Posted by nvarsj 3 days ago
"The “CSAM requirement” is that any relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software which is highly effective at preventing the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming) and viewing of CSAM using that device."
"Regulations under subsection (1) must enable the Secretary of State, by further regulations, to expand the definition of ‘relevant devices’ to include other categories of device which may be used to record, transmit or view CSAM"
Apple, what did you start?
[1] https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/63901/documents/746...
It's happening. Computer freedom, everything the word "hacker" ever stood for, will be officially destroyed if this passes. We're about to be robbed of control over our computers by force of law. It's just the UK now but eventually it will be every country.
This is a very dark day. I've been prophesizing its arrival for a while now. I was secretly hoping I was wrong about everything, that we'd turn this around, that we'd enshrine a right to control our computers into law. The opposite is happening instead. It's so sad...
I'd even go as far to say that if things become this authoritarian, certain "direct" acts would be justified in preventing or fighting it.
If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages. Billion dollar fabs are single points of failure and they will be exploited, subverted, regulated and controlled. The only possible solution is to democratize and decentralize semiconductor manufacturing to the point anyone can do it. We must be able to make free computer hardware at home just like we can make free computer software at home.
Anything short of this and it's over.
> democratize and decentralize semiconductor manufacturing to the point anyone can do it.
Physics makes this completely unrealistic.
Seems to me this is a cultural issue that runs deep. You are his majesty’s loyal subject, like it or not, and more importantly, you are a subject of his bureaucracy. The US works in a similar fashion, except the deep state has slightly different excuses to exist.
I work extensively in the UK(past 5 years, I’ve worked there maybe two years in total). Nothing gets done without endless approval from people with cushy office jobs in the bureaucracy.
It’s in the bureaucracy’s interest to extend its power, and who is going to stop them?
CSAM is an excellent excuse to control the digital world. I wonder what took them this long.
This isn't a problem of one country's specific culture. Australia and Canada are doing the exact same thing, the Democrats would absolutely do the same thing if the libertarian Constitution weren't in their way. The rest of the EU is doing the same thing. It's a left vs right thing.
In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn.
Definitionally not. Left and right are always relative to the local average, "left wing" and "right wing" are nothing more than a seating arrangement turned into a badge.
The Conservatives are, famously, right wing by British standards. If you think the Tories are lefties, you're so far to the right you can't even see the UK's Overton Window from where you are.
The votes I seen on parliament.uk about the Online Safety Bill show the split being usually the Tories vs. everyone else: https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons?SearchText=Online+...
> In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn.
I have bad news for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hybL-GJov7M
The OP was correct. The Tories were left wing and authoritarian. They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service.
Only Reform have made a stand against the Online Safety Act and other creeping dystopian measures.
I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029.
The next General Election cannot come soon enough.
The correct answer is decentralisation of power, and put the government back in the hands of the people. That means frequent voting(multiple times a year), by an educated population.
Works well in Switzerland.
Sufficiently well educated and also willing to read carefully and without partisan (or other) fear of favour.
How many of us read the terms and conditions before clicking "I agree"? How many support a side only because it's their own side?
I don't know how to fix this. The "obvious" solutions (seen in various government systems over the world and the centuries) all have demonstrable problems.
How feasible is this really? I'd feel a lot better if it were possible to produce chips free from backdoors even if the resulting CPUs weren't even as fast as an old Pentium III, but my guess is that any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government
Here's an example that was posted here recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178789
Lithographically fabricated integrated circuit in a garage. Whatever this is, we need a lot more of it to stand a chance at resisting governments.
> any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government
The whole idea is to make this so easy and ubiquitous that they can't shut it down completely. They can shut down some but not all. I believe this is the only way a law like this can be resisted. Promote civil disobedience by making it easy.
Trying to determine the best "diy chip" sounds like a fun project and an admirable goal, but if you actually wanted something useful I'd wager you'd be better off buying esp32's in bulk so you'd have all the spares you might need.
The entire point of of designing your own chip is so that you know there won't be any surprises. Nothing undocumented.
In short, the Pandora's Box of automated surveillance and security risk on any smartphone or tablet is opened, while a gigantic loophole for serious offenders is left open.
Give citizens computers and they can copy at will, making a mockery out of things like copyright, they'd wipe out entire sectors of the economy if left unchecked.
Give citizens computers and they will have cryptography which can defeat police, judges, governments, spies, militaries.
They cannot tolerate it. They will eventually lock everything down. PCs were left out because everyone is on mobile these days, not because they are opposed to locking them down. They will close the loophole if it becomes an issue. Besides, with remote attestation they can just designate those devices as untrustworthy and ban them from everything.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make some law, we make technology that subverts it. Due to technology, they must continuously increase their own tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable population or a totalitarian state. We're heading towards the latter. I was hoping the government's limits would be discovered along the way, some set of basic principles it'd refrain from violating in its quest for control, thereby reaching the fabled "the ideal amount of crime is non-zero" state. Turns out governments know no limits.
I'm not in support of this bill, I'm just saying whenever I read these arguments, it's almost like you're entirely discounting the challenge the very tech your praising incurs for law enforcement and society.
For me the paradox is simple, one the one hand people want everything to be "open and transparent" including their computers, but those same people often want the ability to completely hide everything in cryptography. Which one is it? If you were for openness and transparency in it's entirety, why wouldn't you by default be against cryptography ? This paradox is where the rubber hits the road on legislation like this and likely why the average Joe Smith doesn't really care about the cause. Because realistically, it all sounds suspicious. To a law abiding citizen, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
This is just something people need to accept no matter how angry they get about it. If they don't, they will be manipulated through their fears into trading away their freedom for a false sense of security.
I don't know what you are getting at with "self serving and harmful to other citizens"? Like a private institution? a company? Of course private companies are self-serving. All of them could be described as perpetrating some subjective and nebulous "harm". There are already transparency requirements for businesses, and they are subject to warrants. To the extent that they are public institutions (monopolies, publicity-traded companies), there are increasing demands for transparency and vice-versa.
Individuals have a right to privacy and protection from undue search, regardless of scare quotes employed, unless they are living on a prison island such britan.
Personally I think we're cooked but I can understand why some people are trying to take action and destroy online anonymity. Ideally we'd just live in a world where people can run their own mail server and people would leave it a lone, but we don't.
Maintaining the status quo means western democracy is fucked. There is no anti-dote to propaganda and lies being spread through social media. Maybe getting rid of online anonymity would help but I understand why people don't want a digital ID either.
And who want everything to be open and transparent? I am not aware of anyone who wants this.
