Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
forums.hexus.net
forums.hexus.net
Table 1.1: Priority offences by category ( https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli... )
Disucssion of offenses related to: prostitution, drugs, abuse & insults, suicide, "stiring up of racial/religious hatred", fraud and "foreign interference".
So one imagines a university student discussing, say: earning money as a prostitute. Events/memories related to drug taking. Insulting their coursemates. Ridiculing the iconography of a religion. And, the worst crime of all, "repeating russian propaganda" (eg., the terms of a peace deal) -- which russians said it, and if it is true are -- of course -- questions never asked nor answered.
This free-thinking university student's entire online life seems to have been criminalised in mere discussion by the OSA, there may have been zero actual actions involved (consider, though, a majority of UK students have taken class-A drugs at most prominent universities).
This seems as draconian, censorious, illiberal, repressive and "moral panic"y as the highs of repressive christian moralism in the mid 20th C.
Maybe the future will be places guarded by real life trust.
To pick two examples from the document you linked:
Discussion of being a sex worker would not be covered. The only illegal content relating to sex work would be if you were actively soliciting or pimping. From the document:
* Causing or inciting prostitution for gain offence
* Controlling a prostitute for gain offence
Similarly, discussion of drug use wouldn't be illegal either per se, only using the forum to buy or sell drugs or to actively encourage others to use drugs:
* The unlawful supply, offer to supply, of controlled drugs
* The unlawful supply, or offer to supply, of articles for administering or preparing controlled drugs
* The supply, or offer to supply, of psychoactive substances
* Inciting any offence under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971
That's very different to criminalising content where you talk about being (or visiting) a prostitute, or mention past or current drug use. Those things would all still be legal content.
Recall that we just spent several years where discussion of major political issues of concern to society were censored across social media platforms. Taking an extremely charitable interpretation of what government demands will be made here isn't merely naïve but empirically false.
And the reason I chose those kinds of illegal activities was to show that these very laws themselves are plausibly oppressive as-is, plausibly lacking in "deep democractic" support (ie., perhaps suriving on very thin majorities) -- and so on.
And yet it is these laws for which mass interactive media will be censored.
This is hardly a list with murder at the top.
What makes you pick the mid-20th century as the high point of repressive christian moralism? That doesn't seem even close to the high point if you look back further in history.
USA : * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commiss...
UK : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Chamberlain
> From 1737 to 1968, the Lord Chamberlain had the power to decide which plays would be granted a licence for performance; this meant that he had the capacity to censor theatre at his pleasure.
UK : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_nasty
> To assist local authorities in identifying obscene films, the Director of Public Prosecutions released a list of 72 films the office believed to violate the Obscene Publications Act 1959.
as the highs of (repressive christian moralism in the mid 20th C.)
and not
as the highs of (repressive christian moralism) in the mid 20th C.
- freedom of thought, conscience and religion; - freedom of expression; - freedom of assembly and association; - the right to bodily integrity; - the right to respect for private and family life; or - freedom from discrimination.
Then political views should be protected in the same manner?
Further, would this mean that even mentioning: Problems with child abuse in the Catholic church are forbidden. Problems with LGBT rights in some Islamic groups.
Since both can be seen as spreading hatred of people based on religion.
What about spreading hatred about fat people? Why is that not included?
This response is only intended to point out problems with such censorship as this bill defines.
Spreading or receiving hateful harassment is wrong regardless of the why it should all be banned. Or hateful harassment should be protected under freedom of speech.
To make a law that allows hateful harassment sometimes and makes it illegal in others is inherently not sustainable Since it will almost certainly have to keep expanding as other vulnerable groups are identified and thus deserve equal protection.
Either way, the point of that document in aggregate seems to be that "illegal content" is content that falls afoul of existing criminal law already: (possession and distribution of) terrorist training material is already illegal and so it is illegal content. But saying that you committed an offence is not, in and of itself, an offence, so saying you took drugs at university doesn't seem to me like it could be illegal content. Encouraging people to do so might be, but it already is.
Maybe I missed the bit where it says discussing things is illegal, so correct me if I am wrong.
Not your lawyer not legal advice etc etc
There's nothing illegal about hosting a forum. The problem is that you as the site operator are legally required to take down certain kinds of content if and when it appears. Small sites with no money or staff don't have the resources to pay for a full time moderator. That cost scales with the number of users. And who knows whats in those 2.6M historical posts.
From TFA:
> The act will require a vast amount of work to be done on behalf of the Forums and there is no-one left with the availability to do it
Maybe an LLM can carry some of the load here for free forums like this to keep operating?
It can't give you any guarantees, and it can't be held liable for those mistakes.
Without free discourse...well, I think it'd be real bad
And yet there are restrictions on speech everywhere in the world.
So not sure we need to clutch the pearls too tightly.
a) Duties to take or use proportionate measures relating to the design or operation of the service to prevent individuals from encountering priority illegal content and minimising the length of time that such content is present on the service;
b) Duties to take or use proportionate measures relating to the design or operation of the service to design and operate systems in a way which mitigates and manages the risks identified in the service provider’s risk assessment;
c) A duty to operate the service using proportionate systems and processes designed to swiftly take down (priority or non-priority) illegal content when they become aware of it (the ‘takedown duty’); and
d) A duty to take or use proportionate measures relating to the design and operation of the service to mitigate and manage the risk of the service being used for the commission or facilitation of a priority offence
---
That's a bit more than "have a think"
- Duties to take or use proportionate measures relating to the design or operation of the service to prevent individuals from encountering priority illegal content and minimising the length of time that such content is present on the service;
- Duties to take or use proportionate measures relating to the design or operation of the service to design and operate systems in a way which mitigates and manages the risks identified in the service provider’s risk assessment;
- A duty to operate the service using proportionate systems and processes designed to swiftly take down (priority or non-priority) illegal content when they become aware of it
- A duty to take or use proportionate measures relating to the design and operation of the service to mitigate and manage the risk of the service being used for the commission or facilitation of a priority offence.
