> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".
Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.
> In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety.
Some of the articles, which contain factual information, are damning for the UK government. It lists, for example, political scandals [1] [2]. Or information regarding hot topics such as immigration [3], information that the UK government want to strictly control (abstracting away from whether this is rightfully or wrongfully).
I can tell you what will (and has already) happened as a result:
1. People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them.
2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.
3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it.
I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government (which, by the way, there is still a non zero chance could be Labour) will necessarily reverse this. Maybe Reform would tweak the topics, but I’m not convinced any party can be totally trusted to reverse this.
Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it.
Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:
> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.
It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
> The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes disengagement feel like the only moderate move.
True but all the other parties are currently saying that they 100% will not reconsider this stupid law[1].
I don’t like Farrage. At all.
He’s also currently the only MP questioning this law and he’s making fair points about it.
The government response is not a clever rebuttal but Jess Philips and Peter Kyle making ad hominem arguments comparing him the nastiest people in our country’s history.
1. It’s stupid not because of its goal but because it doesn’t protect kids but does expose vast numbers of adults to identity fraud.
They're all using it to virtue signal their hatred of child porn. It's basically religious at this point. You stray from the line and someone just shouts infidel and you get stoned to death.
Unfortunately the atheism movement of a about ten years ago didn't go far enough in making people aware that religion isn't just about big men in the sky who are the same colour as you. What it actually is is a deficiency in human ability, a bypass for the logical centres of the brain and a way to access the animal areas that can get people to do terrible things to each other. Some of them, like Hitchens, definitely understood this, but nobody seems to be talking about it any more and we didn't learn to be vigilant of this deficiency.
When one votes in this so-called "democracy", one votes for a representative to represent 'you and thousands of others' on thousands of decisions.
And even then, if both parties want to do something, as in this case, there is nowhere to go.
This is force. If you can't say 'no', this is immoral, coercive force, even if the person or party doing the forcing says it isn't.
And no, the forcer (government) won't give back freedoms (the right to privacy) that it takes away.
In the end, the only moral, respectful and free way to proceed, without force, ie where people opt in. Individuals would opt in/out to paying tax for wars/schools/online safety, etc.
"But it is impossible that everyone should be allowed to only opt in to the decisions they like!" .. is only the case because we think it is normal to endlessly abused by governments and because so many citizens are dependent on its handouts.
If the current government reversed it, the 'oh think of the children' angle from the Tories/Reform against them would be relentless. I cant say they have been amazing at messaging as it is.
The current leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform are on record as being against the Act. While this doesn't preclude them changing their mind, it does make it more difficult for them to reverse course.
> I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government will necessarily reverse this.
Agreed. I think the supposed justifications for mass population-wide online surveillance, restrictions and de-anonymization are so strong most political parties in western democracies go along with what surveillance agencies push for once they get in power. Even in the U.S. where free speech & personal privacy rights are constitutionally and culturally stronger, both major parties are virtually identical in what they actually permit the surveillance state to do once they get in office (despite sometimes talking differently while campaigning).
The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings. They keep these presentations secret from public and press scrutiny by claiming it's necessary to keep "sources and methods" secret from adversaries. Of course, this is ridiculous because adversary spy agencies are certainly already aware of the broad capabilities of our electronic surveillance - it's their job after all and they do the same things to their own populations. The intelligence community rarely briefs politicians on individual operations or the exact details of the sources and methods which adversarial intelligence agencies would care about anyway. The vast majority of these secret briefings could be public without revealing anything of real value to major adversaries. At most it would only confirm we're doing the things adversaries already assume we're doing (and already take steps to counter). The real reason they hide the politician briefings from the public is because voters would be creeped out by the pervasive surveillance and domain experts would call bullshit on the incomplete facts and fallacious reasoning used to justify it to politicians.
Even if a politician sincerely intended to preserve privacy and freedom before getting in office, they aren't domain experts and when confronted with seemingly overwhelming (but secret) evidence of preventing "big bad" presented unanimously by intelligence community experts, the majority of elected officials go along. If that's not enough for the anti-privacy agencies (intel & law enforcement) to get what they want, there's always the "think of the children" arguments. It's the rare politician who's clear-thinking and principled enough to apply appropriate skepticism and measured nuance when faced with horrendous examples of child porn and abuse which the law enforcement/intelligence agency lobby has ready in ample supply and deploys behind closed doors for maximum effect. The anti-privacy lobby has figured out how to hack representative democracy to circumvent protections and because it's done away from public scrutiny, there's currently no way to stop them and it's only going to keep getting worse. IMHO, it's a disaster and even in the U.S. (where I am) it's only slightly better than the UK, Australia, EU and elsewhere.
> The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings.
Those politicians who are vocal against mass surveillance tend to change their tune the moment they're in office and I doubt they were all intending to go back on their campaign promises from the start or that they were really convinced by horror stories of terrorists told over powerpoint in closed door briefings.
I wouldn't doubt if they were also giving politicians examples of the kind of dirt they already have on them and their families. This is one of the biggest risks of the surveillance state. Endless blackmail material made up of actual skeletons, as well as the resources to install new ones into anyone's closets whenever needed.
Do what we say or we might get a warrant and find that stash of CP that we installed on your hard drive. How do you even defend against planted digital evidence? It would be easy to fake and very difficult to disprove.
But when it comes to politicians and people with power, I think it's even worse than all of that. It's kind of obvious what Mr Epstein was getting up to with regard to blackmail.
> How do you even defend against planted digital evidence?
With your good name. In the end, it is not important what the politician had or did not have on the disk, but who the public will believe more, the secret services, who claim that there was something there, or the politician, who claims that he is being set up and groundlessly persecuted for the purpose of political pressure.
And as long as public opinion about the special services is what it is, politicians can safely stash CP on their disks without fear that they will be charged with anything even if they are found.
Yes, many of them are really stupid people. But they are not idiots. I think 95 percent of them are perfectly aware of why the laws they pass are really needed. And they pass them EXACTLY FOR THIS, and not at all for protecting children and internet safety.
If these claims are accurate, then the solution is obvious: elected officials who are themselves domain experts in this. They can then explain to their colleagues why these arguments are bullshit.
But, I expect that that won't help because your claims don't tell the while story. Most representatives don't act in good faith and like the government that they're a part of having such power.
The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I don't think they are accurate.
Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.
Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as ‘the government’.
There are many western democracies where there no single ruling party. 'The government' is made by an alliance of many different parties (eg: 25% + 15% + 10% + 5%.) They might share a common overall view of the world but each party can have a very different take on many subjects. The actual government has to do only what all of them agree upon, and the 5% party may have a disproportionate weight because that party leaving the government is as important as the 25% party leaving it.
So, the government is the people in the government and the small parties can be very vocal against it. Opposition from inside is a double edged tool to attempt to get more votes in the next elections, even from within the same coalition.
This is not working. A few decades later the biggest party is like 50% of the politicians.
My theory is that power accumulates like money so you end up having few people with all the power. It's not that original, I must've read it somewhere.
> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
It would be an extraordinary amount of work for a government that can barely keep up with the fires of its own making let alone the many the world is imposing upon them. Along with that, watching the horse trading going on over every change they make - I don't see how they ever get a meaningful final text over the line.
It's not a mainstream political priority at all to my knowledge, so I'm mostly curious why you disagree!
They should just do the same thing many governments the world over have done - adopt a version of the US constitution. Easy, clean, and only massively ironic.
Biggest mistake the Americans did was codify their constitution. I'll probably be pilloried for that but look at the evidence:
- US is about to have military on the streets during peacetime with no terror threat within a codified constitution
- UK has had military on the streets in response to terrorism in Northern Ireland (a real threat) and not for decades. The UK constitution is uncodified and spread over many (10+?) documents ranging from Magna Carta in the 1200s to the Bill of Rights in the 1600s to documents written in the 1800s and then more modern Acts of Parliament.
Importantly the UK constitution can slowly change which means the UK has never had a revolution and never will do. Whereas the US constitution is rigid which achieves the opposite: when it does change it'll be dramatic and as a result of another violent revolution.
The US constitution that's clear as mud about questions like "Is it possible for the president to do something illegal?" and "Does any part of the 14th amendment actually mean anything"?
Why does this increase the likelihood of a (written I assume) constitution? I remember I saw a thing about David Cameron talking about wanting one. I think he also created a Supreme Court. I read into it and it seemed like there was no real reason for either a written constitution or a Supreme Court. Both of those things were popularized by the US's government so maybe that points to why.
None of what you said is true. The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court and moved to a different building (but otherwise essentially unchanged) in 2005 under Tony Blair's Labour government.
The thieves no longer have to hack servers in order to obtain sensitive data, they can just set up an age-check company and lure businesses with attractive fees.
> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
As an repetition of and an aside to all those pointing out that there is a constitution, what may find gaining some momentum after this are calls for a Bill of Rights, something England used to have[1].
A British constitution makes no sense, power is delegated from the king not from the member states like in the US or Canada. The only way the UK could end up with a constitution that's meaningful and not performative would be after a civil war.
We already have a constitution. It just isn't a written constitution:
> The United Kingdom constitution is composed of the laws and rules
that create the institutions of the state, regulate the relationships
between those institutions, or regulate the relationship between the
state and the individual.
These laws and rules are not codified in a single, written document.
Source for that quote is parliamentary: https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-com... - a publication from 2015 which considered and proposed a written constitution. But other definitions include unwritten things like customs and conventions. For example:
> It is often noted that the UK does not have a ‘written’ or ‘codified’ constitution. It is true that most countries have a document with special legal status that contains some of the key features of their constitution. This text is usually upheld by the courts and cannot be changed except through an especially demanding process. The UK, however, does not possess a single constitutional document of this nature. Nevertheless, it does have a constitution. The UK’s constitution is spread across a number of places. This dispersal can make it more difficult to identify and understand. It is found in places including some specific Acts of Parliament; particular understandings of how the system should operate (known as constitutional conventions); and various decisions made by judges that help determine how the system works.
Right of course every state has a "constitution" but the contemporary connotation of the word means an enforceable law that meaningfully constrains the state's power.
In the UK that would probably be the Magna Carta [0] which is a written document that constrains the monarch's power, and the monarch was the state at that time (1215).
Do you mean in the USA, perhaps? It's used more prevalently there, I think it's more likely for an average citizen to refer to a document than a collection of laws and customs. But I don't think that contex overtakes the original meaning.
The GP comment specifically refers to the contemporary connotation, and at least in English there is some consensus around constitutional governments in this modern sense (e.g. Ireland, India, Germany, etc.) as opposed to those that aren’t.
Ironically, while I am absolutely not a monarchist, it provides a kind of stability to British democracy, because it mostly transcends party politics, unlike other presidential systems.
Indeed, the founding fathers of the US identified political parties as a threat to their republic.
And yet, there were defacto political parties in the delightfully misnamed federalist and anti-federalists. It was this divide that led to the first political parties.
No, I meant in the newborn US. The OP founding fathers reference is Hamilton and the Federalists who feared the harms of political parties, but ultimately couldn't reconcile with the anti-federalists who ultimately formed the democratic-republican party.
> If Ofcom permissibly determines that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service, and if the practical effect of that is that Wikipedia cannot continue to operate, the Secretary of State may be obliged to consider whether to amend the regulations or to exempt categories of service from the Act. In doing so, he would have to act compatibly with the Convention. Any failure to do so could also be subject to further challenge. Such a challenge would not be prevented by the outcome of this claim.
Basically, DENIED, DENIED, DENIED. Ofcom can keep the loaded gun pointed in Wikipedia's face, forever, and make as many threats as it likes. Only if it pulls the trigger does Wikipedia have a case.
Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK entirely. No visitors, no editors.
> Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK entirely. No visitors, no editors.
No, it should remove servers, employees and legal presence from the UK. It's not their job to block UK people from accessing it just because the UK regime want them to. Let the regime censors actually put an effort to block them. Let them make a Great Firewall of the UK, why make it easy for them?
Because, as someone living in the UK, the only way people here are going to realise what's going on and apply meaningful pressure to the government is if these organisations force us to. And because once they've given up on one country, they'll give up on the rest just as easily.
Is there backlash for this sort of thing? When they did their blackout thing some years back, a lot of people who were sympathetic to the cause were also highly annoyed at the disruption to their workflows, to the point that if it had gone on much longer it might have backfired on Wiki. I've seen similar affects with protesters blocking roads and such. I always wonder if it's just a small minority or if it happens more widespread
> Someone in the UK starting their own censored Wikipedia would be a good thing in the long and short run.
I’m seeing that playing out with a Russian Wikipedia (forked as Ruwiki and heavily edited to be in line with Kremlin propaganda), and I don’t like it one bit. There’s not much you can do as it’s free/open content, but it still sucks.
If they don't geoblock UK visitors then every person known to be involved with the operation of wikipedia potentially becomes an international fugitive and if they ever land on UK soil (or perhaps even Commonwealth soil), they could be jailed.
They don't need to make anything - that capability has been there for years. It was mostly used to block sites with IIoC, but they also blocked access to various piracy related sites and things like that.
I generally agreed but this depends entirely on the US's willingness to cooperate with UK authorities. This would be the DOJ, FTC, etc. I dont think it would go straight the judiciary although someone can correct me on that if I'm wrong.
IANAL, but international law precedent has allowed countries to prosecute web services for providing services to a country where that service is illegal. A French NGO successfully sued Yahoo! for selling Nazi memorabilia, a crime in France, despite Yahoo! being a US company [0], and this was upheld by US courts.
Nitpick: International law is treaties between countries, the UN, customs like diplomatic immunity, etc. Here it was just about US and French domestic law.
