UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

We elect these inept parasites. It is on us.

The law is not aimed at big tech. It is aimed at any online forum that the government wants to shut down, and gives an lengthy, arbitrary, and vague list of pretenses that they can base a shutdown on. Big tech has shown itself to be eager to conform to government expectations at every turn. Big tech helps even to shape government expectations, and continually shares personnel with government itself.

myopic governments pushed by myopic voters are apparently the new norm.

But:

> Is there a single site ... ?

is asking for a tiny bit of evidence (this is gentle curiousness; the antithesis of combative). Earnestly, are you able to provide one site that 'promotes eating disorders', so I can be educated?

If the answer is 'any site with charismatic too-slim people', isn't that extremely difficult to administer, and possibly become horribly discriminatory, for example if a site has a user profile of a beautiful but illegally[1] slender person, doesn't that 'promote eating disorders'? Would a site admin be legally compelled to block that user, or at least censor their profile pic?

I literally don't know what's legal vs illegal in this sphere, and suspect 99% of others are the same, and that probably includes the legislators themselves. Those claiming to know precisely what's il/legal in this context are probably overconfident.

Although probably a just cause I'd say that the western world does have an obesity problem though, not an anorexia one. So a better example would be all the sites encouraging people being lazy and fat and eating junk while labelling anything criticizing the unhealthiness of obesity as supposedly engaging in "fat shaming".

I mean: even using the term "fat shaming" is encouraging fat people to stay fat. And that's promoting eating disorders IMO.

So: fighting anorexia, sure. But we got bigger fishes (literally) to deal with if the (laudable) goal is to fight eating disorders.

1. Aren’t such threats already covered by existing laws?

2. They weren’t murdered on Twitter, so I fail to see how the Online Safety Act would have helped prevent this.

I am sure threats of violence are already illegal. If those people are in the UK, they should be prosecuted. If they are not in the UK they is not threat. I don't believe any if these online threats BTW are credible.

What these MPs do is frequently make outlandish statements, which then gets them a bunch of hate (Jess Phillips has done this her entire political career) and useful idiots will shout their mouth off online. These MPs then point to all the "hate" they are getting. There is even a meme demonstrating this very effect:

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/960/143/d7a...

> with two MPs murdered in the last decade.

The murder of David Amess had nothing to do with Social Media. The killer said it was to do with religion when asked by Police.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_David_Amess#Investig...

I believe the individual was deemed at risk of radicalisation.

> You and I have the luxury that we can just not be on Twitter - but when you're an MP, unless you're in a very safe seat you've got to meet voters where they are, not where you'd like them to be.

They don't need to be on Twitter. Twitter isn't their local constituents. They have surgeries for this very reason. Very few people on Twitter are relevant to what happens on election day in their constituency.

> So from an MP's perspective? In one hand they've got a report about revenge porn, cyber-bullying, 4chan /pol/ and pro-anorexia facebook groups. In the other hand they've got their phone where someone's just told them to kill themselves.

Even if that is true that doesn't mean we restrict everyone's rights because a minority are engaging in illegal/immoral acts.

> They believe in these "illegal harms" because they've got a front row seat, and experience them on a daily basis.

That is what they say to sell the narrative that they need to censor social media. If you look over the last 20 years. It is as if nobody has learned anything from the early 2000s and the war on terror. They will exploit (or create) any crisis.

> Would you want your children or young adults spending time there?

Suicide is a difficult topic. I'd never want anyone (related or otherwise) to be in a position where ending their life is their best option, but then I support euthanasia (a subset of suicide), so I certainly support people obtaining information that could help their situation, even if their situation is difficult, dire and worthy of enormous compassion.

Thanks again for sharing.

This is being pushed by banks and tech billionaires, including the world's richest man.

Why is that considered a good trend for regular people?

I can think of plenty scenarios where these records should be destroyed permanently after some amount of time - namely, if the police decide not to refer to a prosecutor, or if the prosecutor decides not to press charges, or if the defendant is found not guilty.

I would hope that this along with any other disclosure where the police decided on no action would be treated appropriately and only disclosed/acted upon if the incident was really worrying. On the other hand, I can't help but feel if the incident is worrying enough would it not also meet the bar for a criminal incident?

I'm not really comfortable with the naming and the lack of due process to be honest.

On the other hand, being careful what you say on social media is a requisite in many careers as companies can and do perform private background checks.

And as we all know: corruption ends abruptly at the highest levels.

The standard version was 100% orange pressed

The "healthy" low cal version was 50% orange 50% water and sweetener addictives Same brand/price

The British Heart Foundation also recommends cola zero as healthier than 100% juice

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sugar-tax-revenue-helps-t...

It has to obey instructions on prioritisation from the secretary of state and has no real operational flexibility.

As with much of the (dire) UK legislation here, the government saying something is true until it is blue in the face does not make it true.

It is never "inevitable" that the correct place for law and regulation is somewhere in the middle on every issue. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's never inevitable.