For HNers who just automatically flag anything right wing and want left wing examples instead, right now leftists are outraged by deportations. And a tiny number have tried to assassinate ICE agents using sniper rifles, indeed. But it's making no difference, not even when they're protected by corrupt local prosecutors and juries. They have even accidentally shot migrants instead of ICE.
Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it? Whether it's COVID or ICE, there's been no meaningful armed resistance.
The reason the US seems to be less totalitarian is purely because the constitution and the culture that supports it stops Congress from passing the same kind of restrictive speech laws the rest of the world has. If it weren't for the Constitution the Democrats would have already passed lots of speech laws under Obama and Biden, then used them to harass and illegalize the Republicans to maintain a majority. For example they'd have banned Trump's campaign on the basis that it encouraged "hate" against immigrants, and then they'd have forced big tech to do what Europe is now trying already, to strip all anonymity from the internet so they can harass random individual voters who disagree with government policy online, Germany style.
What protects America isn't guns, it's respect for the voting thresholds in the constitution and a right-leaning SCOTUS.
> Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it?
Drug gangs in latin america.
In my country, drug traffickers have become so organized they have established control over a quarter of Brazil's continental territory. They have armies, laws, tribunals, even taxes. They have essentially pulled off a stealthy unannounced secession. It's theorized that they control politicians, judges.
All thanks to the fact they were willing to arm themselves and die in order to achieve their own ends. The rest of the brazilians constantly prove unwilling to do either, and as a result they are dominated by the people with guns. Police state, military dictatorship, drug gangs, makes no difference.
Yea, I know that's never going to happen. Still, I can dream
It's happening in the US now under the guise of AI data centers for consumers but I suspect it will be instead used to surveillance everyone who doesn't agree with the fascist government. This is Larry Ellison's public vision but Musk and Thiel also play a role.
The modern societies run via those devices and the enforcement will move to the mostly free Internet that was "a long time ago, when it didn't matter as much".
Apple tried to do it in a way where nobody would see your personal data until they had multiple confirmed matches against known CSAM - and even then a human would check the results before involving any law enforcement.
But the internet had one of their Misunderstanding Olympics and now we're here again - with an even shittier solution, being formed into actual law.
When I say "the future is signed, verified code from bootloader to application level" I mean it will likely be backed up by force of law. No one complains about the mandatory safety features various governments require cars to come equipped with. The voices of a handful of nerds will go unheard when the law starts insisting computers come equipped with safety features also.
I mean this is the country of favelas where even the police don't dare to enter.
So while police arresting a kid for having an Ubuntu DVD is unlikely, the Brazilian government twisting the arm of PC manufacturers to prevent the installation of any but approved operating systems on hardware sold to the Brazilian market is highly plausible. Since this already aligns with Microsoft's eventual goals, Microsoft and the PC manufacturers will just hasten the rollout of Palladium 2.0 and nothing will stop it.
They're probably thrilled with themselves because everything will have to be closed, locked down platforms and devices.
IMO the solution to child safety is education with strong user controls. Hell, just delete the social media apps from existence if the other option is dystopian control of our communications.
- require proof of age (ID) to install apps from unofficial sources on your phone or PC. Probably best to block this at both the OS and also popular VPN downloading sites like github.com and debian.org.
- require proof of age (ID) to unblock DNS provider IP addresses like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 at your ISP.
- make sure children aren't using any other "privacy" tools that might be a slippery slope to installing a VPN.
This makes it so much easier for the parents too! The internet will be so safe that they won't even need to talk to their children about internet safety.
So they are much more than halfway there already...
OK, so the entire industry does opt everyone in to content filtering by default, just every single provider, without exception, does it “voluntarily”.
1. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN07...
But yes in the last ~20 years are so it's somehow become a top EU goal as well.
Far more people strongly support it than strongly oppose
The idea it's being done in spite of the public doesn't seem to track with reality. You also don't have to look very hard on social media to find lots of British people supporting strong government policing of the internet.
The concept of free expression basically doesn't exist in most of the UK/EU today and that's scary.
house of lords
it's really not a problem, they're essentially a reviewing chamber
it works quite well
The true issue lies in the fact that the Westminster style of government is de facto an elective tyranny, with no real checks and balances other than the misused ECHR
The commons may _eventually_ overrule them, but it takes time and costs political capital.
The majority of our population want more law, more rules, more restrictions : they don't see the value or enjoyment in doing something, so they don't think anyone should be able to do it.
Ask the average joe whether or not cars should prevent drivers from being able to "chose" to break the speed limit: You'll get a resounding "yes" 8/10 times - the value of freewill seems to be increasing lost on my country men.
My comment on elective tyranny comes from the fact that if a trifecta of: leader/party mps/house of lords are aligned there is little to stop them.
This done I think all of the debates around authoritarianism and censorship put too much blame on the government which seems to represent the views of the majority of people rather well. I think it also comes from the fact that the median age is older and older people are more conservative in their choices and thus more willing to put limitations on everything (and also the fucking boomers vote as a 25% bloc which imposes their choices on the remaining poplation i.e the infamous triple lock of retirements)
> The Security Service Act 1989 sets out our functions and gives some examples of the nature and range of threats we work to disrupt.
> In summary, our functions are:
> to protect national security against threats from espionage, terrorism and > sabotage, from the activities of agents of foreign powers, and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means
Imagine you and I pay likely billions a year and these jokers just let asset managers like Larry Fink influence policies affecting fundamental rights of British people like it's nothing.
The country is corrupt beyond belief and soon we will wake up in corporate prison as slaves.
See:
https://thewinepress.substack.com/p/tokenization-blackrocks-...
https://www.cityam.com/reeves-and-starmer-meet-blackrocks-la...
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-digital-id-scheme-to-...
It is though. This is one of the few surveillance issues actually driven by grassroots organisations like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout) in particular when it comes to adult content who have been at this globally for well over a decade.
There's no shadowy cabal trying to age-restrict porn or social media, this is more like a modern day Carrie Nation. Puritanism always comes from the bottom up
The "think of the children!" argument has long been used by people in government to give themselves more power. In this case there's been a global effort to shut down unapproved speech. The government gains the power to censor and arrest for "bad speech" but it also gets to decide how the labels for the same are applied. There have been panel discussions and speeches on this at the WEF, and discussions of tactics for selling or pushing through this kind of legislation for at least a decade.
That's how we got that video of John Kerry lamenting the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
So under the aegis of "think of the children!" (which may or may not have come from "grass roots" organizations) you get a committee with the power to decide what speech is badthink or wrongthink, label it as such, and hand out arrest warrants for it.
