law) and inspired most modern constitutions.
|
| The problem is the US never bothered to address it's
| technical debt, so it's patch on patch on patch. An
| updated constitution would probably cut through a lot of
| the bullshit in American politics, e.g. the interstate
| commerce clause being the entire justification for the
| federal government lol.
| diordiderot wrote:
| You can amend the constitution. Its been done many times
| bratbag wrote:
| Pass.
|
| Im glad not to be confined by historical rules invented by
| people who could not hope to predict the future, and would
| not choose to put that kind of burden on my descendents.
| diordiderot wrote:
| Amendments can be made with a super-majority's approval
| _rm wrote:
| It's quite farcical to witness a whole thread of debate about
| whether there will be a British constitution when it already
| exists.
|
| People are so quick to start typing their opinions to pretend
| how smart they are that they forget they have to know things
| first.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| >2. The next government will take great delight in removing
| this law as an easy win.
|
| As a rule of thumb, governments don't take actions which reduce
| their power.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I
| don't think they are accurate.
|
| _Politicians_ don 't want to reduce their power, but
| politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually
| empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians.
| The main way politicians loose power is also not by the
| nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.
| nickff wrote:
| Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may
| be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the
| United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as 'the
| government'.
| pmontra wrote:
| There are many western democracies where there no single
| ruling party. 'The government' is made by an alliance of
| many different parties (eg: 25% + 15% + 10% + 5%.) They
| might share a common overall view of the world but each
| party can have a very different take on many subjects.
| The actual government has to do only what all of them
| agree upon, and the 5% party may have a disproportionate
| weight because that party leaving the government is as
| important as the 25% party leaving it.
|
| So, the government is the people in the government and
| the small parties can be very vocal against it.
| Opposition from inside is a double edged tool to attempt
| to get more votes in the next elections, even from within
| the same coalition.
| yard2010 wrote:
| This is not working. A few decades later the biggest
| party is like 50% of the politicians.
|
| My theory is that power accumulates like money so you end
| up having few people with all the power. It's not that
| original, I must've read it somewhere.
| BDPW wrote:
| Denmark, Sweden and Netherlands have the same system and
| it works reasonably well actually.
| account42 wrote:
| The same Denmark whose representative is in the EU
| council is championing for similar laws?
| Jensson wrote:
| EU representatives are not elected the same way, so that
| is unrelated.
| joncrocks wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law - in
| political systems with single-member districts and the
| first-past-the-post voting system, only two powerful
| political parties tend to control power.
| 3acctforcom wrote:
| In parliamentary systems we see fractures and reformation
| all the time, including in the current political climate
| in the UK.
|
| Duverger's Law is only really parroted by Americans,
| who's ballot access and districting is determined by a
| coalition of two political parties instead of an
| constitutionally defined apolitical government
| institution. Don't forget to vote Green or Libertarian!
| Oh wait, you can't because the dems and repubs struck
| them from the ballot :(
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > main way politicians loose power is also not by the
| nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections
|
| This isn't true most actually gain more power because once
| you're out of the frankly trash job of being the figurehead
| of the country you can then take advantage of all the
| deals, favors and contacts you made doing it then move into
| NGOs/thinktanks/board position at meta/etc and start
| actually making real money and having real influence
| without the eyes on you.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| This isn't power until it scope creeps into surveillance, to
| protect the poor kids obviously.
| qcnguy wrote:
| They do if they are libertarian governments. Although it's
| popular to pretend they don't exist, there are plenty of
| examples of governments reducing their power over history.
| The American government is a good example of this having
| originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own
| power. And Britain has in the past gone through deregulatory
| phases and shrunk the state.
|
| Unfortunately at this time Britain doesn't really have a
| viable libertarian party. Reform is primarily focused on
| immigration, and the conservatives have largely withered on
| the vine becoming merely another center left party. So it's
| really very unclear if there are any parties that would in
| fact roll this back, although Nigel Farage is saying they
| would. His weakness is that he is not always terribly focused
| on recruiting people ideologically aligned to himself or even
| spelling out what exactly his ideology is. This is the same
| problem that the conservatives had and it can lead to back
| benches that are not on board with what needs to be done.
| Farage himself though is highly reasonable and always has
| been.
| account42 wrote:
| > The American government is a good example of this having
| originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its
| own power.
|
| This is not an example for an existing government reducing
| its power. It's rather an example of revolutionaries
| recognizing this very problem and attempting to prevent it.
| As we have found out since then, their solution isn't as
| foolproof as they had hoped.
| qcnguy wrote:
| I gave some examples of reductions in power post-dating
| the founding of the US in a reply to someone else above.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| >The American government is a good example of this having
| originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its
| own power
|
| Since its foundation, has the US government ever actually
| reduced its powers? It established itself with limited
| power.. But since then, its power has only increased via
| amendments, to the point where the President is effectively
| an uncontested emperor type figure.
| qcnguy wrote:
| If you define the US as the federal government then yes
| it has rolled back its powers several times:
|
| - The Prohibition was implemented and then ended, i.e.
| the state gave up its power to ban alcohol.
|
| - The Bill of Rights itself post-dates the founding of
| the USA. Those amendments were limiting the power of the
| state!
