More odious nannying by silly civil servants. If Britain is to restore cultural leadership it needs to move policy away from this horrible trend of policing what people say and think, and focus its energy on better policing what people do.
China may be able to bully Apple into letting it snoop on its citizens’ icloud backups, but when the UK wants the same illiberal snooping powers, with 10% the population it’s 90% easier to walk away.
The EU is big and rich enough to force Big Tech into submission under threat of loosing the market.
Capitalism works when there is a competition between companies. Corporations are everything but that.
These slowly degrade societies, like it or not. At least someone tries to do something to weed out the utter, batshit crazy adults, actually childminded idiots, who think the world is their playground.
Any way I see it this is a slow virus, a weapon of sorts. Just politicians usually have their heads lodged in their own back orifice, hence slow reacting.
So, thought crimes?
It's not like we are not warning you, you have netflix, amazon, google, whatever you want - somehow pirating an American movie is an offense in Europe - but abiding by the same logic is not acceptable - same goes for Assange and Snowden - why the did we abide with American shenanigans if that's just one sided ?
And are you getting ready for the turn-over ? Because all it takes is some mad politicians - alternatives - and I'm not sure the status quo is going to last while AI is booming - more than that - people are increasingly hostile to US and it seems it's going to continue this way if the toddler attitude is kept over.
4chan's whole gimmick is that you can say whatever you want, because you don't have to identify yourself when you say it. It's a way for Internet denizens scream their intrusive thoughts into the pseudovoid.
If expressing intrusive thoughts makes society worse, and should be controlled. That, arguably makes expressing thoughts a crime. You shouldn't be allowed to think or say thing.
I guess you could insist that thinking is different from expressing, and that thinking is fine as long as you repress the inate human trait and desire of expression... But I feel that's a stupid line in the sand to draw given my intent was to point out 4chan doesn't make society worse, tolerating ideas you don't like generally improves society. It's how you behave that matters.
In other words, If 4chan didn't exist, people would behave better.
If you weren't exposed to those thoughts and ideas, you would behave better.
If you didn't have a thought....
What’s happening online just drags things down. People chasing clicks, money, and attention by any means. When platforms like 4chan or influencers resort to gimmicks or self objectification to get views, it encourages people to act less like thoughtful humans and more like they’re reverting to base instincts - like animals. It normalizes shallow, attention-hungry behaviour and chips away at basic self-respect and awareness. One idiot can lead a hundred astray.
Why is it ok for a young woman to put a paper bag on her head in a live chat session, in order to gain more subscribers? Or swallow insults after insults? Is this ok? I don't think so.
You want to tolerate ideas like GGG movies and Dick Wadd gay videos where black guys sodomize whitebois acting as nazis and then piss in steel bowls and force them to drink it from said bowl? How do these "ideas" improve society hm? You need these things to be tolerated?
This whole idea that anyone can do anything and people will decide what's best for them is absolute hogwash.
Where I think they are going wrong is that they are trying to levy fines rather than just blocking the business.
Oh, and the whole age verification thing is bonkers. I'm a parent of 2 teenagers, I don't think its asking too much for a parent to be responsible for what children see and do on the internet.
By the time they're teenagers, it's pretty easy for them to access anything on the internet regardless of the controls implemented.
4chan is a cesspool, and society is worse off letting it fester, but you arn't solving this problem by "personal responsibility" of parents.
Buy Wines Online currently does not ship alcohol to AL, MI, MS, UT, HI, AK
Says it requires an "adult signature" but anyone who's signed for fedex/ups knows they don't check your ID. I can say, when I was in high school, they did not check...
It's physically addictive with harsh withdrawal symptoms that makes it difficult to quit; and it has significant healthcare costs for the wider community when smokers eventually get sick and die prematurely.
Nobody is going to get addicted and die prematurely from reading 4chan. Cleaning what you consider a cesspool is not the job of the government. These laws are about kids stumbling into the cesspool before they are ready.
