Online Safety Bill
Discussion
Not sure about anyone else but I really don’t like this.
Nadine Dorries taking our rights to free speech away.
Not good, get a cup of tea and have a read what these lizard overlords are doing now.. swines. No absolute piss taking
s
The Government’s Online Safety Bill has been described as a “world-first”, and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has even boasted that it is leading “a global coalition of countries all taking co-ordinated steps” on internet regulations. But if other countries develop laws anything like this censor’s charter, internet freedom as we know it will be a thing of the past.
The new Bill is a departure from Britain’s carefully balanced right to free speech, instead giving state-backing to social media companies’ distinctly San-Fran, restrictive content policies where they relate to the Government’s “priority harms”. The priority harms are whatever the Secretary of State wants them to be and can target either lawful or unlawful speech.
We should be incredibly cautious about deferring to Americanised terms of service over domestic speech laws. Tech companies’ rules have seen thousands of people censored, suspended and banned for their views on sex and gender, politics, pandemic policies, and for making anodyne jokes. Notably, they even led to Donald Trump being banned from social media whilst serving as President. The Bill creates a legal requirement that these foreign terms and conditions are upheld “consistently”. Public outrage at excessive speech interventionism has been, up to now, directed solely at Big Tech, but under these new laws the British Government will be held squarely to blame too.
The minister in charge of the Bill knows only too well how censorious the tech companies can be. In an experiment we recently conducted, Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries’ own controversial comments in which she (I think, only half) jokingly threatened to nail a journalists’ balls to the floor in 2013 were banned from Facebook when we posted them from a dummy account. We did the same experiment with Boris Johnson’s controversial comments likening women in burkas to letterboxes, and Angela Rayner’s recent comments on shooting terrorists – all were swiftly censored on the platform. Dorries says that the Bill will require the companies to offer an appeals process – but they already do. And when we appealed the take-downs in our experiment, the censorship decisions were upheld.
We can expect much more eradication of controversial speech under Dorries’ Bill. The new law creates a whole new category of speech – “legal but harmful” – to be surveilled by tech companies and regulated by the state. Dorries expects us to be reassured that the types of speech that will qualify as “legal but harmful” will be set out in statutory instruments – but that’s unlikely to reassure anyone who has paid attention to the avalanche of authoritarian statutory instruments flying through parliament with little scrutiny over the past two years.
This Government could and should have taken the opportunity with this Bill to focus on making sure that people are protected from crime online, and that predators, stalkers, terrorists and racist abusers are not just suspended by social media companies but actually face the full force of the law. Everyone agrees that if something is illegal offline, it must be illegal online too.
But instead, the real change under this new law is the invention of a complex new bureaucracy whereby things that are perfectly lawful to say offline will be strictly regulated online – for our own “safety”, of course.
The Online Safety Bill, true to its title, reeks of safetyism. Liberal free speech values are fast becoming relics of our best traditions, left behind in the wake of safety fundamentalism that even encapsulates emotional safety. Indeed, the Bill creates new communications offences for speech that may cause “psychological harm”. There is no clinical definition here, and I have a feeling that in the Twittersphere this threshold will be interpreted very liberally.
In a piece for this paper, Dorries likened this monstrous speech bureaucracy to the requirement of seatbelts, as though suppressing lawful speech is life-saving. Well, strap in and buckle up – Dorries’ brave new internet will be quite a ride.
Nadine Dorries taking our rights to free speech away.
Not good, get a cup of tea and have a read what these lizard overlords are doing now.. swines. No absolute piss taking
s The Government’s Online Safety Bill has been described as a “world-first”, and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has even boasted that it is leading “a global coalition of countries all taking co-ordinated steps” on internet regulations. But if other countries develop laws anything like this censor’s charter, internet freedom as we know it will be a thing of the past.
The new Bill is a departure from Britain’s carefully balanced right to free speech, instead giving state-backing to social media companies’ distinctly San-Fran, restrictive content policies where they relate to the Government’s “priority harms”. The priority harms are whatever the Secretary of State wants them to be and can target either lawful or unlawful speech.
We should be incredibly cautious about deferring to Americanised terms of service over domestic speech laws. Tech companies’ rules have seen thousands of people censored, suspended and banned for their views on sex and gender, politics, pandemic policies, and for making anodyne jokes. Notably, they even led to Donald Trump being banned from social media whilst serving as President. The Bill creates a legal requirement that these foreign terms and conditions are upheld “consistently”. Public outrage at excessive speech interventionism has been, up to now, directed solely at Big Tech, but under these new laws the British Government will be held squarely to blame too.