|
| - Income tax rates were once much higher than they are
| today. Of course you could argue that this isn't a
| reduction of its power given that once upon a time there
| was no income tax. But it has nonetheless fallen from its
| once great heights.
|
| - The federal government gave up its power to regulate
| abortion quite recently.
|
| - In the 60s (or 70s I forget) the US government
| deregulated the airline industry and has never gone back.
|
| - The War Powers veto. One could argue that it's not been
| effective because POTUSes have ignored it, but in theory
| Congress took away the ability for Presidents to declare
| war.
| Macha wrote:
| Ah yes, the "Center-left" party that wants to:
|
| - eliminate taxes on farm inheritance and private education
|
| - reduce benefits spending by stricter eligibility criteria
|
| - reduce immigration by making legal immigration more
| onerous while also blocking asylum
|
| Per the top policies on their prospectus:
| https://www.conservatives.com/our-policy-prospectus
|
| I'm surprised anti-trans stuff isn't in there with how much
| airtime they've given it, but I guess they feel there's not
| enough distance between them and Starmer's Labour.
| qcnguy wrote:
| Every party says they want to reduce immigration. Labour
| says they will "stop the boats" etc. Neither have done
| so, of course, it's all lies.
|
| The Conservatives don't _want_ to reduce spending on
| benefits. They always defended the triple lock that makes
| their pensioner base so happy, of course. They are merely
| slightly more willing to admit that huge cuts are
| inevitable than Labour is. Labour also tried a tiny
| reduction in benefits - there 's not much difference
| between them really - but their MPs are in total denial
| of the scale of the problem and blocked it.
|
| UK benefits are going to evaporate, it doesn't matter who
| is in power. Tweaking eligibility criteria is rearranging
| deckchairs on the Titanic at this point. It's become a
| financial inevitability post-COVID, just look at the
| charts. The austerity that's coming will show the 2010s
| era as the weak sauce it truly was.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| Why does this increase the likelihood of a (written I assume)
| constitution? I remember I saw a thing about David Cameron
| talking about wanting one. I think he also created a Supreme
| Court. I read into it and it seemed like there was no real
| reason for either a written constitution or a Supreme Court.
| Both of those things were popularized by the US's government so
| maybe that points to why.
| milesrout wrote:
| None of what you said is true. The Judicial Committee of the
| House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court and moved to a
| different building (but otherwise essentially unchanged) in
| 2005 under Tony Blair's Labour government.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| No, that's not accurate. The Supreme Court of the UK was
| established in 2009 so I was off by a year. That would have
| been under Gordon Brown.
| brigandish wrote:
| > 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing,
| which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
|
| As an repetition of and an aside to all those pointing out that
| there is a constitution, what may find gaining some momentum
| after this are calls for a _Bill of Rights_ , something England
| used to have[1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
| foldr wrote:
| The Bill of Rights was never repealed, so there's no "used
| to" about it.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| Wikipedia's not perfect, but its transparency and edit history
| make it a lot less susceptible to the kinds of anonymous abuse
| this law is supposedly targeting
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| >> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's
| judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing
| the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for
| everyone".
|
| >Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.
|
| Does it even do _that_?
| account42 wrote:
| It's safer for those in power who don't want their actions
| criticized.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid
| restrictions placed on them
|
| Yeah, its hilarious if you watch or listen to BBC output you
| would think VPNs don't exist the way the BBC promote it as some
| sort of amazing new "think of the children" protection.
| account42 wrote:
| > 2. The next government will take great delight in removing
| this law as an easy win.
|
| This is way too optimistic. Maybe they'll make it as a campaign
| promise but in all likelihood they'll be happy to have it
| without being blamed directly and the law will stay unless
| people put up enough of a stink that it's clear the alternative
| would be violent revolution.
|
| Increasing government control over the population is not a
| partisan issue.
| 3abiton wrote:
| Someone else said it, but oneconspiracy theory is that the UK
| is doing this to instill more "internet" literacy in their
| population (given that they'll go out of their way to do the
| free internet). I doubt that is the case, but that's a better
| cope for many than a dystopian government.
| hnfong wrote:
| What do you mean, the UK always had a constitution! </S>
| _rm wrote:
| People will use VPNs, but no the next government won't remove
| it - the power hungry don't give up powers, and there's already
| a constitution.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Wikipedia ought to block edits from the UK. Giving in to fascism
| emboldens it.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44863487
| ljosifov wrote:
| US should slap travel bans on UK politicians travelling to Disney
| parks and similar in Florida with their families. And/or with
| their older children visiting NYC. The combined pressure of the
| wives and their children, will knock sense in their thick skulls
| quickly. In the sense of - being stupid is not cost free. Atm
| it's cost free for them, and costly for me.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| The US is moving in the same direction.
| watwut wrote:
| US is not exactly desirable location for tourism right now.
|
| And like, appeal of of florida Disneyland as a dream place to
| go to was never all that huge abroad. The Disney cult/dream is
| more of an American thing.
| gambiting wrote:
| And to add to that - I'd wager that British people who want
| to go to Disneyland just go to the one in Paris, it's a LOT
| cheaper than the American ones.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Disneyland Paris is a three hour train ride away from London. I
| doubt the British politicians would go to American Disney Parks
| unless they were already there anyway.