Parents can choose to just not give their kids phones till they are 12 or 13 (highschool). Before that, internet access is on locked down devices in the family room with somebody else around.
Personally I think once your kids are about 13-14 you have probably had your chance to pass on your morals, they need to be mentally prepared to encounter bad stuff on the internet and deal with it.
The government in general has been becoming increasingly authoritarian and centralized far before social media, see the abuses of the CIA and MK ULTRA, Operation Mockingbird, COINTELPRO, the War on Terror. You use the term neonazi, yet I hope you're honest enough to recognize the left also has dark authoritarian impulses. It was only a few years ago that we had ruinous lockdowns, widespread censorship, illegal mandates for experimental medical interventions, mostly peaceful riots, a 30% spike in homicides, anarcho-tyranny with the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, etc.
Plus, there is plenty of dopamine (or other brain juice) to be had from more healthy activities.
I agree thwres no chemical component but addictiond are broadee than just external chemical iintroduction.
I mean, point 1 in favour of this theory is the fact that tobacco is legal, while most drugs aren't.
I don't have them chained up, but I'm also not concerned they are become radicalized, or damaging themselves watching snuff films and goatse.
In a way they are like addicts: you love them and want the best for them but you absolutely have to be on your guard for egregious breaches of trust cropping up without warning. Children / teenagers / young adults can be driven by curiosity, peers, and lack of judgment into all kinds of dreadful behavior, and it can come from the least likely ones just as much as the obviously naughty ones.
The best we can do is to warn them in advance, accept that mistakes will be made anyway, and support them in learning from their mistakes. Keep at it for even a short while and you too can experience the shock of how your most charming, academically brilliant, upstanding star pupil is found throwing up a bottle of vodka she just drank!
The parents I’ve seen who give up and make no efforts because they think it’s impossible to perfect control everything don’t have great outcomes. This applies to everything from internet to drinking alcohol and more.
All it takes is the kid wanting to go behind your back, the rest becomes easy for them. The only chance you have is establishing a good relationship with your kid and instilling good values. You can't actually control them online unless you lock down their life like a supermax prison.
The obvious next step is to ban VPNs too or to block connections to their servers.
The big one is to start whitelisting good protocols only. That means everything must be https and you have to at least pass the hostname in plaintext. Random traffic on UDP ports is now illegal as it is assumed to be VPN traffic.
Another one is to pass a law telling ISPs to flag customers with traffic patterns only to a single IP address, set of IP addresses, or a single ASN. This means that you can’t just tunnel everything to your VPS in Amsterdam.
You might also pass a law that still allows, say, ssh and random UDP traffic, but with the provision that bandwidth on any non HTTPS ports is capped at 200kbps. You only use ssh for running a shell after all — why would you need more than that! /s
ASNs are a fun feature of the internet in that there are a lot of them but they are finite and scale on the order of organised human activity, mostly businesses. That means it is eminently tractable to categorize them all and regulate traffic from residential ISPs to commercial services ISPs only, and throttle traffic from home users to hosting providers. This already happens — try connecting to Reddit from anything other than a residential IP address.
A far more expedient course lies in legislative control: the imposition of a licensing requirement for VPN usage, coupled with punitive measures – fines and imprisonment – for defiance thereof. A few well-chosen prosecutions, conducted publicly with a fanfare and pomp and without leniency, would suffice to instil both fear and obedience amongst the populace.
As ever, the familiar refrain of «think of the children» would provide an acceptable veneer of moral justification to soothe the public conscience.
You do realize that things other than VPNs use UDP right?
The whole post is so nonsensical I would have assumed it's all sarcasm, but the single tag in the middle has me confused.
What's stopping VPN providers from being forced to censor the internet?
I don't want any of these “services” thank you very much. Inflict them on your own people, not us.
