As a software engineer in the UK (and former schoolteacher) I'm supportive of the Online Safety Act. People prefer to interact with people who are similar to them, so they end up with a belief that most people are like them, but as a teacher, I had to grapple with the full distribution of human intelligence. It's wider than I'm comfortable with. Most people struggle to deal with the complexity of everyday life in the twenty-first century.
My grandparents used to fall for every scam phone call or email they received. It wasn't until I showed them a compilation[0] of the George Agdgdgwngo character from Fonejacker - and the rest of my extended family sat around laughing at the ridiculous scenarios - that my grandparents realised that giving their bank details to anyone claiming to be calling from Microsoft and then expecting the bank to refund them their money wasn't an acceptable way to handle their financial affairs. In the end, they disabled their Internet banking and now have to catch a bus to their nearest bank branch to do anything.
I'm sure there will be flurry of Americans along shortly to monotonously repeat that quote about not trading freedom for security. That's their political tradition, not ours. The people of Thetford in Norfolk don't give a flying fuck about the gold statue of Thomas Paine that the Federalist Society (or some other group, I'm not terribly interested in which it was) put up in their town, but they love the fact that a sitcom about the Second World War was filmed there.
Someone else will make a joke about police officers investigating tweets. That practice - which was put to an end a couple of years ago - stemmed from a particular interpretation of a law that required police forces to investigate all threats of violence made by post, that was enacted in the 1980s during a period of increased religiously-motivated terrorism. The following decade brought the negotiations that put an end to that terrorism; negotiations that were the culmination of nearly five centuries of religious conflict. It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.
I shall leave it to others to make the usual accusations about who funded the aforementioned terrorism.
The Online Safety Act is vague and non-specific. Social media platforms differentiate themselves in the market on the bases of: with whom users can interact (people they know personally or the user base at large); and the ways in which they can interact (photos, videos, comments, likes, &c.). Each platform therefore poses its own unique set of risks to its user base, and so needs to have its own unique regulations. The Act acknowledges by empowering Ofcom to negotiate the specific policies that platforms will need to follow on a platform-by-platform basis. And if those policies should turn out to be too strict, and a few social media companies should find it no longer profitable to operate in the United Kingdom, that is not all that much of an issue for His Majesty's Government. They're not British companies, after all.
You can't talk about the Forbidden Meatballs[1] on Reddit or HN. In the 90s, AOL users from Scunthorpe and Penistone were banned from user forums for telling the community where they lived to help diagnose their connectivity issues. Americans have enforced - and continue to enforce - their cultural norms on the entire Anglophone web, and now the rest of the world has started to do the same. I have much greater faith in my government to protect my freedom of speech (no matter how much I may object to their policies) than some foreign company.
For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is? 'Maximum effect for minimum effort and cost' has been the guiding principle of all government in Britain for decades - it's how Britain ruled its Empire, it's what drove the Thirteen Colonies to rebel, it's why the East India Company was allowed to rule a subcontinent, it's why many of the former colonies were given independence despite not wanting it, it's why the roads are so consistently bad, it's why the water companies are dumping sewage into rivers, it's why there aren't enough police officers.
To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state, I suggest you watch Britons at a traffic-light-controlled pedestrian crossing. This isn't the end of the world; it's not going to lead to any social changes of any sort at all. The Act requires protections for free speech, after all. When it's all finally implemented, it'll just be enforcement of social norms that no one finds controversial.
NB: I read through the Act to see whether an idea for a social media platform was still a viable business idea, and apart from sending policy documents to Ofcom, it wouldn't require the business to do anything that wasn't already in that idea. If you want to argue about what the Act requires, I will expect you to have read the Act[2].
I am a software engineer in the UK. One of the reasons I want to move from the UK is because so many of our populace has attitudes such as yours. The online safety act won't solve the problems you think it will and will create a whole new host of issues.
What is amusing is that you even admit that you solved the problem of online scammers with your grandparents through education (I've seen the videos you mentioned as well). This is how people stay "safe" is to be educated on the dangers, not for overbearing regulation.
> To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state, I suggest you watch Britons at a traffic-light-controlled pedestrian crossing.
The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related offences (I guarantee it is more now). I've seen videos of the police arresting disabled pensioners over spicy tweets, journalists have their homes raided in the UK regularly if they criticise UK foreign policy over Israel (doesn't get reported on btw). We are already in a form of a soft totalitarianism. You just haven't noticed because you haven't been looking.