Disagree with policy: that's "hate" or "misinformation" or "inflammatory."
Voice a moral opinion: that's "hate" or "bigotry" or "intolerance."
Express doubt over a leader's actions: that's "misinformation" or "inflammatory."
Fascinating that they're more worried about VPN use than about shutting down rape gangs.
There's simply no data in favor of the argument that this is a minority position or even some kind of conspiracy. Child safety is (not very surprisingly) usually a voter driven concern. You think banning people from social media is an idea coming from big tech and shadowy three letter agencies? What kind of sense does that make
[1] https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
This is not to say that we should not actively work to prevent criminal acts, but that trying to establish a world in which such acts are impossible will cripple society in ways which will leave us vulnerable to much larger and more systemic abuses. Benjamin Franklin’s statement rings as true as ever, if in a rather updated context: “ They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
And what do we do for the children who have parents who fail them. How do we even detect it in time to help those children?
"If only we would just self organize into communities to protect childen..." ok.
Just because you are afraid you can't win arguments doesn't mean you should get to impose your view by violence. Which is what you advocate for, when you say the government should impose your views on the population.
Not trying to win an argument, I just haven't really got a solid answer. People just get passionate about how they should have a right to secret communications online, why all the burden should be on parents to protect kids from harmful substances, yet can't really give a good reason as to why that is. Yet on the other hand, those same people probably want to live in a world that is relatively safe from terrorism, sexual abuse etc.
I just said I can understand why to some people, wanting to stop children having access to a VPN doesn't necessarily have to be this big secret government overreach conspiracy?
Do I think we should have to have government surveillance software running on everyone's computer? No. I just understand more than a single perspective and I think those who seem to shoot these proposals down rarely give good arguments expect, basically, the government is out to get us, or it suits me the way it is now.
They're pretty close to completely de-anonymising the internet for UK citizens. Say they introduce an Australian-style social media ban for under 16s, then requires all social media to link their accounts to digital IDs for this verification.
Naturally the only remaining loophole is if a UK citizen manages to avoid being flagged as British ever by using a VPN, so I expect they will focus on that going forwards. Keep in mind the UK already arrests and imprisons vast numbers of people for speech offences, there's no slippery-slope argument here because the UK is already at the bottom of the slope as an ultra-authoratitarian anti-speech nation.
Isn’t that the entire point of government ID of any variety? The only reason anyone ever asks to see ID is so they can use it verify attributes of your identity, such as name and age. Otherwise what’s the point of an Identity Document, if it’s not to document something?
Digital ID has always been sold as something approximating your passport/Driver License (there is no official government ID in the UK), but digital, on your phone, and actually a government identity document. Rather than a government document that has a specific purpose (such as crossing the border or driving a car), which people pretend is government ID. Something that can cause a serious problem for people because passports and driver’s licenses aren’t free to obtain, replace or keep valid. Plus the government departments that issue them refuse to take any responsibility or liability for the accuracy or validity of the documents for any use case outside their very specific role in narrow government functions, like crossing the border, or figuring out if you’re allowed to drive a car.
The UK already has citizen SSO that stretches across all digital government services, and has had that for a decade plus now. Although it’s not really attached your identity, it’s just a unified auth system so government departments don’t end up creating their own broken auth systems instead.
Ideally this could be done without deanonymizing accounts to service providers unless the user wants to for a 'verified' account linked to their identity publically but I don't think any digital ID system has been built that way. Imagine it acting like OAuth but instead of passing back an identity token it's just verification of age, platforms would store that which would show they had performed the age verification and could be used for other age gates if there are any.
> The selective disclosure of attributes will allow you to only share the specific information requested by a service provider, without revealing extra information.
> For example, with the selective disclosure of attributes you could choose to share your date of birth, but without revealing any other identifying details that could be used for profiling.
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...
(A) most people cannot grasp how it could be that "GovSSO" can attest "This person you just sent our way just logged into GovSSO [with biometric 2FA], and they are at least 16 years old" without the receiving system having any way of knowing who that citizen is or even whether they're 16 or 99.
(B) very real terrible government policies the UK has (like jailing people for speech, and like demanding encryption backdoors that compromise the security, at minimum, of the whole of every British citizen's devices, and at worst every device in the world) incline anyone who's paying attention to assume that the government will somehow use anything related to "ID" and "internet" to do idiotic things like figuring out who owns a Twitter account that committed some wrongspeak so the bobbies can come round them up.
The loophole that every kid everywhere would instantly figure out is that they just need to borrow their mom’s ID, their older brother’s ID, or a pay some Internet service $1 to use their ID.
This is why the services aren’t designed to totally separate the ID from the account. If nothing actually links the ID to the account then there is no disincentive for people to share their IDs or sell their use for a small fee. Stolen IDs would get farmed for logins.
So the systems invariably get some form of connection to the ID itself. The people making these laws aren’t concerned about privacy aspects. They want maximum enforcement of their goals.
These threads always bring up a hypothetical digital ID that simply says “over 21”, but it’s missing the key point that the ID needs to also give enough information to reasonably tie the identity to the user. Otherwise everyone underage would run around with borrowed or stolen IDs because there was no way to prove it did or did not belong to them.
In theory a digital passport could reveal age 21 or older with a photo and name, but it’s only marginally less info for a lot more complexity.
There’s an enrolment process where your identity is bound to your phone, and secured using biometrics.
When you need to prove age, the device can produce a signed token attesting to fact that your older than 21 etc. and your device is trusted to validate your identity using a biometric scan performed by your phone.
All of this is dependent on everyone trusting your phone to both validate your physical identity before signing something, and also not sharing anything it shouldn’t. But given you can already enroll US state ID on iOS, those problems are clearly solvable.
It's Government services SSO.
And no, Digital ID wasn't sold as something like this, it has been sold as a way to prevent (?) "illegals" from working, by introducing system entirely similar to the current eVisa.
Unless you slept through all these televised discussions where Keir Starmer with a stern face explained how a wholly-digital system replacing wholly-digital system will stop these pesky immigrants from getting work (it's almost like in the current systems employers didn't have to do these checks already).
There's been SO, SO MANY lies, like that this system wi be similar to the Polish/Estonian, only these two are primarily physical documents, additionally bearing certificates that can be used to authenticate against the participating systems.
Sure, some countries ALSO have a digital form of the ID, but never advertised as a hate-whip against the others.
The primary problem with the only-electronic Certificate you call ID, is that it's supposed to be always online (never cached, like, say...... Um.....actual Digital ids or cards in the normal phones), so it can be cancelled at any point, also due to the errors of the government employees or systems.