American technology companies operate by finding technological solutions to evading the law, then counting on being too big to fail once regulators catch up. These companies do not provide innovative products, they abuse monopoly power to dominate industries. The Chinese are smart enough to make their own versions of all this stuff so that they aren't under the US yoke and I want the same here (sans the dictatorship of course). I want to replace every horrid US machine with something FOSS or publicly owned, and every regulatory step towards that is a win in my book.
Maybe instead of turning your nose up at other countries that dare to regulate your tech overlords, you should try to get your politicians to do the same thing.
You're showing yourself to believe that America can regulate conduct that never touches American soil.
If you enter America, there may also be consequences, but you don't need to enter America.
That isn't much different. Say an adult American drinks alcohol in America; then they travel to a country where alcohol is illegal. Should they be prosecuted in that country for having drank in America?
There's a world of difference here. Ofcom is claiming to be able to shut down an American website for content generated in America, stored in America, and shown only to Americans. There are no UK citizens in this chain at all. This sets up Ofcom as having global censorship authority even over content seen elsewhere.
> Should they be prosecuted in that country for having drank in America?
In my opinion, no, but some countries are hardasses about this. If you want to do things that are illegal in certain places, you should not plan on traveling to those places. Usually, they will just refuse you entry but you kind of do put yourself at their mercy if you touch their soil. This is how the world works.
You picked a bad example - there are many US crimes that you could get away with if done elsewhere within the local laws, it generally isn't seen as worth bothering with when done elsewhere if the other country doesn't care.
You are making the same argument that Trump is making with the tariffs. Personally, while I can see some good arguments for protectionism, I'd rather have the choice to decide whether or not I want to buy Chinese products, rather than the government making the choice for me.
So you two are on completely separate frames of thought. One party sees it as a matter of choice, the other sees it as removing choice because one party has a monopoly on avoiding the regulations.
The issue here is IMO more so that the taxi driver should be able to operate a taxi business without a license without having to go through Uber. Ultimately what is happening in a lot of places is the guys with medallions will basically use agents of the state to violently enforce their racket (which Uber breaks up, but then monopolizes), or alternatively in some places in Latin America the entrenched taxi drivers will simply shoot to kill their competitors that don't have cartel sanctioned 'medallions.'
Do some research on why these services are so attractive before you give your opinion on it being a good thing. What these companies are doing should be illegal under US law as well, but they have paid your president to make that issue go away.
Keep your american movies and social networks please. Btw why is TikTok banned in US?
1) whatsapp (facebook)
2) telegram (incorporated in dubai)
3) messenger (also facebook lmao)
There is 0 reason for us to let american suck away important infrastructure tools, benefits that goes with it, or even benefit from tax exemption trough the best company framework there can possibly exist.
I still haven't got an answer here - why is TikTok US owned ?
Hell look at HN and literally anywhere. Everybody has their own "ideal" world.
I for instance don't want anybody talking shit about anime or video games ever.
When was the last time anyone visited an unmoderated usenet group?
They won't have personal biases, don't need to sleep (ending the infamous "mods are asleep, post xxx" waves), their prompts would be visible to everyone, and there could be ways for the users themselves to update the space's rules/prompts.
But either way, I want people like dang to be the ones moderating and managing a community - call it "personal bias" if you'd like, but they have a vision for the space, and as long as I as a user think that that vision is of a community I want to be in, then it's fine. If I no longer think it is... I leave.
First, everyone did what they wanted. As conflict became more common, power hierarchies started to emerge. we're now at a stage where every place needs to be governed, yet its members have no influence over who does it.
I have online communities will transition into something resembling democracy where moderators are elected from members by members.
---
While HN is fairly lenient, moderators in pretty much all online spaces are effectively dictators, they are not elected and they cannot be removed by ordinary users, no matter how many disagree.
And of course, such positions attract people who want power for its own sake and who have agendas they want to push.
This[0] blog post puts it nicely - you _can_ move but you lose all your connections and sometimes even you data.
This. How do 1-10 or 20 or even 100 people get the "right" to decide what millions of people talk about and see?