- The safety duty also requires providers to include provisions in their terms of service specifying how individuals are to be protected from illegal content, and to apply these provisions consistently.
Even if the language of this law was specific, it requires so many so invasive and difficult steps, no hobbyist, or even small company could reasonably meet. But it's anything but specific - it's full of vague, subjective language like "reasonable" and "proportionate", that would be ruinous to argue in court for anyone but billion dollar companies, and even for them, the end result will be that they are forced to accede to whatever demands some government-sanctioned online safety NGO will set, establishing a neverending treadmill of keeping up with what will become "industry standard" censorship. Because it's either that, or open yourself to huge legal risk that, in rejecting "industry standard" and "broadly recognized" censorship guidance to try to uphold some semblance of free discussion, you have failed to be "reasonable" and "proportionate" - you will be found to have "disregarded best practices and recognized experts in the field".
But, short of such an obvious breach, the rules regarding what can and can't be said, broadcast, forwarded, analysed are thought to be kept deliberately vague. In this way, everyone is on their toes and the authorities can shut down what they like at any time without having to give a reason. [2]
[1] Good luck arguing over what is "reasonable" in court if the government ever wants to shut you down.
That is a very tricky one to manage on an online forum. If an American expresses an opinion about UK policy, in a literal sense that is literally foreign interference. There isn't a technical way to tell propagandists from opinionated people. And the most effective propaganda, by far, is that which uses the truth to make reasonable and persuasive points - if it is possible to make a point that way then that is how it will be done.
The only way this works is to have a list of banned talking points from a government agency. I'd predict that effective criticism of [insert current government] is discovered to be driven mainly by foreign interference campaigns trying to promote division in the UK.
This runs into the same problem as all disinformation suppression campaigns - governments have no interest in removing the stuff everyone agrees is untrue - what is the point? the flat earthers are never going to gain traction and it doesn't matter if they do - the only topics worth suppressing are things that are plausible and persuasive. The topics most likely to turn out to be true in hindsight.
How so? The "obvious" solution to me, from the perspective of a politician, would be to 1. require online identity verification for signup to any forum hosted in your country, and then 2. using that information, only allow people who are citizens of your country to register.
(You know, like in China.)
And China's system doesn't stop disinformation; it promotes disinformation. It it designed to make sure that only China-sponsored disinformation is available. If you want a system for that it is a solved problem; it just isn't a good idea.
And to be clear, "making sure that only [legislative jurisdiction]-sponsored disinformation is available" is almost always the whole point of laws like this — and what I was assuming the UK was going for here. No state wants to prevent the spread of their own propaganda; they want state propaganda to be the only legal propaganda.
Remember that your phrasing I was responding to here is "the only way this works is[...]". I think what the UK is doing here can work very well indeed to achieve their goals — it's just a question of what those goals are. Which, I think, is where we differ; I may have a far more cynical view of those goals than you.
Foreign interference would probably be interpreted as an organized campaign of interference being launched by a foreign power.
>This runs into the same problem as all disinformation suppression campaigns - governments have no interest in removing the stuff everyone agrees is untrue
at one time everyone agreed Anti-Vaxx was untrue, and now it's American government policy but still just as untrue.
• The unlawful supply, offer to supply, of controlled drugs
• The unlawful supply, or offer to supply, of articles for administering or preparing controlled drugs
• The supply, or offer to supply, of psychoactive substances
• Inciting any offence under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971
Given what has happened to the US as a result of unbridled free broadcast of misinformation and disinformation, we definitely need more "draconian, censorious, illiberal, repressive" rules around the propagation of such media.
Moral panic is EXACTLY what's called for!
You have captains of industry and thought leaders of the governing party throwing fucking nazi salutes, and this is broadcast to the masses! Insanity to defend free speech after the country is circling a drain as a result of said free speech.
"Lfgss shutting down 16th March 2025 (day before Online Safety Act is enforced)
[...] I run just over 300 forums, for a monthly audience of 275k active users. most of this is on Linode instances and Hetzner instances, a couple of the larger fora go via Cloudflare, but the rest just hits the server.
and it's all being shut down [...]"
For the same reasons.
[*] Unless you are a multibillion $ company with an army of moderators, compliance people, lawyers.
I don't see our moderators needing to do any more work than they're already doing, and have been doing for years, to be honest.
So we'll see how the dice land.
For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.
The plan for April is to remove the need for police to obtain a warrant to search peoples homes - that bad.
I'd say "there will be blood on the streets", but there already is...
This video pretty much sums up what the UK is now. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zzstEpSeuwU
This is analogous to s18 PACE post-arrest powers, grafted onto s17 PACE.
The alternative is that we continue to require police to try and get a fast-time warrant while plotted up outside a premises; this is not a quick process, I've done it and it took nearly two hours.
>there will be blood on the streets
Oh, dry up.
After making secure communications a crime.
And you think a state like that cares about the formalities? lol..
They just doing what every other monarchy and dictatorship has done in a desperate bid to hold onto power while the state collapses due to inept leadership.
You brought up warrants, they counterpointed the warrants.
> And you think a state like that cares about the formalities? lol..
The warrant is a formality, isn't it? I'm pretty sure you're arguing against your own point now.