I'm not a lawyer, but that's not how I read it. The appeal by Yahoo! was dismissed according to the wikipedia article, as I read it. How did you read it?
The first court ruled in Yahoo's favor and the appeals court ruled that neither it nor any lower court in the US had the power to adjudicate the matter altogether, which was kind of a loss for both yahoo and the French organization.
This is the part that gets me intrigued. It's quite difficult to parse, having so many conditionals... ifs, mays, woulds, "subject to further challenge", etc
It doesn't seem (to me) as definitive as some claim.
Hopefully, this ambiguous language opens the door for further challenges that may provide case law against the draconian Online Safety Act.
But this is how the law works? Even in the USA, the Supreme Court doesn't act on hypotheticals. They wait until someone brings an actual case.
Ofcom haven't ruled Wikipedia is Category 1. They haven't announced the intention to rule it Category 1. The Category 1 rules are not yet in effect and aren't even finalised. They aren't pointing any gun.
Wikipedia have a case that they shouldn't be Category 1 if that happens. But they went fishing in advance (or to use an alternative metaphor, they got out over their skis).
What else is the court to do but give a reassurance that the process will absolutely be amenable to review if the hypothetical circumstance comes to pass? That is what the section you are quoted says.
First, it's a statutory instrument that ministers will amend if it has unintended, severe consequences.
Second, the rules in question have not been written yet and they are being written in conjunction with industry (which will include Wikipedia). Because Ofcom is an industry self-regulation body.
I remember an example where the UK Government decided it's OK to rip CDs you own (no, really, it wasn't legal until then), and codified that in law. The parasites that run the UK Music trade organisation appealed and found that the UK had not sufficiently consulted them before deciding to make the law.
So - ripping is completely illegal in the UK. Always has been, always will be. Never rip a CD, not even once. Keep paying all your fucking money to the UK Music member corporations and never think you own anything, not even once.
But it illustrates that the UK's law-making is subject to judicial review, and government cannot make laws or regulations without consulting those affected by them how much of a hardship it constitutes to them. The judge here is merely saying we haven't seen the harm yet, and Ofcom can keep threatening indefinitely to cause harm, Wikipedia only have a case when they do cause harm. By contrast, passing the law making CD ripping legal, UK Music argued, using an absolute load of bollocks they made up, that it immediately caused them harm.
It's not that simple. The law the BBC article is referring to[1] was a regulation, i.e. secondary legislation, passed by resolution. Had it been primary legislation, the courts wouldn't have been able to overturn it (Parliament is sovereign).
> But it illustrates that the UK's law-making is subject to judicial review
This is misleading. Actual primary legislation isn't subject to judicial review. The only exception to that is a Judge can declare legislation incompatible with the ECHR - but even then that doesn't actually nullify the law, it only tells the government/parliament they need to fix it.
The bit that is subject to review is _secondary_ legislation, which is more of an executive action than lawmaking. It's mostly a historical quirk that statutory instruments count as legislation in the UK.
> government cannot make laws or regulations without consulting those affected by them how much of a hardship it constitutes to them
This is at best disingenuous.
There is no general requirement on government to consult. It is often referred to in various Acts, which are binding. There is a common law expectation that if the government has made a clear promise to consult that they have to.
But since the Glorious Revolution, parliament has proved to be supreme. It may have to be explicit in the laws it passes, but it can literally overrule itself as needed. Pesky EU human rights legislation is just a mere vote away from being destroyed.
This seems pretty consistent with what I said -- it is essentially a self-regulation body, promoting self-regulation but backed by statutory powers/penalties.
Now what else is untrue?
ETA: rate-limited so I am not able to properly respond to the below. Bye for now.
Your claim that Ofcom is in any way a "self-regulation body" is untrue. And frankly also a straight-up insane thing to say, sorry.
Ofcom was created by the UK government for the sole purpose of enforcing laws passed by the UK government [and sometimes interpreting those laws]. It acts on behalf of the State at all times, and is not empowered to do otherwise under any circumstances EVER.
You appear to be confused about what being a "quango" actually means in this case. "Quasi-NGO" means that while it appears to be a non-governmental organisation, it is not one. Ofcom's at arm's length because the majority of its daily legal obligations are closer to judicial than administrative, and it is UK custom (rightly) to not put judicial functions inside government departments.
While you're correct about Ofcom, the real distinction isn't really to the objective, but to the classification of its employees.
Ofcom, Gambling Commission, and the rest of the quangos are independent statutory bodies, and (this is a big distinction!) their employees are not civil servants.
Quangos include judicial tribunals and places like the BBC, or the Committee on Climate Change- it is a broad umbrella.
Quasi-autonomous, to be completely accurate. They consult regularly with the industry and ministers but the Office of Communications Act established Ofcom to be independent of both Government and industry. They're accountable to Parliament.
One of the most interesting things about this legislation is where it comes from.
Primarily it was drafted and lobbied for by William Perrin OBE and Prof Lorna Woods at Carnegie UK[1], billed as an “independent foundation”.
William Perrin is also the founder of Ofcom. So he’s been using the foundation’s money to lobby for the expansion of his unelected quango.
It has also been suggested that one of the largest beneficiaries of this law, an age verification company called Yoti, also has financial ties to Carnegie UK.
It’s difficult to verify that because Yoti is privately held and its backers are secret.
It’s not as if anyone was surprised that teenagers can get round age blocks in seconds so there’s something going on and it stinks.
> It has also been suggested that one of the largest beneficiaries of this law, an age verification company called Yoti, also has financial ties to Carnegie UK.
Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information. But it's also Wikipedia's greatest strength that it has been so open to basically everyone and that gave us a wide range of really good articles that rivaled the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Wikipedia is a product of the free internet. It is a product of a world that many politicians still don't understand. But those politicians still make laws that do not make sense, because they believe that something has to be done against those information crimes. And they also do it to score brownie points with their conservative voting base.
The internet has it's problems, no doubt about that. But what these laws do is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Actually, the water probably stays in, because it's not like those laws solve anything.
Attributing the actions being taken by the UK (and much of the EU) to a lack of understanding is a quite generous interpretation. That may have been true a generation ago, but it's not now.
Many of us think that they understand a free internet very well, specifically the threats it places on their uses (and abuses) of power, and that the laws are quite well designed to curtail that. The UK currently, without identity verification, arrests 30 people per day for things they say online.
I’ll add to this, no politician is on your side unless it means getting your vote to keep them in power. It’s hard to be an actual good person and get too far up in politics, especially in today’s environment.
So, yes, I believe they both want tracking to exist, because they both benefit massively from it.
I would add, some politicians are on your side on select matters, most are not.
Sad thing is people ignore a politician's actions and keep applying Yes or No to their marketing statements. They use social engineering wording just to get votes and then they will ignore that standing to support their own action of legislation crafting and voting.
By block and limiting access to information, such as Wikipedia, they are advocating for a dumb populous. Irony is that in order to have a strong national security, an educated populous is needed. They are the ones see beyond the easily deployed social engineering tactics and are better at filtering out misinformation.
Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information.
But the top articles are always perma-locked and under curation. Considering how much traffic those articles receive relative to the more esoteric articles, the surface area of vandalizable articles that a user is exposed to is relatively low. Also to that end, vandalism has a low effort-to-impact ratio.
n=1 I’ve used Wikipedia for many years with no immediately noticeable false information. And of course all the “citation needed” marks are there. I trust Wikipedia to be correct, I expect it to be correct, and Wikipedia has earned my trust. Maybe I don’t read it enough to see any vandalism.
Compared to LLMs, it’s extremely striking to see the relative trust / faith people have in it. It’s pretty sad to see how little the average person values truth and correctness in these systems, how untrusted Wikipedia is to some, and how overly-trusted LLMs are in producing factually correct information to others.
> And they also do it to score brownie points with their conservative voting base.
Care to remind me what side of the political spectrum was desperately trying to silence all health-related discourse that did not match the government's agenda just a few years ago?
By "conservative" I mean less digitally-minded people who are typically older. You have these people on the left, in the center and on the right along the classical political axis.
Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
Remember the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" petition? It has gotten over half a million signatures and the response from the government was a loud "no".
> The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
Those petitions aren't really worth anything - governments have ignored ones with over six million signatures before.
And they also ignored this one a few years back that had just under 700,000 signatures to "make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account":
Ironically, the primary reason they gave for rejecting it was:
> However, restricting all users’ right to anonymity, by introducing compulsory user verification for social media, could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to protect their identity. These users include young people exploring their gender or sexual identity, whistleblowers, journalists’ sources and victims of abuse. Introducing a new legal requirement, whereby only verified users can access social media, would force these users to disclose their identity and increase a risk of harm to their personal safety.
The other point is that recent polls suggest the British public are overwhelmingly in support of this legislation [0], which is not reflected in most of the narrative we see online. Whether they support how it has been implemented is a different matter, but the desire to do something is clear.
It's sadly an example of terrible leading question bias, to the point where I'm surprised that it even got a 22% oppose rate.
The percentages would change dramatically were one to write it as, "From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring adults to upload their id or a face photo before accessing any website that allows user to user interaction?"
Both questions are factually accurate, but omit crucial aspects.
I live in a country where 91.78% of the population voted for a referendum that bought back hard labour in prisons.
As one of the few who voted against it I have yet to encounter a single person who voted for it who both supports hard labour and realised that was in the question being asked.
Why do you claim the 1999 referendum reintroduced hard labor in NZ prisons? I've never seen anything to that effect. The reforms were related to bail, victims rights and parole.
"Should there be a reform of our justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offenses?"
Now let's play tldr with the law!
Luckily it was non binding and stands forever as an argument against binding referendums.
I'm not really seeing the deception here since it specifies hard labour and says it would apply to all serious violent offenses. How could you vote for this and not know you were voting for hard labour?
In many respects I agree with you there, I almost went with softer language. The fact remains that it appears people were deceived. All of the advocacy pushing the referendum only focused on the first part. To this day I find people who are amazed that it mentioned hard labour and and that they voted for it.
[edit]
I guess think of it in terms of a vote that you had discussed and decided upon before you voted. Could you honestly say that you would read every word of the question or would you just look at the start of it to establish that it was the question under discussion and then trust that the discussion accurately represented what the question on the form would say. The length of the question, was I believe specifically designed to be long to prevent the frequency of its full publication.
"Should there be a reform of our justice system" -> "should the law be passed"
"emphasis", "restitution", "compensation" -> too hard to skim, brain is bailing out
---
the only way to provide valid direct democracy is to provide more than enough explanations and rewordings from both sides of the debate *at the point of voting* to remove miscommunication
I don't buy that, and even if they did that doesn't make it deceptive. I'm not arguing in favor of this increased punishment, it just seems to me that its stated plainly enough you can't seriously argue that people were tricked.
It is consistent with my experience that most people seem to not realise that they voted for hard labour.
That is indeed the entire theme of this thread, That people can give an answer to a question that in some way does not reflect their honestly held opinion.
idk, maybe they're actually in favor of hard labour (which was after all spelled out in the question) and they're just telling you what they think you want to hear so you don't bug them about it. A lot of people are happy to lie this way.
It is somewhat deceptive, or at least misleading, to bundle up the concepts of giving the victims compensation, and punishing the prisoners more aggressively.
Unless the prison labor is providing the compensation, but that would be totally bizarre and dystopian, haha. Not really the sort of thing you’d see in a civilized country.
"Hard labour for all serious violent offenses" seems almost refreshingly straightforward. Was there more in the actual referendum that was hidden? I grant that "serious violent offenses" is somewhat vague; was it overly broad?
That question clearly says hard labour. I'm sure some people didn't read it, but I think there also may be another effect there, where when talking to people in person, they realize you are morally opposed to forced hard labour, and don't want to seem like a bad person, so they pretend they didn't know. Sort of similar to the recent effect in the US where trump significantly underpolled as many voted for him but don't want to admit it.
Yeah. It's the "foot in the door technique." The same is being done with Chat Control.
It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily expanded to other things like scanning messages to prevent terrorism.
See also:
> Concern over mass migration is terrorist ideology, says Prevent
> It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily expanded to other things like scanning messages to prevent terrorism.
Oh, look, you did it in literally two sentences. It turns out it's pretty easy to to oppose such law. Only there's simply no need to do it when you're the main beneficiary.
The problem is that one of the most secure places in the world is a maximum security prison. Hence many measures that drag us closer to the prison state do genuinely improve security.
It takes some balls for the society to say: No, we don't agree to yield an essential liberty in exchange to actual real increase of security. Yes, we accept that sometimes bad people will do evil things, because the only way to prevent that would inflict even more damage on everyone. Yes, we are willing to risk harm to stay free.
There is always plenty of people who are ready to buy more comfort in exchange for limitations of liberty that, as they think, will not affect them, because they are honest, got nothing to hide, always follow the majority... until it does affect them, but it's too late.
People constantly cite this poll as it is proof that British people want this.
You cannot trust the YouGov polling. It is flawed.
> Despite the sophisticated methodology, the main drawback faced by YouGov, Ashcroft, and other UK pollsters is their recruitment strategy: pollsters generally recruit potential respondents via self-selected internet panels. The American Association of Public Opinion Research cautions that pollsters should avoid gathering panels like this because they can be unrepresentative of the electorate as a whole. The British Polling Council’s inquiry into the industry’s 2015 failings raised similar concerns. Trying to deal with these sample biases is one of the motivations behind YouGov and Ashcroft’s adoption of the modelling strategies discussed above.
Even if the aforementioned problems didn't exist with the polling. It has been known for quite a while that how you ask a question changes the results. The question you linked was the following.
> From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
Most people would think "age verification to view pornography". They won't think about all the other things that maybe caught in that net.
