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.
I don't mean this to be as insulting as it may, but the UK government trying to police US businesses has always felt like a toddler trying to ground his mom.
I don't think its unreasonable for a government to ask company to abide by its laws if it want to do business with its citizens.
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.
It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available. The more you try the more it backfires. By telling your kids they cant see a website they are sure to visit it, all they have to do is google for a free vpn.
There are ways around this too. When the VPN entrance point is a static IP a ban may work but what happens when a product shows up that spins up dynamic VPSs in the public cloud? All the cloud providers have free trials that let people do this for free forever. Sounds difficult but surely people will come up with a streamlined approach if push comes to shove. Even in china where using a VPN is a major crime they are unable to stop people from using them.
Off the top of my head here are some ways you could fairly easily shut down VPNs.
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.
Disruption at the technical level will prove excessively convoluted and impractical to enforce, for censorship-resistant VPN technologies continue to evolve at an accelerated pace – Amnezia and XRay2 serve as exemplary cases in point.
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.
Other VPN providers not being forced to censor the internet? VPN providers in the US will never have to bow to censorship as long as the first amendment is doing its thing
If you honestly believe you can control what your two teens see and do on the internet, you've either got them chained up in a closet, or you're wrong.
Having worked with children from 10 all the way up to 18 in a residential setting, I couldn’t agree more.
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!
There is a fairly big gap between chained in the closet and completely free access to the internet. There is also a lot difference between catching a glimpse of some porn and spending hours in their bedroom exploring the darkest corners of the internet.
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.
With parenting it’s not a case where you have 100% airtight control over everything with no possible leaks. It’s a spectrum where you impose expectations combined with some controls.
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.
I went through it and circumvented it completely in the 90s when the only way online was a computer with a modem in the living room. It's so much easier today, its absolutely trivial to circumvent anything you're doing. Old smartphones from "a friend's brother" are easily hidden and can be used on wifi you don't control.
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.
You can legally order pipe tobacco and cigars on the internet in the US without showing ID. When I was a kid you could do it with wine too, and I doubt that's changed. I don't find it to be a problem.
buywinesonline.com (random retailer I found) says they do
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...
I think smoking is a little different for a few reasons.
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.
There used to be speculation that smokers actually cost less to the government, since they get lung cancer and die before they would get their pensions, or soon after, and therefore the government wanted people to smoke.
I mean, point 1 in favour of this theory is the fact that tobacco is legal, while most drugs aren't.
Psychologically perhaps, but to say physically addictive is not precise.
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.
I see it as a problem of inconsistency that is common in situations where a parochial performer has their moments on the big stage, and follows it up with faceplants.
You are missing the point. US has a lot of harmful cultural exports and one of them is streaming, where people degrade and humiliate themselves for money and the like. Then there is yt shorts, then 4chan, then social media.
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.
This is not reddit. I do not understand how such low hanging opinions are on this. There have been publications and tons of enactments from both govs, research labs, companies just sucking out every social media.
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.
The argument as I understood it was 4chan's existence, degrades society.
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.
Your reasoning is way off. You’re a human being, not some creature running on autopilot. And you’re fully capable of thinking and acting with some intelligence.
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.
I agree and other countries (as well as the US) should educate their children so they are prepared and don't fall into that trap of brainrot consumption.
US businesses can get bent. Half my country is rotten and hollowed out, all the shops replaced by Amazon. Screw them. Uber wants to come over here and put our local cabbies out of work, then bring them all back on lower wages with higher fees. Screw off. Air B&B destroys affordable housing all across Europe and turns cities into tourist hell. Oracle comes over here and they're trying their damnedest to get their hands on our valuable NHS data. Facebook (now Meta) comes over here and shows horrific content to young children, wrecking the mental health of teens, especially young girls. Twitter (now X) wants to pollute my country's politics with American fascist nonsense while its owner promises to donate hundreds of millions to far right political parties across the content.
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.
Tough luck, if you don't like it, then you (or your government) should block those websites. It's not job of the US businesses nor US government to enforce another country's laws.
Let me put this very simply to you: if I go to a country where the age of consent is 14 and start a business streaming child porn to America, I should be stopped from doing that. This is the same principle with a lesser offence.