I clearly didn't mean that (and I think you know that btw).
I said "found out about it via social media". I then did my own research to find the original post by the person that had their home raided. I have been duped before by social media and I like to find the actual source (if possible).
> The last time I checked 7 people a day were being prosecuted for speech related offences (I guarantee it is more now).
So the claim is that the UK is prosecuting a minimum of some 2,555 speech offenses a year (or as few as 1,820 if it's 7 a day each day of a five day working week in a year with 52 working weeks).
Yes. I remember seeing the statistic a number of years ago. I cannot find the source easily. The last time I checked was ~2018. I never claimed "daily raids on journalists". I did say "regularly", which is incorrect, I should have said "an alarming number of". But that if people are going to hold me up on that they are nitpicking.
In the UK there were 11,767 prosecutions (referred by police, whether or not a conviction was found) in the past year flagged as "Hate Crime" (the category that a speech prosecution would fall under?)
Of those many were robbery, homicide, assault, etc .. not simply "speech".
Here is a link to an online sevice to mount by URL those spreadsheets onine (showing the UK Prosecution Crime Type Data Tables Q4 23-24)
"an alarming number of" is entirely relative to the population size and general referral levels, at seems unlikely that just pure "speech" alone and no other action forms 20% of the Hate Crime flagged prosecutions - that would take some legwork to verify I suspect.
When I said “alarming number of” I was specifically referring to journalists being harassed by the UK state. I am aware of at least 3 or 4 this year.
Non-speech related offences I don’t care about in relation to this topic. I believe the 3000 a year number was banded about for speech offences. I do think it is likely that this number is roughly correct as it matches up with what I previously heard.
I btw believe one person being prosecuted for speech related offences is too many. IMO it shouldn’t happen at all.
Moreover I am quite tired of people telling me it isn’t happening after I can distinctly remember a large number of cases over the years where this does happen.
I'm not telling you it isn't happening - I linked to the current UK summaries of all the cases referred by police to the CPS for prosocution.
The 7 cases a day to which you referred to above will be in there and quite likly flagged as Hate Crime related.
> I believe the 3000 a year number was banded about for speech offences.
( Bandied ? ) Sure, I dare say it was, the real question was that a reliable bit of infomation or something spread about?
If you're interested in pursuing the matter then I dare say you can contact the civil servents that maintain the UK CPS stats pages and ask them for speech prosecution numbers.
My stance on such things is that almost all figures "bandied about" with respect to contraversial subjects ( crime, immigration, free speech, climate, et al ) are forms of iterative improv by vested parties. *
I'm genuinely interested in actual figures from authorative sources for all manner of things in the world.
I appreciate you wasn’t but a lot of the discussion about these issues follows the same pattern of people pretending there isn’t an issue, then pretending that it isn’t as bad and then arguing over the minutia.
This convo thread the same route of someone disputing the fact the journalists were having their homes raided, I couldn’t remember the name of the journalist or the exact time, so when someone does find it, we then have a discussion on the exact language and numbers. Ignoring the fact that what I said was largely correct.
The number seems reasonable considering the data we have. TBH, It doesn’t matter if it is 1000 or 3000. It is too much either way IMO.
This isn’t a right or left "team sports" issue either. I deliberately avoid talking in those terms yet people seem to assign a team to you.
You were vindicated in this thread. It's insane that the U.K. is throwing thousands in people a year in jail for speech "crimes". I remember ten years ago when free speech was a sacred value in the West; as soon as non-institutionally-connected people got a platform with social media elites changed their mind though.
They're estimates but I've seen some numbers that suggest the U.K. is imprisoning more people (per capita and absolute) for speech crimes than Russia.
The whole above thread is litigating the number of people in the U.K. arrested for speech crimes. It's hard to put an exact number on it but it seems like low single digit thousands (1k-5k).
Both by equating the number "imprisoned" (which suggests an actual conviction and jail term) with the number simply "arrested". The distinction is important, because when I did check a source, it suggested that the vast majority of convictions under existing statutes resulted in fines rather than jail sentences.
And then by conflating the UK's legislation (which, whatever you make of it, is essential non-political, and covers forms of communication that most people would agree are basically "harmful" even though they would be opposed to a ban on them) with the restrictions in Russia, which are of course highly political (as indicated by the article you linked to), and not related to protecting anyone from harm in any meaningful sense.
