UK version of “Online Harms Bill” wants to prefilter content without due process
easydns.com
easydns.com
It's clear we cannot trust the institutional powers to self-regulate and do the right thing.
Then we saw it again, with "inflation is transitory, we aren't even thinking about thinking about hiking interest rates...".
What got censored exactly?
Personally I feel I got to know everything in proper time as knowledge was being formed and refined.
I think it might be because I know how to read papers and understand nuances? And the average person take policies as the same as high confidence proven scientific conclusions, as opposed to the best guess of the time by some policymaker that needs to make a decision without the full information?
Zerohedge was kicked off Twitter for suggesting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a likely candidate for the origin.
We're seeing that Fauci & Ecohealth co-ordinated the paper to "debunk" the lab leak theory and now the lab leak is looking to be the most likely culprit (it is not without precedent, the 1977 Russian Flu turned out to be a lab leak from gain-on-function research).
Ivermectin, was another. Complete with "horse de-wormer" smears and deplatforming campaigns all over the place.
If you don't know of any instances where this has happened, you either did a masterful job tuning it all out, or still believe 99% of the b/s.
Or are you asking for a source on somebody getting deplatformed for saying that, and Dr. Peter McCullough comes to mind there.
The Great Barrington Declaration was also de-indexed from Google for disputing lockdowns.
> “There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
This was a clear recommendation to not wear masks (unless you're caring for sick people), and overnight it turned to mandatory masks. This is not some random person somewhere, but someone who has to say stuff directly to "average people".
What that means is that people were sharing unproven things. Some of the things were later proven, and some weren't. Censoring everything until it's actually proven science is not a bad strategy when people are willing to inject themselves with bleach because they're so desperate for a cure.
We don't censor those.
Why should we censor lab leak theories? It was a valid theory even then and still is. I mean... to go to extreme, why should we censor reptilian 5g zuckerberg-is-a-robot theories at all, why censorship?
People were spraying their houses with vinegar before too, and we didn't censor that, even if it wasn't proven either.
On the other hand, we had real world data that vaccinated people "don't get sick", and we didn't censor that either:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
For example, early in the pandemic when the surgeon general of the USA and the top doctor of Canada both advised against wearing masks, would you classify that as the authorities "sharing unproven things"? Perhaps they should have censored themselves, instead of shutting out the voices who pointed out that the worldwide evidence was overwhelmingly in favour of masks being effective?
The Science is settled and the science is holy, it came down to us from the anointed scientists and anyone who disagrees with or questions the science is a dangerous heretic, wishing to spread misinformation and promote hate.
You aren't qualified to ask questions, the science is settled the science has spoken, you are a lowly non-government non-scientist and you are not to get out of line. After all you know who else questions the science, climate deniers, and anti-vaxxers and Neo-Nazis and transphobes. So don't question the science it is settled, and you better no longer talk back to your betters.
"The Science," they exclaimed, "feeds us and protects us and elevates us; with it we speak to one another, with it we teach one another, in it is the totality of being. The Science is the friend of rationality and the enemy of superstition: the Science is omniscient, unquestioned; blessed is the Science." And before long this allocution was printed on the first page of the Book, and in subsequent editions the ritual swelled into a complicated system of praise and prayer." - A parody of The Machine Stops
Yes and no.
The UK is a highly surveilled country. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country. We have Automatic Number Plate Recognition tracking cars literally everywhere. We're a part of Echelon and Five Eyes and probably a whole bunch of other things. Pretty much everything we do is tracked.
But...
That data isn't used for very much. The police actually need to request access, and generally they do without abusing it. The government doesn't (seem to) abuse the data available in nefarious ways. People can and do publish things that are very critical of the government. People protest (although those rights have been horribly eroded in the past couple of decades). The media isn't entirely on the side of the state. We don't have social surveillance with people reporting their neighbours.
So, yeah, it could be a lot better. It's not like China though (yet?).
British investigative journalist Joe Bloggs wants to research a country's human rights abuses. Joe visits said country with a strong alibi, and covertly discovers the truth. He returns to Britain, publishing under a pseudonym a critical newspaper report exposing the matter. The British intelligence services note that he did so, not because he's under suspicion for anything but simply because they can. The country that he was researching intercepts that intelligence, learning of the journalist's pseudonym.
What do you think is going to happen to poor Joe when he revisits the country to do some more investigation?
> The UK is a highly surveilled country. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country.
https://aithority.com/news/top-10-countries-and-cities-by-nu...
China has 200 million CCTV cameras
US has 50 million
Germany 5.2 million
UK has 5 million
> The United States has 15.28 CCTV cameras every 100 individuals, followed by China with 14.36 and the United Kingdom with 7.5.
You'll need to provide better citations than just saying that the UK has more CCTV cameras than anyone else, when we have less than the US or Germany, and less per capita too.
When the UK does things which remind of you that, it isn't a coincidence. To be clear I'm not saying "this is literally 1984" or anything like that, I'm just trying to explain how "surveillance state" and "UK" have a LOT of known history.
A few years ago, it was an arrest every 2 hours over mild internet comments, or 3300 a year. The number is much higher now, but I don't know what it is, specifically. One of the worst parts I can think of is criminally charging teenagers with hate speech for posting rap lyrics.
You’re about a decade late here
How long before these two views are exposed as contradictory? (Or do they just resolve that internally as "we only support dewhatevering people we don't like"?)
It seemed like most MPs weren't actually bothered about debanking, it's been going on for several years now and surely many of those people affected wrote/spoke to their local MP. It's required someone like Farage to kick up a fuss about it. Hopefully we'll see proper legislation to prevent it going forward but I won't hold my breath.
The next government is going to be even more all-in on the authoritarian/blasphemy-laws nonsense.
The reason the government is full of decrepit dotards, blustering fanatics, and greedy criminals is because nobody else seems to want to participate anymore.
Mastodon and the fediverse are close, maybe, but many instances refuse to "speak" to one another because of their users.
I think it will be a cat and mouse game, where people will be finding more and more creative ways of exchanging keys and disguising encrypted messages in seemingly normal conversations or images.
It will be again something that won't affect serious criminals, but will give government an insight into who is committing wrong think of the given year (as these things change over time).
I can also imagine, given the wages in the UK are pretty bad, especially for engineers, many of those working on the necessary infrastructure would be tempted by the ideas of insider trading, leaking company and private secrets to the highest bidder and so on.
It feels like this government just doesn't give a flying toss and they just want take a dip into people private lives and see what they can get out of it.
What is even more worrying is that the opposition also supports this bill.
This is not true, this is slander. Child pornographers use whatever is available to them. Censors, however, spend all of their time trying to associate people who wish to speak, listen, and associate freely with child pornographers.
Politicians being censors?! no way in a democracy(rollseyes)
They say
As they cart you off to the gulag.
My perception back then was that people who used VPNs were generally dodgy people who wanted to illegally download things online or mask their identity while doing various other illegal things.
But in recent years geo-restrictions, ISP blacklists, and data collection have forced more and more users to use VPNs to the point where their use today is fairly common.
Obviously I'm not in favour of this legislation, but I would hope that the more the governments seek to censor content and attack encryption online the more people will use services that are un-censorable and encrypted.
Short of requiring spy-ware on all of our devices there's fundamentally very little governments can actually do to prevent this. In fact, the harder they fight the more they'll push people out of their reach.
That goes double for the repetitive+indignant sort of internet comment—those almost always lead to shallow conversation.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
This is more the "Online Harm To Tory Propaganda And Election Chances Bill".
Hey, let's not forget that Labour also supports this bill.
"Online harms are extremely dangerous to our democracy"