All polling has problems like this, but YouGov has the same methodology for everything and usually gets within a margin of error of +-8. Even if they have an especially bad sample, the UK probably really does support the law.
Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
> All polling has problems like this, but YouGov has the same methodology for everything and usually gets within a margin of error of +-8.
The way the very question was asked is a problem in itself. It is flawed and will lead to particular result.
> if they have an especially bad sample, the UK probably really does support the law
The issue is that the public often doesn't understand the scope of the law. Those that do are almost always opposed to it.
> Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
It isn't about the pornography. This is why conversations about this are frustrating.
I am worried about the surveillance aspect of it. I go online because I am pseudo-anonymous and I can speak more frankly to people about things that I care about to people who share similar concerns.
I don't like how the law came into place, the scope of the law, the privacy concerns and what the law does in practice.
Even if you don't buy any of that. There is a whole slew of other issues with it. Especially identity theft.
Out of curiosity, what makes you say that the majority of HN loves porn? I've seen a few random references to it but nothing that would indicate that HN loves porn any more than any other community loves porn.
> I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov
You have secret reasons to suspect all polling?
If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
> If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
It's well-understood that leading questions and phrasing will get you any response to a poll that you want. That being the case, what good are any of them? They're only telling you something about how the issue was put rather than anything about the true preferences of the population.
> What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
I’d still call that statistical illiteracy. Polling, as a cohort, contains information. It’s dispersed across polls and concentrated among quality pollsters.
It’s never definitive. But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because we haven’t actually been to Andromeda.
> what good are any of them?
If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow and what policies they could pass that would be popular, polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can build a coalition around, and which to abandon because the people most passionate about them cannot bother to vote, polling is helpful.
> rather than anything about the true preferences of the population
They’re telling you how people think when they communicate and act. What is in their heads is unknowable. At the end of the day, I care how they will vote (and if they will vote) and if they will call (or are even capable of calling) they’re elected if pissed off or enthralled. Everything else is philosophical.
At the end of the day, whether by poll or advert, information is introduced to a population in a biased form because it’s promulgated by biased actors. Knowing which way that bias is trending and resonating is useful.
It isn't about something not agreeing with my vibes. I don't appreciate when people put words in my mouth. I never said all. I obviously meant some.
Firstly in my original post I stated why I don't believe YouGov to be accurate. It isn't just me that has an issue with thier polling.
Secondly, It is well known that many people are swayed by peer pressure and/or what is perceived to be popular. Therefore if you can manipulate polling to show something is popular, then it can sway people that are more influenced by peer pressure/on the fence.
Often in advertising they will site a stat about customer satisfaction. In the small print it will state the sample size or the methodology and it is often hilariously unrepresentative. Obviously they are relying on people not reading the fine print and being statistically illiterate.
Politicians, governments and corporations have been using various tactics throughout the 20th and 21st century to sway public opinion, both home and abroad to their favour.
This issue has divisive for years and has historically had a huge amount of push back. You can see this in the surge of VPN downloads (which is a form of protest against these laws), the popularity of content covering this issue.
They may not be against content restriction, instead they may be against removal of user privacy or anonymity. If the proof of age thing was some kind of zero knowledge proof such that the age verifying group has no knowledge of what you're accessing, and the site you're accessing has no knowledge of you as an individual (beyond tells like IP address etc.) then perhaps they'd be more open to it?
There isn't any technology that can prevent sharing of age verification with third parties without tying your uses to your identity. To unmask someone in order to uncover sharing, you would require the ability to do it in general, which is incompatible with privacy/anonymity.
The internet has made it much more difficult to censor. It is quite obvious to me that they wish to end online anonymity, which makes it easier for them to target people and thus easier to censor.
I believe that this is the precursor before massive political censorship.
As stated in my first reply on this subject. Even if you don't buy into that there are obvious problems with handing you ID over to third parties. There is no guarantee they can keep your data safe (and often haven't).
He didn't say the majority of HN loves porn. He said that male demographic likes porn more than any other, and that demographic is the majority of HN. It doesn't logically follow that the majority of HN supports porn.
Fake statistics just to illustrate the difference. Males 18-40 support porn at 60%, which is higher than any other demographic. HN is 60% males 18-40. With these numbers, 36% of HN is males 18-40 who support porn, and if all other demographics on HN oppose it, then those 36% are the minority.
(By the way, I have no idea what the real numbers are, and don't really care. I'm just responding to an evident confusion about what was actually said.)
Statistics doesn't work that way, and if OP wanted to say that, they should have specified that, rather than saying the majority of HN is a demographic that likes porn. It may be true in a statistical sense, but that's not how it is read.
There is a couple of threads of people asking for help with porn addiction, you will find that the responses are in a funny way much like potheads, plenty of denialism.
Also, if you post anything critical of porn; you get downvoted with little exceptions. Try it, if the topic ever comes up, say something critical and your comment gets flagged and removed.
HN has a massive demographic overlap with problematic pornography consumers.
> No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
This does not jibe with my experience. I think perhaps your experience is not a representative sample of tech people. But mine probably isn't either. So it's pointless for either of us to state an opinion here based on our experience with our own slice of tech people.
It's kinda funny how this is a subthread about how YouGov's polling on the Online Safety Act is flawed, but we're committing the same exact sins ourselves.
In a number of recent polls in English speaking countries young men have been one of the strongest anti-porn demographics actually. I think HN being tech adjacent with the history and practical reality of how the internet works along with being more libertarian (or at least liberal) is going to bias that more than the gender distribution.
I don't put much faith in polls generally, but I put even less faith in polls where people are asked how they feel about porn. I don't think you can come to any reasonable conclusion from data of such low quality as is typical of polling these days.
Even in the absolute best circumstances where enough people are polled to be representative, and those people aren't asked any leading/misleading questions, and the identity of all those people are known, pre-selected without bias, and verified (preventing the same person/group of people voting 50 times or brigading some anonymous internet survey), and all of those people are 100% confident that their answers are private and won't be able to be used against them, you're still left with the fact that people lie. All the time. Especially about anything to do with sex. They also have terrible memories and their beliefs about themselves and their views often don't hold up when their actual behavior is observed. Self-reported data is pretty weak even when sex/shame/morality/fear of punishment don't come into play.
Without really digging into the specifics to try to work out how seriously you can take a given survey's results at all, it's best to just not to treat them seriously.
Sure but IIRC the statistics were relative to previous polls and the conversation was about how people talk about porn on the web not how they actually use it so I think in this case it actually works well.
As always, the devil is in the details. Very careful wording:
>do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
"may" is doing the heavy lifting. Any website that hosts image "may" contain pornograohic content. So they don't associate this with "I need id to watch YouTube" it's "I need ID to watch pornhub". Even though this affects both.
On top of that, the question was focused on peon to begin with. This block was focused more generally on social media. The popular ones of which do not allow pornography.
Rephrase the question to "do you agree with requiring ID submission to access Facebook" and I'd love to see how that impacts responses.
It's funny, I actually interpret it differently; by using "may" vs omitting it would actually imply to include sites like YouTube and Facebook. Without the "may", to me it would imply only sites that have a primary intent of pornographic material, not sites that could include it accidentally.
The moment the Russia Ukraine war hit, the top 10 apps in Russia was half VPNs.
As long as websites don't want to lock out any user without an account, and as long as vpns exist, it'll be hard to enforce any of this. At least for now, that's one line big tech won't let them cross easily.
It isn't a requirement to enforce this. All it does is to ensure that you will be more at risk of breaking the law and that little detail will show that you intended to evade the law so your presumption of innocence gets dinged: apparently you knew that what you were doing was wrong because you used a VPN so [insert minor offense or thought crime here] is now seen in a different light.
Selective enforcement is much more powerful as a tool than outright enforcement, before you know it double digit percentages of the populace are criminals, that might come in handy some day.
Not yet - only for searching extremist and terrorist content, no matter using VPN or not. Oh, almost the same content that is regulated by Online Safety Act in UK.
I had the misfortune of talking with a few potheads, and HN's reaction to porn addiction is the same of potheads, denialism, mental gymnastics, and everything but accepting that porn can actually be problematic.
The only reason it doesn't have it's own DSM classification is a mere question of technicality, whatever it is a separate and distinct kind of addiction, or just a manifestation of other types of hyper-sexual disorder.
School bullys, parents, friends, community members, church leaders and many others I imagine. The idea was that it would have your real name and it was verified by your ID.
Yep, I feel like there is a cognitive dissonance somewhere in there. On one thread about social media and internet affecting young people negatively, you have people saying parents should control their kids' exposure to the internet. And in another thread about ID laws, you have people saying kids should have privacy to roam the internet.
Parents have plenty of capacity to exercise control over their children.
For example, how about a law that says websites have to restrict access to pornographic content if the client's user agent sets an HTTP header indicating they don't want to see it? Now you don't have any privacy problems because the header contains no personally identifying information -- you don't even have to be under 18 to opt into it. But then parents can configure the kid's devices to send that header, without even impacting the kid's privacy to view content that isn't designated as pornographic, since the header is an opt-in to censorship rather than the removal of anonymity.
Also notice that an academic discussion of sexual identity isn't inherently pornographic but is something that can require privacy/anonymity.
Porn peddlers would probably pinky-promise not to disobey the user-agent and expose the kids to the content (and get them while they're young).
However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn peddlers better target children. We also know from recorded interviews with these predetors that they don't seem to actually mind exposing kids to porn.
I'm not sure how online privacy laws (or a lack of them) would spare a child who objected to marrying someone their parents wanted to force her to. Murdering your children is/was already illegal and the parents did that anyway. We can't worry about what the small number of psychopathic parents might do if kids don't have online privacy. We should instead try harder to make sure that kids are protected against their abusive parents regardless of the situation. There should have been places Shafilea could have gone to or reached out to for meaningful help and protection long before it got to the point of a murder.
That said, I personally think good parenting means giving children privacy, even online, and doing so increasingly at ages set according to the maturity/capability of the child. That's the sort of thing a parent is in a better position to assess than the government. I also think that this particular law is garbage. I just don't think "We must protect children from their parents by allowing them to access the internet in secret and anonymity" is a very compelling argument.
Minors are still humans who deserve rights. They should not be considered property of parents, regardless of fear mongering about grooming. Teenagers should have the right to access information without their parents knowing, as their parents can be just as, if not more dangerous to their health and well being as a hypothetical groomer. Many teens face real abuse from their parents over their sexuality. They should not be forced to live in the shadows or face abuse due to a "protect the kids" narrative.
I do, of course. It's just worth considering that not every parent is how you or I might like or imagine them to be.
For some children their parents finding out they're gay would cause a great deal of real world physical or phycological harm. It's a really tricky thing to navigate, but aside from saying 'no children should be allowed access to the internet unsupervised' it gets really difficult.
this is coming across as intentionally obtuse questioning. Many people, including governments think that adopting specific sexual preferences and identities is wrong and worthy of criminal charges and harassment at a minimum.
I wish that we didn't always have to phrase things like this. Yes, it's true that the aforementioned folks may likely have more of a need for anonymity than I do as someone who isn't a member of any protected class; but that doesn't mean I don't have a legitimate right to it too. And, if this is the way we phrase things, when a government is in power that doesn't care about this (i.e. the present American regieme), the argument no longer has any power.
We shouldn't have to hide behind our more vulnerable peers in order to have reasonable rights for online free speech and unfettered anonymous communication. It is a weak argument made by weak people who aren't brave enough to simply say, "F** you, stop spying on everyone, you haven't solved anything with the powers you have and there's no reason to believe it improves by shoving us all into a panopticon".
Totalitarian neoliberalism sucks; your protest petition with six million signatures is filed as a Jira ticket and closed as WONTFIX, you can't get anyone on the phone to complain at, everyone in power is disposable and replaceable with another stooge who will do the same thing as their predecessor. Go ahead and march in the streets, the government and media will just declare your protest invalid and make the other half of the population hate you on demand.
It's quite right that petitions are (mostly) ignored in Parliamentary matters, IMHO.
MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their constituents. Bills are debated, revised, voted on multiple times. There are consultations and input from a board range of view points.
A petition is in effect trying to shout over all that process from the street outside.
MPs belong to political parties - consider what happens if an MP's constituents and an MP's party disagree?
They might be allowed to vote against the government, if their vote will have no effect on the bill's passage - but if they actually stop the bill's passage? They're kicked out of the party, which will make the next election extremely difficult for them.
MPs are elected for reasonably long terms - and that means they regularly do things that weren't in their party manifesto. Nobody running for election in 2024 had a manifesto policy about 2025's strikes on Iran, after all!
That flexibility means they can simply omit the unpopular policies during the election campaign. A party could run an election campaign saying they're going to introduce a national ID card, give everyone who drinks alcohol a hard time, cut benefits, raise taxes, raise university tuition, fail to deliver on any major infrastructure projects, have doctors go on strike, and so on.
Or they can simply not put those things in their manifesto, then do them anyway. It's 100% legal, the system doing what it does.
I have just described how the public drives the democratic process to ensure everyone gets a voice, not just whoever shouts the loudest. That's the opposite of ignoring the public.
That's the nice-sounding theory, but I don't see any metrics on how well it works in practice. MPs aren't required to share the input from the public or publish lists of how they voted on every issue prior to elections. Representative democracy really includes very little accountability for the legislators.
You vote for someone who says "I will create more jobs"
They instead propose a bill that will cut jobs
There's deliberation, but a lot of other people want to cut jobs
Is you shouting "hey, that is not what I voted for!" yelling and disrupting process, or calling out the fact that you were lied to and your representative is in fact not representing you?
Yet this looks nothing like their reaction to SOPA and PIPA. They even explicitly state that Wikimedia is not against the legislation on the whole.