The problem is that MANY people had a very serious problems with eVisa already, leading to being bounced off the Border Patrol or failing to prove right to rent.
Even if the idea of the ID was in general good (and I use one I really love, works wonderfully well), this government lied too many times and is forcing us to eat the frog that we've seen many times prior, is half baked and will burst in someone's face.
This idea is tainted because we're lied to and it's half-baked, and hostile in principle, not helpful.
Criticising ID for making it possible for 3rd parties to verify attributes is a ridiculous thing to do, because that’s the entire point of ID.
If someone wants to criticise the exact mechanism used to allow 3rd parties to verify attributes of someone’s ID, then they should be clear about what that mechanism is, and why it’s problematic. Otherwise it’s impossible to have a sensible discussion, and discuss the various pros and cons of different implementations.
At the end of the day it’s beyond clear we’re moving towards a world where governments and people expect the internet to work closer to how the real world works, with equivalent limitation such as age gating. Putting forward inaccurate, and hyperbolic arguments about arbitrary, indistinct risks associated forms of Digital ID ultimately does us all a huge disservice, because it creates the opportunity to dismiss all criticism as little more than hysterical whining by people uninterested in learning about the societal problems Digital ID is meant to deal with. Which ultimately means we’re removed from the entire discussion about alternative approaches to Digital ID, or implementations of Digital ID that are privacy preserving.
If we’re not involved in those discussions, and seen as creditable contributors to solving the underlying problem, then those pushing for more authoritarian approaches win the argument by default.
I think you’ve been spending too much time on Twitter
https://freespeechunion.org/daily-mail-investigation-exposes...
Not all of them are online posts, in fact probably a minority
> The total arrest figures are likely to be far higher because eight forces failed to respond to freedom of information requests or provided inadequate data, including Police Scotland, the second largest force in the UK. Some forces also included arrests for “threatening” messages, though these do not fall under the specified sections. [emphasis added]
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr... (https://archive.is/kC5x2#selection-3325.0-3325.335)
But the Times article also says:
> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.
So I think the categorisation is a mess, and probably not even consistent across forces
Why do you think that is?
It is not just a British thing, because this ruling class tyranny is descending all across the western world, regardless of whether it is particularly egregious in the UK. Or should we maybe just start calling it Airstrip One at this point, the AO?
And so when I hear "speech offences", my immediate thought is to question the premise: Are we talking about people publicly advocating for mass violence? Are we talking about bullying or harassment? Are we talking about a private conversation? Are we talking about a group chat? Are we talking about hate speech? Are we talking about defamation? Are we talking about "fighting words"? Etc. Context matters.
For all the talk I see online advocating for social media to be considered a public space, I've yet to see anyone really grasp the consequences of that: have any of them tried yelling out in a public space that they should burn down a populated building? That won't go down well, and rightly so. It has never been okay to do that.
People facing consequences for broadcasting their depraved bloodlust online doesn't concern me. What concerns me is the extent to which protests against genocide are being suppressed, with police looking for any minor infraction to pounce upon, but we have video of people saying to police "I support the genocide" to make a point, which the police don't bat an eye at. That scares me.
You will never have free speech just controlled speech with alternating people in power. Which I think is a worse outcome because the people in power will never allow controlled speech against them.
When you remove all content and context from what is actually being said and done, then yes, this is fairly accurate, but it's also an entirely meaningless framing. But you have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right. But what you're doing here is (to use a hyperbolic comparison) accusing me of hypocrisy because I'm okay with interpretive dance but not murder, even though they're both just actions. It reminds me of 2016 Reddit where slurs were "just soundwaves, bro".
We don't have American-style freedom of speech, nor should we. We have freedom of expression instead because we have very personal experience within our very recent history what unfettered hatred does to a continent. Attempting to import American-style freedom of speech will genuinely destroy this country, we are already seeing it happen.
Take a step back. The right is in power you are not allowed to speak your ideas. The left is in power you can say anything that supports their agenda.
What you can never do is speak against the government right or left
Why would you want that? Seems like the worst of all worlds.
Isn't the history you are trying to not repeat a history of controlled speech where the wrong party got elected or got in power? Why won't this happen again and again?
Y'all really don't make a convincing case for freedom of speech when you cannot even read. Let me repeat: "You have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right."
Free speech does not amplify or cultivate hate, it lets it fester in dark areas until it explodes when a crisis happens (which is what is happening currently).
Free speech and open discourse serves as a pressure valve release and self-correcting mechanism where by impopular or "untolerable" but common opinions have to be dealt with i.e the migration backlash in Europe
Tweets (and other censored social media) for better or for worse have been at the center of impactful political movements and protests
Take the example *Bernadette Spofforth, 55*, she shared false information that the attacker was an asylum seeker, adding "If this is true, all hell will break loose." (not false btw) Deleted it, apologized. She still got arrested, held 36 hours, and then *released without charge because of insufficient evidence*.
No call for violence, "misinformation", which she retracted when corrected. Yet she still was arrested during the crackdown. The state used riot prosecutions to sweep up misinformation, political speech and "hatred" on one swoop not just incitement. Spofforth's arrest (and quiet release) shows they criminalized *any speech near the riots*, then kinda sorted legality later.
You're using the retarded Lucy Connolly to justify arresting people like Spofforth (which has opinion closer to the average). That's the poisoning-the-well: conflate extremists with moderates sharing concerns, arrest both, then claim all arrested speech was violent incitement.
You also seem to not take into account that *the UK has built the legal apparatus to enable this overreach:*
- *Public Order Act 1986*: Criminalizes speech where "hatred" is "likely" to be stirred up. You're criminal based on how others react.
- *Online Safety Act 2023*: Forces platforms to remove "harmful" content or face £18 million fines.
- *Non-Crime Hate Incidents*: Since 2014, police record speech "perceived" as hateful, even when no crime occurred. 133,000+ recorded. No evidence, no appeals, appears on background checks. Court ruled this unlawful for "chilling effect" in 2021 yet police continue anyway.
In total it ends up with 12,000+ annual arrests for speech (30/day), fourfold increase since 2016. 666,000 police hours on non-crimes. Broad laws + complaint-driven policing = arrest first, determine legality never.
Free speech protects conditional statements about policy during crises or when the people has something to say to its elites. The 36-hour detention without charges proves the suppression.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-6... (arrested for post wearing a Manchester Arena bomber costume)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670 (arrested for posting "the only good British soldier is a dead British soldier" from Scotland)
that would be categorically protected speech in the US.