What's keeping them from burying/boosting opinions about shit they have strong personal feelings about?
Steve Huffman/Spez of Reddit literally edited users' comments, and they autoban anyone saying "Fuck Spez"
Society does not progress by people being nice and hugging eachother.
HN is NOT fairly lenient. HN has a very strict set of rules (applied with infinite discretion) and absolute bunches of tiny rules and quirks that are completely hidden and no real transparency of any kind.
HN has basically an official party line for heavens sake! This is a site for disseminating information about VC things and driving engagement about things that VCs want people to talk about and think, driving traffic to Paul Graham things, and advertising YC businesses and people and ideology.
And not politics unless it's positive towards the ideology of VCs
There aren't official punishment policies or official ways to appeal anything. There's no higher power to call out to. There's a semisecret clique of users.
HN, like most places that are actually good to participate in, is a strict, tyrannical dictatorship that usually uses it's powers to shape behavior towards "discussion", but what that means is entirely up to dang and now tomhow.
The internet requires such behavior because it's just too easy to participate in a non-genuine way and entirely escape any retaliation. You cannot shun a human in an internet setting like you can in real life. The social tools humans and other animals use to shape community behavior are impossible online.
This idea that if we just let people speak absolutely free on the internet things will work better is hilariously uninformed. Humans do not pick or latch on to narratives that are correct, they pick narratives that feel the best and in the modern world, that is almost never the "correct" one. Brains hate nuance, but reality is nuanced.
It's funny, the same exact people on here who insist they can't ride the bus or walk around cities because they freak out if a homeless person accosts them seem to be blind to the concept of how other people's free expression can have a chilling effect.
HN has incredibly strict moderation, and to be clear, that's a good thing. It keeps discussion in line and useful, for the most part.
> It's funny, the same exact people on here who insist they can't ride the bus or walk around cities because they freak out if a homeless person accosts them seem to be blind to the concept of how other people's free expression can have a chilling effect.
I've seen that the term "gatekeeping" is recently starting to be reclaimed as people realize this, to emphasize that while anyone is welcome to participate, the community is not required to bend its rules or standards to accommodate new people. i.e. anyone is welcome to use the bus, but openly shooting heroin while you're on it won't be tolerated.
Oh, the Party-Approved Correct Narrative.
Nazi/fascist narratives were sure as hell correct in 1930s-1940s Germany, mind you, and have been becoming correct again worldwide since 2020.
It just takes the first 3-4 viewers to downvote you to prevent the next 10000 people from seeing what you said. There's no downside to downvoting just because you don't like what someone says, even if it's true.
And usually no amount of corrections can outshout a lie/mistake with 100+ votes.
It will be hard to design a formula that can only be gamed by making quality contributions.
A quality discussion requires parties who disagree, exchange of ideas and facts and ideally some kind of eventual agreement.
The hardest part is to make it enjoyable to use.
Let people regularly vote on which prompts should be added/removed, and have the AI justify all of its decisions, show which information it used etc.
4chan was great in 2015 precisely because anyone could comment, but it's a young man's website in that scrolling through a 300 comment thread to find the worthwhile parts of the discussion will require upwards of fifteen minutes, whereas on Reddit or Hacker News most of that sorting is already done. This does have censorial effects, so it isn't ideal for controversial topics like politics, but it's better for almost everything else.
It’s a single board with a full-time moderator and almost everyone on it has a background in information technology. These kinds of networks leave very obvious signatures, and the site simply isn’t a big enough place for them to hide.
> This kind of behavior almost certainly goes on here.
Do you have any examples?
I’m not asking for timestamps or evidence, I’m asking for general instances where you believe vote manipulation may have occurred.
>But this kind of stuff happens everywhere on the internet where you can post for free
This isn’t true.
You can get there in days if you just spot a few bandwagons to hop on.