That is: the UK's idea of harmful speech is that which promotes "terror, hate, fraud, child sexual abuse and assisting or encouraging suicide". Whereas in Russia, per one of your articles, it's stuff like this:
Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: “Squeeze Russia out of yourself!” For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.
Do you not see a major, categorical distinction here?
The point is that Russia is supposed to be a "totalitarian state". The UK is supposed to be a modern Western democracy with "freedom of expression" (which isn't freedom of speech). The whole point is that there really shouldn't be any speech related offences at all. These arrests should not happen in the first place. Many of these arrests do end up with prosecutions as well.
> And then by conflating the UK's legislation (which, whatever you make of it, is essential non-political, and covers forms of communication that most people would agree are basically "harmful" even though they would be opposed to a ban on them) with the restrictions in Russia, which are of course highly political (as indicated by the article you linked to), and not related to protecting anyone from harm in any meaningful sense.
They specifically say that certain forms of speech are prohibited, that includes political speech that you and I might find detestable. That speech you may find offence but it is still political speech. Some of it includes opposition against Israel's military campaigns in Palestine.
What most people agree is "harmful" isn't objective measure.
> That is: the UK's idea of harmful speech is that which promotes "terror, hate, fraud, child sexual abuse and assisting or encouraging suicide"
Terror and hate are nebulous terms that are entirely subjective. Pretending that they are somehow objective is what everyone does when they side with the UK government on this issue and they use the same nebulous terminology as the UK government such as "harmful". Speech cannot be harmful in itself. The vast majority of adults outside of mentally disabled have their own agency. People choose how to react to speech.
Also notice you also groped speech related offences with things that should be banned like CSAM material and things that are already illegal (fraud).
> Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: “Squeeze Russia out of yourself!” For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.
That isn't actually fundamentally different to what happens in the UK. So no I don't see the difference. It so funny that you think it is a gotcha and it really isn't.
Some of it includes opposition against Israel's military campaigns in Palestine.
First off, this is in regard to an entirely different piece of legislation (the Terrorism Act of 2000). But more importantly, you are making a very significant distortion here.
No, people do not get arrested under this Act for holding up signs saying "IDF bad". Or otherwise for "opposing Israel's military campaigns" like you are describing.
Instead they get arrested for things like making statements which seem to indicate support for groups like Hamas, or for "Palestinian resistance" generally. Per the actual language of the act, "expressing a belief in support of a proscribed organistion."
You can be opposed to the Terrorism Act if you want to, and I would happen to agree with you - it is a horrible piece of legislation.
But the bigger point (for now) is -- the actual situation, in terms of what the Act prohibits, is very different from what you're describing.
I'm not saying you're lying. More likely you've ingested some news articles which either intentionally omitted (or never bothered to investigate) key aspects of these cases. It actually takes some digging to find the various people arrested under this Act (folks like Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst) were actually charged for.
But invariably (at least in the cases I've looked at) it turns out that, lo and behold, these people actually did make statements online that were clearly "in support of proscribed organisations". In the Medhurst's case, for example:
”Hamas are fighting the same war of national liberation against an occupying power. It is their moral and legal right.”
Which is rather different from simply indicating "opposition against Israel's military campaigns in Palestine".
Your response is chock full of weird distortions like this -- way too many to unpack and patiently analyze.
Point being: if this is how the truth gets mangled and distorted inside your own head; or you simply choose not to vet and fact-check your sources, at least once in a while -- then that's a situation which you've created for yourself. Not the doing of some totalitarian government, or any other kind of external bully.
> Your response is chock full of weird distortions like this -- way too many to unpack and patiently analyze.
No it isn't. If you can't explain what the issue is with my logic then what you are saying is utterly unconvincing. I was largely correct about everything I have claimed. I will grant you I may get minutia wrong, but that doesn't take away from the general point that I am making.
> Point being: if this is how the truth gets mangled and distorted inside your own head; or you simply choose not to vet and fact-check your sources, at least once in a while -- then that's a situation which you've created for yourself. Not the doing of some totalitarian government, or any other kind of external bully.
What you are essentially trying to convince me that I am crazy. I am quite familiar with this form argumentation and I don't appreciate it.
I will redirect you back to the point that was being discussed, because you made several accusations towards me that just aren't true and I am not going bother to address them after you tried gas-lighting me. All I am going to tell you is that I actively avoid news sites these days as I agree they omit information to suit a narrative.