Or in other words, the proper legal authorities are parliament and the law itself. Sometimes the law needs interpreting and judgment calls, which where warrants come in. This law removes the need for interpretation in one narrow and clearly defined case. If before judges were expected to issue warrants on the kind of evidence that this law requires, then now codifying that expectation and removing what has now become nothing but a bureaucratic delay doesn't reduce liberty.
This seems to be limited to stolen geo-tagged items: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/25/police-new-p...
I would agree that this law is a slippery slope, but at the same time we should not omit important facts.
And that is before you get into the court system, which if you need a quick primer, just look at the treatment of Julian Assange - and thats a "best case" for someone with millions of global supporters.
Uk police have targets to hit, they can't hit those targets going after real criminals, so they predominantly target people nieve enough to think they want to help them.
Of course they had to make running public forums a crime.
How small was your school year?! What does Elizabeth (presumably the 2nd) dying have to do with anything?
Lets just say her replacements brother is Andrew, and his best mate was Jimmey Saville. Should tell you all you need to know about her replacement with less chance of me ending up like David Kelly.
Heads of state do matter, regardless of how much propaganda they push that they only matter in other countries. These laws are not something the labour voters asked for.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/27/queen-secret...
Appointed by the head of state. Meets the head of state regularly to be told what to do (wednesdays iirc).
Think about what it has taken for you to say what you just said despite those facts.
We are also talking about what is still the richest, most most powerful family on the planet. You think Elon musk is rich for owning Tesla and Twitter, these guys still own for example, England, Wales, Canada and Australia.
its called crown land
Secondly, the British monarchy have absolutely nothing to do with politics and have remained impartial for nearly 100 years.
The UK government has always been right wing compared to most of the rest of western Europe. It sucks, but it is what it is. But the way you’re talking is as if the UK has suddenly gone to hell when the reality is just that this is just more of the same.
If anything, the biggest footgun the UK has done was leaving the EU, and that was something the dumb British public voted for. We did it to ourselves.
What do you think she was doing?
A small website operator can keep child pornography off their platform with ease. Facebook have a mountain to climb — regardless of their resources.
Facebook can actually train AI to detect CSAM, and is probably already doing so in cooperation with NCMEC and similar organisations/authorities across the world.
Your average small website? No chance. Obtaining training material actively is seriously illegal everywhere, and keeping material that others upload is just as bad in most jurisdictions.
The big guys get the toys, the small guys have to worry all the goddamn time if some pedos are going to use their forum or whatnot.
Also, those filters are obviously imperfect. Remember the man who got his Google account terminated because he took a photo of his son's rash to send to his doctor? Pedo alert, pedo alert, a child is naked in a photo. My parents must be pedos too, they took a photo of me sitting in the bath when I was a toddler. Call the police.
Prove it. I’m asking for specifics, not hand waving.
Last month.
“ We’ve heard concerns from some smaller services that the new rules will be too burdensome for them. Some of them believe they don’t have the resources to dedicate to assessing risk on their platforms, and to making sure they have measures in place to help them comply with the rules. As a result, some smaller services feel they might need to shut down completely.
So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is unlikely to be the case“
“If organisations have carried out a suitable and sufficient risk assessment and determined, with good reason, that the risks they face are low, they will only be expected to have basic but important measures to remove illegal content when they become aware of it. These include:
easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions; a complaints tool that allows users to report illegal or harmful material when they see it, backed up by a process to deal with those complaints; the ability to review content and take it down quickly if they have reason to believe it is illegal; and a specific individual responsible for compliance, who we can contact if we need to.”
Your turn. Where are these compliance costs?
>they will only be expected to have basic but important measures to remove illegal content when they become aware of it. These include:
>easy-to-find, understandable terms and conditions; a complaints tool that allows users to report illegal or harmful material when they see it, backed up by a process to deal with those complaints; the ability to review content and take it down quickly if they have reason to believe it is illegal; and a specific individual responsible for compliance, who we can contact if we need to.”
To your point even your extract from the link there are compliance costs.
>So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is *unlikely* to be the case
Your source admits there are extra costs that will likely cause some small services to have to shutdown if the costs are to burdensome for them, they are just saying that they hope the costs are small enough that it doesn't put most small services in that position.
Even in your quote it explicitly lists extra costs. i.e. the cost of a compliant compliance tool. Obviously the government isn't going to implement it or spend the time moderating reports or abuse of reports. Which means the cost of extra hours moderating and setting it up are on the service provider.
"Must have an individual responsible for compliance". So either employ someone to take this risk or take on the risk and responsibility yourself and the associated due diligence costs (lawyers in the UK are only free if you're already losing hours of your life to the court system).
These costs will definetly push some people over the line to not wanting to host such services. Especially when the wording is so wide that you need to moderate out insults in your forum.
Jesus Christ! Your comment would probably be flagged as foreign propaganda to soft peddle broken UK policies, that is if the US had such rules. My comment should be flagged because that could be an insulting insinuation or the expletive at the start of this paragraph could be stirring up religious hatred by being needlessly blasphemous. And a moderator has to read the entire post to get to the non compliant part.
For example, the site must have an "illegal content risk assessment" and a "children’s risk assessment". And the children's risk assessment is a four-dimensional matrix of age groups, types on content, ways of using the service and types of harm. And it's got to be updated before making any "significant" change to any aspect of a service’s design or operation. It also makes it mandatory to have terms of service, and to apply them consistently. The site must have a content reporting procedure, a complaints procedure, and maintain written records.
Now obviously the operator of a bicycling forum might say "eh, let's ignore all that, they probably don't mean us"
But if you read the law and interpret its words literally, a bicycling forum is a user-to-user service, and a public forum is almost certain to be read by children from time to time.