|
| Most Britons support the current rules:
| https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
| bigyabai wrote:
| If this is the biggest threat America can levy then the UK has
| already won.
| kersplody wrote:
| At least wikipedia has an out in the legislation by disabling
| content recommendation engines for UK users, this includes:
|
| 1. "You may be interested in..." search suggestions on the
| Wikipedia interface--these are algorithmic, content-based
| recommendations.
|
| 2. Editor suggestion tools that propose pages to edit, based on
| prior activity. Academic systems helping newcomers with article
| recommendations also qualify.
|
| Most links within articles--like "See also" sections or
| hyperlinks--are static and curated by editors, not
| algorithmically chosen per user. That means they do not meet the
| recommender system definition.
|
| The legislation text for reference:
|
| "Category 1 threshold conditions 3.--(1) The Category 1 threshold
| conditions(10) are met by a regulated user-to-user service where,
| in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, it--
|
| (a)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom
| users that exceeds 34 million, and
|
| (ii)uses a content recommender system, or
|
| (b)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom
| users that exceeds 7 million,
|
| (ii)uses a content recommender system, and
|
| (iii)provides a functionality for users to forward or share
| regulated user-generated content(11) on the service with other
| users of that service.
|
| (2) In paragraph (1), a "content recommender system" means a
| system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service
| in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses
| algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques
| determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated
| user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other
| content, may be encountered by other users of the service. "
| oytis wrote:
| Category 1 means you have some additional duties, but it is not
| necessary to e.g. be obliged to verify your users' age.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| At what point is is time to put this very real island on a
| virtual island and just block all traffic that seems to be coming
| from there? Maybe they're right and all their meddling will
| really make the internet better, in which case I hope they enjoy
| their own private improved internet very much while I enjoy my
| inferior one in which I am not forced to aid materially in the
| government's surveillance of me.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Just turn off Wikipedia for the UK until it gets fixed.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Now is the best time to remember: if there's something you value
| online, download it. There's no problem with downloading the
| entirety of wikipedia, and it's actually pretty easy and light to
| do so. Get your favorite songs, movies, etc. too ASAP
| nomilk wrote:
| Wild. People compelled by law to produce id before accessing an
| online encyclopaedia. Shouldn't we be _encouraging_ good
| behaviours like learning?
| bn-l wrote:
| That won't help them build a profile on you though and then,
| through the help of AI determine if you're a threat because
| you've been displaying a pattern of looking at things you
| shouldn't be.
| tempestn wrote:
| I was just vacationing in the UK last week and ran into this
| ridiculous thing trying to browse (entirely non-pornographic,
| fwiw) Reddit threads. Which I opted not to read rather than going
| through the hassle and privacy breach.
|
| Also got to experience the full force of the cookie law, which I
| hadn't realized I was only seeing a fraction of here in Canada.
| karel-3d wrote:
| The cookie law is not in UK but in EU, no?
| lpribis wrote:
| Much of it comes from GDPR law which was passed prior to
| brexit. After brexit, the UK kept most of the regulation
| under the "UK GDPR", meaning it does apply in the UK as well.
| karel-3d wrote:
| Ah. I didn't know there is UK GDPR and UK cookie law!
| (cookie law is not related to GDPR? or is? I donno)
|
| What was the point of brexit if you keep the annoying parts
| of EU? But, whatever.
| alt227 wrote:
| > What was the point of brexit if you keep the annoying
| parts of EU?
|
| Indeed, however the UK was part of the EU for 50 years.
| All the laws created in that time cannot immediately be
| replaced quickly or easily, and so most were carried over
| 'temporarily'
| EasyMark wrote:
| Why not just get a cheap VPN for traveling or set up tailscale
| to your home router?
| tempestn wrote:
| Because it was only a few days. If I'd been there longer I
| would have.
| trallnag wrote:
| Cheap VPNs are only a temporary solution. I doubt that the EU
| and the UK will abstain from following China's and Russia's
| example in slowly locking down means of anonymization /
| obfuscation.
| sherburt3 wrote:
| I'm kinda okay with the internet dying. I feel like it peaked
| in the early 2010s anyways.
| vsgherzi wrote:
| Block the UK. Ridiculous behavior.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Maybe this is good. On balance, perhaps Wikipedia has become too
| important a cultural asset for anonymous editors.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I am not surprised. Every time I mention the draconian laws
| around digital speech when flying into london, hackernews
| historically said I was being ridiculous.
|
| The UK has some of the oddest laws I have seen from a western
| nation.
| StopVibeCoding wrote:
| america and europe are not too far
| deepsun wrote:
| Going to be downvoted, but I support the move to make Wikimedia
| (and other websites that distribute user-generated content) to
| verify identities of their users (editors). It is ok to be
| responsible for what you're posting. We are living in the age of
| global irresponsibility.
|
| And it doesn't mean Wikimedia must make the identities public.
| Same as any other website -- real identity to be provided only to
| authorities following a court order.
|
| Also, there's a ton of bots and paid agents working full-time to
| shift political opinions to their political agenda.