The minister in charge of the Bill knows only too well how censorious the tech companies can be. In an experiment we recently conducted, Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries’ own controversial comments in which she (I think, only half) jokingly threatened to nail a journalists’ balls to the floor in 2013 were banned from Facebook when we posted them from a dummy account. We did the same experiment with Boris Johnson’s controversial comments likening women in burkas to letterboxes, and Angela Rayner’s recent comments on shooting terrorists – all were swiftly censored on the platform. Dorries says that the Bill will require the companies to offer an appeals process – but they already do. And when we appealed the take-downs in our experiment, the censorship decisions were upheld.
We can expect much more eradication of controversial speech under Dorries’ Bill. The new law creates a whole new category of speech – “legal but harmful” – to be surveilled by tech companies and regulated by the state. Dorries expects us to be reassured that the types of speech that will qualify as “legal but harmful” will be set out in statutory instruments – but that’s unlikely to reassure anyone who has paid attention to the avalanche of authoritarian statutory instruments flying through parliament with little scrutiny over the past two years.
This Government could and should have taken the opportunity with this Bill to focus on making sure that people are protected from crime online, and that predators, stalkers, terrorists and racist abusers are not just suspended by social media companies but actually face the full force of the law. Everyone agrees that if something is illegal offline, it must be illegal online too.
But instead, the real change under this new law is the invention of a complex new bureaucracy whereby things that are perfectly lawful to say offline will be strictly regulated online – for our own “safety”, of course.
The Online Safety Bill, true to its title, reeks of safetyism. Liberal free speech values are fast becoming relics of our best traditions, left behind in the wake of safety fundamentalism that even encapsulates emotional safety. Indeed, the Bill creates new communications offences for speech that may cause “psychological harm”. There is no clinical definition here, and I have a feeling that in the Twittersphere this threshold will be interpreted very liberally.
In a piece for this paper, Dorries likened this monstrous speech bureaucracy to the requirement of seatbelts, as though suppressing lawful speech is life-saving. Well, strap in and buckle up – Dorries’ brave new internet will be quite a ride.
While I'm sure nothing with Dorries attached is going to be good, complaining about Trump being banned from social media for inciting an attack on a public building which killed six people is just fking stupid. He'd have been banned multiple times previously if he hadn't been President.
king stupid. He'd have been banned multiple times previously if he hadn't been President. E63eeeeee... said:
And just fwiw, refusing to publish, repeat or amplify something that someone has said, is in no way the same as restricting their free speech.
I’m confused, are you agreeing with the wokery? This looks to me like an assault on what used to be called a democracy. They are turning into a dictatorship and we need to stop this madness. Everyone seems too busy watching BBC the national brainwash co that we also have to fund.
WAKE UP!!
nick30 said:
E63eeeeee... said:
And just fwiw, refusing to publish, repeat or amplify something that someone has said, is in no way the same as restricting their free speech.
I’m confused, are you agreeing with the wokery? This looks to me like an assault on what used to be called a democracy. They are turning into a dictatorship and we need to stop this madness. Everyone seems too busy watching BBC the national brainwash co that we also have to fund.
WAKE UP!!
E63eeeeee... said:
And just fwiw, refusing to publish, repeat or amplify something that someone has said, is in no way the same as restricting their free speech.
Mr X had his media account suspended. Don't worry use another platformMr X had all his accounts terminated. Don't worry set up your own platform
Mr X set up a goFundMe to set up the platform, it was cancelled. Don't worry just start small
Mr X started small. Donations came in for his ideas, he had his bank account closed. Don't worry just start smaller still
Mr X bought some online webspace. Then google banned him.
Mr X now stands on a street corner with a placard
But don't worry he still has freedom of speech
Shame this wasn't in place over the last few months, isn't it.
Johnson and his brilliant team could have decided that although any content on posted to social media about parties in Number 10 during the Lockdowns is, of course, entirely legal, it would have been harmful to the efforts to combat Covid and as such, should be taken down immediately.
[/s]
Johnson and his brilliant team could have decided that although any content on posted to social media about parties in Number 10 during the Lockdowns is, of course, entirely legal, it would have been harmful to the efforts to combat Covid and as such, should be taken down immediately.
[/s]
If you need to be protected online then you’re soft and need hardening up, not protecting.
I didn’t recoil and die when exposed to goatse or three girls one cup, and all the other web1 wonders.
The focus here is 100% on controlling counter-opinion.
They want to compartmentalise the range of your information exposure to limit free discourse within boundaries that they choose, to essentially control what society thinks and will ultimately do.
War, covid, brexit, it’s all the same old st.
The real issue here is building the apparatus to keep you dumb to the ever more obvious and insidious reality that the West is on its downward trajectory.
On a finite world consumerism and debt based economics have reached their peak.
But the rising levels of poverty and inequality will be argued away within the bounds of things like green and climate change, but won’t even include or allow to include such topics as the wealth of the few, the hypocrisy of those we elected to represent us… because pointing that out is surely going to be seen as bad because it’s solving the fundamental issue and not retaining the happy status quo of the few.