The point being discussed was whether people an alarming number of people were being imprisoned for speech in the UK. Some people have compared Russia and the UK. Russia is ran essentially by a dictator, the UK is a constitution Monarchy and is considered to be modern democracy. The UK is supposed to be better in regards to Russia in a vast number of things, one of those being human rights.
There are three simple facts:
* People in the UK can be and have been punished for speech.
* People in Russia can be and have been punished for speech.
* There is evidence that there are less people per capita being arrested and prosecuted in the Russia for speech than the UK. This has been reported on by a number of news sources which looks like it has come from official numbers.
It does not matter to me what rationale is used for justify that punishment is, I don't believe people should be punished for speech outside of very specific criteria e.g. direct calls for violence (that quote your provided from Richard Medhurst wouldn't fall under that btw) or defamation.
What exact bullshit legislation people have been charged under is something I don't care about. I don't make the distinction. I believe it is to create a chilling effect, and allow the two major parties to prosecute their political rivals.
e.g. There was even talk of prosecuting Nigel Farage (one of the eternal boogiemen) shortly after this year election as the media were trying to pretend he was somehow the cause of the riots earlier this year. I don't like him, but he didn't cause the riots.
> For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is?
The problem is that it's very easy to selectively enforce this sort of thing. Most people will never have an issue, but whoever manages to sufficiently annoy someone who has the ability to trigger an enforcement action could be screwed. That leads many of the people who might find themselves in that situation to stop annoying the government or stop running websites entirely.
That's called a chilling effect.
People would probably not be as concerned if the law only applied to large platforms.
The Online Safety Act is about content moderation. If Ofcom taps you on the shoulder, they're asking for your moderation policies, and proof you're enforcing them. Platforms can no longer wash their hands of responsibility by saying that some random user uploaded the content and an opaque algorithm showed it to hundreds of thousands of people: the platform allowed the content to remain, and it was the platform's algorithm that showed the content to hundreds of thousands of people.
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.
This comment talks about large platforms with opaque algorithms showing some content to hundreds of thousands of people. I will not debate the merits of this law in that context here. My objection addresses your example of a "small Mastodon instance", which I'll extend to include a hobbyist forum, a blog with a comment section, or any similar website that can be run by a single person or informal, noncommercial group of people.
By not exempting the latter, this legislation makes it unreasonably risky for an individual with sufficient connection to the UK to operate such a website. The moderation policy is "I run some open source spam filter software and if I happen to see anything heinous, I delete it". Such websites are usually not businesses and often represent a net cost to their operators. A universal duty to moderate will accelerate the disappearance of hobbyist websites and further entrench corporate social media. I think that's a bad thing.
Blog and news website comment sections are explicitly exempted from the Act.
> A universal duty to moderate will accelerate the disappearance of hobbyist websites and further entrench corporate social media. I think that's a bad thing.
I also mourn the loss of the lawless Internet, but it's spilling out into the real world, and that's where I happen to live. We have to make compromises.
When the English people decided that our flirtation with being a republic was a failure, the some of the puritans who supported that republic refused to compromise, and left to start a new country across the Atlantic Ocean. They called themselves... Pilgrims.
Do you think harmful behavior from anywhere online other than large platforms is spilling out into the real world in a way that the Online Safety Act will prevent? If so, can you offer examples?
> Do you think harmful behavior from anywhere online other than large platforms is spilling out into the real world in a way that the Online Safety Act will prevent?
I have no idea.
If you're thinking of how to protect the fediverse, my solution (which I intend to use if I am kicked off mainstream social media because of this or other regulations in the UK) is to run my own server, only allowing people I know personally to have accounts on that server, and federating with other servers. Federation may be a grey area in this law - it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, if it ever goes to court.
Blogs are only not covered if the author of the Blog is the website owner. If the owner allows other people to post blogs - or in a forum start new threads then they have to take note of the law.
> They can't even speak freely about the horrible crimes being committed in their nation by grooming gangs.
Unsure what exactly you're referring to, which might be ironic, but there's lots of news reports about grooming gangs, as well as the surrounding controversy and debate around ethnicity and political correctness see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=grooming+gang&d=NEWS_PS
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.
Do you have a citation for that? People may have said words to that effect in addition to inciting rioting, but no one has been send to jail for saying that.
It is very difficult to see what your argument is here.
