Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online

• Senal@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It being a real and powerful motivational force means it’s one of the more useful covers.

  Just because it motivates the voters/customers doesn’t mean it’s the genuine reason behind a decision.

  I cannot think of a single recent “think of the children” based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.

  Can you?

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  • FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I cannot think of a single recent “think of the children” based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.

    Are you judging the motivation purely based on the effects? Otherwise, how are you working out what goes on inside people’s heads?

    I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better. It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.

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    • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      politicians must somehow know better.

      No, no, the accusation is that politicians are lying.

      Let’s phrase this another way. Asking every single website in existence to implement and maintain an ID database and monitoring system is expensive, yes? So, why wouldn’t private companies shift some of this responsibility off to a 3rd party who specializes specifically in this service?

      If I were google, I would:

      • One, be very excited about tying a user’s account analytics to their government personhood; can’t multiple-credit-cards your way out of that one.
      • And two, already be looking at my own 3rd-party user login service as a means of beating out all competition in this space.

      The only thing left to do is lobby. Politicians might not have this vision, but they do understand really expensive dinners.

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      • FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        No, no, the accusation is that politicians are lying.

        In order to be lying, they must know better - that’s my point. You can’t have a nefarious plan without understanding the plan.

        The only thing left to do is lobby. Politicians might not have this vision, but they do understand really expensive dinners.

        That is more of an uphill battle in an environment like Europe or the UK where politicians are deeply skeptical of American big tech companies.

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    • Senal@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Are you judging the motivation purely based on the effects? Otherwise, how are you working out what goes on inside people’s heads?

      A combination of the effects, the prior actions, reactions and consequences of the subject and others in similar categories/contexts (to the extent i actually know/pay attention).

      I don’t know of another way of performing predictive analysis.

      Also that didn’t answer the question.

      I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better. It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.

      I’m genuinely not sure what you are saying here, but i’ll go line by line, tell me if I’m reading it incorrectly.

      I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better.

      I don’t know what this means, there are voters who genuinely believe this, yes, i think i follow that bit.

      I’m not sure what you think is crazy here (i’m not disagreeing, i just don’t understand) , do you mean to say the politicians do or don’t know better ?

      It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.

      This i agree with, i can also anecdotally add first hand experience of the consequences of such lack of understanding.

      Not sure how it ties in to the other sentence though.

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      • FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I’ll try to rephrase:

        It makes more sense that politicians are simply like ordinary voters and are wrong and misguided when it comes to the internet (in this regard and others), and genuinely believe that the Online Safety Act is helpful for its stated purpose, than that they are using it as some nefarious way of helping out Google. The simple reason is that politicians are people too and just as susceptible to being wrong as voters are; we don’t actually need to hunt for any greater reason than that.

        Besides that, we constantly talk about how politicians catastrophically fail to understand technology (I believe the Online Safety Act makes mention of hypothetical encryption-backdooring technology that is simply impossible). For politicians to have a different true motive - i.e. their stated motive is false - we are essentially saying that they couldn’t possibly have made got this wrong, there must be some corrupt reason for it - but we don’t actually believe they couldn’t have got it wrong because we’re constantly complaining about how they very obviously do get it wrong.

        I also mentioned (but you didn’t mention being confused by it) that the UK government isn’t really friendly to American big-tech firms, who are universally opposed to the Act as a whole because of its threat to end-to-end encryption.

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