Sleepwalking? I believe they're wide awake and have made their choice: they prefer an inoffensive world over a free one. Maybe it helps them sleep better at night but personally I'm not setting foot anywhere I might have an illegal opinion.
As a Brit, I'm embarrassed. These politicians are LARPing and haven't learned the most important political lesson of the last 100 years - that restrictions on speech are dangerous.
I’ve noticed on HN whenever there’s threads about censorship as soon as it’s late at night here (EST) and morning in Western Europe a ton of censorship defenders come out of the woodworks.
So it seems popular among the EU people too, even among the more sophisticated HN crowd.
I noticed: If I comment something about pro free speech, I get downvoted in the morning (I am on EU timezone). However, once friends in USA wake up - I get upvoted again.
Have lived in the EU and they definitely have a stronger concept of censorship there. You honestly don't have a right to say anything you want, especially if you are saying things to a large audience who might be incited. Most people I have met are quite happy that people such as nazis are censored and cannot spread hate. Given their history, that makes some sense, but I honestly get the feeling they focus too much on appearances and not on trying to actually undermine these groups and interfere with their recruiting. You will find plenty of such people in working class bars around the continent, but as long as they are not making public shows and speeches, the populace seems to ignore them.
Why not both?
Seriously, showing off symbols of national socialism saved Germany many embarrassing clips on international media. All those groups who gathered under the anti-intellectual agenda of the past years here in Germany would have had someone with this stuff marching the streets against covid restrictions, etc.
I wouldn't call it censorship either. No symbol or idea is being repressed. You can learn about the lies of Holocaust deniers. About the symbols, and so on. Youre "just" not supposed to go out there and recruit people with those tools.
The discussion and misunderstanding OP has seen here comes from the fact that the "radical" free speech laws in the US set no borders on spreading this kind of propaganda. The results are very visible these days in the US and I'm happy they're not in Germany (at least not in a relevant way).
This from a foreigner who has been living in Germany for longer.
> I wouldn't call it censorship either. No symbol or idea is being repressed.
In Germany it is straight up illegal to display nazi symbols, do their salute, or even advocate their beliefs, isn't it? I was told as much by quite a few Germans at least.
That said, my problem with the censorship approach is that these groups appeal to actual problems within society and individuals, and by censoring them, none of that goes away. If anything, I think they just get pushed underground and the real issues that allow them to successfully recruit are still there, and they just do it quietly, which is why the local motorcycle club is full of fucking nazis, like it or not. The only way to stop these groups is to remove the fuel, which implies making changes to society itself to reduce the number of people who are in poor circumstances and might find a voice telling them it is the immigrants/jews/brown people who are to blame for their personal sense of injustice. Officially censoring also gives an anti-establishment sheen to them that definitely appeals to some.
> In Germany it is straight up illegal to display nazi symbols, do their salute, or even advocate their beliefs, isn't it? I was told as much by quite a few Germans at least.
You can display them for educational or artistic reasons for example. This is not a religious law. It's forbidden to walk around randomly with a swastika on your T-Shirt or recruit people under your new fascist party which has a swastika as a logo for example.
> That said, my problem with the censorship approach is that these groups appeal to actual problems within society and individuals, and by censoring them, none of that goes away.
Those groups have enough other ways to display their affiliation and intentions. Nobody here has a problem distinguishing those since the education on those topics is quite thorough. Which goes for your second argument on how to fix it. I doubt there is a country on this planet which schools their children more clearly on this topic but there will always be that bottom parts of society which will still go there. They follow the myths and do have those "forbidden materials". However they do also have a problem coming along. It's illegal. They can't spread it openly and promote it this way. It works quite well.
> Officially censoring also gives an anti-establishment sheen to them that definitely appeals to some.
They don't need a picture of a swastika to justify that story.
I think the misunderstanding here comes again from this "free speech" doctrine which doesn't allow for self thinking. Everything is 1 or 0 because otherwise it would be too complicated. But it can work different. It works in Germany at least.
> In Germany it is straight up illegal to display nazi symbols, do their salute, or even advocate their beliefs, isn't it?
How is that different from communism being illegal in the US?
At least Germans banned Nazism which was born in Germany and wrote one of the worst pages of modern history, same reason why in Italy the fascist party is illegal and cannot be recreated.
Both have creates societies were violence is an order of magnitude less prominent than in the US and society tries to help those in need, more than those with deep pockets.
Maybe educating people to avoid totally nihilistic and destructive ideas works...
What's the excuse USA found to ban communism, which never actually rose to power there?