Berkeley instead offered this alternative solution, because they did not want to pay.
I guess they spent a tiny bit of money so why not 1000% times more?
I don't mind giving your child some candy on Halloween but I'm not going to pay for braces. Even though he may really need them.
Stripping all usernames out of a forum certainly makes it safer, but I don't think anyone can say there still won't be a few pissed off users who wrote things they now regret on there, and can be tracked back to individuals based on context/writing style alone.
I'm going to guess this forum is UK-based just based on all the blimey's. Also the forum seems to have been locked from new users for some time, so it was already in its sunset era.
The admin could just make it read only except to users who manually reach out somehow to verify their age, but at the same time, what an oppressive law for small UK forums. Maybe that's the point.
> any websites that let users interact with other users has to police illegal content on its site and must implement strong age verification checks.
But I believe you only need age verification if pornography is posted. There's also a bunch of caveats about the size of user base - Ofcom have strongly hinted that this is primarily aimed at services with millions of users but haven't (yet) actually clarified whether it applies to / will be policed for, e.g., single-user self-hosted Fediverse instances or small forums.
I don't blame people for not wanting to take the risk. Personally I'm just putting up a page with answers to their self-assessment risk questionnaire for each of my hosted services (I have a surprising number that could technically come under OSA) and hoping that is good enough.
But if you let users interact with other users, you're not in control of whether pornographic material is posted, so it's safer to comply beforehand.
I commend you for keeping your site up and hoping for the best. I don't envy your position.
This has echoes of the Snooper's Charter and Apple's decision to withdraw ADP from all of UK.
It is not enough for regulators to say they won't anticipate to enforce the law against smaller operators. As long as the law is on the books, it can (and will) be applied to a suitable target regardless of their size.
I saw this this same bullshit play out in Finland. "No, you are all wrong, we will never apply this to anything outside of this narrow band" -- only to come down with the large hammer less than two years later because the target was politically inconvenient.
For example, if you ever leave your home country to visit a third country, that country could arrest you and extradite you to the country that doesn't like you.
Or they could force any financial institution (or even any company) that wants to do business within their territory to stop doing business with you. The EU probably wouldn't do that, because it's difficult and expensive to get the member states agree on sanctions. The US does it regularly. The UK could probably try, but they have less leverage.
That's quite sizeable. How many sites can you name have 7 million monthly active UK users? That's over one-in-ten of every man, woman and child in the UK every month using your site.
It just seems like an overly formalized way of saying "All forums should have a "report" button that actually goes somewhere", I'd expect that to be already there on pretty much every forum that ever existed. Even 4chan has moderators.
Idea being the US-based owner migrates the DB with posts and user logins to servers hosted on US soil, then if the UK government comes knocking the former owners in the UK can say "Sorry it doesn't belong to us anymore, we sold it, here's the Paypal receipt." (Ideally they'd sell the domain too, but as long as you still have the DB you could always host the forum at a different domain.)
Any forum admins here willing to add another forum to their portfolio?
It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away!
But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere.
At some level, I think it's reasonable that online spaces take some responsibility for staying clear of eg hate speech. But I'm not sure how you match that with the fundamental freedom of the Internet.
Yes, racism exists and people say hateful things.
Hate speech is in the interpretation. The US has it right with the first amendment - you have to be egregiously over the line for speech to be illegal, and in all sorts of cases there are exceptions and it's almost always a case-by-case determination.
Hateful things said by people being hateful is a culture problem, not a government problem. Locking people up because other people are offended by memes or shitposts is draconian, authoritarian, dystopian nonsense and make a mockery of any claims about democracy or freedom. Europe and the UK seem hellbent for leather to silence the people they should be talking with and to. The inevitable eventual blowback will only get worse if stifling, suppressing, and prosecuting is your answer to frustrations and legitimate issues felt deeply but badly articulated.
If you don't want it tolerated online, which I don't, you need some kind of legal statement saying so. Like a law that says, you can't do it, and websites can't just shrug their shoulders and say it's not their problem.
I don't line this legislation as it seems to be excessive, but I disagree that the root issue it tries to address is a made up problem.
EDIT it just struck me that in speech and otherwise, the US has a far higher tolerance for violence - and yes I do mean violence. Free speech is taken much further in the US, almost to the point of inciting violence. Liberal gun laws mean lots of people have them, logically leading to more people being shot. School shootings are so much more common, and it appears there is no widespread conclusion to restrict gun ownership as a result.
Maybe that's a core difference. Europeans genuinely value lower violence environments. We believe all reasonable things can be said without it. That doesn't make this legislation good. But at least it makes sense in my head why some people glorify extreme free speech (bit of a tired expression in this age).
Because a lot of speech people don't like gets relabeled as hate speech - which is's not. Or a lot of discussion/debate topics that are sensitive get relabeled as hate.
Some edge cases might include: arguing about interpretations of historical events (eg. Holocaust denial, colonialism, nuclear bombings); arguing about the economic effects of immigration policy; suggesting that one country or another is currently committing genocide; suggesting that one country or another is not currently committing genocide; expressing support for a country or political party that some consider to be committing genocide; arguing that travel restrictions should be imposed on certain countries to contain an epidemic; writing "kill all men" on reddit; publishing a satirical political cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammad; advocating political independence for some geographic region; expressing support for the police in an instance in which they took a state-authorized violent action; expressing support for a vigilante; expressing support for one's country during a violent conflict; expressing sympathy with the opposing side during a conflict; demanding stronger legal penalties for criminals (eg. supporting Singapore's death penalty for drug dealers); publishing a fiction novel in which the villain is a member of a minority group and acts in accordance with a stereotype.