| luke727 wrote:
| Think your position through and try to determine if there is
| any possibility of unintended consequences.
| Sateeshm wrote:
| Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
| temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
| xuno wrote:
| That's a quote from Benjamin Franklin about a taxation
| dispute, and he was making a pro-Government statement.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Isn't the lesson here that every website should just block UK
| access?
| vandahm wrote:
| What are the consequences of simply disregarding the UK ruling?
| Does Wikipedia have British employees, offices, or financial
| assets?
| codedokode wrote:
| In Russia there is a plan to make special SIM cards for children,
| that would not allow registration in social networks. Isn't it
| better than UK legislation?
|
| The whole idea that every site or app must do verification is
| stupid. It would be much easier and better to do verification at
| the store when buying a laptop, a phone or a SIM card. The
| verification status can be burned in firmware memory, and the
| device would allow only using sites and apps from the white list.
| In this case website operators and app developers wouldn't need
| to do anything and carry no expenses. This approach is simpler
| and superior to what UK does. If Apple or Microsoft refuse to
| implement restricted functionality for non-verified devices, they
| can be banned and replaced by alternative vendors complying with
| this proposal. It is much easier to force Apple and Microsoft -
| two rich companies - to implement children protection measures
| than thousands of website operators and app developers.
| preisschild wrote:
| > Isn't it better than UK legislation?
|
| Not at all, because SIM cards are bound to your real identity.
| So the government knows exactly which websites you visit.
| codedokode wrote:
| I don't understand your comment, the government knows which
| sites you visit anyway because it can see the SNI field in
| HTTPS traffic.
|
| The main point is that the verification is done on the
| device. The device has a digitally signed flag, saying
| whether it is owned by an adult user or not. And the OS on
| the device without the flag allows using only safe apps and
| websites sending a "Safe: yes" HTTP header. User doesn't need
| to send your ID to random companies, doesn't need to verify
| at every website, and website operators and app developers do
| not need do anything and do not need to do verification -
| they are banned from unverified devices by default. It is
| better for everyone.
|
| Also, as I understand the main point of the Act is to allow
| removing the content the government doesn't like in a prompt
| manner, for which my proposal is not helpful at all.
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| What about open source browsers that don't respect this
| convention?
| codedokode wrote:
| In case with a smartphone, you will be able to install
| only white-listed apps from an app store on an unverified
| device, so you won't be able to install such browser. As
| for PCs, Windows might also prevent sideloading on
| unverified devices.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| One more reason to not use windows i guess. Also, you're
| handing a _lot_ of control to the smartphone vendors here
| (the two major ones have demonstrated that they don 't
| have your best interests at heart...)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44875961
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > because it can see the SNI field in HTTPS traffic
|
| ECH (the successor to eSNI) is becoming more and more
| common and with Let's Encrypt soon offering IP
| certificates, any website will be able to hide their SNI.
|
| Digital verification exclusively on-device doesn't work
| because addons and alternative applications make it
| possible to bypass those checks. There's no credible reason
| to trust local software to protect the kids.
|
| The point of the Act is that the UK government no longer
| pretends to believe that the "I am 18 or older" checkbox is
| actually stopping anyone, and that there are no better
| alternatives. The public (in most democratic countries, not
| just the UK) doesn't want kids to be able to freely access
| porn the way you can now and the government is acting in
| the interests of the public here. If the tech industry had
| felt any responsibility, they would've been working on a
| solution to this problem somewhere in the last thirty or so
| years of internet pornography, but so far they've done
| nothing and are all out of ideas.
|
| The EU's reference digital wallet representation seems to
| be the best solution so far (though it's not finished yet
| and has some downsides as well), hopefully the UK will set
| up a similar (compatible?) programme so UK citizens can
| skip the stupid face scans and ID uploads.
| codedokode wrote:
| > Digital verification exclusively on-device doesn't work
| because addons and alternative applications make it
| possible to bypass those checks.
|
| The OS on device with "isAdult == false" would allow only
| to install apps from app store, which are marked by
| developers as "safe". Alternative apps which do not
| respect isAdult bit won't be marked as safe and cannot be
| installed from an app store. And sideloading or
| bootloader unlocking, of course, will be disabled if the
| phone has "isAdult == false". There is no simple way to
| bypass this protection, even for a skilled adult, because
| modern OSes are closed-source and digitally signed and
| you don't have the source code or private key.
|
| > The point of the Act is that the UK government no
| longer pretends to believe that the "I am 18 or older"
| checkbox is actually stopping anyone, and that there are
| no better alternatives.
|
| The better alternative is "isAdult" bit that is stored on
| device, cannot be changed by the user, and respected by
| an OS and white-listed apps. It doesn't require sending
| one's IDs or photos of one's face anywhere. It is better
| in every aspect and requires ZERO costs from website
| operators and app developers for compliance. The only
| ones who will bear the costs would be OS developers, like
| Apple or Microsoft who have a lot of money and engineers
| to implement this.
|
| > The point of the Act
|
| I glanced through the overview of the Act and it seems
| that the main point is in letting the government (Ofcom)
| to remove online content promptly without long
| procedures.
