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

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 ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨19⁩ ⁨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?
  
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  - FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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    Senal@programming.dev ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    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)
    
    I can list examples of politicians promising things and then backtracking or making decisions that benefit them or their retinue directly but it’s so entrenched in the zeitgeist I’d be genuinely shocked if you didn’t know any examples yourself.
    
    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.
    
    So we’ve established a baseline of possibility, we can work from here.
    
    That’s not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success.
    
    Yes, politicians are people too, there will be disagreements between them, most have no idea what they are talking about with regard to this so that discussion probably won’t actually help anyone, but such is life.
    
    it is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success.
    
    Same with brexit, popular support isn’t necessarily a good indicator of idea.
    
    Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact
    
    Agreed
    
    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.
    
    Indeed, and by that rationale there’s no basis for saying this is a good idea with regard, specifically, to the protection of children.
    
    Which is why many people say this isn’t about the protection of children, because they have no way of proving it, or really even a vague idea of how to measure it , at all.
    
    There is however precedent for this kind of attempt at control to be poorly implemented and abused in other areas, such that there is a provable downside.
    
    So if there’s no provable upside but there is a somewhat provable downside, which option should be used.
    
    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.
    
    That’s a different discussion, but yes, ethics, morals etc.
    
    The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.
    
    It’s a different scenario yes, but it proves the possibility of that type of action, which it seems you were denying by saying “they’re just idiots they couldn’t possibly be doing bad things”
    
    There is an example of action not based in incompetence.
    
    Citation needed.
    
    Indeed, this is personal opinion/anecdote.
    
    I can give you examples of shady politicians doing shady things but probably not enough to demonstrably push it over that 50% line.
    
    In the same way you can’t prove incompetence over intentional malice.
    
    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.
    
    That level of naïveté is staggering ( and also conveniently skips over power as a motivator )
    
    Even if we don’t agree on the percentages i think we can agree that there is a level of political corruption, a quick buck doesn’t even begin to cover it.
    
    Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak from recent memory, i could probably dredge up some more.
    
    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.)
    
    That’s why i stated it as me saying, not as an objective fact, though i see that might not be clear.
    
    Also remember the predictive analysis based on previous actions.
    
    I the absence of hard proof i’m pretty sure you’ll agree that opinions can be formed using predictions based on past actions of the person and similar situations and scenarios.
    
    as i said earlier, it’s not
    
    “it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.”
    
    so much as it is
    
    “Previously, on multiple occasions they have proven to not be doing things for the stated reasons, it’s perhaps reasonable to work under the idea that they may be doing this again”.
    
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