Imagine a country where you can be a Nazi, praise Hitler, say that there's good in him and that you love the Jews but also Nazis, but can't stand for workers rights and support the class struggle.
How dare they to even think about it?
Also: remember when to export encryption freely the World had only one option: avoid USA? GPG was possible only because a German free software developer (Werner Koch) created and maintained it, if it was for US laws, nobody else could use it. If that's their idea of freedom, I'd rather stay on the Germans side.
It actually is, simply, like in Germany with Nazi people, it's not strictly enforced. Nazi in Germany exist and have much more rights than communists in the USA, they can also participate to the public political life of the country, but can't use Nazi symbols and names. And I agree, it's important to remove them and force those people to come up with new ways to express their ideas, because those symbols and names represent the worst of humanity.
It's not censorship, it's SOCIAL PROGRESS, something the USA seem to have abandoned long time ago.
Neo nazis also won some local election in Germany, of course not as the official "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei"
Proving that there is much more freedom of expression in Germany than in USA, where a communist party existed, has been outlawed, people have been persecuted, arrested and killed, for being a member, long after the war ended ensuring that their ideas would disappear from the public discourse.
It's easy to claim comolete freedom when you kill ideas you don't like in the crib. And with the ideas usually the US also kill the people...
If you talk to an average american, they still believe that socialism is a crime and communism killed 100 million people (myth debunked hundreds of times)
How free!
You can't understand the kind of freedom we experience in the old continent, the same way a lion born and raised in a cage cannot understand the savana.
You don't understand that we all think that banning Nazi symbols and ideas is a good thing, we wouldn't feel more free if they could show them at will, we would think we are descending into madness and that we are all in danger. Because it's how those things work, the more they are free to spread, the more they are picked up. We've seen nazi flags in the US recently and it scared us all here. Also it disgusted us. We collectively think that some things are better relegated to history, like the death penalty, slavery, segregation, racism and of course fascism and nazism.
Again, that's not censorship.
At least in Germany you can drive around knowing that police officers won't shoot you for speeding [1]
And of course USA don't want to ban Nazism under the pretense of "freedom" [2]
The Communist Control Act of 1954 (68 Stat. 775, 50 U.S.C. §§ 841–844) is an American law signed by President Dwight Eisenhower on August 24, 1954, that outlaws the Communist Party of the United States and criminalizes membership in or support for the party or "Communist-action" organizations and defines evidence to be considered by a jury in determining participation in the activities, planning, actions, objectives, or purposes of such organizations.
No, it isn't. The act was almost entirely repealed, and an attempt to enforce it would be struck down by every court that heard it. The US is a common law country; what's legal or not here is a question not just of statute but of jurisprudence.
> communism killed 100 million people (myth debunked hundreds of times)
A myth? Do you not know why there are monuments to victims of communism all over Europe? Have you not heard of the holocaust that the Bolsheviks unleashed on Russians, Ukrainians and countless other ethnic groups? Do you not know how many millions of people were murdered in communist China during its Cultural Revolution? Do you not know why communism is often rightly compared with Nazism?
>The results are very visible these days in the US and I'm happy they're not in Germany (at least not in a relevant way).
Your "tolerant" western Europe has no shortage of ingrained racism of all kinds that it just sweeps under the rug to a degree that in the U.S doesn't happen nearly so much. Many Americans are indeed racist but at least in the U.S there's a lot of very open, free and very public discussion and debate about it. In the EU, it's more a case of people patting themselves on the back because they ban symbolic things and hide the modern nasty traits so many of their fellows still have towards all kinds of ethnicities.
Free speech "radicalism" is not responsible for racial tensions in the U.S. If anything it helps ease them slowly by bringing them into the open.
> Seriously, showing off symbols of national socialism saved Germany many embarrassing clips on international media.
There we have it, the true philosophical split between those who support freedom of expression and those who would limit it. The first care for truth more than the problems expressing the truth bring, and the latter care more about orderliness and reputation, the clinging to which brings myriad problems too (far worse in my opinion, but who could compare a few harsh words on Twitter or in a newspaper with a the rise of fascism in several places and the odd genocide?)
You have the freedom of expression. You'll be prosecuted for some of it though. It's been the case since we invented speech. Insulting your fellow tribesman would probably have had even more severe consequences.
What we actually have here is what I expressed in an answer below: certain people understand only 0 and 1 but humans are not like that. One needs to grow up and have a proper education to understand that but it will work than. It does in Germany. We neither slipped into some dystopian censorship state nor did it lead to harm within the society.
> You have the freedom of expression. You'll be prosecuted for some of it though.