You will stopped from doing that by American law. The difference between this and that is that Ofcom believes it can regulate conduct that never touches British soil. Ofcom notably is not setting up a "great firewall," but instead sending takedown notices to websites about content that is already blocked from British IPs.
> You will stopped from doing that by American law. The difference between this and that is that Ofcom believes it can regulate conduct that never touches British soil.
You're showing yourself to believe that America can regulate conduct that never touches American soil.
America won't go after you. America will go after Americans who access your site and American ISPs will block your site. That's not America regulating your behavior. You're still free to do whatever you want.
If you enter America, there may also be consequences, but you don't need to enter America.
America may well go after you and we have a large military to do it with. most often a simple diplomatic message will shut you down - most countries have their own child porn laws, and the exceptions (if any) are going to face problems as this is something the us takes seriously.
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.
> If you enter America, there may also be consequences
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.
Singapore does exactly that, and they explicitly warn outbound Singaporean travelers that any drug use outside Singapore will be prosecuted as if it has happened in Singapore.
They're warning everybody, not just Singaporeans. It's just that Singaporeans are the most likely to go travel abroad, have some fun, and then come back like nothing has happened. But if somebody inbound gets caught in a random drug test at the airport (they do that), he's going to be prosecuted just the same no matter their citizenship. There were several (in-)famous examples of this happening.
Yeah, extradition treaties are a thing, and I believe he wasn't a citizen of New Zealand so the US actually could make the request. The hypothetical above can be narrowed to "you are doing something completely legal in your country of citizenship or some other non-extradition country but illegal in the US" if you want to get more precise about it.
We are America. We can do whatever we damn well please because we have the biggest guns and most money. Welcome to the how the world really works. Not saying it’s right.
I've sympathy for what you're proposing - on-shoring our own tech - but the Online Safety Act is a terrible law and it should've been repealed yesterday. It will do nothing to advance those aims, and plenty to stifle innovation in the UK tech space. Ofcom can get fucked.
So ban those businesses from operating in your region. Don't pretend that Ofcom can regulate the content that is viewed around the world just because you're upset about things in your country.
I bloody wish I could! Sadly, these things aren't up to me, and the companies involved would probably pay more bribes to your gangster president to get him to sanction our economy if we tried.
The US has great relations with many countries that ban AirBnB or Uber. The reason they operate in your country is because the people in your country want them.
If your countrymen want to use Uber, Air B&B, Oracle, and Facebook, should you try to stop them from doing it, even if you personally dislike those companies?
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.
Closer to the point: having Uber in a place with a licensed taxi trade is basically the same thing as removing licensing and then granting a monopoly on one business to operate taxis.
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.
I personally think that FB, Uber, RBNB, Oracle, Google, Amazon, and literally every american SASS should be completely forbidden from Europe. Period no discussion at all. Given the state of current America, given the reactions even on this very post that do not see how Cambridge Analytics has damaged the entire world - yes, I think it would be safe to put a good 10 year ban on every US web tech. It would fasten up Europe and leave out the important decision to someone who can actually make a difference instead of being washed out by some reddit / twitter with fake russian bots. Let the economics just move away and make the decisions for people who are in a state of hypnosis instead of playing with mass control and then calling it "freedom".
Keep your american movies and social networks please. Btw why is TikTok banned in US?
Yes I do - for example ; any American that wishes to make a company in Europe will need to have a European voucher which is the owner of the service - so the money doesn't flow out of the country trough some UberMornonization app with $millions to ultimately do colonization.
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 ?
I *personally* have a freaking orchestrator, mail server, git server, faster than rocksdb DATABASE ENGINE, freaking world of warcraft and faster than NGINX for static. It's cute that you think you have the capabilities to imagine what Europe can or cannot do.
We've got plenty of servers, electricity, network hardware and people who code. We are missing the oxygen in the room, which American services all collectively sucked out. Banning those services will open some potential for innovation.
I think what your missing is a regulatory framework that wont immediately screw you. Just look at how far behind you are with AI. AI is nascent so you have no excuse about "oxygen" or whatever.
No you’re right. Instead of a multi-billion dollar organization supporting the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, serving directly their millions of customers, we would be better off running this with a team of Oxbridge literature and PPE alumni, armed with a hodgepodge of constituent letters accompanied by stiff emails by one or two members of parliament funded by god knows who, who otherwise have no skin in the game.
