Comment on No, the UK’s Online Safety Act Doesn’t Make Children Safer Online
FishFace@lemmy.world 22 hours agoNo, 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.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 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.
FishFace@lemmy.world 18 hours 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.
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.
Senal@programming.dev 16 hours ago
By that rationale you world also need to prove that they are misunderstood upstanding citizens.
Because both interpretations are deviations from the stated intent and outcome, why would yours not also need journalistic rigour?
Just because yours is a slightly positive spin doesn’t mean its not conjecture against the provided facts.
FishFace@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
You’ve probably heard “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.” This is an example of that.
They are not. Both are deviations from stated outcome, but not stated intent.
People on your side of this seem to think that, because politicians are saying that something will happen and you disagree with that, they must actually also believe that the outcome will be as you believe, but are lying about it.
Not only is this poor reasoning, it’s really quite arrogant. When it comes to predicting outcomes, there is often genuine disagreement. I think you need a good reason to conclude that this can’t possibly be a case of politicians disagreeing about the outcome and no-one has come up with such a good reason - no-one has said, “actually, the minister for DCMS was reported to have met with the bosses of Google, Microsoft and Facebook and a source in the department said they lobbied for age-verification”. All anyone has given is the same argument I have been pointing out:
Can I walk you again through how this argument does not work?