Assuming that it is makes it far too easy to move the Overton window: regulation proposes something stricter than the status quo, "compromise" moves in that direction, repeat.

The UK has a very funny (literally ha-ha funny) notion of "democracy" -- with people just voting against the status quo most of the time and with "first past the post" resulting in leadership that doesn't have, and cannot even credibly claim, genuine popular support. It's a totally broken system.

Has shown itself to be vague enough to be a perfect stand in for "harmful" in everything the parent comment says.

Leaving is useful, if it improves your personal well-being.

No need to be spiteful about it.

It’s a shame that Britain gave one of its “high earner” jobs to someone who’d enjoy seeing it collapse.

Schools in the UK spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with this, and in almost every case it turns out parents have no idea what their kids are sending/seeing online.

So the result is that bad parents demand bad legislation so that they can, in their minds, transfer responsibility for parenting their kids to the state. The state, well meaning rather than malicious, massively overreaches in its attempt to provide an answer. As a result everyone else suffers. And the 'majority of the public' think parents should parent, rather than making it the government's problem, and butt out of their internet.

1) The majority of the UK's populace are onboard with the vast majority of these laws. Even if all the people that opposed this voted for another party, due to how the constituencies work, your vote will be effectively made moot.

2) Both major UK parties essentially agree that these laws should be implemented. The only solution to any problem that UK government can envisage is banning something. You can look into the Lotus Carlton ram raids of 40RR, they were singing the same tune back in the late 80s/early 90s.

3) There is no realistic pro-liberty / anti-censorship movement at all in the UK

This has been going for longer than I have been alive in the UK (I am now in my early 40s). I am not an anarchist, but I've heard the phrase repeated by anarchists of "You cannot vote yourself free". The only way to resist such laws is to subvert them via technology.

I wonder how it is that you know about it then?

The Web isn't the information superhighway in cyberspace that it was in the '90s. The muggles are here, and they're treating social media like another part of the physical world, and we just have to live with the consequences of that. Mandatory content moderation is just one of those consequences.

You're not entitled to run any business, let alone a social media platform. Every right has attendant responsibilities. Fulfil your obligations to society.

Many US companies won't capitulate to these regulations. The UK is going to simply be cut off from many social media services.

That would land you in jail in the UK no matter what forum you said it in. No we have no right to incite people to riot in the UK. That is something I'm rather proud of.

My arguments are:

* free speech is not a cornerstone of our national identity (despite John Milton's attempts to make it one);

* social media causes genuine harm (but does not do so inherently);

* the Act imposes a legal responsibility on social media platforms to limit harm caused by those platforms; and

* while members of the HN community may have a personal capacity to use social media in such a way that minimises harm to them, the majority of people do not.

> The Act unquestionably causes harm - it makes it effectively impossible for open, anonymous APIs because of the age verification requirements. It requires the vast majority of operators (because the UK's definition of pornography is so impossibly wide it will catch almost anything) to collect a huge tranch of information for age verification, which will cost an astonishing amount of money and prevent many community initiatives from ever getting off the ground. It will lead to many sites simply blocking adult communities entirely for economic reasons, a part of society that is already subject to substantial discrimination from UK authorities.

Alternatively, social media platforms can ban pornography. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok (amongst others) already do this; the problem is they don't enforce these bans. My perspective on this is that if you can't effectively moderate your social media platform in accordance with the social norms of your users' surrounding social context, then you shouldn't be operating a social media platform, and if you strongly disagree with your users' social context (e.g., users in, say, Iran), then you shouldn't offer your platform to them.

Also, commercial social media platforms are increasingly disinterested in providing open APIs, anyway.

> You say that the UK is not a totalitarian state because it's half assed. And it's certainly true that enforcement will be capricious and arbitrary. But that is hardly a defence of the act - it will still have a remarkable chilling effect because you never know if it's you that will be targeted.

This is how offensive speech is policed in meatspace. On a more general note, having the right to say something doesn't mean that saying that thing doesn't make you an arsehole.

> Meanwhile, it will probably have very little effect on any of the things it is supposed to prohibit.

Maybe. Let's wait and see, shall we?

> Many communities are already discriminated against by payment providers, banks and online services, and this legislation will make those effects significantly worse, but at the same time, achieve none of it's goals.

I don't recall the Online Safety Act regulating the financial industry - could you point out which parts of the legislation relate to that? I do, however, agree that we do have excessive restrictions on access to certain financial services.

There is nothing easy to point to, like the first amendment to the US constitution, but it probably wouldn't matter anyway.

The key differences between the UK and US, particularly in this area are that:

1) Governments in the UK tend to have large parliamentary majorities - the current government has a majority in excess of 150 seats. So if there was some sort of written constitution guaranteeing Free Speech, and it required a supermajority to change, it's likely that many UK governments would easily be able to do that.