Come on. Was that necessary? I understand what we are talking about, I am saying none of those articles indicate that there is some huge thing going on where people in the UK are being arrested by the tens of thousands for irreverent memes or whatever. The issue is not my understanding, it’s the handwaving and vague generalizations that are causing issues. It’s coming across as fear mongering and I am looking for clarity.
It was to say: even a single arrest on those grounds would be national news in the U.S. and quickly over turned by any circuit in the judiciary.
I was responding to the initial comment at first: that upwards of 10,000 people are being arrested annually now in the UK for irreverent posts online and the like. The sources that were shared do not show that. Now you’re saying it’s really about any single incident being unacceptable and how an American can’t fathom it.
Do you see why I’m having trouble following this conversation?
The lie here is you've picked too examples of atrocious behavior, but you're trying to pretend that actually all the rest are just people posting dank memes and so "it could happen to you!!".
Even with "freedom of speech", you do not have "freedom from fascism" built into that, case in point, Wikipedia has multiple pages documenting both the current US administration's attitude towards trans people (that, in Charlie Kirk's words, we are "abominations unto god" that should be "taken care of" "as in the 50s/60s", which can only be taken to mean lynching), as well as the attitude of the US presidency towards democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_transgender_peo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_political_opponen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14290 (were PBS and NPR "biased"?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/25/transg...
I would would work with your fellow citizens to change that.
That said, it's not just "someone posted an idiotic idea on Twitter". The idea of stripping people of their citizenship has literally been suggested by the current president to a press gaggle, and that's not a one off random statement it follows years of things like prominent political voices suggesting that certain Muslim members of congress should be deported despite their having been born in the US...
As to the technical difficulties of passing a constitutional amendment, I agree it's hard to imagine that happening. Depressingly though it's less hard to imagine the president signing an executive order telling ICE to go against that part of the constitution, followed by one or both of ICE actions outpacing judicial ability to enforce the constitution, and/or judges ruling in favour of ICE being allowed to ignore the constitution.
These are possibilities that, if suggested 30 years ago would sound like crazy conspiracy theory territory, but in 2025 they're actual plausible scenarios looking at the coming months, yet alone years. I wish this was just scare mongering, but the truth is if you don't think this is possible then you haven't been following US politics closely enough - from the words of Trump and his team, such as Stephen Miller, to the actions of agencies such as ICE and the FBI, to rulings of the Supreme Court such as the one giving Trump unqualified immunity that anything he does as a work act rather than a personal one can't be treated as illegal, even if it goes against the constitution.
The law was written in such a way intentionally to suppress speech. People who wrote it ain’t stupid.
A former Marine was charged with inciting racial hatred after describing some migrants as “scumbags” and “psychopaths” in a 12-minute video posted on Facebook following the murders of three children in Southport, which sparked riots around the country. He was then banned from coaching his own daughter's football club. A jury cleared him in 17 minutes, but Wales is run by the left so they kept the coaching ban in place because they believe right wing people are a threat to children.
In another case a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that "Britain is still a Christian state"
There are lots of cases like this. Especially if you expand to Europe. The German Chancellor has personally prosecuted thousands of speech cases against people who insulted him. Merkel established a general rule against insulting politicians so now people get police visits and their devices confiscated for saying things like such and such a politician is a dumbass.
Do you understand the concept of a slippery slope? Anyone being arrested for online posts is too many from a free speech absolutist pov.
> Prosecutor George Shelley said Dunn had posted three separate images. The first one showed a group of men, Asian in appearance, at Egremont crab fair 2025, with the caption: “Coming to a town near you.”
> The second also showed a group of men, Asian in appearance leaving a boat on to Whitehaven beach. This, said Mr Shelley, had the caption: “When it’s on your turf, then what?”
> A final image showed a group of men, again Asian in appearance, wielding knives in front of the Palace of Westminster. There was also a crying white child in a Union flag T-shirt. This was also captioned, said Mr Shelley, with the wording: “Coming to a town near you.”
https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/24513379.sellafield-worke...
> Sentencing Thompson, Judge Temperley had said of the zero tolerance approach being taken by courts:
> “This offence, I’m afraid, has to be viewed in the context of the current civil unrest up and down this country. And I’ve no doubt at all that your post is connected to that wider picture.
> “I don’t accept that your comments and the emojis that you posted were directed at the police. I’ve read in the case summary of the comments you made on arrest which clearly demonstrate to me that there was a racial element to the messaging and the posting of these emojis.
> “That has to be reflected in the sentence...there to be a deterrent element in the sentence that I impose, because this sort of behaviour has to stop.
> “It encourages others to behave in a similar way and ultimately it leads to the sorts of problems on the streets that we’ve been seeing in so many places up and down this country. This offence is serious enough for custody.”
So the actual news here is "man jailed for sharing memes that Asian people are invading the UK and coming to murder you".
And for a more recent example, you have a presidential couple that (among a million other things) lied publicly, and admitted to it. And they're now in power because their hatred-filled lies were not checked. And the country is sliding fast towards fascism, ignoring courts to concentration camps with no records to suing media to bully them into favourable reporting to pick any other example you want. Guess the country!
You say that as if people posting about Israel/Palestine isn't political speech that matters. Free speech matters and you shouldn't have police coming after you for it even you're just a teenager posting lyrics to facebook (Chelsea Russell) drawing a penis on a photo of a cop (Jordan Barrack), sharing a vacation photo of yourself holding a gun (Jon Richelieu-Booth), repeating gossip surrounding recent events (Bonnie Spofforth), talking shit about your boss (Robert Moss), or saying that a politician should resign (Helen Jones).
While that kind of speech can be silly, thoughtless, rude, or annoying it's also normal everyday speech that happens everywhere. Just because technology allows police monitor our speech more closely than they could before that's no reason for using that to go after people for the kinds of expression that have been a normal part of life for ages.
Not really. They're arresting people for protesting a genocide.
>i don't mean some obnoxious twat bulling teachers over Facebook. I mean speech that actually matters
Just a holocaust, nbd.
And for saying "not my king".
Wikipedia by itself is not a reliable source [0].
[0] https://en.ejo.ch/public-relations/manipulation-wikipedia
And the reason for that is accuracy nor bias, just that Wikipedia is not a primary source. You don't generally cite any encyclopedias in scientific papers.
They are being kept in remand, with no possibility of release, for at least two years, without being convicted of a crime.
This is legal because Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation and the UK passed some farcical laws aimed at preventing terrorism, that everyone pointed out at the time would be used against non-terrorists eventually. They are using this same law to arrest hundreds of people for doing nothing more than holding a placard.