> The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
---
I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
The old generation of idealists grew up and we raised no one to replace them. I know because I'm in that emotionally and ideologically stunted generation.
A lot of 1990s tech optimists thought that people with awful opinions were the unfortunate victims of a lack of access to books and education; and the strict gatekeeping of broadcast media by the powerful.
This new multi-media technology was going to give everyone on the planet access to a complete free university education, thousands of books, and would prevent the likes of Chinese state-run media suppressing knowledge about Tienanmen Square.
And after they receive this marvellous free education, all the communists and nazis and religious nutjobs will realise they were wrong and we were right. We won't need any censorship though, in our enlightenment-style marketplace of ideas, rational argument is all that's needed to send bad ideas packing, and the educated audience will have no trouble seeing through fallacies and trickery.
Also the greater education will mean everyone can get better jobs and make more money, and with this trade with China we're just ramping up they'll see our brilliant democratic system, and peacefully adopt it. The recently fallen Soviet Union is of course going to do the same, and it's going to go really well. We'll all live happily ever after.
This Bill Clinton chap has a federal budget surplus, now we're not spending all that money on the cold war, so we'll get that national debt paid off in no time too.
You may be able to figure out why this particular brand of optimism isn't so fashionable these days.
To be fair, we have lots of things that people in the '90 were just hoping for (in medicine, tech, average world wealth, etc), but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.
Also, I think tech optimists might have a tendency to ignore how slow changes actually happen (thinking of how many times we got promised self driving cars or fusion).
My impression is that the covid pandemic had a huge psychological impact on everybody which resulted in anger and fear surfacing at all levels, with bad implications (emotion based decision making, aggressiveness, conflict). No clue if this is real or if it is how it will play out on the long term...
>but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.
Yes. The techis mostly there, and a few decades later it's readily available and cheap enough to be almost universally available. But you can't make a horse drink. The old guard may have underestimated the power of a cult and this attraction to authoritarianism. I didn't believe it either some decade ago. But seeing it before my eyes shows the folly of man.
COVID was definitely an accelerator for all these bad traits to come out of the woodwork. It could have been any economic downfall, but a global pandemic requiring a simple behavior to not die really showed this odd. If "wear a mask or you'll die" can't convince some people, I'm not sure what can.
I wouldn’t say that optimism and idealism are no longer fashionable, but instead that original optimism (however true) was blinded by it’s own lack of knowledge. We should still be perusing optimist/idealist outcomes but not the ones from another era.
Economic infantilisation and the new productised and externalised way of being brought upon by social media. We were an autopilot society that thought it had no need to restate values or keep innovating. The things that used to matter like community bonds and values dont matter literally because we cant see them in an instagram post and they may as well not exist-
plus the media and public sphere dysfunction we see through the fact that we haven't seen any new celebrities or public intellectuals elected in the past 10 years, telling people ideas don't get you anywhere.
This will only get worse as we are at the end of progression of this culture and cultural consensus has split between educated legacy media and uneducated young new media which develops its own often incorrect assumptions about the world- like about mental illness assumptions. It's cultural ouroboros- we're destroying parts of ourselves because they've grown too different. We need a new way forward and a new culture of contentment that champions the human.
If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.
>If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.
Maybe I'm a bit dramatic here, but the subtext I seem to get is that "legacy media is dying out and we're not going to cede power easily. Even if we burn the country down with us."
There's no graceful transfer to the next generation like usual (or perhaps, there never was a graceful transfer to begin with). It has this apocalyptic feeling where the old guard wants to do any and everything they want and don't care what happens after they are gone. Not every boomer, but it's the generation with those people in power.
It's a fire sale on american imperialism, capital and cultural dominance, and everyone wants in. American leadership is geriatric and asleep at the wheel and the dementia vote is dangerous. Everyone sees this as the free for all it is.
There will always be those who seek to create order from chaos for their own benefit. We're seeing multiple groups trying to emotionally stunt this next generation and sow social discord. These are the same groups that have blackmail on the current sitting. China is more of a military threat but russia is far more of a cultural threat because they understand the west, which is nothing to joke about. Hungary is obviously also influential, due to their constant meetings in the us and hungary with the heritage foundation, and their help in formulating the presidential transition project.
Our blue "friend" in the middle east is just as malicious, easily scorned and has a passion for retaliation.
Apathy and fatalism is ascendant in western leadership, just look at the culture behind davos and modern american tech start ups. Mass hardcore group sex parties of the wealthy and influential(davos and openai), designer drugs, an underlying humour on selling out the world and killing it with climate change. They don't care about the atomization of the individual or the sancitity of him either.
We need to identify the new poles of power to understand the currents that shape our world if we are to have any hope in fighting them.
>I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
I absolutely abhor the "Kids these days" sort of argument, but it does seem the case that we lowered the barrier of entry sufficiently in the tech sector that people who simply dont give a shit, or actively want to harm our values, now outnumber us greatly.
What has happened previously was we would rally around corporations and institutions that would generally work in our best interests. But the people driving those social goods in those entities are now the villains.
Not to mention all the mergers and acquisitions.
In Australia, during the internet filter debate, we had both a not for profit entity spending money on advertising, but also decently sized ISP's like iiNet working publicly against the problem. The not for profit was funded by industry, something that never happened again. And iiNet is now owned by TPG who also used to have a social conscience but have been hammered into the dust by the (completely non technical, and completely asinine bane of the internets existence and literal satan) ACCC and have no fight left in them for anything. When Teoh leaves or sells TPG, it will probably never fight a good fight ever again.
Its the same everywhere. We cant expect people to fight for freedom when the legislation just gets renamed and relaunched again after the next crisis comes out in the media. We lost internet filtration after christchurch, for absolutely no justifiable reason. And we lost the Access and Assistance fight despite having half the global tech industry tell our government to suck eggs.
The only real solution is to prep the next generation to fight back as best as possible, to help them ignore the doomsayers and help the right humans into the right places to deal with this shit.
> we lowered the barrier of entry sufficiently in the tech sector that people who simply dont give a shit, or actively want to harm our values, now outnumber us greatly.
I don't think it's a matter of number but activity. There are numerous ways that entities with no morals can make huge amounts of money by exploiting people online (via weaknesses in human psychology adapted for hunting on a savannah), both children and adults. It's hard to make money doing the opposite.
Hey hey hey.. hold on, wait a minuet. What did you just say about the ACCC. Those guys make sure we have good warranties and cracking down on scams. They are the good guys protecting us from the scammers and cooperate greed.
I share your general frustration, but as an unabashed Wikimedia glazer, I have some potential answers:
1. They lost this legal challenge, so perhaps their UK lawyers (barristers?) knew that much broader claim would be even less likely to work and advised them against it. Just because they didn't challenge the overall law in court doesn't mean they wouldn't challenge it in a political sense.
2. The Protests against SOPA and PIPA[1] were in response to overreach by capitalists, and as such drew support from many capitalists with opposing interests (e.g. Google, Craigslist, Flickr, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress, etc.). Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns with having to implement ID systems as they did about policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact will be on minors, which AFAIK are far from the most popular advertising demo. Certainly some adult users will be put off by the hassle and/or insult, but how many, and for how long?
3. Wikimedia is a US-based organization, and the two major organizers of the 2012 protests--Fight for the Future[2] and the Electronic Frontier Foundation[3]--are US-focused as well. The EFF does have a blog post about these UK laws, but AFAICT no history of bringing legal and/or protest action there. This dovetails nicely with the previous point, while we're at it: the US spends $300B on digital ads every year, whereas the UK only spends $40B[4]. The per-capita spends are closer ($870/p v. $567/p), but the fact remains: the US is the lifeblood of these companies in a way that the UK is not.
4. More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting children from adult content". We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of the day, people do seem concerned about children accessing adult content. IMHO YouTube brainrot content farms are a much bigger threat to children than porn, but I'm not a parent.
The final point is perhaps weakened by the ongoing AI debates, where there's suddenly a ton of support for the "we're protecting artists!" arguments employed in 2012. Still, I think the general shape of things is clear: Wikimedia stood in solidarity with many others in 2012, and now stands relatively alone.
> Just because they didn't challenge the overall law in court doesn't mean they wouldn't challenge it in a political sense.
That's my point, though. This is the perfect opportunity to do so, and they aren't doing it. Instead, they are picking the smallest possible battle they can. That decision alone makes waves.
> Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns with having to implement ID systems as they did about policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact will be on minors.
That's ridiculous. ID systems endanger everyone, particularly the adults who participate. This issue isn't isolated from capitalism. These ID systems must be implemented and managed by corporations, whose greatest incentive is to collect and monetize data.
> We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of the day, people do seem concerned about children accessing adult content.
The think-of-the-children argument is the oldest trick in the book. You are seriously asking me to take it at face value? No thank you.
> More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting children from adult content".
If people really are blind to the change that has happened right in front of them, then we should be spelling it out at every opportunity. This is my biggest concern with how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a significant position politically, and are abdicating this crucial responsibility.
Some of it is probably about the scope of UK judicial review. Acts of Parliament are absolutely exempt from being struck down. The closest you can get is a "declaration of incompatibility" that a bill is incapable of being read in such a way as complying with the European Convention on Human Rights. If at all possible the courts will gloss and/or interpret hard to come up with a compliant reading. And an incompatibility declaration just suggests Parliament looks again: it doesn't invalidate a law by itself.
Executive acts, on the other hand, can be annulled or overturned reasonably straightforwardly, and this includes the regulations that flesh out the details of Acts of Parliament (which are executive instruments even when they need Parliamentary approval).
In short, judicial review is a practical remedy for a particular decision. "These regulations may unreasonably burden my speech" is potentially justiciable. "This Act could be used to do grave evil" isn't. If an act can be implemented in a Convention compatible way then the courts will assume it will until shown otherwise.
The consequences can look something like the report of this judgement. Yes, it looks like the regulations could harm Wikipedia in ways that might not be Convention compatible. But because interpretation and enforcement is in the hands of Ofcom, it's not yet clear. If they are, Wikipedia have been (essentially) invited to come back. But the regulations are not void ab inito.
Thanks for the detailed answers! Again, I share at least some of your underlying concern, and don't want that to be overshadowed. That said, some responses:
This is the perfect opportunity to do so, and they aren't doing it. Instead, they are picking the smallest possible battle they can.
It looks like they've written three articles "strongly" opposing the "tremendous threat" posed by this bill: two when it was being considered[1,2] and another after it passed[3]. Yes, these articles are focused on the impact of the bill on Wikimedia's projects, but I think that's clearly a rhetorical strategy to garner some credibility from the notoriously-stuffy UK legislature. "Foreign nonprofit thinks your bill is bad in general" isn't exactly a position of authority to speak from (if you're thinking like a politician).
More recently, they've proposed the "Wikipedia test" to the public and to lawmakers (such as at the 2024 UN General Assembly[6]) that pretty clearly implicates this bill. The test reads as such: Before passing regulations, legislators should ask themselves whether their proposed laws would make it easier or harder for people to read, contribute to, and/or trust a project like Wikipedia.
That's ridiculous. ID systems endanger everyone, particularly the adults who participate.
I was more making a point about why social media companies aren't involved than justifying that choice for them on a moral level. I suspect you have stronger beliefs than I about the relative danger of your name being tied to (small subsets of-)your online activity, but regardless, Wikimedia agrees, writing in 2023 that the bill "only protects a select group of individuals, while likely exposing others to restrictions of their human rights, such as the right to privacy and freedom of expression."
The think-of-the-children argument is the oldest trick in the book. You are seriously asking me to take it at face value? No thank you.
It's still a valid argument. Again I wasn't really endorsing any position there, but I do think that in general the government should try to protect children. The only way I could imagine you disagreeing with that broad mandate is if you're a strong libertarian in general?
This is my biggest concern with how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a significant position politically, and are abdicating this crucial responsibility.
This, I think, is the fundamental disagreement: I just don't see them as being in that significant of a position. Given today's news I wouldn't be surprised to see them throw up a banner on the Wikipedia homepage and/or do a solo one-day blackout reminiscient of 2012, but even those drastic measures are pretty small beans.
The real nuclear option--blocking the UK from accessing Wikimedia sites--would certainly garner some attention, but it would cost them greatly in terms of good will, energy, and raw output from their (presumably quite significant) UK editor base. And when would it end? If the UK government chooses to ignore them, wouldn't it feel weird for Wikipedia to be blocked for years in the UK but remain accessible in brutal autocracies worldwide?
In the end, this feels like a job for UK voters, not international encyclopedias. I appreciate the solidarity they've shown already, but implying that they are weak for "abdicating [their] crucial responsibility" seems like a step too far.
The UK spent the last weekend arresting hundreds of people for holding up signs with the words "Palestine Action" on them, while ignoring people marching around and giving Hitler salutes.
Anyone expecting sanity from the UK on this topic is being somewhat optimistic.
To reiterate - this is not about protecting kids. If it was about protecting kids it would be trivial to set up a blacklist of the most popular porn sites that need ID as a first step, and worry about other sites - like Wikipedia - later.
This is about setting up a mechanism for mass surveillance of future dissent.
The "think of the kids" argument is a Trojan horse - a standard and predictable populist appeal to protective emotions.
Pretty telling what speech on the left and the right looks like.
For the left, it's:
> Eugene Debs, for example, was sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act after he spoke at a rally for peaceful workers telling them they were “fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder”... Likewise, in 1919, Schenck v. U.S., the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Socialist Party member after he sent anti-war leaflets to men across the country.