2) Politicians and the public at large in the UK have very different attitudes to Free Speech (or rather, they take a more pragmatic approach to things and can see the need to compromise). Polling has shown that the Online Safety Act has over 70% of the public supporting it. Parts of the act see even higher support than that. Consequently, most of the major political parties support the act or even think it should go further.

This is in deep contrast to the US, where imagining a scenario in which you could amend the constitution would be virtually impossible in the current climate.

It's a quote from one of the American founding fathers. I don't remember which, and I don't remember the exact quote.

> Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on them what does it matter whether or not a particular government acknowledges it?

In British law, most of what we now call 'human rights' were granted as settlements following rebellions or civil wars, the most notable example being those in the Bill of Rights 1689[0]. It was the Americans who copied that piece of legislation and wrote God's name at the top. The Parliamentarians who first wrote that bill remembered the Second English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I on charges of Tyranny - he wanted to levy taxes that Parliament opposed. (Sound familiar?)

> It's still an infringement and should be fought.

We don't have absolute freedom of speech in this country and that's fine. Freedom in this country is about doing not speaking.

> Or maybe that's exactly the time you should make those assertions all the more loudly. Principles don't mean anything if you only hold them when it's easy, and we should all stop treating people who drop their principles at the slightest road bump as some kind of warrior for safety or whatever they'd like to frame it as, and treat them as they are - cowards and authoritarians.

We don't do abstract principles in Britain, we're all about 100% organic realpolitik. Our system of government has been slowly evolving for nearly one thousand years, and continues to evolve. One of our kings was a tyrant, so we killed him. The republic that replaced him was worse, so we restored the monarchy. We solve the problem in front of us - there's no need to solve every problem ever right now.

> Oh so the hope is just that the government is too ineffectual to prosecute something they're completely within their rights to prosecute? How is that not absolute madness?

This is how Britain has always been governed - with minimal effort. Yes, it's mad. With specific reference to prosecutions, the Crown Prosecution Service only prosecutes if it think it will get a guilty verdict.

> Why in the world would you trust a government to enforce this fairly? What's to say your Conservative Party doesn't use this to target prominent supporters of Labour, or vice versa?

The government (i.e., the Cabinet and other Ministers of the Crown) have no direct control over the implementation of this legislation; that is delegated to Ofcom, a regulatory body that answers to Parliament as a whole. Any attempt to seize control of Ofcom would require legislation, which would be heavily scrutinised by the House of Lords (which is not elected, and therefore is only weakly influenced by party whips) and would also have to gain Royal Assent, which would probably be refused if the legislation were seen to weaken British democracy.

> As an American (the horror, I know, that I deign to comment on something British), I'd love to know where your freedom of speech is codified and what a government would have to do if they wanted to change what counts as speech, what doesn't, and what's protected and what isn't. I suspect that you and I have very different definitions of what qualifies as free speech.

Absolute freedom of speech is only granted to parliamentarians when speaking in Parliament. The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law; Article 10 of the Convention provides for a general right to freedom of expression, but permits certain restrictions. Prior to the Human Rights Act, there was no general freedom of speech; instead everything that was not specifically prohibited was allowed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

Then we found out that police is an "identifiable social group", and so are the MPs...

If I Google poor and homeless people in the US, will I find there are none? Everyone is healthy and getting medical treatment?

I wouldn't want every user to validate their age with government ID.

But we can say schools should ban kids from using phones. We can say that large social media platforms need to whitelist content/creators that children are allowed to access. We can insist that social media companies throttle the ability for minors to scroll through videos at a dopamine addiction pace.

More generally and more applicable to the discussion, I think regulations for social media need to be applied proportional to the userbase and centralization of a platform, and target viral algorithms.

Old school message boards should be safe from government interference, broadly.

It may be time to research simpleX chat and Briar if we will maintain the ability to communicate without government filtering.

No need to go there. What about commenting anonymously on your work place?

I guess we should stop checking age when buying alcohol in pubs (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's alcohol purchases_)

And stop checking age when buying cigarettes (_Parents should be the ones that should be controlling their children's tobacco purchases_)

etc.

It's illuminating that your post is both "tech can't solve it" and so brazenly pro-tech with manifestations of its laziest arguments each way.

Of course tech can solve the ID problem. It could solve it in a way that doesn't need to give ground to your slippery slope argument too. It just doesn't have the incentive model to do so. Any "control" in this space would reduce the marketable headcount and so it's not in tech's interests to solve - without government intervention.

I don't like that it that American companies enforces it language policing on UK residents, I also don't like that fact that the UK wants to force it language policing world wide (the UK state acts as if it has an empire).

The reason people are unwilling to consider an alternative viewpoint, is that in the past they have been more moderate and what has happened has been a complete erosion of civil liberties under the guise of "stopping the terrorists". I was arguing the same thing I am arguing essentially over 20 years ago.

Ironically many of those groups that we went to war to stop (Al-queda/ISIS) are now being presented as moderate because foreign policy has shifted again.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/cons...