In the UK, if the government can make a case that you are a terrorist, then arrest is absolutely the same as imprisons. And similar farcical laws are operating in most Western democracies.
Do you even descern any difference?
Surely no problem! But being serious if anything this is worse than no imprisonment. Why are they arresting so many people they don't have any grounds to jail longer term?
> The police can hold you for up to 24 hours before they have to charge you with a crime or release you.
> They can apply to hold you for up to 36 or 96 hours if you’re suspected of a serious crime, such as murder.
> You can be held without charge for up to 14 days if you’re arrested under the Terrorism Act.
https://www.gov.uk/arrested-your-rights/how-long-you-can-be-...
[0] https://legalknowledgebase.com/how-long-can-someone-be-held-...
>Keep in mind the UK already arrests and imprisons vast numbers of people for speech offences
>>I think you’ve been spending too much time on Twitter
Did you miss it or are we moving the goalposts for some reason?
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
Online Communication Offence Arrests Volume 847: debated on Thursday 17 July 2025
Protesting in favour of Palestine remains legal, doing so under the name of a proscribed organisation is not.
Admittedly, the reason for them being proscribed is rather idiotic.
It explicitly doesn’t do that, folks are still very much free to protest in support of Palestine.
They broke into a military base. If that was sanctioned by the organisation, they should be shut down.
Also the whole thing moved incredibly quickly; it went from new organization to banned almost immediately. I'm fairly sure that other groups previously like the Greenham Common camp didn't get this treatment.
It was reasonable to arrest people who actually broke into the base and those who organized it. Going after those speaking in support is what's excessive.
Speaking out, yes. Helping organize? No.
Where the UK took it over the top was in using terrorist statute to shut down the organisation. That was unnecessary. But if the organisation helped organise the action—and this is not yet proven—its assets should have been frozen while the organisation and its leaders are investigated. If the organisation were found to have knowingly aided and abetted the break-in, it should have been shut down.
All of this could have been done using mostly civil and a little criminal law. None of it required terrorism laws.
Are you sure? They were founded in 2020.
You can argue that destroying property may be legitimate protest, but that is not all they did. In 2024 they used sledgehammers to destroy machinery in an Elbit factory. Again, arguably legitimate protest. But then they attacked police officers and security guards who came to investigate with those same sledgehammers. That is in no way legitimate.
If the government was going to proscribe them for anything it should have been for that. The RAF thing was indeed bullshit.
Anyway, it seems to me that to simultaneously believe that
a) telling a group of people that they can't use a particular name is an unacceptable attack on our freedoms yet
b) physically attacking people with sledgehammers is OK
requires quite some mental gymnastics.
I think that damaging what little remains of its defences, which may exist mostly to keep the nukes safe so nobody tries anything, is still a really bad idea. Especially given that the US is increasingly unstable and seems like it may stop responding to calls from assistance from anyone else in NATO, and the UK isn't in the EU any more and therefore can't ask the entire EU for help either just the bits that are also in NATO. Theoretically the UK could also ask Canada for help, but right now it seems more likely that Canada will be asking all of NATO except for the USA for military aid to keep the USA out.
(What strange days, to write that without it being fiction…)
They should consider themselves lucky they did it in an enlightened country like Britian. Many places in the world that would be a death sentence.
By the way, in case you somehow overlooked it, the whole point of people protesting under the banner of Palestine Action is to protest the illegitimate proscription.
> Officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023, the equivalent of about 33 per day. This marks an almost 58 per cent rise in arrests since before the pandemic. In 2019, forces logged 7,734 detentions.
They think that European countries (or commonly just "Europe") are about to arrest all citizens for criticizing politicians. "Europe" must be saved from their leftist fascist regimes. For now using propaganda. Soon militarily.
Generally, selective enforcement is itself a huge problem. That might not actually be an issue in this instance though if the only thing preventing enforcement is the lack of a formal complaint and assuming that the complaint process is easily accessible to everyone (not requiring money to file, and without other barriers that might prevent certain people from filing but not others). It's still a terrible idea to make it illegal to insult others, but "rarely enforced" may not be the red flag it usually is.
On the other side of the pond cases are routinely decided by who can afford the right lawyer or litigation costs.
So yeah, it's very admirable that you want German law to be perfect, but you've gotta admit how it currently ranks up against real-world points of reference other than the ideal.
> But it was a 2021 case involving a local politician named Andy Grote that captured the country's attention. Grote complained about a tweet, that called him a "pimmel," a German word for the male anatomy. That triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government. As prosecutors explained to us, in Germany, it's OK to debate politics online. But it can be a crime to call anyone a "pimmel," even a politician.
Naturally, it's necessary to arrest people for being mean and/or expressing VERBOTEN political beliefs on the Internet so that...uh...everyone will feel free to express their opinions.
> Josephine Ballon: This is not only a fear. It's already taking place, already half of the internet users in Germany are afraid to express their political opinion, and they rarely participate in public debates online anymore. Half of the internet users.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/policing-speech-online-germany-...
I'm not saying this is good, but it's not recent and it does not prevent free communication of ideas.
What a bold lie. There are plenty of opinions that are literally illegal to voice such as Nazism.
That's why freedom of speech must entail the freedom to say things people find offensive, or there's no free communication of ideas at all. The state and ruling elites will determine that there is a set of proscribed ideas and a set of approved ideas and yours fall into the wrong set.
Banning speech and ideas also accelerates extremist - Weimar had very strong hate speech laws and prosecuted and imprisoned Nazis many many times. [1] The Nazis turned around and used the same laws on their enemies. Then the Stasi with similar motives used similar means. Suppressing speech in the name of order seems to be a German cultural value.
[1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
Claiming that Germany recently introduced a law prohibiting criticism of politicians is an admission of belief in something demonstrably incompatible with reality.
It's being enforced more these days, perhaps because social media makes it more tempting and easier to insult politicians in a manner where it can be easily detected. In the old days, you'd have to hand out flyers or get your letter to the editor published in a newspaper, in order to insult politicians where they could notice, and even then there was no way to automatically detect it. But when people insult politicians on social media, it's an extremely low bar for the effort required, both to do it, and to detect it.
If someone were to insult me on social media, I'd never know about it, because I'm not constantly monitoring Twitter. But some politicians pay some agency to constantly monitor Twitter etc, and then they file complaints about everyone they catch in the act, and then the jackbooted police kick down the perpetrators' doors and confiscate their phones and computers.
The inability of the government to know everything about its citizens is an important check that prevents it from slipping towards illiberal, even if prosperous, system, like that in mainland China, or Singapore.