Initially you state that people are defrauded - indeed they are, very effectively and commonly, via phone calls. Ofcom has regulated the telephone system since their inception, and can charitably be said to have achieved zero percent operational effectiveness in that time.
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.
The Act does not include meaningful provisions for free speech. The Ofcom guidance simply says that people should be mindful of it, with no enforcement whatsoever. It is still the case that, given the penalties for not taking down illegal speech, platforms are much safer taking down much more speech than previously. Ofcom's consultation responses on their "proportionality" show they have taken a view that the actions are proportional because Ofcom say they are proportional, and no actual work has been done to demonstrate that.
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. Meanwhile, it will probably have very little effect on any of the things it is supposed to prohibit.
You talk in your first paragraph about how HN posters are in a bubble, but remain remarkably unaware of your own. 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.
> It is very difficult to see what your argument is here.
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.
> 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.
Regular pornography isn't bad. The problem is that sites like fetlife full of consensual adult content would be hugely undermined by all their users having to identify themselves. A lot of users are new to the community and very iffy about being exposed due to e.g. a hack. With good reason, not every place is as open-minded. But it gives people a way to truly express themselves. These sites are really important.
Banning pornography on mainstream social media is a very heavy-handed move too imo. I'm glad reddit still allows it.
Social media does not cause harm in of itself. People can use social media in a way that can be harmful, but you can say that about absolutely anything. Plenty of people that are not tech people manage to use social media to promote themselves, their business etc. People use it as a place of business. It is a mixed bag, like most things are.
You are (like the government) pre-supposing that is the case and basing your whole argument upon that.
As for Offense speech/Free speech. What constitutes what is and isn't offensive is subjective. That is why people argue for a free speech standard. Pretending that it is right to restrict unpopular speech (this is what is really meant by offensive) because the majority agree is completely asinine, as things that were offensive in the past may not be offensive in the future and vice versa.
The reason we don't have a decent tech industry in the UK (the tech industry here sucks) is because we don't have things like a Section 230 protections. Imposing legal responsibility will make it more difficult for anyone to make anything interesting in the UK.
> 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.
You completely misunderstood the point. The point is that we can predict from similar laws in another industry (somewhat related industry) what the effect maybe.
The best cultural difference analogy I’ve heard — two ends of “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument. One side genuinely believes that statement, the other thinks without guns there would be less death.
Same applies to social media and web as well. Yes, it is people ruining each other’s lives, but using an intermediary tool. Whether you think that way will depend on your preexisting conceptions and beliefs. I don’t think there is a wrong way of thinking of this, and every government will handle it differently depended on their goals and needs.
I had an issue with alcohol for many years. That doesn't mean that drinking is inherently bad. There are plenty of people that can enjoy a few drinks responsibly. I am not one of those people. Therefore I abstain from alcohol as a result. I don't ask that alcohol to be banned.
Alcohol sales and laws are fairly draconian in North America, compared to equivalents in Europe and Asia. Once again, I don't think there is right or wrong approach to it, and all the discussions will stem from cultural beliefs and predispositions. Your "freedom" and my "freedom" will always be conceptually different as well, the interpretation of the idea and making policies around it is the job of the government. By the way, I'm actually on your side when it comes to this specific topic, but growing up in different continents, I can understand why different policy makers approach it through different lenses.
‘No section 230’ might be the reason why there’s no social media tech scene. I’d like to think that HN cares about things other than social media too - maybe Brits could do something that actually adds some value.
But in any case, original point also brings up the question: why is the UK allowing foreign companies to violate laws that it would prosecute British businesses for violating?
If you allow a foreign domiciled business to break laws in your country, then how the heck do you expect to ever have domestic industry? It’s strictly less risky to always be foreign domiciled.
This bill aims to stop that regulatory arbitrage and as such is hopefully a leveling of the playing field for the UK tech scene.
I don't really understand how many people on here (I've been lurking for a while), essentially pretend everything is backwards. You don't level the playing field by making it more difficult to do business, you make it easier.
BTW, I get btw a threat letter from another UK quango (I forget the name), which basically says "if you have any user data you need to pay us £60 a year". Yes you need to pay a levy for a database in the UK. It is basically a TV license for a database. I did work as a freelancer in the UK (made impossible now because of IR-35 regulation) and have a dormant company because freelance/contract is dead, so I have to inform them I don't have user data. It is just another thing to worry about when creating an online app.
> But in any case, original point also brings up the question: why is the UK allowing foreign companies to violate laws that it would prosecute British businesses for violating?