Personally, while I think limits are necessary, the guidelines should be extremely specific and the interpretation extremely narrow to minimize any chilling effect on legitimate expression and discussion. Even where speech can verge into hurtful or offensive territory, I think it's important to allow it in the open, because I think dialogue builds more bridges than it burns. I am concerned that a lot of internet hate-speech legislation goes too far into leaving hatred open to interpretation, which results in conversation spaces being closed down because of the potential liability.
Generally on the Internet you would make use of existing tools to prevent people from talking to you if you find them hurtful. For example, I could just block you and not deal with you any more. Sometimes people get around those to harass others. That is definitely bad and we already have laws against harassment and ways for law enforcement to find those individuals without creating a full police state on the Internet. Posting your opinion once is not harassment, no matter how much it makes me want to puke. Or as we used to say in a more civilised time, I abhor your speech, but I will fight to the death for your right to speak it.
I don't know where you got your conclusion from - I am European and I don't mind violent speech. In fact I think we generally need a lot more freedom since many countries give their citizens barely more freedom than serfs had. School shootings have been a perennial favourite for your type to parade around so you can rule over a disarmed population, but e.g. Czechia lets you have a gun at home as easily as the USA and they do not have that problem. USA's problem is mostly societal.
Your opinion sounds like it was formed in the ivory tower of university with no connection with reality. Please get more varied life experience and reconsider your position.
How on earth did you conclude that? Where is the emotional charge you are implying? What about the other party feelings (of being intimidated)?
Hmm. Well, it's the US that has liberal freedom of speech and freedom of violence. It also has a "free speech absolutist" as a first buddy and that's going great too. To me that is a picture of where this kind of "absolute free speech" leads to, and I'm frankly happy with going in the opposite direction.
> Your opinion sounds like it was formed in the ivory tower of university with no connection with reality. Please get more varied life experience and reconsider your position.
You have literally no idea. I could easily say the same to you - except this is highly impolite. But suit yourself.
Its just that Americans think that that is the default level of free speech, any extra restrictions are an affront, and any lesser restrictions are irrelevant
Do you really think you are contributing to the conversation when you say things like this?
instead of applying them arbitrarily (which you won't like when your political party isn't in power), just apply them fairly across the board regardless of whose in charge so we can coexist in a civilized manner without the kind of extreme psychological aggression that takes place in the heart of censorship
That post only works if you use an absolutely ridiculous definition of hate speech.
It does not show a flaw in the opposing argument. It's not an example of a rule being applied arbitrarily. It's an example of falsely claiming a rule applies when it objectively does not apply. If that's a weakness, it's a weakness in basically every law. It's not a disqualifier.
They could have tried to show an unfairness or a contradiction that actually relates to sloppy definitions of hate speech, but they didn't. They went outside the definition.
> instead of applying them arbitrarily (which you won't like when your political party isn't in power), just apply them fairly across the board regardless of whose in charge
I think you mixed something up here. Applying a law fairly doesn't prevent a different political party from interpreting it differently and ending the fairness. I'm pretty sure your argument is supposed to be that these laws should not exist in the first place, because they're too dangerous in the wrong hands. Not "just apply them fairly".
That's a very different argument from the one I was critiquing.
> you're the only one here whose lacking an example.
It's not about whether I can come up with an example myself, it's that the specific example used by Asooka was a troll argument.
Explain Czechia and Switzerland, then, please.
Basically unlike the U.S. Switzerland doesn't view background checks and permits as a slippery slope to a dictatorship and implements them effectively.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland, I could have a fully automatic SIG 550 in about two weeks with some paperwork. In fact, the harder part is finding a range to shoot the damn thing at!
"Good Reason" carry permits, meanwhile, are looked down on due to their messy history of being Jim Crow laws. Generally, the "good reason" was "being white" and this was used to ensure that the Black community was disarmed when the Klan rolled in.
The Swiss... since the 2000s
The US has had strict background checks since the 60s
The Swiss.... 1997? Maybe later, the EU forced them to change their gun laws.
The questions stands: more Swiss households have guns than the US, yet gun violence does not exist.
Why?
So for all everyone crows about how likely you are to get shot in America, it's statistically no more likely to happen than the rest of the world unless you're a) suicidally depressed, b) a drug dealer or in a street gang, or c) in a violent relationship.
Yes, that's where we (here in the U.S.) draw the legal line. But almost inciting violence is not inciting violence. Since the U.S. made free speech the focus of the very first rule in the constitution, an enormous amount of jurisprudence and precedent has emerged around exactly how to make those tricky case by case judgements. Whether one agrees with it or not, it's easily the most evolved, detailed and real-world tested (over many decades) body of free speech law humanity has. Because it's deep, complex and controversial, there's also quite a bit of misunderstanding and misinformation about U.S. free speech law. I see incorrect assertions and assumptions quite often in mainstream media outlets who should know better. Here's a good primer on some of the most common misunderstandings: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/free-speec...
I've studied and read a lot about free speech and the first amendment as I find it fascinating. It took me quite a while to really understand how and why the U.S. implementation got to where it really is (and not the exaggerations and extrapolations that sometimes get amplified). In terms of free speech current practice and precedent, I now think the U.S. has got it just about right in the tricky balance between ensuring the open exchange of ideas (even unpopular ones) against preventing actually real and serious defamation, libel and incitement. To be sure, the U.S. system is based on the principle that it's not the job of the current government in power to force adults to be nice, reasonable or respectful in either words or tone. Freedom of speech means the freedom to be wrong, stupid, or mean, to be insulting or offensive - even to provoke or inflame should you choose to.