| codedokode wrote:
| > If the tech industry had felt any responsibility, they
| would've been working on a solution to this problem
| somewhere in the last thirty or so years of internet
| pornography, but so far they've done nothing and are all
| out of ideas.
|
| OS developers like Apple and Microsoft, and hardware
| vendors simply don't want to spend money on what gives
| them no returns.
| codedokode wrote:
| Also, current UK Act divides websites into categories and
| has different content moderation requirements for them.
| With my approach, all websites that do not mark content
| as "safe" would be blocked by default, which is much
| safer and leaves no loopholes.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Digital verification exclusively on-device doesn't work
| because addons and alternative applications make it
| possible to bypass those checks. There's no credible
| reason to trust local software to protect the kids.
|
| Then nothing will protect the kids.
|
| I don't mean this tongue in cheek or implying that no
| protection should exist. I literally mean what I wrote.
| Children can always acquire hardware that will let them
| bypass any controls.
|
| What pisses me off the most is people like you who
| pretend to care about things they don't care about. If
| only perfect solutions are acceptable, but perfect
| solutions don't exist, but good enough solutions are
| insufficient because of some theoretical bypass, then you
| essentially argue for no protection at all, but you do
| this under the pretense of advocating for protection.
| That is your stance, not mine.
|
| Children who actively seek out blocked content are simply
| unstoppable. There is nothing you can do about that, so
| instead of going on and on about your nirvana fallacy,
| you should be happy with protecting the children who
| aren't adversaries to your protection scheme. After all,
| protecting children is good, so protecting millions of
| children should be better than protecting no children.
| The fact that there is a hypothetical fascist police
| state in which it is possible to protect every single
| child on the planet through world domination (in the name
| of protecting children) should play no role in making
| that decision.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The UK legislation extends beyond cellular access, as I'm sure
| Russia's does as well.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Rare case of Russian doing something more honestly.
| Implementing it as a device flag sent to websites, and making
| it easy to set for the device of any minor, is an elegant and
| unintrusive solution.
|
| If you get w3.org and major browser and os vendors in on it, it
| simply becomes a legally enforced an universal parental control
| without much drawbacks.
|
| But that would not permit the complete tracking of identity of
| all individuals in a country with their ptivate Internet
| activity and political stance.
|
| And that's a massive loss to the true purpose of any law
| pretending to protect children; Just like the multiple attempts
| to outlaw encryption or scan all private or messages.
| Zarathustra30 wrote:
| That solution reminds me of the evil bit. However, if someone
| has the skills or resources to unset the bit, they likely are
| allowed to anyway.
|
| https://archive.org/details/rfc3514
| codedokode wrote:
| In case with Windows laptop, the verification proof might be
| for example, a digitally signed serial number of the
| motherboard (and the OS is itself signed to prevent
| tampering). While it's possible to work around this, an
| average kid or adult is unlikely to do it. And in case with a
| phone there is almost zero chance to hack it.
| account42 wrote:
| And this would be just as bad as the UK solution as now
| you've outlawed any third-party operating systems and
| computers.
| codedokode wrote:
| Only for children.
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| Apple, Google etc are already implementing the Digital
| Credentials API standard which would make this type age
| verification much more secure.
| codedokode wrote:
| No, "digital credentials" is an awful idea because it
| requires to store your ID on your phone and thus make it
| accessible to Apple and Google and secret courts. What I
| suggest is simply to store a single "isAdult" bit on device,
| without revealing any identity, and make apps like browser do
| the censorship on device, without sending any data to a
| webite. The algorithm is as follows: if
| isAdult == 0 and website doesn't send a "safe-content"
| header, then: browser refuses to display content
| if isAdult == 0 and photo in a messenger doesn't contain a
| "safe-content" metadata, then photo viewer
| refuses to display content if isAdult == 0 and the
| app is not marked as safe, then app store refuses
| to download the app and OS refuses to launch it
|
| With my approach, you don't need to store your ID on your
| device, you don't need to send your ID anywhere, and website
| operators and app developers do not need to do anything
| because by default they will be considered not safe. So my
| solution's cost is ZERO for website operators and app
| developers. As a website operator you don't need to change
| anything and to verify the age.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| What stops the under age user from setting isAdult = 1?
| imtringued wrote:
| Their parents. The alternative is complete government
| surveillance of literally everything and I mean literally
| everything, starting from resource extraction and
| knowledge needed to manufacture electronics and the
| policing of every planet in the universe that is capable
| of giving rise to sentient intelligent life.
| codedokode wrote:
| Proprietary closed-sourced OS, the same thing that
| prevents you from installing Debian on your phone (unless
| it is Google Pixel).