Because then we don't have any alternatives and people already use it. I also don't think the laws should exist in the first place, so I don't care if a US company is violating them.
I would love the UK to actually require IP blocks of twitter/Facebook etc, because it might actually force people to think about the issues.
> If you allow a foreign domiciled business to break laws in your country, then how the heck do you expect to ever have domestic industry? It’s strictly less risky to always be foreign domiciled.
You don't make it more difficult to do business. Many of the US tech successes were people starting up in a garage. The UK micro business did extremely well (until PC/Macs came on the scene) and that had almost no regulation or gov interference (other than standard stuff for electronics).
> This bill aims to stop that regulatory arbitrage and as such is hopefully a leveling of the playing field for the UK tech scene.
No. It is to try to censor the internet. It been going in this direction for ages. I am quite honestly fed up of people telling me that it is nothing to worry about. The UK politicians complained about replies to their tweets, after one of their colleagues had been stabbed to death. I found it honestly sickening. There is no crisis they won't use as an opportunity.
>I get btw a threat letter from another UK quango (I forget the name), which basically says "if you have any user data you need to pay us £60 a year".
The Information Commissioners Office. Just tell them you are not storing any data and they will go away.
> I did work as a freelancer in the UK (made impossible now because of IR-35 regulation)
Freelancers were never covered by IR35. IR35 covers employees masquerading as contractors. If you work for multiple companies on specific projects that won't cover you
My comment around IR-35 is that it has caused a lot of confusion and thus made contracting a lot more difficult as a result. A lot of freelancers and contractors have been affected by this.
Contracting made a bit more difficult, freelancing totally unaffected. It was always pretty easy to check at below. Every contractor I have ever met seems to know about umbrella companies...
It was not a great regulation, and seemed to affect government contractors the most, which was a bit of an own goal. But it never affected Freelancers
> Contracting made a bit more difficult, freelancing totally unaffected.
That isn't true. It has made contracting a lot more difficult. I am in a number of freelancer groups and it has affected them. I have heard the same from recruiters, from freelancers, from people that run job boards.
> Every contractor I have ever met seems to know about umbrella companies
Most contractors run their own private LTD (like I did). They don't use umbrella companies because you are put on PAYE and you end up paying through the nose in tax.
Typically you get a third party to check a contract for you to see whether it falls under IR-35. I could do it myself, but I would rather pay someone to check it for me.
Many contracts will require you to have IR-35 "insurance" which feels like a scam, but it is required a lot of the time by the contract. This is in addition to PL and PI insurances.
I'm trying to give this comment a gracious reading. You can find videos on YouTube from the last couple months of police talking to people about comments they left online, and tweets, and FB posts, etc. So saying that practice "was put to an end a couple of years ago" is a complete fiction.
The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American? Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on them what does it matter whether or not a particular government acknowledges it? It's still an infringement and should be fought.
> It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.
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.
This is the first I've heard about the Forbidden Meatballs, thank you for the chuckle.
> For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is?
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?
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 Act requires protections for free speech
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.
At the end this seems like the same thing we see in the US a lot - this is something my side of the political divide supports, so I should support it, so I'm going to twist myself into a mental pretzel to support it, even if it solves no real problem, opens up a huge door for future government abuse, and further erodes the rights of everyone.
>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.
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.
I like this comment a lot. I can understand the argument to amend the Constitution for things like the Second Amendment (I disagree but I can at least see how you would believe we should do that).
Maybe I'm just too cloistered in my Americanism but I can't even comprehend the thought process that leads someone to believe in good faith that restricting someone's speech which doesn't incite violence and doesn't constitute fighting words to be a Good Thing.
The example I come back to is that saying "the holocaust never happened" will get you jailed in some European countries (and maybe Israel too? IDK). To me and my suburban American sensibilities going to jail for saying that is worse than saying it in the first place. Saying that is objectively wrong and it points to some related beliefs that I find abhorrent. Saying it does not incite any violence. Saying it does not harm anyone - in the real, physical way not the pseudo-"speech can be violence" nonsense way.
I think companies should be able to fire you for abhorrent speech. Platforms should be able to de-platform you. Business should refuse to serve you. I have no problem with any of that. But a government should be restricted in what it can do to people based on their speech.