While the government won't send men with guns to force you to shut up, other citizens are also free to exercise their rights to tell you (and everyone else) you're an asshole, that you're wrong and exactly why. They are equally free to be rude, offensive and even hateful against your ideas and you. One of the key ideas behind the U.S. constitution is every fundamental right granted to all citizens comes with matching responsibilities for all citizens. In other words, no right is free - they have actual, personal costs for each citizen. In the case of the first amendment, the responsibilities include tolerating speech that's wrong, boorish, offensive or even hateful. As well as the responsibility to exercise your own good judgement on which speech to ignore, reject and/or counter. The open marketplace of ideas, like all markets, is two-sided. Another responsibility is accepting the consequences of exercising your free speech unwisely. Your fellow citizens are free to ignore, argue, yell back, openly mock or just laugh at you. Ultimately, the framers of the constitution believed the majority of citizens can figure out for themselves who's an idiot and who's worth listening to. Which ideas are worth considering and which are important to stand against.
Americans for lack of a better description grapple with violence of the state differently than Europeans, but it seems neither are without consequence.
For the most part, this act says that content already considered illegal by existing and new laws must be policed by platforms. What is illegal is actually quite well defined, it seems. This article covers it nicely: https://www.theguardian.com/law/article/2024/aug/08/what-is-...
Indeed, the controversy is, it appears, not about what is illegal, but about how the onus on policing this, and other things like the restrictions, is put on platforms. There are no major changes to what content is and isn't illegal! There are some additions, like "revenge porn", which is likewise easy to define and hard to see as a fundamental freedom of speech issue.
Freedom of speech is a binary choice for a society. When you introduce politically motivated discretion and ambiguity, then instead of protecting people, such laws serve only as tools of power and control. With freedom of speech and press, the laws preclude any attempts at control like this. Freedom of expression and press supersede responsibility for the potential of other people doing something bad.
This is why they can't have nice things. It's the equivalent of shutting down businesses because you impose a law that 20 armed guards must attend every building 24x7, just in case some bad guys with guns try to get in.
I do however reject the notion that it's either absolute freedom of speech or a totalitarian censorship state. Freedom of speech has always had well defined boundaries, well before the Internet - and yes, even in America, just these boundaries are somewhere different to eg. Europe.
Point is, we must draw the line somewhere. It's never "everything goes". Tolerating intolerance always ends up reducing freedom of expression.
Look at the US, the government is doing everything it can to shove trans people back in the closet, their voices are silenced and government websites are rewritten to remove the T in LGBT. By the very same people who abused "the first amendment" to push their hateful rhetoric further and further until it's become basically fine to do nazi salutes on live TV.
"Free speech absolutism" is a mirage, only useful to hateful people who don't even believe in it.
Why then not allow them but allow flurries of racial slurs? Or harassment? Or foreign propaganda? The line is never "anything goes", we have to draw it somewhere. So, why act like anything other than "anything goes" is "literally 1984".
In Europe, it's "La liberté des uns s'arrête là où commence celle des autres" (Rousseau). Americans should simply stop trying to impose their different conception of freedom that just led them into a violent kleptocracy.
More importantly, causality doesn't erase culpability. The step that immediately preceded the [Charlie Hebdo shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting) was publishing a cartoon in a newspaper. Those who create hateful environments may have some culpability, but those that act almost always have greater culpability than those who speak.
I'm not trying to be edgy, but genuinely why do you care if someone says or believes something you feel is hateful? Personally I'm not convinced this is even a problem. I'd argue this is something that the government has been radicalising people in the UK to believe is a problem by constantly telling us how bad people hating things is. Hate doesn't cause any real world harm – violence does. And if you're concerned about violence then there's better ways to address that than cracking down on online communities.
In regards to radicalisation, this is a problem imo. I think it's clear there is some link between terrorism and online radicalisation, but again, I'd question how big a problem this is and whether this is even right way to combat these issues... If you're concerned about things like terrorism or people with sexist views, then presumably you'd be more concerned about the tens of thousands of unvetted people coming into the country from extremist places like Afghanistan every year? It's not like online radicalisation is causing white Brits to commit terror attacks against Brits... This is obviously far more an issue of culture than online radicalisation.
So I guess what I'm asking is what radicalisation are you concerned with exactly and what do you believe the real world consequences of this radicalisation are? Do you believe the best way to stop Islamic terrorism in the UK is to crack down on content on the internet? Do we actually think this will make any difference? I don't really see the logic in it personally even if I do agree that some people do hold strange views these days because of the internet.
At least you can limit the speed of radicalization. Every village used to have their village loon, he was known and ignored to ridiculed. But now all the loons talk to each other and constantly reinforce their bullshit, and on top of that they begin to draw in the normies.
I see this as an internet analogy.
Does burning a religious book "incite violence" ? It causes it, for sure. Free expression brings about, in the fanatic, a great desire to oppress the speaker. That's why we have such a freedom in the first place.
Without mentioning the oxymoron that lawful free speech is.
People have always had opinions. Some people think other people's opinions are poor. Talking online was already covered by the law (eg laws re slander).
Creating the new category of 'hate speech' is more about ensuring legal control of messages on a more open platform (the internet) in a way that wasn't required when newspapers and TV could be managed covertly. It is about ensuring that the existing control structures are able to keep broad control of the messaging.
I mean we had the holocaust, Rwandan genocide and the transatlantic slave trade without the internet.
The discovery, by the governing classes, that people are often less-than-moral is just as absurd as it sounds. More malign and insidious is that these governors think it is their job to manage and reform the people -- that people, oppressed in their thinking and association enough -- will be easy to govern.