For the right, it's:
> It will not defend the First Amendment rights of pro-life pregnancy centers [...to trick desparate women into receiving useless propaganda instead of the medical care they were seeking] or small religious businesses [...to deny service based on rank bigotry]. It no longer defends religious freedom [...to deny adoptions to LGBT couples[1], to fire employees for receiving or abetting an abortion[2], and to perjure yourself in a senate hearing about your intention to make legal rulings on the basis of religion[3]], although it once did. And in a leaked internal memo, the ACLU takes the position that free speech denigrating “marginalized groups” should not be defended.
If you're ever in a position to write "marginalized groups" in scare-quotes, perhaps that should be a wakeup call...
P.S. It doesn't help that your links are to 1) a libertarian thinktank founded to oppose the New Deal, 2) the Heritage Foundation and 3) an opinion piece by Alan Dershowitz. The first is extremely biased, and the latter two are just plain bad-faith.
The next time somebody says the phrase "Fire in a crowded theater" to support free speech restrictions, remind them that this phrase comes from Schenck vs US (argued 1919), which was about whether you have the right to distribute antiwar pamphlets.
At issue was whether antiwar speech can constitutionally be punished as espionage, which can be a capital crime under US law, punishable by death.
Whether you're allowed to to speak in ways that Congress considers too close to 'creating a clear and present danger of a significant evil that Congress has power to prevent'. Whether you could criminalize speech deemed disloyal or detrimental to the war effort.
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921, and among other things, his administration dramatically expanded the precedential authority of the federal government in authoritarian directions, particularly with regards to things like surveillance and censorship. The Sedition Act of 1918 "broadened the scope of prohibited speech to include any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the U.S. government, flag, or military", and the Espionage Act of 1917 "made it illegal to interfere with the military, obstruct recruitment, or convey information that could harm the U.S. or aid its enemies. "
It took the Warren and Burger courts of the 60's/70's to reel this back in and re-establish many of the Constitutional rights you were taught about. It's unclear whether the pendulum will swing back the other way precedentially, but doubtless Trump would prefer carte blanche to target dissidents.
Linking from right-wing organizations does not make the facts presented in the articles less true… you should critique the content of the articles, not their origin.
Brandolini's Law is relevant. If we havs to carefully point-by-point critique every point our opponent makes, while they get to use ChatGPT to write nonsense at fifty times human reading speed, we lose.
To work around this, when a bullshit-producing organization is cited, it's proper to ask for an alternative citation from an organization that produces mostly non-bullshit. If it truly isn't bullshit content, there should be many, so cite one.
It's just spam filtering. I don't reply to "forward this to ten people you know or suffer eternal damnation" but my ignorance doesn't mean they're right. If you put important content in an email starting with "Dear Sir or Madam, I have a business proposal, I am a Nigerian prince" that's on you and the fact that I ignore your email doesn't mean I agree with whatever you wrote in the email.
Except that in this particular case these were not bullshit articles. I had time to read them and I agree with them. You should read the articles before calling them names….
> Except that in this particular case these were not bullshit articles.
They are, though. I had time to read them, too, and agree with the "bullshit" assessment. Each relies on the deeply bad-faith idea (in each case, from people/groups all quietly permitting much more significant First Amendment violations go unchallenged, like the President extorting law firms and colleges for millions of dollars) that the ACLU must take up every case that comes their way. That has never been the case; if the Heritage foundation wants that, they can step in and help fund.
A good portion of the ACLU's job is to determine which cases will meaningfully advance civil rights; which cases will lead to precedent or outcomes that support their goals.
If they are not bullshit content, then please prove it by citing the same content from a not bullshit source. There should be plenty.
In other words, if your email really isn't a Nigerian prince scam, why did you choose to begin it with the words "I have a business proposal for you - you see, I am a Nigerian prince"?
Neither the left or the right wants anything. People inside each group do. This is an important distinction that pundits love to invert.
I have a very hard time taking any of your sources seriously, particularly when it comes to any categorization of "the left".
FEE is a conservative libertarian think tank. Heritage Foundation is the most infamous conservative think tank. Alan Dershowitz is most famous for defending Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein, and decided to leave the Democratic party as soon as it showed signs of becoming a bit less Zionist.
These are prime examples of pundits who love to frame the "the left" as a singular cohesive boogeyman. You may not intentionally be picking on the left, but the sources you have cited make a living picking on a version of "the left" that they invented.
I am so much not willing to listen to what heritage specifically has to say on the topic. Could you pick less hypocritical and less eager to lie resources to "definitely not pick up on left totally both side"? Heritage foundation literally where Project 2025 was created and published.
Also, I definitely love the track record of "the measure of free speech is your willingness to defend nazi and never use words to support the left":
> To be sure, the ACLU will still occasionally take a high profile case involving a Nazi or Klan member who has been denied freedom of speech, though there are now some on the board who would oppose supporting such right-wing extremists. But the core mission of the ACLU — and its financial priority — is to promote its left-wing agenda in litigation, in public commentary and, now, in elections. If you want to know the reason for this shift, [...]
Yeah, their litmus test is always willingness to defend nazi AND not have left like opinions. If you are aligned with right wing specifically, you are fine. Just dont you dare to have left like opinions. Total neutral.
Sure, here are some liberal leaning sources saying things you might not like if you believe these things, including vile things said by extremist groups, should be censored:
Please note: I 100% abhor white supremacy and any kind of racism. But you can and should defend the right to free speech without agreeing with that speech.
We need to support the speech of all groups we detest - baby eaters, satanists, polygamists, racists, sexists, murderers, capitalists, Marxists, televangelists, etc. - in order to champion free speech for all. Once that freedom disappears, it won't come back. Then the systems of censorship and oppression will be used against us.
I'm LGBT. I know what it was like to grow up when my "lifestyle" was taboo. I know how easily and quickly society can change. I don't want to ever have my freedom removed or to be put into a box.
If you're uneasy about this, remember that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from judgement. If you say something disgusting, you'll lose credibility and business from most people. Crowds already effectively censor. But we don't need the government or public squares becoming thought police and building automated systems to muzzle and detain us. Once those systems get built, we're done for.
> We need to support the speech of all groups we detest - baby eaters, satanists, polygamists, racists, sexists, murderers, capitalists, Marxists, televangelists, etc. - in order to champion free speech for all.
Except that, in practice the defense of self styled free speech advocates did not extended to left, gay, radical feminists, progressives anyone not far right.
In what world is NY times left leaning.
> If you're uneasy about this, remember that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from judgement.
Somehow that part did applied to only selected groups. Criticising right and conservatives was treated as grave danger to free speech by the self styled free speech advocates.
The big crisis of free speech is never about speech rights of anyone left of center. Literally even now.
> Except that, in practice the defense of self styled free speech advocates did not extended to left, gay, radical feminists, progressives anyone not far right.
IANAL, but I assume this could open Wikimedia leadership to charges of contempt and eventually lead to needing to avoid visiting the UK or other extraditing countries and potentially pave the way for asset seizures. You generally don't want to antagonize world power governments.
That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not wikimedia’s responsibility to ensure people from the UK don’t hit their servers by typing wikipedia.org into the browser bar.
That does make sense, but then that would mean that any business not doing business in UK would not have to follow the rule, which would make the rule worthless. But I hope I am wrong.
"It doesn’t matter where you or your business is based. The new rules will apply to you (or your business) if the service you provide has a significant number of users in the UK, or if the UK is a target market."
As ridiculous or absurd as this idea might seem, it's probably the most succinct and likely effective response to this kind of situation. The UK is betting the rest of the world doesn't reciprocate.
No, they should block with a very visible message, tailored to the british public. I know what that status message means, you know it, but the general public doesn't. They need the black page with big letters they used before with sopa/pipa/etc.
We need new 6xx codes. "Requests that are fine, need no redirection and have no errors but are blocked because of politics, overbearing laws or regime"
I wish all non-UK entities which may be affected by this law just dropped the UK. But unfortunately it seems they have too much money invested in not doing that.
But I'm sure even if that happened, the public consensus would just be "good riddance".
This after the gaffe with the postal services, we are going to see some innocent folks being branded.
In general, I think we need a shift in society to say "yea, screw those kids". We don't put 20km/h limits everywhere because there's a non-zero chance that we might kill a kid. Its the cost of doing business.
Having privacy MEANS that it is difficult to catch bad people. That is just the price. Just swallow it and live with it.
Problem with Wikipedia specifically going all-in on a UK block is, due to the licence, there's nothing to stop someone circumventing the block to make a OSA-compliant Britipedia mirror with minimal effort.
“Pay this or we will concoct some criminal charges on your entire leadership team, append each of you to interpol lists and formally request your extradition” is probably a good start.
Problem is that all that most people want out of Wikipedia is ingested in LLMs and for unfathomable reasons people now go to those first already. So the general public might not even notice Wikipedia being inaccessible.
1) There are multiple posters on this site, they sometimes have contradictory opinions.
2) Lots of people like it when a company does an obviously good thing, and dislike it when a company does an obviously bad thing. I guess you’ve made a happy discovery: it turns out the underlying principle was something about what the companies were trying to accomplish, rather than some reflexive “American companies are bad” silliness.
I'd like to add, it's fine and dandy to have the stance that huge corporations in general shouldn't throw their weight around to shape politics, that's still not the world we live in and that must be acknowledged.
Even if I'd rather have Wikipedia stay put, it does matter to me if they push for something I support as opposed to something that I'm against.
Not to dismiss bee_rider's sibling comment, like at all, but: Wikimedia's nature and purpose might be distinguished from your generic "American" tech "company".
> Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
It is a gamble. If people increasingly get their “encyclopedic” information via AI, then it might make almost no noise and then the govt will have even more leverage.
In the recent ChatGPT 5 launch presentation, ChatGPT 5 answered a question about how airplane wings produce uplift incorrectly, despite the corresponding Wikipedia page providing the correct explanation and pointing out ChatGPT’s explanation as a common misconception.
AI chatbots are only capable of outputting “vibe knowledge”.
Yeah, but even so people use that nonsense, not checking if anything is correct. I suspect not enough people would notice that Wikipedia is inaccessible, sadly.
Wikipedia is a moving target. Content today is not the content of yesterday or tomorrow. This is like saying all knowledge that humanity can gain has already been accomplished.
My personal test usage of AI is it will try to bull shit an answer even when you giving known bad questions with content that contradicts each other. Until AI can say there is no answer to bull shit questions it is not truly a viable product because the end user might not know they have a bull shit question and will accept a bull shit answer. AI at it's present state pushed to the masses is just an expensive miss-information bot.
Also, AI that is not open from bottom to top with all training and rules publicly published is just a black box. That black box is just like Volkswagen emissions scandal waiting to happen. AI provider can create rules that override the actual answer with their desired answer which is not only a fallacy. They can also be designed to financially support their own company directly or third party product and services paying them. A question about "diapers" might always push and use the products by "Procter & Gamble".
Despite having consumed all of Wikipedia, it still can't accurately answer many questions so I don't think it's relevance or value has waned. AI has not got anywhere near becoming an encyclopedia and it never will whilst it can't say I don't know something (which Wikipedia can do) and filter the fact from the fiction, which Wikipedia does uses volunteers.
Good point, it's similar to some extent. Although clearly the quality of the work that the people doing RLHF on the major LLMs is rather low in comparison with those volunteering at Wikipedia.
There were no "good" volunteers qualifier used though. Obviously, some RLHF "volunteers" are better than others just like some used by Wiki are better than others. I wonder if there's edit battles between RLHF like we've seen on Wiki?
> Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
I'm quite critical of the implementation of this legislation but the idea of an American company throwing their weight around trying to influence policy decisions in the UK gives me the ick.
Fair enough if the regulations mean they just don't want to do business there but please don't block access to try and strong arm the elected government of another nation.
Well, that would be tricky, since Wikipedia is not a business, and is nor is it specifically American. (Other than a foundation in the US that runs the servers) . There are Wikipedias in many of the world's languages!
If the UK effectively bans public wikis above a certain size (even if by accident), then it is the law of the land that Wikipedia is banned. Or at least the english wikipedia, which is indeed very large. And if it is banned, then it must block access for the uk, under those conditions. Depending on the exact rules, possibly the uk could make do with the Swahili wikipedia?
That said, the problem here is that it is a public wiki of a certain size. One option might be for Wikipedia to implement quotas for the UK, so that they don't fall under category 1 rules.
Another option would be to talk with Ofcon and get things sorted that way.
By Wikipedia I meant the foundation of course. I'm not sure localisation automatically makes them a multinational entity. Windows is available in Chinese but we both understand that Microsoft is not a Chinese company.
It is fair to say it's not a business, but essentially there's no difference to my feeling that private entities from other countries shouldn't be throwing their weight around in local democracy.
Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it continuing to operate there?
The Wikimedia Foundation is not in charge of the Wikipedias per se (though as always, once you have a central organization, it starts stretching its tentacles) .
Wikipedias are not merely localized versions of each other, they're truly independent.
If you happen to know two languages and want to quickly rack up edits (if that's your sport), arbitraging knowledge between two Wikipedias is one way to go.
Wikipedia is not throwing their weight around. They are merely pointing out that the law happens to make their operating model illegal, and surely that can't be the intent. If they are illegal, they cannot operate. Is "very well, we disagree, but if you truly insist, we shall obey the law and leave" throwing your weight around?
And yes, I get the impression that the UK's letter of the law could lead to a categorization with rules that (a) Wikipedia simply cannot comply with, and still be a Wikipedia. So in that case Wikipedia would be effectively banned.
But we're not there yet. Hence the use of proper legal channels, including this court case. Ofcom is expected to make their first categorizations this summer, so this is timely.
It's the foundation who are involved in this court action and who is the topic of this thread. The code uploaded to GitHub wouldn't change the geographic basis of Microsoft either...
