The Old Bailey with Britain's last court reporters
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
From the article:
> If Toyn puts up a story about rape or sexual assault, using any of those words, the story will be buried by Google. To ensure his stories remain visible, he has to word many crimes euphemistically. As a lover of language in its specificity and extremity, and as a journalist who believes in reporting what actually happens in society, Toyn finds this outrageous. “What are we going to say, rape doesn’t exist?”
Exactly. Many jurisdictions removed it from the books decades ago. Its exact definitions were always problematic. Now it is more often described as one end of a s-assault continuum.
But not the jurisdiction in question.
"Rape is a statutory offence in England and Wales. The offence is created by section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003: "
It doesn't. But the reason for having two terms is so that there can be a legal term, "sexual assault", which people interpret as meaning "rape" despite the fact that it includes, and almost always refers to, very different behavior. The point of the term is that the actual meaning is unrelated to the colloquial meaning. The purpose is to be uninformative.
It's the same reason that "human trafficking" is legally defined as "prostitution". It sounds like slavery, which is good for the reputations of police and prosecutors, but if you look at prosecutions, they're effectively all made against women who are accused of "trafficking" themselves.
As societies, we have to force Google, YouTube, Tiktok and all the other algorithm-based rankers to fully disclose their ranking criteria as a first step, and then actually discuss as a society if we want to force the rankers to rank differently.
And how do you fully disclose the ranking criteria? It's a giant pile of evershifting programs. And even if you disclosed them, that wouldn't mean normal people would understand them. Just like barely anyone understands exactly how your favourite filesystem works in the fully disclosed Linux kernel.
> and then actually discuss as a society if we want to force the rankers to rank differently.
Just don't use the services that seem to have rankings policies you disagree with. No need to drag other people in with your own choices 'as a society'.
'As a society' we already make laws about what's legal and what's illegal, and there's also some vague consensus (but not universally shared) about what's perhaps legal but still in bad taste.
But 'as a society' we don't decide on every last thing. People should have their freedom as much as possible, the freedom to make their own decisions.
Do you want to disclose exactly how you make your decisions when you are voting on HN comments? Can you even do that?
A 'society' that makes all the decisions for everyone is totalitarian.
Usually by outsourcing it to some government regulatory agency
> that wouldn't mean normal people would understand
That’s fine, some people would and be able to explain it to others who care (minimizing the likelihood of misinformation since it would be easy to verify)
> understands exactly how your favourite filesystem works in the fully disclosed Linux kernel
Because it doesn’t really matter. Almost all people are entirely unaffected by this and have no reason to care
> Just don't use the services that seem to have rankings policies you disagree with.
Right.. doesn’t work with oligopolies/monopolies. Do you think Bing is much better? No? Well..that’s that.
Barrier to entry have never been lower. Both over time, and also compared to most other industries.
If you don't like any of the offerings on the market, perhaps your tastes are just not wildly shared? (And if they are, but underserved, that's a lucrative niche for a new company!)
You’d be trying to compete against products into the development of which two of the biggest global corporations have invested billions over the years. Eve MS itself could barely dent Google’s market share…
A lot of properties, like the emergence of conspiracy theories or social media fueling political polarization, are a direct consequence of such rules working as intended. One doesn't need an explicit is_flat_earth_related variable to still contribute to the spread of flat earth videos and show them to those who are the most vulnerable.
In the UK, many courts are streamed, including civil courts, crown court, and the supreme court.
https://www.judiciary.uk/the-court-of-appeal-civil-division-...
https://www.supremecourt.uk/live/court-01.html
https://insidehmcts.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/19/broadcasting-from...
> There are very complex restrictions on reporting
These badly need reforming for the 21st century, but, like a lot of the courts system, which is simultaneously inefficient and badly funded, nobody's going to touch it.
And has just won this year's Paul Foot Award for it:
This is really just a story about a broader lack of local news reporting because no one wants to pay for it in general. My small town had a rather good local newspaper back in the day (which I subscribed to) but it was a labor of love and the publisher became ill so now there's nothing unless it's sufficient news that it hits the big city paper about 50 miles away or at least some regional website.
People have long talked about the difference between "the public interest" and "what the public are interested in", but I think it's becoming particularly acute with regard to what the public will pay for.
Social media and lately AI make this worse, too. People will be content consuming only the highest-octane global court reporting (US Supreme Court; I know far too much about this for a Brit) and the rest will just be .. fake news.
Cases at both levels are well covered in the media with open access to dockets via PACER - and people should be paying attention to the results of these cases because they have real impact on the law.
On the other hand, District Court cases do not set precident.
Imagine their joy when one of their own was present in the dock, for a drunk-and-disorderly before the local magistrate. Fully reported, blandly, blindly, doubtless to much dismay for the student concerned.