A riot, from time to time -- a mob -- a bully -- are far less dangerous than a government which thinks it can perfect its people and eliminate these.
It is hard to say that this has ever ended well. It is certainly a very stupid thing in a democracy, when all the people you're censoring will unite, vote you out, and take revenge.
I read a number of stories about school children being cyber-bullied on some kind of semi-closed forum. Some of these ended in suicide. Hell, it uses to happen a lot on Facebook in the early days.
I totally understand a desire to make it illegal, past a certain threshold. I can see how you start off legislating with this in mind, then 20 committees later you end up with some kind of death star legislation requiring every online participant to have a public key and court-attested age certificate, renewed annually. Clearly that's nonsense, but I do understand the underlying desire.
Because without it, you have no recourse if you find something like this online. For action to be even available, there has to be a law that says it's illegal.
I wanna eat hamburgers like Peter Griffin in the stroke episode. But I don't because I'm an adult with logical thinking abilities and I know that there are consequences to my actions even if they are not immediate.
I have less, much less, than zero sympathy for people who advocate for doing things with law and government that the history textbooks are stuffed full of the horrific and nearly inevitable eventual consequences of.
Having benign motives doesn't absolve people for being stupid.
Not that any of this is in disagreement with your points.
We're not running the counter-factual where the internet does not exist, or was censored from the start, and where free expression and discussion has reduced such things.
The salem witch trials are hardly a rare example of a vicious mob exploiting a moral panic to advance their own material interests -- this is something like the common case. It's hard to imagine running a genocide on social media -- more likely it would be banned as "propganda" so that a genocide could take place.
We turned against the internet out of disgust at what? Was is the internet it itself, or just a unvarinished look at people? And if the latter, are we sure the internet didnt improve most of them, and hasnt prevented more than its caused?
I see in this moral panic the same old childish desire to see our dark impulses as alien, imposed by a system, to destroy the system so that we can return to a self-imposed ignorance of what people are really thinking and saying. It's just victorian moralism and hypocricy all over again. Polite society is scandalised by the portrait of dorian gray, and we better throw the author in jail .
IMO there's benefit in making easy Bad Things hard, even if you can't stop them. Like gun ownership in Europe. How you do that while respecting internet freedom - my original question - I don't know. But I disagree with simply stating there is no conflict.
There's a base rate of human malevolence running in each society. We do not know this base rate, and we can only sample malevolence via mass media (, police reports, etc.). If the mass media (including internet) were a neutral measurement device then we could say for sure that what we're seeing is just the background conditions of society leading to eg., riots, etc.
Because our measuring device isnt neutral we have a problem: are the things we see caused by our measuring? Do we cause more malevolence by participating in social media, which also makes us aware of it?
My argument is that we are presently significantly over-estimating the effect of our participation in the internet as a cause. My view is that its effects at reducing bad-stuff are likely more potent than its effects at causing it, and the vast majority of what we see isn't caused by the internet at all.
One argument for this is that it seems baseline malevolence (violence, etc.) is significantly decreasing, is historically very high, and that nothing we see via the internet is suprisingly above this historical case.
Certainly it's possible (and perhaps likely!) that the EU and US will want to copycat this kind of law, but until that happens, I think your alarm is a bit of an overreaction.
EFF summary on Section 230: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
Are you suggesting that if the European Union were post-Westphalian that the UK wouldn't be able to leave? Not sure how that follows. That the EU is a post-Westphalian system is not a new idea.
Welcome to the new internet.
(and it's funny how everyone's yelling 'fascist' at whatever happens in the US instead)
And it's not like the UK and the US aren't known for exchanging the worst of the worst with each other all the time.
The UK government has a long history of meddling in media coverage to achieve certain aims. Up until Covid, legacy media still had control over the narrative and the internet was still considered 'fringe,' so governments could still pull the tried-and-true levers at 1-3 of the big media institutions to shape opinion.
Post-covid, everyone became internet nerds and legacy media in english-speaking countries fully lost control of the narrative.
This regulation is intended to re-centralize online media and bring back those narrative control levers by creating an extremely broad surface area of attack on any individual 'creator' who steps out of line.
let it be known the UK used its carve out territory in Cyprus to process bomb shipments to the IDF in furtherance of a genocide
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/15/uk-bases-in-cyprus-...
It isn't in the EU, but it is a member of the Council of Europe, which is why it is still a party to European Declaration of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights still hears appeals from the UK.
No international agreement can ever or has ever been capable of imposing legal constraints on the British Parliament because it is absolutely sovereign.
HOWEVER.
Deleting their forums? "The act will require a vast amount of work to be done on behalf of the Forums and there is no-one left with the availability to do it." [1]
This is a false dichotomy. Put Cloudflare in front of the site, block UK traffic [2], and you're done. 5 minute job.
[1] https://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/426608-looks-like-end-he...
[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/custom-rules/use-cases...
> About Us
> HEXUS.net is the UK’s number one independent technology news and reviews website.
An opportunity for anyone with a transformer from "UK.GOV Hand-waving" -> forum_settings.json
Children's access assessments - 32 pages
Guidance on highly effective age assurance and other Part 5 duties - 50 pages
Protecting people from illegal harms online - 84 pages
Illegal content Codes of Practice for user-to-user services - 84 pages
I look forward to reading your fully compliant risk assessment before interacting with this comment, lest it be judged to contain offensive, inappropriate, or pornographic content.
The costs required to operate any website covered by this act (which is effectively all websites) is grossly excessive and there are either NO exceptions, or the UK has refused to explain who is excepted.