But that said I want to be clear that I have no issue with the Foundation's current actions or position in the court system. I was responding only very specifically to the suggestion above that they "should" block Wikipedia access immediately in order to force the hand off the British government.
> Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law?
Wikipedia is certainly large enough, in terms of traffic. And as anyone can edit it, it would seem to be a user-to-user service, making it a Category 1 provider, equivalent to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.
And their wiki page about 'breasts' certainly shows photographs of female nipples. Their pages on penises are likewise illustrated. They also have pages about suicide and self-harm.
Wikipedia is also a website we could reasonably expect children to access.
And Wikipedia did lobby the government, before the act was passed, to make it clear they weren't subject to it, which the government opted not to do.
So it would certainly appear they are subject to it.
> Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it continuing to operate there?
This isn't so much up to feeling as it is up to interpretation of the law. If there isn't a good way for Wikipedia to hide parts of itself and the law requires that it does, then it is effectively banned by the letter of the law.
The question of it continuing to operate exists because it is an obvious good to society that the law is yet to act on shutting down themselves. Right now it continues to exist in the UK despite being illegal due to the good will (or incompetence if you're not feeling generous) of the UK government.
You call it strong arming, I call it malicious compliance. Wikipedia hosts images, it "may contain pornographic material". Make anyone trying to search up a top 5 website see it before their eyes on how this isn't just a way to affect pornhub.
>respect the democratic decisions
Let the peope have a say in the going ons instead of lying to get elected, and maybe we can call it democratic again.
Or they should not do business in them. To me this means block access. If you don't then they're supposed to block access to you anyway so who is strong arming who?
As I said in my first comment: if it makes doing business in the UK unpalatable then they are of course free to halt their operations. I was specifically responding to the suggestion above that they should do so as a bargaining move to force the government's hand.
The Wikimedia Foundation isn't "doing business" in the UK, they're a nonprofit. Their mission statement is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
Part of fulfilling that mission is opposing laws that restrict free knowledge and open access, so why should they not use their huge presence as a bargaining tool? Doing so directly aligns with their purpose.
Because there are legal avenues of protest awarded to them by the United Kingdom. They also definitely "do business" there even if they aren't in it for profit.
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
Well, the OSA was put into law by the Tories in 2023. The democratic decision of the UK was that they resoundingly rejected what the Tories were doing in the landslide win for Labour in the 2024 GE. I'd quite like UKGOV to respect the democratic decisions of the country and if they won't, I'm quite happy for other people to push back via the courts, public opinion, etc.
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
They do that by staying out of such countries. Many US companies don't want to work with EU GDPR and just block all european IPs, wikipedia has full right to leave UK. They are under no obligations to provide service to them in the same was as pornhub is under no obligation to provide services in eg. a country that would require them to disclose IP addresses of all viewers of gay porn, etc.
Saying that it was a democratic decision without people actually being asked if they want that (referendum) is just weaseling out instead of directly pointing out that it's a bad policy that very few brits actually wanted. Somehow no one uses the same words when eg. trump does something (tarifs, defunding, etc.), no one is talking about democratic decisions of americans then.
Wikipedia has the full right to say "nope, we're not playing that game" and pulling out, even if an actual majority of brits want that.
I know that and I've been clear about it several times. If business subs unpalatable they gave every right to withdraw. I was responding to the suggestion above that they should do so explicitly as a bargaining chip.
And parliamentary representative democracy is still very much democratic even without referenda on every little issue.
Is it "democratic" when both parties agree on everything of substance and elections don't change anything no matter who wins? Because that's how "democracy" has worked in the UK for at least as long as I've been alive.
Also, no-one asked for this bill, both parties support it, it received basically no debate or scrutiny and was presented as a fait accompli. Where's the democracy exactly?
There are any number of criticisms I would happily join you in directing at the British parliamentaey system but I don't think relying on American businesses to pressure the government would actually be the win for democracy you seem to suggest?
For all it's issues, it's practically bad faith to argue that the UK is a democracy in the spirit of the term. I believe that's how the EU works with law?
Representives not representing their constituents makes democracy a sham. If you think representatives as of late are acting in good faith, I question yours.
The correct time for major service providers to shift their weight and start pulling out of any jurisdiction necessary to get their point across has already come and gone. The second best time would be as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, the Internet world we live in today isn't the one I grew up in, so I'm sure things will just go according to plan. Apparently a majority of Britons polled support these rules, even though a (smaller) majority of Britons also believe they are ineffective at their goals[1]. I think that really says a lot about what people really want here, and it would be hard to believe anyone without a serious dent in their head really though this had anything at all to do with protecting children. People will do literally anything to protect children, so as long as it only inconveniences and infringes on the rights of the rest of society. They don't even have to believe it will work.
And so maybe we will finally burn the house to roast the pig.
I think this is actually a better place to draw the line than the EU’s Digital Services Act, for example. It's just the UK. Blacking out service for EU would be a more bitter pill to swallow.
In Russia there is a plan to make special SIM cards for children, that would not allow registration in social networks. Isn't it better than UK legislation?
The whole idea that every site or app must do verification is stupid. It would be much easier and better to do verification at the store when buying a laptop, a phone or a SIM card. The verification status can be burned in firmware memory, and the device would allow only using sites and apps from the white list. In this case website operators and app developers wouldn't need to do anything and carry no expenses. This approach is simpler and superior to what UK does. If Apple or Microsoft refuse to implement restricted functionality for non-verified devices, they can be banned and replaced by alternative vendors complying with this proposal. It is much easier to force Apple and Microsoft - two rich companies - to implement children protection measures than thousands of website operators and app developers.
Rare case of Russian doing something more honestly. Implementing it as a device flag sent to websites, and making it easy to set for the device of any minor, is an elegant and unintrusive solution.
If you get w3.org and major browser and os vendors in on it, it simply becomes a legally enforced an universal parental control without much drawbacks.
But that would not permit the complete tracking of identity of all individuals in a country with their ptivate Internet activity and political stance.
And that's a massive loss to the true purpose of any law pretending to protect children; Just like the multiple attempts to outlaw encryption or scan all private or messages.
In case with Windows laptop, the verification proof might be for example, a digitally signed serial number of the motherboard (and the OS is itself signed to prevent tampering). While it's possible to work around this, an average kid or adult is unlikely to do it. And in case with a phone there is almost zero chance to hack it.
I don't understand your comment, the government knows which sites you visit anyway because it can see the SNI field in HTTPS traffic.
The main point is that the verification is done on the device. The device has a digitally signed flag, saying whether it is owned by an adult user or not. And the OS on the device without the flag allows using only safe apps and websites sending a "Safe: yes" HTTP header. User doesn't need to send your ID to random companies, doesn't need to verify at every website, and website operators and app developers do not need do anything and do not need to do verification - they are banned from unverified devices by default. It is better for everyone.
Also, as I understand the main point of the Act is to allow removing the content the government doesn't like in a prompt manner, for which my proposal is not helpful at all.
I think the better option is wikipedia to pull all operations out of the UK that might be there and NOT block UK IP addresses. Stand up for the British people, thumb their nose at the British government. Let the UK put up a "Great Firewall of Great Britain" so the British people understand how close their government is flirting with fascism, while they still have time to remove the fascist leaning politicians.
For the record, I'm not actually against age verification for certain content. But it would have to be:
1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services).
2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate.
The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. And the measures they say they will accept are trivially easy to bypass - so what's the point?
I worked in a startup that satisfied point 1 back in 2015. The widely available bit didn't come off though when we ran out of runway.
Age verification should be done at the point of buying a laptop or a SIM card, the same way as when you buy alcohol. And there would be no need to send your ID to a company so that it ends up on the black market eventually.
there's some irony that the EU is set to have a fairly anonymous solution like next year. they could have waited or tried to use similar tech for this, in theory
Important to note: Their anonymous solution is reported to be temporary until their digital ID system is released[1], which does not offer that same anonymity, but rather functions as a server-side OpenID-based authentication system.[2] While you can share only your age with an online service, it still creates an authorization token, which appears to remain persistent until manually removed by the user in the eID app. This would give the host of that authentication system (EU and/or governments) the ability to see which services you have shared data with, as well as a token linked to your account/session at that service. There is also no guarantee that removing an authorization will actually delete all that data in a non-recoverable way from the authentication system's servers.
It's anonymous to the sites or companies you use it with and not to the government, but that would still be more robust than the uks checks so far. it's only end of 26 though, I thought it was at the end of this year instead.
And that really shows the difference in how the EU operates Vs the UK.
They see a general need which the market cannot easily satisfy on its own - it needs standardisation to be cheap and interoperable, and it needs an identity backed by a trusted authority. So they establish a framework and legislation to make that possible.
The UK instead just states it's illegal not to do it, but without any private and not-trivially bypassed services available.
Proactive vs reactive.
It is often said that legislation tends to lag behind technology. At last, the UK is beating the world by legislating ahead of it!
Add to that
3) Verifiable to a lay person that the system truly has those properties, with no possibility of suddenly being altered to no longer have those properties without it exceedingly obvious.
This whole concept runs into similar issues as digital voting systems. You don't need to just be anonymous, but it must be verifiably and obviously so — even to a lay person (read your grandma with dementia who has never touched a computer in her life). It must be impossible to make changes to the system that remove these properties without users immediately notice.
The only reason why paper identification has close to anonymous properties is the fallibility of human memory. You won't make a computer with those properties.
It's easy to demonstrate (3) for an age verification system - practical experience will amply demonstrate it to everyone.
Voting is very different - you do need to be able to demonstrate the fairness of the process verifiably to everyone - not just crypto nerds. Age verification - well, some people might get around it, but if it generally seems to work that is good enough.
China is doing great. Not saying the UK will do well, just that authoritarian regimes can be successful as states although not great for the commoners.
China only started doing great when they relaxed their ultra-centralized economic rules a little bit in the 1990s.
Read business books and news from the 80's - 90's, and they almost never mention China - it's all Germany, UK, Japan, USA. The stats tell the same story - China spent half a century going nowhere fast.
After liberalizing their economy, China spent the 90's quietly growing, and only started making real waves in the news around 2000.
All this to say that economic authoritarianism has never worked and there's no reason to suppose that the social kind is going to fare any better for anyone either.
Economic liberalism isn't really relevant to the question of social authoritarianism. While an enterprising individual in guangzhou can sell whatever he wants to the world without much state involvement, he can't really go around discussing Tibetan sovereignty for example.
Leaving the market never works - in Russia, once another Western site or app gets blocked, several local competitors instantly pop out. That's how the market works, there are always people hungry for money.
It would shield them from legal liability which is more than nothing.
That is the primary reason to ban UK visitors.
They do seem to be considering banning only users after the 7 millionth - 1 visitor every month to avoid being classified as category 1 instead. That would let them avoid some of the most onerous parts of the OSA that would require stripping anonymity from editors and censoring whatever Ofcom says is "misinformation" and "disinformation."
The UK is spearheading this charge, but if they are successful it will have paved the way for many more governments to embrace these policies. How this plays out is important for people living in every western country.
The US has been implementing similar bans sporadically as well. It's being done on a state-by-state basis due to the limited federal power structure of our government making it more difficult for minority power groups like fascists to push legislation.
I do believe the social factors leading to support for these bans are quite a bit different, but the core minds behind them are of the same creed.
I'm really confused about what would realistically happen if Wikimedia just decided to ignore those regulations.
They have surely ignored demands to censor Wikipedia in more authoritarian countries. What makes the UK different? Extradition treaties? Do they even apply here?
I have the same confusion about Signal's willingness to leave Europe if chat control is imposed[1], while still providing anti-censorship tools for countries like Iran and China. What makes the European laws they're unwilling to respect different from the Iranian laws they're unwilling to respect?
> They have surely ignored demands to censor Wikipedia in more authoritarian countries. What makes the UK different? Extradition treaties? Do they even apply here?
The UK has the authority to arrest them (anyone who owns a website) if they ever set foot in the UK if they feel they either haven't censored it adequately enough or refuse to do so.
It's one of the reasons why Civitai geoblocked the country.
Yes, there are unilateral policies and treaties that let the US and the UK collaborate in legal action (going through US institutions to judge them), some of them referenced in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal/Legal_Policies -- a keyword might be letters rogatory
Wikimedia also seems to have a presence in the UK https://wikimedia.org.uk/ that presumably would be affected.
In most cases they might have enough pull to get folks blacklisted by payment processors, but wikimedia in particular might win that one.
- Employees become accountable for their company's actions
- Wikimedia could be blocked
- Other kinds of sanctions (e.g. financial ones) could be levied somehow
In practice what will likely happen is Wikimedia will comply: either by blocking the UK entirely, making adjustments to be compliant with UK legislation (e.g. by making their sites read-only for UK-users - probably the most extreme outcome that's likely to occur), or the as-yet unannounced Ofcom regulations they've preemptively appealed actually won't apply to Wikimedia anyway (or will be very light touch).
Having moved out of the uk many years ago, being banned from there, may not be such a bad thing.
The worst thing is, people will vote out the labour government, and the tory bastards (who will say they are 'the party of freedom) will tell the country "Well, it wasnt us".
Its worth noting of course, that this is Tory law which was given a grace period before implementation. Labour have chosen to continue its implementation and not repeal it.
.... so far it is. Current politicians are certainly working at the state level to stop anonymous internet usage. Currently limited to pr0n sites, but you can bet that's just the first notch of increased heat on that poor frog in the cooking pot
The whole idea that the UK government, or anyone, can distinguish between "worthy" and "unworthy" exceptions is absurd in itself. The fact that they recognize there are exceptions blows a hole in the whole thing.
The OSA is already written such that only very large sites are potentially caught by the most onerous rules (at least 7 million MAU for Category 1; at least 3 million MAU for Category 2B). Smaller sites are automatically exempted.