The freedom in freedom of expression is the freedom from consequences other than:
- being listened to
- being ignored
- getting speech in return
> One needs to grow up and have a proper education to understand…
> So how about looking at reality for a change?
How about you try reading about the subject first, or asking people who've thought it through far longer than the the arrogant instant you spent on it, and then it will save us all from having to endure your blurting out basic mental errors which you use in pursuit of an authoritarianism that you erroneously think will lead somewhere different than the authoritarianism you claim it counters.
The HN guidelines[0] say:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
I'm always happy to make an exception for those who decide such unwarranted lack of respect is okay though.
As you chose to ignore my advice I'll expand on it for you so that you can avoid a straw man - intentional or not - with your next reply, because the one you just gave is embarrassing:
- Read some of what advocates of freedom of speech have written. If you're able to find someone advocating the freedom to lie to whomever one choses or about whomever one wants without restriction, you've hit the jackpot. Bring back a flying pig while you're at it.
- English common law (and hence American) already includes some types of lie as protected speech(see [1] for a primer and [2] for more examples from America).
Hence, both the idealists and the pragmatists are well ahead of you here.
Finally, this:
> Like the media or police for example?
Why should there be a law against lying to the media? That made me chuckle. Or did you mean by the media? Also a laughable notion. Shackling the press for the common good is almost a cliché in a dictator's playbook.
As to the police, why lie to the police when you shouldn't talk to them at all?[3] You have a right to silence (or did, in the UK) since hundreds of years back (which is itself another aspect of free speech). That video also covers how the police are legally permitted to lie to suspects and routinely do, so whichever question you intended based on brazenly displayed ignorance of the subject at hand, it's been covered.
Assumptions are why people are often mistaken, and lack of clarity in writing often exposes a lack of clarity in thought.
Regardless, I didn't make assumptions and covered all bases. Do get back in touch if you bother to find out what this free speech stuff is all about, otherwise you are welcome to leave it.
I love it how you complained about an personal attack on you (even when it wasn't but you seem to have taken it personally) and from than on you intentionally failed to follow 1) my argumentation 2) the above mentioned real life example of a working restriction 3) attacked me personally.
My attempt to break the problem down so you won't be able to derail again failed since you intentionally misunderstood me and wrote a huge comment which is completely irrelevant since what you described is the case in every civilized country. My second attempt to push you on the topic. Without any decoration was followed by this personal something.
So the discrepancy between you seeming to want to participate in a discussion and the amount of work you invest in derailing it, do not fit. I assume therefore that I fell for a troll.
It depends on how do you define “censorship”, and your view of the fundamental role of the state.
I used to be a free speech absolutist (especially as a teenager, campaigning against Internet filters in school, as one is want to), I’ve refined my position over time away from that unsophisticated and unhelpfully simplistic position, but I haven’t yet found an accurate succinct way to describe my current feelings beyond saying I’m “aligned with defensive-democracy” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy ) - but I try to avoid advocating DD with language like “reasonable restrictions” because that’s currently the language used by people who I’m ideologically opposed to, but I don’t want to come across as a libertarian… nor a V-for-Vendetta fan either.
As much as I’d love to blame Ofcom’s letter on the Tories, I believe under Labour it would be just as bad: Labour is/was the party of Wacky Jacqui Smith after-all; whereas this perennial paternalism comes from the current constitutional design of the Home Office: until and unless the Home Office changes their attitude we’ll keep on seeing this kind of policymaking - it’s an analogue to the US’ “foreign policy blob” situation, imo ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/us/politics/blob-afghanis... )
I agree with what you wrote but wanted to comment on the link you shared.
I read some of that Wikipedia page on defensive democracy, it has as one of the examples Holocaust denial in 10 countries. I do wonder why in countries, such as Germany, that do have a continuing problem with Nazis and anti-semitism, people think that restricting speech is the way to combat it. It didn’t work in the past as it arguably gave rise (or at least was a supporting factor) in the rise of both ant-semitism and National Socialism to such prominence, and the problems aren’t going away despite it being three quarters of a century since their terrible apex even with these laws in place.
Britain, Canada, Australia, NZ and the US, which all (historically) have a speech culture derived from Locke’s liberalism (to varying degrees but broadly similar, hence the strong objections to infringement of speech in them by the populace regardless of legality) have had no such problems as both anti-semitism and National Socialists are thankfully a fringe activity in those places.
Liberal speech laws reduce authoritarianism and racism because they can only grow without opposition. In fact, we see growing anti-semitism and clearly racist behaviours amongst “progressives” in those places, and they are the biggest supporters of censorship because they understand this too as they fail to persuade others of the merits of their position when people can say what they like in return.