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| I think you misunderstood how the digital credentials api
| works. It keeps it in your phone's secure element and lets
| you share just a "yes/no" proof like "over 18" without
| revealing anything else. It's basically the
| cryptographically secure version of the isAdult bit you're
| describing. It also has trust by cryptographically signing
| the proof and it can handle different jurisdictions.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| A simple solution would just be an enforced response header
| marking content as NSFW as well as mandatory phone parental
| controls that enforce them.
| codedokode wrote:
| No, the header should mark content as safe (for example:
| "Content-Safety: US-14; GB-0"), and lack of header should
| mark the content "unsafe". In this case, existing websites do
| not need to change anything.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| That works too. Anything is better than this. Infinitely
| less work for existing websites, not as privacy invasive,
| not such a massive security risk.
| dartharva wrote:
| Are social networks in Russia mandated to ask for phone numbers
| to login?
| codedokode wrote:
| Every website is required by law to do phone verification or
| use other method that confirms real identity (for example,
| auth through government services website or biometric data).
| As for social networks like Vk, they require a phone number
| since long ago before the law changed.
|
| Also a phone number verification is needed if you want to
| connect to free WiFi in a subway or a bus or a train. Foreign
| phone numbers are often not supported in this case.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Parliamentary democracy has proven absolutely useless in
| defending alienable rights like freedom of speech.
|
| I have been trying to think what sort of system is ideal to
| replace them. I think there has to be some kind of strong
| constitution that guarantees aforementioned rights. But I also
| think it's instructive to look at America wrt how that can go
| awry - ie their constitution is routinely ignored, and a lot of
| the political decision making is done by fifth columnists
| lobbying for a foreign nation.
|
| Regardless, we need to start having these conversations. It's not
| a matter of getting different people into Westminster.
| Westminster is illegitimate. Let's think about what's next and
| how we can get there peacefully.
| storus wrote:
| An honest question - which devices can be used for secure
| communication if phones get government-borked for
| "children/foreign interference" purposes?
| 867-5309 wrote:
| an unborked phone
| storus wrote:
| Give me one example of a government-borking-resistant phone?
| 867-5309 wrote:
| tba
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Of course it did. This is all completely arbitrary and the powers
| that be will do what they want and this is what you asked for,
| nay, begged for during covid.
| twothreeone wrote:
| I'm confused.. can't they appeal High Court decisions (since the
| UKSC was formed after the government didn't like the High Court's
| decisions in the Diego Garcia thing)? [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_Ki...
| idorosen wrote:
| To all of the commenters recommending that Wikipedia block UK
| visitors: This is incredibly short-sighted in the age of LLMs,
| where Wikipedia does not need to exist in a country in order for
| the benefit of its existence to be felt. Such a move would likely
| just drive people to obtain dubious regurgitations of Wikipedia's
| (freely available) content via their favorite LLM chatbot, in my
| opinion.
| bovermyer wrote:
| How is the state of the art as far as blocking LLMs from
| accessing a site?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Option 1: enabling "dubious regurgitations of information"
|
| Option 2: enabling draconian abuse of power, violation of
| privacy, and mass surveillance
| trhway wrote:
| Does Online Safety Act covers only HTTP? I mean does it cover say
| bittorrent? Or any outgoing TCP connection?
| wiredpancake wrote:
| As if this is even a consideration in the law.
|
| They are clueless to whatever an internet protocol is.
| Effectively, if it uses the "internet" and you interface with
| it from a device, it is subject to the ruling.
| trhway wrote:
| And if i were a lawyer i'd use the legal system -
| specifically i'd start by challenging OSA on the undue burden
| grounds for say BitTorrent - bringing in some experts, etc..
| If not successful - such ruling would effectively prohibit
| all unauthenticated network activity - would make the cost of
| OSA clear to the public. If successful, i'd show that the
| same content OSA worried about - like p.rn - is widely
| available on BitTorrent, and thus having limitations for HTTP
| while not for BitTorrent is capricious or something like
| this.
| wpm wrote:
| You're allowed to say porn
| cobbzilla wrote:
| Somehow this rhymes with the US's "War on Drugs", and it makes me
| very afraid:
|
| Similarities I see:
|
| * In the years leading up to government action, a mass hysteria
| was well cultivated in the media (evil drug users committing
| abhorrent crimes).
|
| * When launched, the public was overwhelmingly in favor of it (In
| 1971, 48% of the public said drugs were a serious problem in
| their community [1]).
|
| That's where we are now. THEN:
|
| * It got worse for decades (By 1986, 56% of Americans said that
| the government spent "too little" money fighting drugs [1]).
|
| * Following many years of lobbying, _some_ rights are slowly
| restored. (NORML and other groups fighting for legal medical,
| then recreational use; mushrooms are legal in few places, etc).
|
| * It's still going on today. (Over 100,000 people currently
| serving prison sentences for drug-related offenses [2]).
|
| [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/6331/decades-drug-use-data-
| from...
|
| [2] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html
| kittikitti wrote:
| There are too many Big Tech bootlickers on YCombinator who
| enabled this. All of a sudden, they get to act surprised and
| morally superior. I guess this is who the gatekeepers let in,
| people who publicly seem moral but when push comes to shove they
| will always act evil.
| fgfarben wrote:
| How exactly did "Big Tech bootlickers on YCombinator" enable
| the UK's parliament to enact authoritarian censorship laws?
| Pray tell.
| StopVibeCoding wrote:
| It's not just ycombinator, it's everywhere on the internet.
| Too many bootlickers big government & big tech bootlickers
| not sounding alarms as soon as privacy violations happened is
| what caused this.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Wouldn't think this kind of law could ever have popular vote.
| Could anyone that support this law explain why they think it is
| good?
| chris_wot wrote:
| So, theoretically, this would have revealed the identity of one
| of the biggest trolls in Wikipedia history: BrownHairedGirl.