Corporations have skin in a game - namely to keep their power, prevent competition from arising, make sure the workers are squeezed with less options so that they demand less salaries.
Capitalism works when there is a competition between companies. Corporations are everything but that.
On the other hand, the limited size of the British market limits Parliament’s ability to pressure foreign companies.
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.
It's quite ironic that they would have an easier time enforcing that if they were still part of the EU and could have been the deciding factor towards more regulation faster.
The EU is big and rich enough to force Big Tech into submission under threat of loosing the market.
Frankly, LLMs with transparent prompts, as well as user-side filters based on LLM prompts (e.g. "Don't show me comment threads talking shit about Attack on Titan") could do a better and more "fair" job than meat-based moderators now.
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.
The evolution of governance of online communities mirrors that of the real-world.
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.
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.
Yes this is absolutely correct. I can think of more content that's disallowed on HN than content that's allowed: no politics (for the most part), no flamewars/aggressiveness/name-calling, no self-promoting links to your OnlyFans, nothing hugely offtopic, etc. And that's on top of very aggressive moderation of things other social media sites are filled with but are de facto banned here: shitty puns or jokes, one-line zingers, meaningless affirmation comments like "So much this" or "This is the way", nitpicks about submitted articles or personal swipes at the authors' politics...
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 please. Vote-based social networks are way too vulnerable to burying the truth and boosting lies.
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.
I was thinking of discussion platforms but for general government I had a great idea: we know how to write and publish new laws but we are terrible at unpublishing outdated garbage laws. AI would be great for finding all laws that it thinks are dubious, impractical or otherwise undesirable in today's context and zeitgeist. There can be various manual deletion processes for different categories of absurdity.
Vote manipulation is a non-issue here because users require a minimum of 500 karma to vote, and because the site is so much smaller than Reddit it can take months to reach that threshold. Downvoting is also capped so that you're very unlikely to get pushed back below the 500 karma threshold unless you are consistently making comments that the community doesn't like. 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.
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.
What stops people from setting up and aging (or buying) sockpuppet accounts to the point where they control 10+ or even 100+ flag-capable / vote-capable HN accounts, and then using them as a network to deny or boost certain topics? This kind of behavior almost certainly goes on here.
> What stops people from setting up and aging (or buying) sockpuppet accounts to the point where they control 10+ or even 100+ flag-capable / vote-capable HN accounts, and then using them as a network to deny or boost certain topics?
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.
Of course, only the site admins would be able to show you actual examples. But this kind of stuff happens everywhere on the internet where you can post for free, so there is no reason to think it's not happening here.
> the site is so much smaller than Reddit it can take months to reach that threshold.
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.
> 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.
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.
In this case no. Interestingly, in the US in agencies like the ATF the civil servants make the regulation and enforce it, binding as law. In immigration it's even crazier -- civil servants create the policies, enforce them, and act as the judge.
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.
Unfortunately, Britain, like America, is seized by the worst of both worlds because conservatives and business interests have captured the electorate and narrowly agree on authoritarian nonsense.
Left and right doesn't really matter - all western politicians do what benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else. If they didn't they wouldn't even make it on the poll.
I’ve come to align with Trump’s right wing politics, based on their direct announcements on Youtube and policy decisions. What they are doing makes economic and strategic sense. I have also come to see the general hostility as emanating from people who are fed deranged distortions on the Trump admin’s decisions, likely fostered by narrow business interests and foreign entities who don’t care about the plight of America. This is after 23 years of Democrat support, since I moved to this country.
On the one hand if you police what people say and think you risk moderation being weponized into censorship. On the other hand if you don't you risk big corp weaponizing free speech into misinformation.
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.
You're right, speech should not be limited... in fact I am telling everybody about the time you beat your wife and abused your kids. And I'm putting $100,000 in to advertising this all over the place and ensuring every forum is littered with this fact along with your name and address...
Hopefully you see simple solutions come with their own complex problems.
That falls under libel laws, which is a civil tort. There isn't an administrative or ministerial apparatus fining you based on the presumption that you violated a speech code.