- easier access to the services - remember this is supposed to be STRICTLY digital only, so presumably on par with government gateway ID? - control of illegal immigration - with scale of the problem wildly blow out of proportion - presumably by helping control the border? how? And ostensibly by making impossible to work without right - which is a check mandatory already based on the existing digital-only online check -- once again fake non-solution
Certainly after experiencing multiple problems with the existing eVisa (Digital only) and reading multiple horror stories of faults and errors it proves to me the government is NOT taking ANY of the best practices into consideration while unfairly using parallel to the (like Estonian ID)
The only thing it would do is to cut the fraud a bit, but the impact would once again be limited because it would be a physical document (which, I must repeat from the abundance of caution, might bear a certificate or a chip that makes it incredibly hard to make a fake version of it).
I'm sorry but the government made it a fight for the souls of the rightwing voters once again, it didn't show the awesome project. It showed the stick it want to introduce to conduct the same checks it runs already :)
Just VERIFY and examine their claims. It's been discussed so many times, not only on HN.
It's Russia level. They're prosecuting people for holding up signs protesting a genocide.
Source?
For holding rhe sign.
The famously authoritarian police threatening arrest for an attempt to hold an EMPTY placard.
Or arresting for a shirt with "Plasticine Action".
Or locking in a prison for several years for zoom call in which they planned nonviolent protest (blocking the motorway).
We could do it for months.
A man wearing the "Plasticine Action" T-shirt was indeed arrested [2]. That was extra absurd because the protest was against AI-generated animation, not about a political cause.
All in all, quite bad :(
[1]: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/police-arrest-blank-paper...
[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/palestine-action...
As dumb as it may be, you should be free-in a democracy, with limited exceptions—to verbalize support for a foreign or even domestic terrorist organization as long as you aren’t materially aiding it.
Is “supporting” defined in the UK Terrorist Act?
Nobody killed, no real damage done.
Obviously the Nazis back then would agree with modern far right that defacing weapons used to commit genocide fits the definition of terrorism and that voicing support for such a crime demands prison time.
And, modern liberals have always had an easier relationship with the far right than they have had with free speech.
No it fucking doesn’t.
Vast? No, they really don't.
It has been the most authoritarian country in the West for decades already, this is nothing new.
British people are the most apathetic people in the world, so it's really easy to abuse them.
Australia and the US are more authoritarian in specific areas e.g. censorship and taxation respectively.. but overall, yes, the UK is worse.
>British people are the most apathetic
I'm not sure that's fair, our culture looks apathetic from abroad, but like other countries we care deeply about what our media tell us to care about.
I live in the UK, and have lived in multiple other western countries before.
British people absolutely ARE apathetic.
Arrested is not the same thing as being charged. The latter is what would lead to a trial.
> So they are currently trying to get rid of juries, which they will do
Huh
> a leader that has styled himself as a more extreme Nigel Farage
I’m sorry, what?
> The UK is actually a scary place right now
It is?
Often the entire point of the arrest is to get restrictive and onerous bail conditions imposed on people. Frequently restricting their speech on social media by threat of imprisonment for violating their bail conditions.
That the charges are later dropped isn't the point.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5lxg2l0lqo
>I’m sorry, what?
Take the online protection act for an example, Nigel Farage though it went too far, Keir Starmer wanted to include a ban on VPNs...
>it is?
If you have been paying attention, yes.
There is however the Salisbury convention which is that the HoL shouldn't block legislation that was a manifesto commitment of the governing party. That doesn't meant they can't amend it at all, but they can't substantively change it. It's also just a convention, not a rule.
> In the United Kingdom, section 1(1) of the Parliament Act 1911 provides that the House of Lords may not delay a money bill more than a month.
This is the closest thing the UK has to that.
It's generally fine-tuning rather than another massive hurdle after getting it through the Commons that the Lords might not pass it at all, though.
You might be thinking of 'royal assent' which is pretty much just a rubber stamp, yes, post-Lords.
Gotta hand it to them - "protecting the children" is a pretty good pretext.
The one from yesterday was discussing how australia is banning social media for anyone under 16. Most comments were supportive because they hate social media.
A few comments were discussing how it is just a way to propagate more KYC.
This is a problem with Australia's attempt to ban kids from it, where there's some surprising exemptions from the restrictions.
The voting public via their elected representatives, as with literally all laws.
None of this recent crackdown on social media is really about 'protecting the kids', is it?
There’s a bunch of benefits to an ad-tax too, beyond revenue generation: Users won’t be encouraged to use VPNs (and most VPN users probably also use ad blockers anyway). It’s difficult to evade, since an advertising business kind-of has to operate in the open; if nobody knows you’re running an ad business, your ad business has failed at the one thing it’s supposed to do. Advertisers are also purely profit-motivated, and so won’t hesitate to rat out their competitors if they’re using some loophole to gain a competitive advantage. It’s also very difficult for them to hide which country they’re targeting, since that information has to be available to their customers, so the taxmen can get it by subpoenaing customers or posing as them. And there’s not that many big ad-tech companies, so you don’t really mind if a few small-fries slip through the net.
Whenever I read these comments on Hacker News, on user-generated stories which are ranked in my algorithmic front page feed, written by other users posting comments and socializing, I wonder if the comments realizes that HN is also a social media website with millions of global users.
Or if they just get angry and yell “No that’s not what I meant” because they thought the government social media regulations would only target the sites they don’t like, not the sites they do.
There are things that can have lifelong harmful consequences that we as a society recognize adults have rights to, and which they may be capable of moderating their exposure to, but which minors are simply not prepared to fully understand the consequences of.
Banning minors from social media does not ban their speech or access to speech. It bans their access to the gamified drug-like patterns of engagement surrounding the commoditication of speech for the gain of companies which know full well that the services they provide are built on hooking someone's eyeballs at the earliest age possible.
After the number of data breaches we've seen, they want to do this, and in the least privacy-preserving way possible.
Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok? Nope, we'll just pick a few sites and force everyone to give them their data, what could go wrong?
And if you actually look at the suicide statistics, there's no epidemic of suicides going on...
https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/populat...
It's just lazy parents who can't be bothered parenting looking for a quick fix. I want to hand my phone to little tommy and turn my brain off.
What's even more galling is that the quick fix with so many obvious negatives won't even fix anything. As a kid I had unlimited time to get around any blocks. It's so dumb.
4chan is perfectly fine, but reddit must be stopped! Just to be clear I don't think either should be blocked.
Make the entire internet 18+ only and put the parents who let kids on the net in jail, I don't care.