This isn't to say that the OSA is a universally good thing, or that smaller sites won't be affected by it. However, this request for judicial review wasn't looking to carve out any special cases for specific large sites in favour of smaller sites.
No, they're not. I don't know why people keep repeating this "7 million active users limit" idea, it's nowhere to be found in the actual rules. Tiny forums have already had to close because they didn't want to deal with the legal risk:
Quite. Sites that have resources and influence will be fine - they can either comply with the rules or will be given soft exemptions. It's small and new communities that will suffer.
I was just vacationing in the UK last week and ran into this ridiculous thing trying to browse (entirely non-pornographic, fwiw) Reddit threads. Which I opted not to read rather than going through the hassle and privacy breach.
Also got to experience the full force of the cookie law, which I hadn't realized I was only seeing a fraction of here in Canada.
Much of it comes from GDPR law which was passed prior to brexit. After brexit, the UK kept most of the regulation under the "UK GDPR", meaning it does apply in the UK as well.
9 our of 10 online businesses will simply ban English users altogether. Which will be good for England as it will allow it to develop local competition without global multinationals' boot on their necks.
At least wikipedia has an out in the legislation by disabling content recommendation engines for UK users, this includes:
1. “You may be interested in…” search suggestions on the Wikipedia interface—these are algorithmic, content-based recommendations.
2. Editor suggestion tools that propose pages to edit, based on prior activity. Academic systems helping newcomers with article recommendations also qualify.
Most links within articles—like “See also” sections or hyperlinks—are static and curated by editors, not algorithmically chosen per user. That means they do not meet the recommender system definition.
The legislation text for reference:
"Category 1 threshold conditions
3.—(1) The Category 1 threshold conditions(10) are met by a regulated user-to-user service where, in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, it—
(a)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom users that exceeds 34 million, and
(ii)uses a content recommender system, or
(b)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom users that exceeds 7 million,
(ii)uses a content recommender system, and
(iii)provides a functionality for users to forward or share regulated user-generated content(11) on the service with other users of that service.
(2) In paragraph (1), a “content recommender system” means a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service.
"
Post reads: "Periodic reminder that Wikipedia has a squillion times more money than they need to operate the actual website, and all marginal donations go to the fake paper-shuffling NGO that attached itself to the organization for the purpose of feeding on donations from rubes."
Quoted post reads: "I have no interest in giving Wikipedia money to blow on fake jobs for ovecredentialed paper-pushers, but if the banner said “Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia and he’d like to buy a yacht” then I’d pull out my wallet immediately."
Long-time WP contributor and apologist here. I still think Wikipedia does more good than bad (for all its sins), is the greatest collaborative human work of our time, and there is some merit to the idea of having a giant pile of money to be able to fight government-scale battles like this one. But the story of the bureaucrats settling in and leeching donations at scale is basically accurate.
I've contributed content to Wikipedia and broadly agree with the sentiment. Users are guilted into thinking donations go towards the cost of serving the encyclopedia, which is not really where the money goes.
“Wikipedia is one of the best resources humanity has ever produced” and “The Wikimedia Foundation spends money frivolously while soliciting donations with messages that make users think their money is going towards the project they actually care about” are not statements which are incompatible with each other.
Wikimedia does by and large an OK job (the endowment they set up in particular was a great move), but it’s incredibly bloated in ways that should be curtailed before it gets worse. It’s reasonable to want better for a resource as important as Wikipedia.
Correct, it is especially of note given the publicity of Wikimedias funding and balances.
There is a million more greedy companies than Wikimedia, there is also other places that could use your money though, i.e Internet Archive, which is always desperate for donations.
I don't understand why Wikipedia would fall under Category 1. Am I looking at the wrong thing, or does the definition in 3.(1) not require the service to use an algorithmic recommendation system (which Wikipedia does not do)?
> Definition of content recommender systems: Having any “algorithm” on the site that “affects” what content someone might “encounter”, is seemingly enough to qualify popular websites for Category 1. As written, this could even cover tools that are used to combat harmful content. We, and many other stakeholders, have failed to convince UK rulemakers to clarify that features that help keep services free of bad content — like the New Pages Feed used by Wikipedia article reviewers—should not trigger Category 1 status. Other rarely-used features, like Wikipedia’s Translation Recommendations, are also at risk.
> Content forwarding or sharing functionality: If a popular app or website also has content “forwarding or sharing” features, its chances of ending up in Category 1 are dramatically increased. The Regulations fail to define what they mean by “forwarding or sharing functionality”: features on Wikipedia (like the one allowing users to choose Wikipedia’s daily “Featured Picture”) could be caught.
I agree, it does seem odd. They do promote bits of their content on the main page, I assume with an algorithm, but it's hardly like a social media feed.
Adding to what others said, they can just let UK block Wikipedia, but as a foundation that tries to share knowledge I think they're obliged to try avoid that. So they're doing just that right now, by challenging the law.
To me, that judgment reads like a fairly strong warning to Ofcom. The outcome section makes it clear that although the request for judicial review has been refused at present, that refusal is predicated on the fact that Ofcom has currently not ruled that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service. If Ofcom were to rule that Wikipedia is a C1 service, the Wikimedia foundation would have grounds to request a review again -- and, between the lines, that request might well succeed.
So, is Wikipedia really a Category 1 service? From https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2025/9780348267174, it seems to come down to whether Wikipedia is a site which uses a "content recommender system", where that term is defined as:
> a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service
There's plenty of flexibility in that definition for Ofcom to interpret "content recommender system" in a way that catches Facebook without catching Wikipedia. For instance, Ofcom could simply take the viewpoint that any content recommendation that Wikipedia engages in is not "in respect of the user-to-user part of that service."
After today's judgement, and perhaps even before, my own bet is that this is exactly the route Ofcom will take.
If Ofcom permissibly determines that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service, and if the practical effect of that is that Wikipedia cannot continue to operate, the Secretary of
State may be obliged to consider whether to amend the regulations or to exempt categories of service from the Act. In doing so, he would have to act compatibly with
the Convention. Any failure to do so could also be subject to further challenge. Such a challenge would not be prevented by the outcome of this claim.
Seems pretty logical.
Again I think people outside of the UK perceive Ofcom to be a censor with a ban hammer. It's an industry self-regulation authority -- backed by penalties, yes, but it favours self-regulation. And the implementation is a modifiable statutory instrument specifically so that issues like this can be addressed.
In a perfect world would this all be handled with parental oversight and on-device controls? Yeah, maybe. But on-device parental controls are such a total mess, and devices available so readily, that UK PAYG mobile phone companies have already felt compelled (before the law changed) to block adult content by default.
ETA: I am rate-limited so I will just add that I am in the UK too. Not that this is relevant to the discussion. There is no serious UK consensus for overturning this law; the only party that claims that as a position does not even have the support of the majority of its members. I do not observe this law to be censorship, because as an adult I can see what I want to see, I just have to prove I am an adult. Which is how it used to work with top shelf magazines (so I am told! ;-) )
I suppose it's not really the done thing to say this, but if you disagree with me, say something, don't just downvote.
As someone in the UK: Ofcom is a censor, that by leaving these things unclear are further having a massive chilling effect that is absolutely already being felt.
The issue here is not parental oversight. It's the massively overly broad assault on speech.
The UK PAYG block is a good example of a solution that would have had far less severe impact if extended.
Pretty sure the PAYG block is circumvented by simply changing the APN in the carrier settings using freely available information online - that's how 3Ireland works and VodafoneIRL IIRC. It also had the annoying consequence of blocking all 'adult' sites - which included sites of historic interest and things like the internet archive.
The problem with 'child safety' in the UK has almost nothing to do with pornographers or 'toxic' influences as viewed through the lense of neo-Victorian morality anyway.
Instead, it is a societal powderkeg of gang indoctrination and social deprivation leading to a culture of drug-dealing, violent robberies, and postcode gang intimidation. This bill is simply a cheap and easily supported deflection from the dereliction of duty of successive governments towards the youth of the country since Blair.
In short, it is nothing but an electoral panacea for the incumbent intolerant conservative voting base; moral-hysteria disguised as a child safety measure.
This is inherently obvious when you assess the new vocabulary of persecution and otherness - detailing 'ASBO Youth', 'Chavs', 'NEETs and NEDs' and their inevitable progression to 'Roadmen'.
The Netflix series 'Top Boy' is the Sopranos equivalent of how this culture operates and how children are indoctrinated into a life of diminished expectations in a way that is often inescapable given their environment and cultural norms around their upbringing.
Even with this plethora of evidence and cultural consciousness, the powers that be are smugly insistent that removing PornHub is more important than introducing Social Hubs and amenities - and those that argue otherwise are derided as 'Saville's in the new parlance.
Normalizing those mosquito devices and trying to drive teenagers out of public life, banning kitchen knives in some attempt to keep kids from getting used to blades...
the UK strategy on kids is very very strange to me. I can't follow the logic at all. Do they expect them to silently sit at home, not using the Internet, not going anywhere with friends, and end up well adjusted adults anyway?
Because these trials and tribulations are designed to disenfranchise the lower classes - regardless of age, the protected classes tend to be unimpeded by societal measures in the UK.
If teenagers Felicity or Joshua need to purchase a knife, or access questionable internet content, it'll be an assumed part of their privilege that they'll be able to do so. Similarly they are unimpacted by anti-social behaviour orders or restrictions on their entitlement to exist in public spaces unmolested, as this is the demographic insulated by their memberships to 3rd spaces such as Social and Sporting clubs - a fry cry from their lower-class urban peers resigned to hanging around the Tesco carpark.
Seems like It’s just too dangerous for Wikipedia or many others to risk though - the potential penalties in the law are just too huge as far as I’ve seen.
For a lot of sites, the safe response has just been cautious over-blocking as far as I can see (or smaller UK-based services just shutting down) but you can imagine why Wikipedia don’t want to do that.
But you’re right that encouraging much better parental controls would have been better than passing this bad law - I’ll give you that one.
> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".
Suppression of information is not safety, it’s control.
To all of the commenters recommending that Wikipedia block UK visitors: This is incredibly short-sighted in the age of LLMs, where Wikipedia does not need to exist in a country in order for the benefit of its existence to be felt. Such a move would likely just drive people to obtain dubious regurgitations of Wikipedia’s (freely available) content via their favorite LLM chatbot, in my opinion.
Somehow this rhymes with the US's "War on Drugs", and it makes me very afraid:
Similarities I see:
* In the years leading up to government action, a mass hysteria was well cultivated in the media (evil drug users committing abhorrent crimes).
* When launched, the public was overwhelmingly in favor of it (In 1971, 48% of the public said drugs were a serious problem in their community [1]).
That's where we are now. THEN:
* It got worse for decades (By 1986, 56% of Americans said that the government spent "too little" money fighting drugs [1]).
* Following many years of lobbying, some rights are slowly restored. (NORML and other groups fighting for legal medical, then recreational use; mushrooms are legal in few places, etc).
* It's still going on today. (Over 100,000 people currently serving prison sentences for drug-related offenses [2]).
US should slap travel bans on UK politicians travelling to Disney parks and similar in Florida with their families. And/or with their older children visiting NYC. The combined pressure of the wives and their children, will knock sense in their thick skulls quickly. In the sense of - being stupid is not cost free. Atm it's cost free for them, and costly for me.
US is not exactly desirable location for tourism right now.
And like, appeal of of florida Disneyland as a dream place to go to was never all that huge abroad. The Disney cult/dream is more of an American thing.
Just leaving this here, in case things really start going south and people realize they need to stack up on knowledge supplies (note: I am not affiliated with them, I just think that Wikipedia, among other resources, is too valuable to let it fall through the cracks):
> When there is No Internet, there is Kiwix
Access vital information anywhere. Use our apps for offline reading on the go or the Hotspot in every place you want to call home. Ideal for remote areas, emergencies, or independent knowledge access.
I'm confused.. can't they appeal High Court decisions (since the UKSC was formed after the government didn't like the High Court's decisions in the Diego Garcia thing)? [1]
Is Wikimedia Foundation a UK entity? Otherwise why should it concern itself with some country's regulation? USA does not have a global jurisdiction. But it has global leverages.
It has UK based editors and users. Employees of the foundation surely travel to the UK. They take donations from UK users. Their network peers with UK based ISPs.
They have enough touch points with the UK that complying not complying with UK law could cause significant problem.
Now is the best time to remember: if there's something you value online, download it. There's no problem with downloading the entirety of wikipedia, and it's actually pretty easy and light to do so. Get your favorite songs, movies, etc. too ASAP
From about ten years ago, ISPs were required to block web sites which were unsuitable for children by default. Any ISP's customer (the person paying for internet access, who would therefore be over 18) could ask for the block to be removed. Requiring individual web sites to block access was unnecessary if the intention was to prevent children accessing those sites.
My understanding is that the default "block" just worked through the ISP's DNS servers. So that only works if the parents know to restrict the ability of their kids to change their DNS servers on their local devices (which is not set up by default) and the kids don't know how to get around it.
I'm no longer convinced that nothing popular will be shut down, assuming that includes voluntarily withdrawing from the UK market. A couple of days ago, this popped up:
> The Science Department, which oversees the legislation, told companies they could face fines if they failed to uphold free speech rules.
> A spokesman said: “As well as legal duties to keep children safe, the very same law places clear and unequivocal duties on platforms to protect freedom of expression.
> “Failure to meet either obligation can lead to severe penalties, including fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue or £18m, whichever is greater.
They seem to be putting social media platforms between a rock and a hard place, particularly as political debate in the UK is starting to heat up somewhat. I suppose the best to hope for at this point is that fines for infringing free expression never materialize.