| davidhyde wrote:
| To me the online safety act is a latency tax and nothing more.
| Sucks for others though. I feel bad for them, it's not right.
| changadera wrote:
| What's a latency tax?
| cobbzilla wrote:
| using a VPN adds some latency
| mkoubaa wrote:
| It's a shame both sides can't lose
| Havoc wrote:
| It's disappointing that their argument was more "exempt up" and
| less "this is an unworkable law".
|
| Not sure what comes next but wikipedia blocking UK followed by
| perhaps a study or two about harm done to the economy may be a
| good start to get the morons in charge to see the light
|
| This whole saga tells me that nobody in UK gov knows wtf their
| doing on anything online. (This act was introduced under
| conservatives and passed under liberals)
| al_borland wrote:
| > The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's
| judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the
| Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".
|
| Suppression of information is not safety, it's control.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Just ignore the law, what are they going to do about it? Block
| Wikipedia in the UK?
| dghughes wrote:
| Here in Canada there is Bill S-210 Protecting Young Persons from
| Exposure to Pornography Act aka "think of the children".
|
| I don't think the politicians thought of or could conceive of the
| technological requirements needed if this passes. It's just a
| knee-jerk bill sponsored by self-professed Conservative Senator
| Senator Julie Miville-Dechene. Conservatives of the CPC party in
| Canada are much farther right of center more evangelical
| religious than the old Progressive Conservatives PCs were.
|
| Note that Senators in Canada are not like US Senators.
| curiousgal wrote:
| > _The government 's lawyers argued that ministers had considered
| whether Wikipedia should be exempt from the regulations but had
| reasonably rejected the idea._
|
| It's funny, I'm coming up on my citizenship application and I
| sure as fuck won't ever be voting for Labour. I would rather
| create my own party and fail then vote for them (or conservatives
| or Reform). It's amazing how accurate The Thick Of It is.
| jibal wrote:
| The debate(s) here is (are) premature.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Okay but what if I want zero safety
|
| Can I have zero safety if I choose that?
| gethly wrote:
| 9 our of 10 online businesses will simply ban English users
| altogether. Which will be good for England as it will allow it to
| develop local competition without global multinationals' boot on
| their necks.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| Feels like a classic case of a law written with "big social
| media" in mind accidentally scooping up something that clearly
| isn't in the same category
| PeterStuer wrote:
| While I am _very_ much opposed to the OSA, if you were going that
| way it somehow makes a little more sense to verify the identity
| of wikipedia editors than those of random social media users.
| silasdavis wrote:
| Coming back to London for a spell having lived abroad, I see
| speech supporting a non violent protest group banned, and find my
| myself firing up a VPN to avoid dragnet data collection.
|
| Terrorism Act 2000 and 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006
| Investigator Powers Act 2016 Online Safety Act 2023
|
| There has been a raft of legislation both permitting and
| mandating digital monitoring while increasingly prohibiting types
| of speech. Many of these laws with overly broad definitions and
| large amounts of discretion.
| esskay wrote:
| Shameful that Wikipedia are using this as another big yellow box
| "We need your money or we will have to shut down" message (and if
| anyone's not already aware, they really, really don't need to be
| doing this - they are not in any kind of financial struggle).
| ramon156 wrote:
| iirc wikipedia has a company that hosts the site and has more
| than enough funding to survive
| xinayder wrote:
| Don't worry guys, the UK government is protecting the "children"
| against access to knowledge, you know, the thing that got humans
| kicked out of the Gardens of Eden.
|
| Who would've thought the government would confirm that access to
| knowledge is a threat to their power?
| hopelite wrote:
| Did anyone think at this point, on this trajectory that any
| British court would have struck this down?
|
| It reminds me of whatever the process is that keeps people in
| abusive relationships rationalizing how things will be fine now
| because their abuser promised to stop abusing them for the 100th
| time.
|
| Our current model of the mind would consider it a delusion, a
| mental illness.
|
| Considering the past few years and the abuses by government that
| follow the Biderman's Chart of Coercion, it seems rather clear
| that humanity finds itself in a dungeon of the aristocracy once
| again; sadly enough, due to its own choices and actions.
| v5v3 wrote:
| Decisions need to be made by juries and not judges...
| Palmik wrote:
| I think UK OSA in its current state is bad, but I also think
| Wikipedia losing this case is good.
|
| Here is Wikipedia's original case:
|
| > The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government's commitment
| to promoting online environments where everyone can safely
| participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge
| to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1
| duties themselves. Rather, the legal challenge focuses solely on
| the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1
| duties (the OSA's most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
|
| They were asking for special carve-out just for Wikipedia. This
| was not some principled stance.
|
| Now that they they lost the challenge, they might have to block
| visitors from UK, which will bring bigger awareness to how bad
| the current implementation of UK OSA is.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| This is a loss, but only really a technical loss. What happened
| is that Wikimedia have been told that they haven't been told
| that they are Category 1 at this point and, given that they've
| already made a submission to Ofcom which makes an argument that
| they aren't Category 1 [1], then they need to wait and see if
| Ofcom agrees. If Ofcom doesn't agree, then Wikimedia is invited
| to come back again, with a fairly strong hint that they will
| find the door open for a review under the ECHR [2].