All my soapbox-standing being said, I’m confused as to how you’ve got a foot in the defensive democracy camp, given your clear sympathies with strong free speech allowances (if no longer so absolutist), a clear understanding of the failings of our legislators, and the role of the Home office in all of this. I’m not criticising you, I’m just at a loss as to how to reconcile them. Perhaps it’s the narrow examples given on that page?
I see the rhetorical tricks used by (buzzword warning) cryptonazis and protofascists as exploiting vulnerabilities in how we think and operate: I believe most of everyone is primed to respond to arguments against otherness and those based on fear.
(Bad analogy warning) It’s like a heuristics-based anti-virus with root permission: userland processes can largely do what they want, but if I see an executable program making a syscall that it has no good reason for making, like DailyExpress.exe or FoxNews.exe manipulating the memory space of processes owned by the ImpressionsbleAudience user-group (which contains all of us) instead of going through hardened, public, well-defined interfaces then yes then I’m going to kill-9 it.
As a proponent of free speech, I strongly believe that people should be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship or retribution. However, I also think it's important to recognise that there are limits to free speech, and that moderation is necessary in order to protect the rights and safety of others.
For example, it's one thing to express a controversial or unpopular opinion, but it's quite another to engage in hate speech, incite violence, post SPAM, excessive use of straw-man arguments, countering scientific consensus with harmful conspiracy theories, et al. In these cases, allowing such speech to go unchecked can have harmful consequences, and it's important for society to have mechanisms in place to address these issues.
Free speech is important to balance a strong democracy but its not an absolute right. Moderation in free speech is necessary in order to balance the rights of individuals to express themselves with the need to protect the rights and safety of others. Without moderation, the right to free speech can become a license to cause harm and to silence the voices of others.
>In these cases, allowing such speech to go unchecked can have harmful consequences
I don't think anybody disputes that. The question was never "do these things harm us?". They clearly do.
The question is - is the medicine as bad or worse than disease?
Imagine a vile political leader whom you thoroughly loathe. Now imagine the powers of speech suppression you advocate for will probably wind up in their hands. How much do you still want it?
Ironic it's a straw-man itself to suggest the comment was advocating suppression. It wasn't. The point is moderation, and yes that means moderation that can be moderated as necessary. i.e A non-partisan framework that is acceptable regardless of if it is an adversary or it is an ally enforcing it.
Easier said then done, but perhaps this just means a type of Overton window. It's not legally enforced, people just come to learn that being reactionary is faux pas.
Clearly it's not plausible to provide an absolutist definition because things change, setting rules could undermine their original objectives. But for the points raised in my original comment; laissez-faire free speech is also widely open to abuse.
>countering scientific consensus with harmful conspiracy theories
You mean "harmful conspiracy theories" such as previous suggestions that COVID might have accidentally come from a lab accident? or that the vaccines didn't work as wonderfully as first advertised, or that they may just cause harm to some people? How about others that also later proved to have some truth to them. All of these things would have been perfect candidates for using your supposedly moderate "harm reducing" stance on free speech to snuff out worthy debate even if some of it is colored with tones of irrational conspiracy thinking.
And that is exactly why free speech moderation is so dangerously stupid. It allows reasonable sounding people to crush attacks on reasonable sounding ideas, right up until both these reasonable ideas and the people supporting them become unreasonably authoritarian, and attack even wider ranges of open expression.
This seems to have taken one sentence from my comment out of context in order to widely exaggerate and attack it.
All, if not most conspiracy theories have some element of truth to them. That's what makes them so compelling - In a similar fashion to fiction writing. Philosophers like Nietzsche would say “there are no facts, only interpretations”.
Rather than debate semantics. What I was referring to in context was the festering of dangerous conspiracy theories such as 1930's anti-semitism, and yes, hoaxes about inoculation.
Being wrong is acceptable. Purposely seeking to undermine scientific evidence on the bases of small instances which are not sufficient to draw conclusions about the wider point is intentional.
Well then you probably can't set foot anywhere much. If you were thinking of the USA, remember that people have been extra-judicially killed by the state for being "communist", only 2 or 3 decades ago.
Details? And, um, we had an official Communist Party back then, and maybe still do, and the people in it were not killed, so... maybe what you're implying isn't a reasonable inference?
We do, the CPUSA is still a thing. However, back in the apex of its popularity and influence (interwar period) the people in it were killed, or intimidated, harassed, or imprisioned, over the course of the two major Red Scares.