The parliamentary note is particularly interesting. It was posted elsewhere that Labour got something like 1/3 of the vote this time around but due to the parliamentary system is basically running the government? The US is obviously very different where even having a majority doesn't allow you do whatever you want (by design, and IMO a good thing).
> The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American?
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.
Seems like its not really possible to run an indie web site with a forum any more in the UK if you don't want to accept the risk of an 18 million pound fine -
>To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state
Ha-ha-ha. Writing from Russia.
No, seriously, it started with completely reasonable law mandating that internet providers block pages encouraging suicide or providing information on ways to do it.
Well, I remember that case[0], the guy had written that there are no good cops and was calling for burning policemen alive on the city square in a crematorium "like in Auschwitz" and got one year of suspended sentence for that. I can't say that I disagree with the court, but that's the problem.
> And if those policies should turn out to be too strict, and a few social media companies should find it no longer profitable to operate in the United Kingdom, that is not all that much of an issue for His Majesty's Government. They're not British companies, after all.
His Majesty’s government is struggling to keep its people warm and fed, let alone show any economic growth.[0][1]
The UK needs more foreign investment than ever before.
My grandparents used to fall for every scam phone call or email they received. It wasn't until I showed them a compilation[0] of the George Agdgdgwngo character from Fonejacker - and the rest of my extended family sat around laughing at the ridiculous scenarios - that my grandparents realised that giving their bank details to anyone claiming to be calling from Microsoft and then expecting the bank to refund them their money wasn't an acceptable way to handle their financial affairs. In the end, they disabled their Internet banking and now have to catch a bus to their nearest bank branch to do anything.
I'm sure there will be flurry of Americans along shortly to monotonously repeat that quote about not trading freedom for security. That's their political tradition, not ours. The people of Thetford in Norfolk don't give a flying fuck about the gold statue of Thomas Paine that the Federalist Society (or some other group, I'm not terribly interested in which it was) put up in their town, but they love the fact that a sitcom about the Second World War was filmed there.
Someone else will make a joke about police officers investigating tweets. That practice - which was put to an end a couple of years ago - stemmed from a particular interpretation of a law that required police forces to investigate all threats of violence made by post, that was enacted in the 1980s during a period of increased religiously-motivated terrorism. The following decade brought the negotiations that put an end to that terrorism; negotiations that were the culmination of nearly five centuries of religious conflict. It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.
I shall leave it to others to make the usual accusations about who funded the aforementioned terrorism.
The Online Safety Act is vague and non-specific. Social media platforms differentiate themselves in the market on the bases of: with whom users can interact (people they know personally or the user base at large); and the ways in which they can interact (photos, videos, comments, likes, &c.). Each platform therefore poses its own unique set of risks to its user base, and so needs to have its own unique regulations. The Act acknowledges by empowering Ofcom to negotiate the specific policies that platforms will need to follow on a platform-by-platform basis. And if those policies should turn out to be too strict, and a few social media companies should find it no longer profitable to operate in the United Kingdom, that is not all that much of an issue for His Majesty's Government. They're not British companies, after all.
You can't talk about the Forbidden Meatballs[1] on Reddit or HN. In the 90s, AOL users from Scunthorpe and Penistone were banned from user forums for telling the community where they lived to help diagnose their connectivity issues. Americans have enforced - and continue to enforce - their cultural norms on the entire Anglophone web, and now the rest of the world has started to do the same. I have much greater faith in my government to protect my freedom of speech (no matter how much I may object to their policies) than some foreign company.
For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is? 'Maximum effect for minimum effort and cost' has been the guiding principle of all government in Britain for decades - it's how Britain ruled its Empire, it's what drove the Thirteen Colonies to rebel, it's why the East India Company was allowed to rule a subcontinent, it's why many of the former colonies were given independence despite not wanting it, it's why the roads are so consistently bad, it's why the water companies are dumping sewage into rivers, it's why there aren't enough police officers.
To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state, I suggest you watch Britons at a traffic-light-controlled pedestrian crossing. This isn't the end of the world; it's not going to lead to any social changes of any sort at all. The Act requires protections for free speech, after all. When it's all finally implemented, it'll just be enforcement of social norms that no one finds controversial.
NB: I read through the Act to see whether an idea for a social media platform was still a viable business idea, and apart from sending policy documents to Ofcom, it wouldn't require the business to do anything that wasn't already in that idea. If you want to argue about what the Act requires, I will expect you to have read the Act[2].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9biM_ZfIdo
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/282049626
[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/contents