|
| What I hope (and optimistically expect) to happen from here is
| that Ofcom takes a pragmatic view and interprets the rules such
| that Wikipedia is, in fact, not caught as a Category 1 site and
| can continue as before.
|
| That outcome would be in line with Parliament's intent for this
| Act; the politicians were after Facebook, not Wikipedia, and
| they won't want any more blowback than the (IMO misguided) porn
| block has already brought them.
|
| [1] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/08/Wikimedi..., para 66.
|
| [2] ibid, para 136.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| The problem is that a regulatory body is determining all this
| instead of the independent judiciary. Ofcom now has the power
| to granularly decide who gets categorized as what, and to
| what degree small organizations are given less stringent
| rules. They have the power to become a ministry of truth.
| That is hyperbole today, but only because they haven't been
| wielded by a suitably minded leader yet. If this seems
| paranoid consider it is coming from an American. Might ask
| Poles and Hungarians what they think too. The Poles might
| still feel free to answer honestly.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| _> The problem is that a regulatory body is determining all
| this instead of the independent judiciary._
|
| What we have is the regulatory body (which, as a non-
| ministerial government department is effectively part of
| the government) making the specific regulations, and the
| comparability of those regulations with other laws being
| determined by the independent judiciary.
|
| That's exactly as it should be, no? I don't think I want
| judges _creating_ laws or regulations. That 's not their
| role in our democracy.
|
| _> [Ofcom has] the power to become a ministry of truth._
|
| The judgment makes clear that any such attempt would be
| incompatible with the freedom of expression rights
| guaranteed to us by the ECHR. That's a good thing!
|
| We don't need to panic about the OSA, as things stand.
| However, we should be very worried about the stated desire
| of Reform for the UK to join Russia in being outside the
| ECHR. In that scenario, the judiciary would have no power
| to prevent the scenario you're outlining and, exactly as it
| is in Russia, there's a good chance that the media would be
| captured by the government.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| My understanding was that ofcom itself decided on a case
| by case basis categorization and waivers. If they just
| set out some rules and appeals go to the judiciary
| instead of ofcom, then that is certainly better. But that
| was not what I understood.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| Most public bodies in the UK, including Ofcom, are
| subject to judicial reviews.
| https://www.judiciary.uk/how-the-law-works/judicial-
| review/ However Ofcom eventually reaches its final
| decisions, it will need to do so consistently.
| jajuuka wrote:
| Wikipedia doesn't have grounds to really challenge this law. It
| is a principled stance is that everyone should have open access
| to encyclopedic knowledge. This is Wikipedia protecting that
| access within the framework they can operate in (as someone
| subject to this new law) and protecting their contributors from
| doxing.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| It was decided this will happen and no one can do anything
| against it.
|
| Everything else is just theater.
| nelox wrote:
| The decision upholding the Online Safety Act verification rules
| against Wikipedia's challenge overlooks practical and
| proportionality concerns. Wikipedia operates with minimal
| commercial infrastructure, relies on volunteers and does not
| require age-restricted content verification for its core
| encyclopaedia. The law's blanket requirement for platforms to
| implement age verification fails to distinguish between services
| with high-risk harmful material and those providing general
| reference. That is a regulatory overreach that imposes compliance
| burdens without measurable safety gains. The ruling also
| discounts the privacy risks of verification schemes, which can
| create centralised databases vulnerable to misuse or breach. This
| is not a hypothetical threat; data leaks from verification
| providers are well documented. A risk-based approach would focus
| enforcement on platforms with demonstrated harm while exempting
| low-risk educational resources. Treating all online services
| identically undercuts the intended aim of child protection and
| diverts resources from genuine problem areas.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| The OSA has several different parts. This ruling is not
| concerned with those parts of the OSA which deal with child
| protection; age verification isn't meaningfully mentioned
| anywhere in the judgment. Additionally, encyclopedias in the UK
| have routinely included factual sexual content for many decades
| -- just pick up an old Britannica for evidence -- without being
| characterised as pornographic. I don't think the OSA seeks to
| change that.
|
| The main problem I have with the OSA is that age verification
| for explicitly pornographic sites exposes users to the very
| real risks that you mention. However, that's really nothing to
| do with this ruling, which is instead around the special duties
| that the OSA imposes on "categorised" services.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Freedom is in decline around the planet
| DocTomoe wrote:
| There's an HTTP status for these kind of situations: 451 -
| unavailable for legal reasons.
|
| If a government decides to dismantle the net - let them see what
| that means.
| zastai0day wrote:
| This regulatory challenge reveals how policy changes can create
| new cybersecurity , from identity verification risks to
| operational security gaps, underscoring the importance of
| holistic vulnerability management that addresses both technical
| and regulatory security risks.
| jedahan wrote:
| Not sure why, but this reads as an AI generated summary. Can
| someone confirm/explain? What does it mean to create new
| cybersecurity?
| dlenski wrote:
| Does Wikipedia/Wikimedia have any facilities in the UK? I assume
| it does have some paid employees based there.
|
| How would/could the UK enforce this law against WP/WM if they
| simply didn't obey it?
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