However I was thinking in particular of people like Fred Hampton, a young progressive with an electrifying oratory style who commanded the respect and admiration of his people, advocated for anti-capitalism resistance, self-relience, self-government. The most dangerous kind of subversive: idealist in words, pragmatist in actions. He was assassinated at the peak of his popularity by the FBI on explicit orders of the top of American government.
Read the introduction of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO to get an idea of the sort of things we are talking about: intimidation, violence, imprisonment, and assassination if need be, target on people from the Black Panther Party to environmentalists.
Then you are stuck in the USA for the rest of your life. I think the USA is the only country on the entire planet which allows unfettered free speech, every other nation has some legal limits on speech (or expression as we call it in Europe).
For instance, what Kanye said on Infowars would likely land him in jail if he was German, and his talk about the holocaust not being real would get him in trouble with the authorities in a lot of other nations.
The US doesn't allow unfettered free speech, that would be insane (although people on HN may disagree).
But it is definitely "extreme" - you can lie publicly, knowingly, and with resulting damages, very easily; it is much more difficult to pursue charges against someone who does so vs in the UK.
With regards to political speech, it's even less restrictive.
Exactly, we have had the concept of "Libel" in uk law for over 700 years [0].
It's this Libel and Defamation law that has often contributed to the allegations of censorship. Fundamentally some of this is built into British culture, and is significantly different to US culture where "free speech" rules supreme. But it's the bleeding of US culture into that of the UK though the media+internet that leads to a more vocal debate around these issues than before.
To quote form the Wikipedia article below:
"English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, and does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood. For that reason, it has been considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world."
The world is so much more connected now it's inevitable that cultural and legal differences will reduce and some sort of equilibrium will be found.
>It's this Libel and Defamation law that has often contributed to the allegations of censorship.
Exactly the same in Austria. Often politicians and even shitty businesses use the libel law to get undesirable negative information about them removed from public spaces
An MP was called a "corrupt traitor" on Facebook and Facebook was forced to remove that comment under the libel law.
Often businesses will force Google, Kununu and other websites where people can leave reviews, to remove the negative ones under the libel law, that even doctor's practices do it.
Basically, your not allowed to air the dirty laundry of the rich and powerful unless you have bulletproof hard evidence, wich you can never really get as the GDPR and other strong privacy laws make legal evidence gathering nearly impossible by individuals.
I've been legally threatened twice by a German restaurant on google for leaving a 3 star review on the basis that it damages their ability to do business. Pretty ridiculous... . Google required me to post proof I had been there, but that didn't stop the Restaurant threatening a second time...
My wife's brother, who lives in Munich, say, that it is impossible to leave bad review for doctor or hospital, because here is court decision, that patient is not qualified (doesn't have education and training) to distinguish good medical service from bad one!
I was referring more to a patient not being able to discern whether or not a certain diagnosis or treatment plan is the best option, just as they would not be able to with a car mechanic.
I was more meaning that from the patient’s perspective, it’s hard to tell the difference.
It helps that I live in NZ where you can’t sue very easily for injury, and most medical errors are covered by a national insurance scheme which applies to everyone.
When one doctor says "it is some muscular spasm, take painkiller and wait" and other one remove stones from my ureter (true story), I know that first one didn't give me good medical service, for sure.
Or if doctor starts to speak about homeopathy, osteopathy, thin energies, some concepts from ayurveda (one doctor in expensive clinic with good reputation to my ginger wife: "You are red-haired, so you warm woman, you need to shift your diet that and this"), you don't need to be MD to understand, that it is bullshit, and this doctor is not very good one.
I'm convinced that libel laws in the UK boil down to putting the two sides on front of an extremely wealthy and connected judge who decides which between the complainant and the accused is poshest, then makes the other one apologize.
You can be so posh that you accuse the current PM of raping a dead pig's head in the widest circulating tabloid and face absolutely no consequences.
"The thing to point out about that story is that there is no need for burden of proof on a colourful anecdote where we’re quite upfront about our own reservations about whether to take it seriously."
There were no consequences because the Prime Minister didn't sue, both because Prime Ministers generally have more important and less embarrassing things to be doing that testifying in court that they never stuck their penis inside a roast piglet for a funny photo during their adolescence (even if they didn't!), and because the authors knew how to word rumours and innuendo so that it probably didn't fall foul of libel law, and that a PM they knew personally would go all "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response" in response rather than spend the next few years pursuing a vendetta against them.
No official consequences , but he did come down with a sudden serious and moderately rare illness immediately after making that claim, which interfered with the book launch that the claim was related to.
I'm not saying it was a conspiracy, but I am saying that it's the kind of plausible deniability I'd aim for if I was writing a story about the British Government wanting to get away with an exo-legal punishment.