You have to prove that an actual crime or harm was involved. There is some nuance there, but there absolutely is not a censorious bureaucrat issuing warning letters and fines for things they don't like.
The point is that you're now defending a completely different position from "Free speech is absolute." Determining what should count as "an actual crime or harm", how it can be proven, and so on, is pretty much the entirety of the problem you were claiming to have solved.
Free speech doesn't include the freedom to use speech to do illegal harms (that are themselves, not speech).
In other words, "Speech + Offense" is prosecutable, for illegal "Offense".
You don't get a hall pass to use speech to commit a crime, and not be culpable for the crime.
Fraud, libel, harassment, giving false testimony in court, colluding with competitors to artificially increase prices,
broadcasting a copyright work, signing your name (just your name!) to an illegal contract, etc. all may involve speech, but the offense is defined by the non-speech functional impact.
Convincing someone to kill someone for you is not legal, because murder is not legal.
People generally have to prove that the speech was intentionally or recklessly geared to cause harm to others.
Although many cases may be clear, there isn't a mathematical separation between the two, so we have courts and precedence, and further reviews, as the practical means of drawing the line.
And that is true for the vast majority of laws and rights.
I don't think that's the case in the US. For instance, if you take a picture of a patient you are treating, go home and send that picture to your wife and say "treated this lady for syphilis today" you are violating HIPAA despite the fact you're telling 100% truth, conveying it privately with no expectation or desire it will ever impact the victim, and literally are only conveying it as information to be consumed and not acted on then it is still illegal.
That is breaking a law that protects patients' privacy. Nobody should distribute private information given to them under an agreement to maintain privacy.
Nobody is forced to abide by HIPPA, without their consent. Nobody is forced to sign a HIPAA agreement.
In fact, nobody is forced to work in the medical professions, or look at private medical data, in the US. And no law prohibits asking a patient or caregivers if they are ok with some harmless informal sharing, and explaining the urge to them...
This is similar to the voluntary civil jeopardy of signing an NDA before being informed of trade secrets. Penalties may vary.
HIPAA prohibits share private medical information that isn't yours. Regardless of signing anything or how you got it.
And no medical establishment can (legally) share records with you, without a legal purpose, and documentation you know your obligations or are legally allowed to have the information.
Nobody cares what your opinion is, without an explanation.
This is HN. Two-way curiosity and friendly discussion are encouraged. Enlighten me, instead of posing, please.
Yes you understand now. Every time you understand, you move the goal posts. You've moved them twice now, this time simply declaring the speech you don't like "isn't yours." At first it was about offenses that cause harm, then it was essentially about contract law. And then when you found out there was no contract, then you just moved the goal posts to the patient owning the information inside the provider's brain.
There is no curiosity in your approach, you know in your heart of hearts you're simply backtracking and then shifting the posts everytime your claims are wrong.
I was certainly thinking about things more. Part of a normal discussion is people try to be clearer with their thinking as they discuss something.
And clarifying can be either or both tuning reasoning or tuning communication.
You realize you can nit pic at almost any comment with some validity?
And you didn’t include any of your own substantive thoughts, which I apparently moved closer to, until your second comment after I asked you for them?
So what to do? Just communicate in a positive and clear way yourself if you have something to add.
I come here to learn. I would rather learn from you than wonder why you make negative comments, in a discussion where you and your thoughts are welcome.
Any absolutist position on any topic is almost certainly wrong. This includes absolutist free speech. The bar in the US is if the speech has some benefit to wider society to allow. And we are very lenient on what we call benefit in these cases. Anyone that tells you the US has absolutely free speech is either lying or just wrong. And in the real world, you can't run society with any absolutist policies including absolutist free speech policies.
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...
This is no solution. We as a society can define free speech as being absolute, and this is fine, I'm onboard. We still need to handle the consequences from this decision.
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??
> 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.
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
England was cooked in WW2. While the USA was landing on hte moon and back, the UK borrowed $1Billion dollars because they caused a deficit after the war. Rather than moving forward, the monarchy held the UK back from progress. And they still are, Brexit was the latest scheme. charlie isn't going to help them get out of the 18th Century.
Putin was doing just fine under Biden. In fact, if you take into account these last weeks, Trump is taking a much tougher stance on Putin than Biden did.