That depends what you count as the costs. If you're a small site[0] and go through the risk assessment[1], that's the only costs you have (unless pornography is involved in which case yes, you'll need the age verification bits.)
[0] ie. you don't have millions of users
[1] Assuming Ofcom aren't being deliberately misleading here.
Reality: the forum has negative 358 posts in the last month. The forum has negative ~2k posts over the last 12 months. The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them. 8 people have created accounts in the last year.
The forum has been long dead.
Thankfully you aren't writing the laws in my country.
Creating a law that makes internet creators want to delete all historical record for fear of potential prosecution under extremely broad terms -- doesn't seem like it's in the interest of the greater good.
Let's be real, for most dead sites this is an excuse for old admins to close the thing down because they got tired of running it. For sites with fewer than millions of users you basically needed to add a contact form and report button. These places are just deserted, and instead of having a few angry oldheads screaming at you, you can just blame the government
I think it's equally likely that people didn't take them seriously, but each new law has had increasingly dire consequences AND has been increasingly difficult to decipher. So there's that.
>The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them.
They've been in read-only mode, more or less, for awhile. Primarily, again, due to the (at the time proposed, now passed) law.
Not to mention, this comment is missing the forest for the trees. This is not the only forum or website to shutter operations in the wake of the UK Online Safety Act.
Forums and small websites have been killed off by changing consumer behaviour, the shift to big social media platforms. Using big numbers to suggest that the UK Online Safety Act is responsible for killing off these smaller independent websites is disingenuous.
If you do the same exercise for the other forums, you’ll find they’re all long dead too.
That's just one other example. I can assure you that it is not just long-dead forums deciding to shut down, despite your preconceived notion.
Just considering that the law is forcing people to think about shutting down operations is a sign that the law is having a chilling effect. Both for existing websites and the potential creation of new ones.
Just because you believe yourself to be the sole arbiter of which websites are valuable and which can be deleted without worry doesn't change the fact that this law is having a negative effect on small websites.
Perhaps with better communication about the law, rather than the hundreds on hundreds of pages of vague guidance, the law could remain as-is and small website operators wouldn't be as concerned. However, that is not the case.
I think historic content is very valuable which is why I am offended by this absurd response on hacker news where people are conflating the actions of a protest with the consequence of a law.
If someone chooses to protest this law by deleting their website then more power to them but we must be honest about what it is: protest.
People should be considerate about the consequence of the services they release onto the internet. We can debate the specifics of whether certain requirements are reasonable/fair/beneficial but it’s patently absurd to label choices these website owners are making as being caused by this law. The law has zero to do with historic content, there’s not a single risk to anyone who leaves a website online in read only mode as an archive.
Your posts make sense if this is true, but I really don't think it's true.
Your argument that they won't be fussed to do anything about archived websites is very much not zero risk.
https://medium.com/@rviragh/ofcom-and-the-online-safety-act-...
(In short it is funded by the regulated tech companies, which must pay fees to it.)
A lot of US websites initially geoblocked EU to avoid dealing with GDPR, for example.
In other non-UK-based cases, geo-blocking is the answer being used by some people.
Per https://geoblockthe.uk/, they state:
"Luckily OFCOM (the UK Government department responsible for 'enforcement' of these new rules) have confirmed that blocking people in the UK from accessing your website is a perfectly legal and acceptable way to comply with the law.".
"This website is not available in the UK. Ask your representative about the UK Online Safety Act for more information".
I'm also not familiar with UK law, which may or may not deem that be a sufficient counter-measure against VPNs. Also, if the forum's operator is based in the UK this also might not be an option.
I just read through the entire HN discussion about lobste.rs and continued down that rabbit hole to other discussions of forum, deletions, and the safety act, etc.
The part I don’t understand is: Why aren’t these operators placing the forum into a corporate or partnership entity, without personal liability, that would be the target of some eventual enforcement?
These very small forums Are almost certainly not going to be targeted for enforcement… The issue is simply the risk…
… So why not just incorporate, go on your merry way, and if enforcement goes very differently than we all assume then you walk away from a corporate entity And continue to vacation in London without fear of arrest.
What am I missing here?
To my understanding working at American non-profits, however, corporations are most helpful as a liability shield when they are clearly distinct entities, with distinct goals, and distinct decision making. In practice, that means having multiple people, writing some sort of charter / statement of purpose, and having quarterly meetings of a board of directors with quorums where notes are written and votes are taken. This can all be a fair bit of work, where before nothing was required.
There's a requirement to name a senior manager: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/103
There's personal liability attached to being the named senior manager: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/110
Other nearby sections have additional personal liabilities. Like Sec 109 (5) (a) probably criminalizes your exact suggested response of walking away from Ofcom's inquiries: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/109 It depends on the legal definition of "permits the suppression of... any information required". We'd have to hire a UK lawyer for a confident answer.
All this is a couple sentences in the law. The law is 250 pages long. Ofcom's guidance was rounding 3,000 pages the last time I counted.
If you want to understand the OSA, I think the most accessible and valid writing available is by Neil Brown: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ There's a lot developing as Ofcom continues to publish new rules and ignore questions, so I suggest reading the 'Replies' tab of his fediverse account.
Thank you - that's a missing piece that helps.
"In addition to the "you're not fooling anyone" bit ..."
I don't suggest a corporate veil as a ruse - it's a tool that has a function and I think this is certainly it.
My sense is that enforcement for small operators is unlikely but the potential liabilities skew the risk dramatically. Pointing the initial enforcement at a corporate entity could change that risk assessment.
"Just shut it down" is the lazy thing to do. Should take tips from dissidents in other totalitarian shitholes - they just move it abroad to relatively free countries.