The libel laws do exactly what they were designed for: prevent uppity peasants from importuning the people who really matter, a group that now includes Russian oligarchs (basically kindred spirits to the inbred descendents of the original robber barons).
The Defamation Act, in England and Wales, brought in specific and very helpful reforms for defendants. It's privacy law that claimants now use, not least because you don't have to prove falsehood or serious harm, unlike in defamation claims.
Oh sure your right to say "I'm going to blow up a school" is of course protected. Say "I'm going to shoot the president" though and off to jail.
Want to run an advert that someone thinks it false? Nope. Print some stories the government doesn't like? nope. Draw a picture of Lisa Simpson being screwed by Rupert Murdoch as a symbol of the collapse of the quality of the simpsons? Off to jail for you
And of course there's the whole mess of copyright, trademarks and patents which infringe on your right to speech
Taboo is a UK stable food, and it goes hand in hand with censorship.
In fact, with the current political and economical situation, I'm surprised it's not getting worse. The Finger would be tempting to create in a time of crisis.
Britain? All major media outlets and social network platforms worldwide now have established censorship as "the new normal".
The only mainstream platform now setting itself up to become the exception to this is the one platform that since a few weeks gets consistently attacked by the establishment: Twitter.
A whole bunch of people including a few minor celebrities got banned after changing their username to "Elon Musk" and tweeting jokes in response to the self proclaimed "free speech absolutist" declaring that unlabelled parodies would be an automatic ban. Apparently even names like "Elon Musk (Parody)" lost posting privileges
Ah, gotcha. Though, I'm not sure impersonating someone else falls under free speech, right? I mean, if Weird Al did some parody songs and marketed them as the original artists, he'd get sued...unless he made it clear it was parody. Right?
I bet you'd get banned for impersonating anyone on twitter, not just Musk. Or was that not happening?
Lmao, no offense but holy damn the mental gymnastics going on there.
> Great to see free speech finally thriving on Twitter now that Musk has taken over!!
> See but Musk is banning people for making fun of him, even accounts clearly labeled as "parody".
> Hmm sure, but then again does parody really fall under free speech?
Dear god
--
Free speech is free speech. It's not "you're free to say things I like", especially as defined by some slightly-deranged billionaire CEO. Plus, parody is the bread and butter of comedians making fun of politicians since at least ancient rome.
For what's worth, Musk had already been notorious before for attempting to silence those critical of him. And let's not even get into the union-busting stuff (free speech to hurl abuse at trans people online, but not to organize collective action!).
Parody absolutely does fall under speech, not only being legal and considered valuable for political discourse even in places with strong restrictions on other types of speech but also having explicit case law protecting it under the First Amendment. (Copyright law is a different matter, but nobody is selling their "Elon Musk" accounts). Of course, private websites are perfectly entitled to ban it, just as they were entitled to ban other stuff (there are reasonable grounds for thinking some unlabelled parody may be problematic, but there's a school of thought that racial hatred might actually be worse!). But it's impossible for Elon to credibly masquerade as a "free speech absolutist" whilst simply changing the guidelines to focus bans on stuff that annoys him more than the stuff that used to be banned.
I'm sure some other people were banned for unlabelled parodying accounts under the new rule too, but they're busy stopping people using labels as obvious as "Elon Musk (Parody)" too...
But there was more notably a wave of people being permanently banned for changing their display name to Elon Musk, a previously accepted behavior on Twitter:
> The only mainstream platform now setting itself up to become the exception to this is the one platform that since a few weeks gets consistently attacked by the establishment: Twitter.
The platform where Nazis can say what they want but people mocking Our Lord Musk are suspended? No thanks, I prefer free speech.
"Worse, this isn’t even intentional. It’s happening because ministers have not really thought through the implications"
don't often agree with Telegraph but their analysis is accurate.
Our era of soundbite politicians vulnerable to populist measures which superficially sound reasonable (sue big tech for hosting bad content) but disguise deep complexities (what is bad content, who decides this, it is universally applied?) which have profound implications for society (blaming platforms for user posted content means no more user posted content without prior moderation)
> It’s happening because ministers have not really thought through the implications
I think they've thought through the implications perfectly well. Or at the very least they've been told what the implications are by their legal advisors. The real problem is that they do not care about those implications.
But this is Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, writing in the Telegraph - both publications have been the absolute cheerleaders of the Conservative administration’s descent into an idiocracy. Reap what you sow, Fraser, you dolt.
> Our era of soundbite politicians vulnerable to populist measures which superficially sound reasonable
I’m deeply skeptical that this is a real problem. I mean, there’s defined a list of extremely popular issues which have no support from politicians (like a healthcare reform in US), and also a long list of unpopular policies enacted a lot of times with bipartisan support.
