Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online
Senal@programming.dev 1 day agoIt 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?
FishFace@lemmy.world 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?
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.
Senal@programming.dev 1 day ago
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’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 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 ?
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.
FishFace@lemmy.world 16 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.
Senal@programming.dev 11 hours ago
Politicians are people too, sure.
Doing a bad job of implementing a self serving plan doesn’t excuse the self serving plan.
That’s some ‘boys will be boys’ nonsense.
Take brexit and Alexander as example, his intent was to do something shitty for self gain, he’s not an idiot no matter how it seems.
There’s no chance he believed that ridiculous tagline about the NHS funding and Europe, even if he did, someone at some point would have pointed it out to him.
He did it anyway, that’s intent.
Regardless of the outcome, he did something he knew was shitty, for whatever reason he had.
These people might be idiots, but their intent is usually to do something shady, that they are incompetent and do a shitty job of it isn’t the point.
Wrt to the America thing, I agree, I’m not saying the government is working with tech companies, im saying their intent usually isn’t ‘save the children’, at that point we absolutely should be hunting for the reasons, because if it isn’t the reason they have stated, what are they hiding?
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
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:
The only thing left to do is lobby. Politicians might not have this vision, but they do understand really expensive dinners.
FishFace@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
In order to be lying, they must know better - that’s my point. You can’t have a nefarious plan without understanding the plan.
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.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 hours ago
The plan is that they like money, and they’ll say whatever they have to to get more money. Or power, maybe.
I don’t really need to know what their motives are, though, anyway. If they were saying that spilling gasoline over a fire would put out the fire, I know that they’re either lying for some reason, or they’re really fucking stupid. Kind of a distinction without a difference.
I could believe that people are. Especially after recent events. But… you really think your right wing isn’t in bed with capital? Google was just an example, you know.