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

• petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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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    • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

      where politicians are deeply skeptical of American big tech companies.

      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.

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      • FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        If the right wing were in bed with big tech, they would never have passed this Act, which all big tech companies hate because it imposes serious duties and costs on them.

        I don’t really need to know what their motives are, though, anyway.

        Then you shouldn’t pretend that you do.

        It’s perfectly reasonable to argue about how shit the law is, but it’s not reasonable to advance without evidence the view that politicians made the law for some underhanded purpose. Have you trawled the MPs’ Register of Interests to find whether its supporters were wined and dined by those companies? Do you have an explanation for why their request was supposedly “let us become age-verifiers” rather than “don’t force us to moderate our products more”?

        No; you and others don’t have any of this because you haven’t done that journalistic work (and because it probably doesn’t exist). You’re just pissing conspiracy theories into the pot.

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• Senal@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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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    • Senal@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?

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      • FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Doing a bad job of implementing a self serving plan doesn’t excuse the self serving plan.

        But you haven’t provided any reason to believe it’s self-serving (other than it is actually quite popular, so it will probably help to get them re-elected)

        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.

        I agree. In that case, the tagline was objectively false and it was printed anyway, so we can conclude pretty safely that the people in charge of making it were lying. That’s not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success. It is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success. Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact - not only can we not see the future, there is also no objective way to balance the benefit of decreasing harm to children by preventing access to harmful content with the cost of preventing their access to useful information and the cost of increased friction and privacy breaches to everyone else. If there’s a 0.01% chance of photographs of people’s IDs being leaked online due to this, but a 90% chance that more than 100,000 children will be prevented from seeing content advocating suicide, is that OK? We don’t know if those are the correct percentages and, even if we did, that is a moral question, not a factual one.

        The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.

        but their intent is usually to do something shady

        Citation needed.

        People don’t go into politics to line their pockets - not in the UK anyway. It’s just not that lucrative. People go into politics mostly for the right reasons (that is, they want to change the country in a way they believe will be better - even if you disagree about that) and some of them are natural grifters who try and make a quick buck off it as well.

        im saying their intent usually isn’t ‘save the children’

        Again, nobody in this thread or elsewhere has provided any evidence that this is not their intent. The only argument put forward comes down to “it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.” But that is not how it works. People can disagree about things and on this particular matter most people disagree with you (and me.)

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