As I mentioned in yesterday's thread, an online API still allows the government to track and monitor residents, which is arguably worse. You no longer have plausible deniability when the government asks you to hand over your social media credentials because they now know that you have, or at least attempted to open, an account with that provider.
The better solution would be an offline, cryptographic "wallet" (similar to the EU Digital Identity Wallet) that only exposes the age information and nothing else, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Especially because it's gotten so bad. At first it was just 'making things popular in your network more visible'. But now it's to where when I use something like Facebook there is more 'algorithm spam' than anything actually happening with my friends. It's become something where the primary purpose is 'driving views' rather than communicating. [1]
A VPN is a bit different; it's a tool, and I will note one that depending on the specific definition has legitimate (or at least morally/ethically legitimate) uses.
[0] - e.x. unless it has been reversed in the last decade or two, in the US you still can't cut from a kid's cartoon right into a commercial for a toy/game related to said cartoon. I mean FFS that was a rule that got put in before 'attention hacking' was even a term.
[1] - TBH I'd love if we could get back to Myspace or maybe even early Facebook type social media. There's a lot of excitement lost when an algorithm feeds you shit versus a friend sharing it, and it was a lot less noise...
My point is more so that these are both approaches to push more KYC.
And many comments in here understand that this particular ban is using "for the kids" as an excuse, so why didn't the other thread have more comments recognizing this excuse?
> Social media platforms have admitted verifying user ages would likely involve surrendering personal IDs, as the Albanese government forges ahead with its under-16 ban.
[1] https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/privacy-a...
At that point all the technical components exist to make this an ultra easy UI for parents. Require ISP WiFi routers at least to support VLANs and PPSKs, which ultra cheap gear can do nowadays no problem, and have an easy to GUI to "generate child password, restrict to [age bracket]", heck to even just put in a birthday and by default have it auto-increment access if a parent wants. Add some easy options for time-of-day restrictions etc, done. Now parents are in charge and no adult needs anything ever.
Now I highly doubt politicians are all being honest about full motivations here, clearly there are plenty of forces trying to use this issue as a wedge to go after rights in general. But at the same time parental concern is real, and non-technical people find it overwhelming. It'd be good if industries and community could proactively offer a working solution, that'd reduce the political salience a great deal. It's unfortunate the entire narrative has been allowed to go 100% backwards in approach.
Once the baseline is established, the playbook becomes simple: Shift that age bracket up to the very moment when someone can vote. Make sure that every new voter spends all their formative years unable to access even basic resources on the struggles that marginalized groups go through, and the history of their existence; set the bars for the "whitelist" so high that one must toe the party line in every bit of messaging, and thus is effectively a list of propagandists whose businesses can be fined astronomically if they deviate. Take away the parent's choice, and make it mandatory to use routers that block the non-whitelisted TLDs for any device that doesn't cryptographically authenticate as being operated by an adult. Find ways to impose this on groups other than children (for instance, by making it illegal for criminals to access the non-whitelisted web, then greatly expanding that definition). All in the name of peace and tranquility.
If you want V for Vendetta, this is how you get V for Vendetta.
... only to the degree it hasn't been manufactured by tabloid media and Russian propaganda warfare, that is.
With every little news about local shootings, robberies, rapes, beatings, thefts, whatever not just making national, but in the worst case international headlines, one might think that Western countries are unsafe hellholes of the likes of actually legitimately failed states - despite criminality rates often being on record lows. Of course parents are going to be afraid for their children, and it's made worse by many Western countries financially only allowing for one, maximum two children.
On top of that, a lot of the panic is simply moral outrage. Porn and "trans grooming" it seems to be these days, I 'member growing up with the "Killerspiele" bullshit after some nutjob shot up a school in the early '00s. My parents grew up with the manufactured fear of reading too much as it was supposed to make you myopic. Again, all manufactured fear by organized groups aiming to rip our rights to pieces.
Parents should relax and rather teach their children about what can expect them on the Internet, how people might want to take advantage of them, and most importantly, that their children can always come to them when they feel something is going bad, without repercussions. When children think that they cannot show something to their parents, that is where the actual do-bad people have an in.
"everyone should just adopt my values and then all these political problems would just disappear. voila!"
The problems I mentioned aren't real, that's the point.
It hasn't just never been proven that Counter Strike et al cause amok runs, it's been disproven [1]. Consuming porn doesn't make people rapists (although I do concede: the ethical aspects particularly around studio-produced porn do require discussions), and consuming LGBT content doesn't make children LGBT. People are, to the extent that we reasonably know, born LGBT.
The fact that some organizations (particularly religious) have framed these issues as "political" doesn't make them political either.
If you want kids to be healthier you're gonna have to deal with it on the device level at worst, and the healthcare level at best. Include mental health services and counseling as part of a single-payer preventative care plan if you really, really want to save the kids.
Spoken like a true groomer. Have some gold, kind stranger!
Can you possibly think that determining what is and is not a valid problem isn't a subjective evaluation?
Even looking at your examples, which are not chosen well for your argument. In each of these you're just shifting the burden of proof to reflect what your values. "No one has proven counter strike causes violent behavior, consuming porn makes people rapists or people can become gay." All wide-open empirical questions. Maybe none of these gets resolved in the near future; they aren't even well-formed questions. Meanwhile parents, governments, policy-makers need to make decisions. If you are very concerned about your kid being violent, you will avoid videogames even as a precautionary measure.
"The fact that some organizations (particularly religious) "
Ah you found an even easier way to resolve the issue, just ignore religious values.
And if that means that Discord has to shut down... well, okay, if that's the price? An organisation that doesn't care about the impact on its host society is nothing more than a parasite or cancer and should be treated as such.
(Besides: if you're aiming at stuff like groups of kids bullying other kids into suicide or self harm - guess what: that existed in times where there was no Internet. It just wasn't widely reported, other than maybe holding a vigil for a classmate who had "passed away")
What is making Discord different from the real world? Do we ban kids from going to school because they could get bullied there?
Yes, sure, some content we decide to age-gate in real life... but hell. Our parents perused the VHS porn stash of their parents. Their parents wanked off to Playboy magazines. It has all been bullshit from the start.
Our governments have turned into the very thing they claimed to be opposing for decades. It's disgraceful.
Their next-door neighbour is threatening war and their longtime ally has turned into an unreliable kook. It’s not all that surprising that countries are looking to bolster their defences.
It's not bolstering defenses, it's bolstering expansion of the surveillance state panopticon because "think of the children!"
God I'm sick of the constant attacks against online freedom.
God forbid anyone should ever have a private conversation.