With wealth inequality at its peak and the end of an omnipotent West, what more does anyone expect?
My 2p.
Support i2p, Maidsafe network etc.
And stop using mainstream damned social media.
Get on prism break and just use some free decentralised stuff.
Stop feeding the data-hoover-monsters.
Wrap all your online cloud storage in stablebit drivecloud and maybe veracrypt.
Stop using cloud unencrypted at the server side.
Online censorship only exists for the easy low hanging fruit.
Even right now they’ve ‘blocked’ RT but you can just not use an app, or smart tv, and watch it on a web browser.
Even if they nerf the dns and “censor the internet” proper, you can watch it on freesat.
Or point a dish at a satellite that broadcasts it.
They only need to censor enough so the majority are dumb enough to mean a mass of sentiment never builds.
I’d argue the more they try ram bks down your neck the more people will gag on it and stop using social media… and they might actually just talk again, and share ideas and thoughts more honestly.
In summation. Bad form from a free democracy.
But cretinous like all they do these days, and unlikely to be effective, and perhaps even counter effective.
They can’t even make electricity or get gas sorted any more, so what hope of creating a totalitarian super-state?
I didn’t recoil and die when exposed to goatse or three girls one cup, and all the other web1 wonders.
The focus here is 100% on controlling counter-opinion.
They want to compartmentalise the range of your information exposure to limit free discourse within boundaries that they choose, to essentially control what society thinks and will ultimately do.
War, covid, brexit, it’s all the same old s
t.The real issue here is building the apparatus to keep you dumb to the ever more obvious and insidious reality that the West is on its downward trajectory.
On a finite world consumerism and debt based economics have reached their peak.
But the rising levels of poverty and inequality will be argued away within the bounds of things like green and climate change, but won’t even include or allow to include such topics as the wealth of the few, the hypocrisy of those we elected to represent us… because pointing that out is surely going to be seen as bad because it’s solving the fundamental issue and not retaining the happy status quo of the few.
With wealth inequality at its peak and the end of an omnipotent West, what more does anyone expect?
My 2p.
Support i2p, Maidsafe network etc.
And stop using mainstream damned social media.
Get on prism break and just use some free decentralised stuff.
Stop feeding the data-hoover-monsters.
Wrap all your online cloud storage in stablebit drivecloud and maybe veracrypt.
Stop using cloud unencrypted at the server side.
Online censorship only exists for the easy low hanging fruit.
Even right now they’ve ‘blocked’ RT but you can just not use an app, or smart tv, and watch it on a web browser.
Even if they nerf the dns and “censor the internet” proper, you can watch it on freesat.
Or point a dish at a satellite that broadcasts it.
They only need to censor enough so the majority are dumb enough to mean a mass of sentiment never builds.
I’d argue the more they try ram b
ks down your neck the more people will gag on it and stop using social media… and they might actually just talk again, and share ideas and thoughts more honestly.In summation. Bad form from a free democracy.
But cretinous like all they do these days, and unlikely to be effective, and perhaps even counter effective.
They can’t even make electricity or get gas sorted any more, so what hope of creating a totalitarian super-state?
nick30 said:
I’m confused, are you agreeing with the wokery?
This looks to me like an assault on what used to be called a democracy. They are turning into a dictatorship and we need to stop this madness. Everyone seems too busy watching BBC the national brainwash co that we also have to fund.
WAKE UP!!
This looks to me like an assault on what used to be called a democracy. They are turning into a dictatorship and we need to stop this madness. Everyone seems too busy watching BBC the national brainwash co that we also have to fund.
WAKE UP!!
Yawn. Wot?
voyds9 said:
E63eeeeee... said:
And just fwiw, refusing to publish, repeat or amplify something that someone has said, is in no way the same as restricting their free speech.
Mr X had his media account suspended. Don't worry use another platformMr X had all his accounts terminated. Don't worry set up your own platform
Mr X set up a goFundMe to set up the platform, it was cancelled. Don't worry just start small
Mr X started small. Donations came in for his ideas, he had his bank account closed. Don't worry just start smaller still
Mr X bought some online webspace. Then google banned him.
Mr X now stands on a street corner with a placard
But don't worry he still has freedom of speech
Incidentally, Google can't ban you from the internet, so at least you've learned something.
nick30 said:
E63eeeeee... said:
And just fwiw, refusing to publish, repeat or amplify something that someone has said, is in no way the same as restricting their free speech.
I’m confused, are you agreeing with the wokery? This looks to me like an assault on what used to be called a democracy. They are turning into a dictatorship and we need to stop this madness. Everyone seems too busy watching BBC the national brainwash co that we also have to fund.
WAKE UP!!
Wake up sheeple.
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