"Worse, this isn’t even intentional. It’s happening because ministers have not really thought through the implications"
It might be right that the ministers/politicians have not really thought through the implications. But someone else surely has and is making censorship (of the things that challenge their power) a matter of policy. The actions of big tech are a matter of their internal policies. Which "populist" opinions politicians respond to (and which they ignore) is a matter of policy. In an age when populist opinion is manufactured through control of content and media, politicians are no longer moved by the opinions of their constituents but rather by those holding onto that control. Instances of bipartisan support in the US, for example, are merely instances where the topic is important to the elite and need bear no relationship to the opinions of the people.
Why is that so obvious? Italics and the word “simply” do not actually make a convincing point. It seems like you’re implying that politicians never fail to anticipate the (un-)intended consequences of their rhetoric and policies.
Laws might have unintended concequences, but that verbiage " powers to censor anything deemed “legal, but harmful”" is a strict play at a wide-ranging authority on what that means.
Vague verbiage is the name of the game... Because it's their full time job as a politician... I
I wonder how much of it is also due to technologies making this possible. The centralisation of a huge chunk of communications via a few massive actors makes this kind ideas enforceable.
So, while those ideas aren't new, the thought of generalising it comes from having layed down the technical foundation that makes it possible.
> And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.
> So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.
The fact that's even a possibility put me off such centralised platforms. (Of course, HN is centralised; but it's a niche forum, rather than a general medium of communication)
> So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.
Wow, had Egypt’s Mubarak done the same just before the Arab Spring maybe his sons would still be in power right now. But, of course, bank then it was totally legit to use Twitter and FB in order to plot “violence and disorder”.
This argument fails in the same way that “I’ve got nothing to hide” arguments against privacy fail. Even if someone is not currently running afoul of the current government’s current definition of a particular illegal act, we still might not want to grant them absolute power to enforce. These definitons of illegality tend to change (read: expand) over time, and when governments change they tend not to give back powers they’ve been granted.
>I wonder how much of it is also due to technologies making this possible. The centralisation of a huge chunk of communications via a few massive actors makes this kind ideas enforceable.
At the time of the US revolution most communication was centralised in the postal service, monitored by the British. That's one of the reasons for the first amendment.
I believe that the government is encouraging media monopolies in the US. It's obviously infinitely easier to work with a few dependent giant media corps than trying to play a bunch of competitive outlets against each other to get your message out. You can literally just flood the few giant media companies with your own staff; just route their government paycheck through Raytheon (as a "consultant") or promise them they'll be able to retire from media to a lazy job in higher education as the Harriet Foundation Endowment Chair at the Council for Democratic Innovation at Harvard. Internet media companies are filling up with ex-intelligence agency employees.
It's not that technologies are making this possible, but rather that technology is undoing the previous era of centralized information when it was much easier to censor people without anyone noticing. The glass half-full take is that the internet is decentralizing information in a way that central authorities can no longer control, and this is one of the many desperate attempts at retaining that control. I don't think it will be successful unless governments go totalitarian.
How about talking about the source? The actual source for all those creeping towards totalitarianism? Its that governments are aware of the crisis coming and they have no solutions, no plans, no scenarios, no capabilities they want to develop to counter problems to come, except suppress the citizenry as long as they can and weather it out. Wish we could vote a whole generation of useless politicans out in lockstep.
I've been hearing constant news about how awful their censorship laws are for at least 5 years now. The only reason telegraph is saying Britain was "sleepwalking" was because up until now they've been exclusively benefiting from it
Parental controls are now the default on (most?) UK mobile providers, so a lot of archive/user-driven sites get blocked if you don't login to your provider's portal to tick the "I'm over 18" box. IIRC this has been the case since David Cameron's government made threatening noises about bringing in legislation to force it.
Honestly, I think that's one good thing. I believe that isp's should provide more content controls and allow fine grained controls for account owners to block content in categories. And they should have at least adult content blocked by default with an opt out.
It's insane to me that parents have to be network admins to be able to make even do basic content filtering for their children in the US.
When I bought a throwaway GiffGaff SIM while I was waiting months for BT to set up my broadband, it had content blocking on by default.
They wanted me to send a picture of my driver's license to lift the restrictions.
I'm not sure what I'm more disgusted by: the fact I need to give away my identity to have unfiltered (except the outright blocked stuff) access to the internet, or that I caved and gave it to them anyway.
I guess I should be happy proof of identity wasn't required to buy or activate the SIM in the first place.