> I post things I know won't be well-received here all the time and it's quite rare for a comment to go below -2 karma, but comparatively common for these sorts of comment to get flagged despite not breaking any rules.
Yep, there's no downside to frivolously downvoting/flagging: It just takes a 2-3 people to hide your comment from the majority of the users as soon as it's posted, easy for a PR firm with paid people watching a topic like hawks.
Sometimes when I get insta-downvoted in a heated topic, if I delete my comment and repost later, the first few votes are positive. So it's clearly dependent on luck/time, which it shouldn't be.
I and others suggested this years ago: Maybe votes shouldn't have any effect for the first 12 or 24 hours.
s/civil servants/lawmakers/g
Civil servants didn't create, write, or pass the law. They simply got handed a flaming, bad smelling paper bag and got told to implement it.
This concept in the U.S. is also evolving since 2024 decision reducing the strength of this legal protection.
Practically all countries have some version of this, few hundred lawmakers and their staff cannot reasonably set every single policy and micromanage its execution for every for government function.
Civil servants always have a lot of say in direction of governance even if not directly enshrined in law or recognized by the court.
The classic 80s satire Yes, Minister is good illustration of the parliamentary version of how it happens in say England even if not enshrined in law so to speak.
The bag is handed by the legally elected government body in charge of making laws. I assume the UK citizens who elected their representatives agree with the policy.
They might benefit the rich, but they also benefit the lower classes very much as those are the ones they need to vote for them.
And they take all that from the middle class that had to pay for mostly everything for mostly everyone.
It's not a simple problem to solve, and it's not like having one problem is better than the other, because both devolve outside the boundaries of democracy.
It's not absolute in the US because the US constitution only protects from the governmental limiting it, which means there is a lot of potential to effectively and fully legally limit free speech. And even the government gave itself a lot of limitations where through excuses and loopholes it can limit free speech (e.g. from teachers in public schools).
Then there is the question of what even is "speech", in the us spending money can be an act of speech but wouldn't that make bribing an act of free speech even though it clearly shouldn't be legal?
Should systematically harassing/mobbing people with the intent to drive them into suicide be protected by free speech? It's speech, but you would need to be a very cold hearted person to think that this shouldn't be a crime.
Is leaking trade secrets free speech when you do it vocally? It would be strange if that where no crime but technically you do so by speech.
What if you systematically rail up people with deep fakes and all kind of misinformation? Is that free speech? Before WW2 many intellectual would probably have argued that people aren't that easy to mass rail up and as such it should be free speech. But after Hitler gained power in exactly that way the position is more one of "if people systematic rail up the population and spreed misinformation en mass with the intend to overthrow the government" then letting them do that is pretty dump thing to do.
So no "speech" not only is free speech not absolute, it's a pretty bad idea create absolute free speech protection. And both in small and large cases this has been proven again and again through history.
This doesn't mean that censorship is right either.
Like with everything in live "extremes" are close to never a good thing to peruse.
Anyway you know what is even more embarrassing then being a hall way monitor, it's to never question your believes and insisting they are right even when its repeatedly shown to you that there seems to be some problem with them. But seriously, why edit you response to add an insult against anyone who doesn't share your opinion??
That is not a limitation on free speech; it's a recognition of the right to free association.
but no, it's not about that, it's more about how e.g. Hitler took over Germany. Systematically rilling up people, spreading systematic misinformation about how the Jews supposedly backstabbed German and how the world economic crash between WW1-2 was another devious plan of them etc.
like the difference is its very dump for a country to let people destabilize it with such means, it's still ethically wrong to do so about other countries, but less of an potential existential thread to democracy
Hopefully you see simple solutions come with their own complex problems.
"Free speech" doesn't mean it can't be challenged.
/not a lawyer
That being said, the UK government can pound sand and should be embarrassed by its behavior. UK isn't a serious country anymore. If you want to know why Americans don't really care what others think, this is a really good example as to why. Total clown show...
I agree it was enabled by the corrupt class, but initiated elsewhere.