I'm admittedly pretty cynical about these things, but i think blocking adult content by default is mostly to help pedophiles and predators. The internet is a dangerous place for kids, why else would you want to make it look safer, while leaving the real dangers (people) in place?
Kids shouldn't have unsupervised access to the internet. This has become a controversial statement, mostly due to a false sense of security brought on through censorship.
In my country (Jordan), archive.org was also blocked for some reason, but interestingly, only one ISP (ZainJO) was blocking it afaik. I have no idea why; no other sites I could think of were blocked.
Idk if the block is still there today; I moved out of Jordan years ago
The UK has always been authoritarian in sheep's clothing.
Don't be fooled by its geographic location and shared language with the US. It's very extreme as far as western countries go, and not towards the freedom side.
I can see a "symbol of the absolute" being a thing, both real and imagined, influencing peoples' minds and affecting the world in a very real sense. Human politics aren't exactly known for logic.
We seem to be in a vicious cycle of politicians trying to suppress public discontentment by limiting free speech but this only creates more discontentment which requires even more suppression of speech.
Why do people in power seem to prefer to kick the can down the road until it explodes instead of trying to resolve problems as they come? It seems to be a recurring theme of history.
> Why do people in power seem to prefer to kick the can down the road until it explodes instead of trying to resolve problems as they come? It seems to be a recurring theme of history.
People in power are often motivated by gaining more power & their core competency is acquiring more power, usually by manipulating social dynamics. They also also adept in manipulating organizations to have power-focused people, especially if they can be controlled, in positions of governance & management. Any other popular ideological position they publicly espouse is a mask to consolidate power. There are some books on psychopathy in governance & management...such as https://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Psychopa...
With advances & consolidation in the state/empire, technology, automation, & global socioeconomic systems, people in power have more leverage over everybody else...Consolidation will increase until systems become too top-heavy & a collapse occurs. Most people, including people in power, tend to not desire being ruled by others, so infighting is inevitable, which also leads to collapse...Usually the breakups occur suddenly when the status quo becomes obviously untenable & it is less risky to break ranks.
Political rivals that can execute a coherent long term strategy of systemic growth & power have a long-term advantage over those who are unable to execute continued growth.
You can test these assertions in an analysis of the history of the various political & business empires which grew & collapsed.
That makes sense. Unfortunately, our current system seems to support almost unlimited centralization and this is the ideal kind of system for psychopathic power-hoarders.
In the past, it was far less common for companies to grow to the point that they would dominate large parts of the economy. In essentially all cases, scale is achieved through illegal or at least highly unethical practices. Mega-corporations are not a natural part of capitalism; rather, they're the result of intentional system design and manipulation at the political/social layer.
I think decentralization can go a long way to protect the system from power-hoarders. All things considered, it's probably better to have small groups, headed by many low-grade psychopaths, competing and even (on occasion) fighting each other for dominance rather than a single monolithic global empire headed by top-grade psychopaths.
Also, I think if we could decouple political groups from geography, we would be able to protect ourselves from existential threats such as nuclear weapons. Nobody is going to risk nuking their own people in order to destroy an opposing group if they are all intermingled geographically.
This is a thing in most countries on the planet. Try tweeting "I wish all X people were dead!" outside of the USA, and in many places you'll get a visit from the authorities (if they notice that is, they don't actively monitor for it, someone would have to give you up to the local police).
> This is a thing in most countries on the planet.
Also totalitarian governments have happened everywhere around the world, except in the USA. I've lived abroad in places where it seems the citizens are property of the government. It really feels the government can at anytime do whatever they please with anyone, and it won't even be questioned.
Government dissent is a privilege that apparently only USA has at the moment (and we're in a cultural battle trying to preserve it).
Based on that bill it seems like the ideas are similar, i wonder if, at some point, they'll merge together and form some sort of super state that gets to decide what's right to say and what's not right to say
I'm no fan of the Telegraph, but all those links show is that it's willing to give comment space to people with different points of view.
(Or, to put it another way, the fact that they're willing to print a column by Fraser Nelson isn't a reason to suppose their home affairs editor isn't still in favour of the bill.)
See the bit where it says "Author", the person who wrote the articles you linked to (Charles Hymas) is a different person to the person who wrote the article posted by OP (Fraser Nelson). Viewpoint diversity exists, just because two people write for the same newspaper they don't have to share the same views. If you're a Guardian reader that might be a new concept though
The plan is to have a legal but harmful framework, and Elon Musk decides what is harmful. What could possibly go wrong? Threatening US multinational with billion dollar fines? Try that shit in a non-Biden administration. Has the UK gone mad?