True, but its not going to get blocked. AFAIK all the big porn sites are happily implementing age verification. Why not? Its an excuse to gather data, to increase numbers of registered users or some other form of tracking, and to raise a barrier to entry to smaller competitors.
Other aspects of the OSA have similar effects on other types of sites such as forums vs social media.
Because only 10% of visitors actually do it. It might not be as bad as this because probably anyone who was actually going to pay for the porn would be ok with giving them their credit card number anyway. Bad for advertising income though.
Some are not, an ironically, Ofcom's website now provides a handy list of websites you can visit without age verification (in their list of companies they are investigating)
> AFAIK all the big porn sites are happily implementing age verification
I don’t know what you had in mind by “big porn sites”, but the biggest one I know of (Pornhub) is not doing that.
They decided to voluntarily withdraw from the US markets where age verification became required (TX, GA, etc.), and wrote a pretty good blog post explaining their rationale (which revolved around the idea that letting third parties to just receive and process ID documents just so that users could watch porn was both not secure at all and absurd).
I just tried to visit pornhub and was prompted to verify my age.
> Please verify your age
>
> To continue, we are required to verify that you are 18 or older, in line with the UK Online Safety Act.
> To view your verification options, please visit our Age Verification Page. As part of this process, you will be asked to create a new account on Pornhub - this will automatically create a new account on AllpassTrust as well.
> By proceeding, you acknowledge and agree to Pornhub’s and AllpassTrust’s Privacy Νotices and Pornhub’s and AllpassTrust’s Terms & Conditions.
> Pornhub is dedicated to developing state-of-the-art security features to protect its community. Pornhub is fully RTA compliant, which means that devices with appropriately configured parental controls will block access to our content. We encourage all platforms in the adult industry to use this technology, along with all available safety and security protocols. We also recommend that all parents and guardians use technology to prevent their children from accessing content not intended for minors.
> Our parental controls page explains how you can easily block access to this site.
That won’t help them build a profile on you though and then, through the help of AI determine if you’re a threat because you’ve been displaying a pattern of looking at things you shouldn’t be.
What I hate most about this latest push is that people in their 30s are trying to convince us all that blocking children's access to porn and such is the issue. As if most people don't agree with that in the abstract.
Not only people in their 30s, but it's who I see making a fuss about it. Presumably because they are now parents of children newly reaching this age.
They are completely ignoring that they are entering a debate that's been going on for longer than they have been alive, and are just arguing from a source of "common sense" gut feelings. They are literally a third of a century behind on this issue, but it doesn't stop them talking about it.
They are incompetent on this issue (nothing bad about that. I'm incompetent in most things), but they are also stupid because they don't let that incompetence stop them.
They are too incompetent to understand that they just did the equivalent of entering a room full of mathematicians with a collective thousands of years of math knowledge, and saying "how about just making 2+2=5? You could make 2+2=4, so you smart people should be able to do it". How do you even start with someone this ignorant? They don't even understand what math is.
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" — "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
UK Online Safety Act has a much bigger scope than porn.
In fact you've picked probably the least offensive, which is not to say uncontroversial, part of the law to argue with. Its illegal to distribute porn to minors just like its illegal to let underage people gamble on your poker app.
Yet people in factor of age verification laws for porn still have concerns with this because it's just a totally open-ended backdoor into content moderation across the internet.
I wish I could agree with you, but this is not how things work. My experience says that if there's enough people wishing for 2+2 to equal 5, that will become the socially accepted standard, and the whole society will get organized around 2+2=5. Will it be less efficient? Yes. Will people care? No.
They are clueless to whatever an internet protocol is. Effectively, if it uses the "internet" and you interface with it from a device, it is subject to the ruling.
And if i were a lawyer i'd use the legal system - specifically i'd start by challenging OSA on the undue burden grounds for say BitTorrent - bringing in some experts, etc.. If not successful - such ruling would effectively prohibit all unauthenticated network activity - would make the cost of OSA clear to the public. If successful, i'd show that the same content OSA worried about - like p.rn - is widely available on BitTorrent, and thus having limitations for HTTP while not for BitTorrent is capricious or something like this.
This is about the duties of a "category 1 service" under the Online Safety Act. Wikipedia is one mostly because of their size, I believe. These duties are quite onerous, and over the top (someone might say that the government is seeing adults are real "snowflakes" these days):
Large user-to-user services, known as Category 1 services, will be required to offer adult users tools which, if they choose to use, will give them greater control over the kinds of content they see and who they engage with online.
Adult users of such services will be able to verify their identity and access tools which enable them to reduce the likelihood that they see content from non-verified users and prevent non-verified users from interacting with their content. This will help stop anonymous trolls from contacting them.
Following the publication of guidance by Ofcom, Category 1 services will also need to proactively offer adult users optional tools, at the first opportunity, to help them reduce the likelihood that they will encounter certain types of legal content. These categories of content are set out in the Act and include content that does not meet a criminal threshold but encourages, promotes or provides instructions for suicide, self-harm or eating disorders. These tools also apply to abusive or hate content including where such content is racist, antisemitic, homophobic, or misogynist. The tools must be effective and easy to access. [1]
If the incessant banner ads said, "Hello, this is a special plea from Jimmy Wales, get in, we're saving the Brits from themselves", then maybe I'd actually donate.
Right - in terms of liability there is nothing the UK can do to them if they aren't operating there. Up to the UK to block them with the Great British Firewall if they still aren't happy.
Having said that, if Wikipedia geo blocked the UK it would send a powerful message to everyone living here.
Going to be downvoted, but I support the move to make Wikimedia (and other websites that distribute user-generated content) to verify identities of their users (editors). It is ok to be responsible for what you're posting. We are living in the age of global irresponsibility.
And it doesn't mean Wikimedia must make the identities public. Same as any other website -- real identity to be provided only to authorities following a court order.
Also, there's a ton of bots and paid agents working full-time to shift political opinions to their political agenda.
Parliamentary democracy has proven absolutely useless in defending alienable rights like freedom of speech.
I have been trying to think what sort of system is ideal to replace them. I think there has to be some kind of strong constitution that guarantees aforementioned rights. But I also think it's instructive to look at America wrt how that can go awry - ie their constitution is routinely ignored, and a lot of the political decision making is done by fifth columnists lobbying for a foreign nation.
Regardless, we need to start having these conversations. It's not a matter of getting different people into Westminster. Westminster is illegitimate. Let's think about what's next and how we can get there peacefully.
I am not surprised. Every time I mention the draconian laws around digital speech when flying into london, hackernews historically said I was being ridiculous.
The UK has some of the oddest laws I have seen from a western nation.
If wikipedia can show the Jimmy Wales banners, then sure it can go for the throat of some politicians.
It allready collects few hubdred million per year, spends like 10 on wikipedia itself and rest goes for political projects. They could do something useful for once.
(On a side note: all those money and they dont use it to track the cliques / country level actors across admins...)
Of course it did. This is all completely arbitrary and the powers that be will do what they want and this is what you asked for, nay, begged for during covid.
> The government's lawyers argued that ministers had considered whether Wikipedia should be exempt from the regulations but had reasonably rejected the idea.
It's funny, I'm coming up on my citizenship application and I sure as fuck won't ever be voting for Labour. I would rather create my own party and fail then vote for them (or conservatives or Reform). It's amazing how accurate The Thick Of It is.
At what point is is time to put this very real island on a virtual island and just block all traffic that seems to be coming from there? Maybe they're right and all their meddling will really make the internet better, in which case I hope they enjoy their own private improved internet very much while I enjoy my inferior one in which I am not forced to aid materially in the government's surveillance of me.
Here in Canada there is Bill S-210 Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act aka "think of the children".
I don't think the politicians thought of or could conceive of the technological requirements needed if this passes. It's just a knee-jerk bill sponsored by self-professed Conservative Senator Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne. Conservatives of the CPC party in Canada are much farther right of center more evangelical religious than the old Progressive Conservatives PCs were.
Note that Senators in Canada are not like US Senators.
There are too many Big Tech bootlickers on YCombinator who enabled this. All of a sudden, they get to act surprised and morally superior. I guess this is who the gatekeepers let in, people who publicly seem moral but when push comes to shove they will always act evil.
It's disappointing that their argument was more "exempt up" and less "this is an unworkable law".
Not sure what comes next but wikipedia blocking UK followed by perhaps a study or two about harm done to the economy may be a good start to get the morons in charge to see the light
This whole saga tells me that nobody in UK gov knows wtf their doing on anything online. (This act was introduced under conservatives and passed under liberals)
> The categorisation regulations are a statutory instrument rather than primary legislation, so they _are_ open to judicial review. But the Wikimedia foundation haven't presented an argument as to why the regulations are unlawful, just an argument for why they disagree with them.
Ofcom's SI could simply be modified to exclude research texts, and it could even be modified to exclude Wikipedia specifically; there's no obvious problem with that considering its scale and importance.
The answers are 1) yes, 2) yes, 3) no, 4) probably "No, but...", 5) no, 6) no.
But the answer to getting out of the problem entirely might be to change the answer to question 6 -- that is, register Wikipedia as an education provider in the UK (since it is already used in that capacity).
I mean Wikipedia have actually exhibited at BETT, the main educational tech show here; Jimmy Wales did a keynote.
I was mostly familiar with laws that required porn companies to verify their user's age. That is a lot more targeted and less offensive than UK Online Safety Act Regulations IMO. I mean it's already illegal to distribute porn to minors - that's just requiring them to enforce it at the expense of porn watcher's anonymity. Whereas the UK Online Safety Act is more like a backdoor for content moderation across the internet.
The online safety act being a more well thought out step on this slippery slope doesn’t mean it isn’t leading to the same horrible end. We are just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".
Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.
> In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety.
Some of the articles, which contain factual information, are damning for the UK government. It lists, for example, political scandals [1] [2]. Or information regarding hot topics such as immigration [3], information that the UK government want to strictly control (abstracting away from whether this is rightfully or wrongfully).
I can tell you what will (and has already) happened as a result:
1. People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them.
2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.
3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_in_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Labour_Party_(UK)_sca...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...
The law was passed by the previous government and everyone assumed the next government would take great delight in reversing it.
I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government (which, by the way, there is still a non zero chance could be Labour) will necessarily reverse this. Maybe Reform would tweak the topics, but I’m not convinced any party can be totally trusted to reverse this.
Every single Labour politician who voted on this bill voted against it.
Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:
> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.
It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
> The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes disengagement feel like the only moderate move.
Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
Why? People make all kinds of empty promises to get into power.
True but all the other parties are currently saying that they 100% will not reconsider this stupid law[1].
I don’t like Farrage. At all.
He’s also currently the only MP questioning this law and he’s making fair points about it.
The government response is not a clever rebuttal but Jess Philips and Peter Kyle making ad hominem arguments comparing him the nastiest people in our country’s history.
1. It’s stupid not because of its goal but because it doesn’t protect kids but does expose vast numbers of adults to identity fraud.
They're all using it to virtue signal their hatred of child porn. It's basically religious at this point. You stray from the line and someone just shouts infidel and you get stoned to death.
Unfortunately the atheism movement of a about ten years ago didn't go far enough in making people aware that religion isn't just about big men in the sky who are the same colour as you. What it actually is is a deficiency in human ability, a bypass for the logical centres of the brain and a way to access the animal areas that can get people to do terrible things to each other. Some of them, like Hitchens, definitely understood this, but nobody seems to be talking about it any more and we didn't learn to be vigilant of this deficiency.
Governments do seem to hate weakening their power over the population.
If Wiki had the guts it'd leave the UK. Nothing will happen unless there's a backlash from the citizenry.
Wiki isn't the citizenry.
And no one voted for this.
When one votes in this so-called "democracy", one votes for a representative to represent 'you and thousands of others' on thousands of decisions.
And even then, if both parties want to do something, as in this case, there is nowhere to go.
This is force. If you can't say 'no', this is immoral, coercive force, even if the person or party doing the forcing says it isn't.
And no, the forcer (government) won't give back freedoms (the right to privacy) that it takes away.
In the end, the only moral, respectful and free way to proceed, without force, ie where people opt in. Individuals would opt in/out to paying tax for wars/schools/online safety, etc.
"But it is impossible that everyone should be allowed to only opt in to the decisions they like!" .. is only the case because we think it is normal to endlessly abused by governments and because so many citizens are dependent on its handouts.
What? I can't imagine anybody who was paying attention through any of this would have expected that Starmer's Labour would reverse this...
If the current government reversed it, the 'oh think of the children' angle from the Tories/Reform against them would be relentless. I cant say they have been amazing at messaging as it is.
The current leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform are on record as being against the Act. While this doesn't preclude them changing their mind, it does make it more difficult for them to reverse course.
They will reverse it when politicians visiting pron sites are exposed through a leak or something. Everybody else uses VPNs.
Politicians already use VPN and even expense it. They've got their ducks in a row.
> I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government will necessarily reverse this.
Agreed. I think the supposed justifications for mass population-wide online surveillance, restrictions and de-anonymization are so strong most political parties in western democracies go along with what surveillance agencies push for once they get in power. Even in the U.S. where free speech & personal privacy rights are constitutionally and culturally stronger, both major parties are virtually identical in what they actually permit the surveillance state to do once they get in office (despite sometimes talking differently while campaigning).
The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings. They keep these presentations secret from public and press scrutiny by claiming it's necessary to keep "sources and methods" secret from adversaries. Of course, this is ridiculous because adversary spy agencies are certainly already aware of the broad capabilities of our electronic surveillance - it's their job after all and they do the same things to their own populations. The intelligence community rarely briefs politicians on individual operations or the exact details of the sources and methods which adversarial intelligence agencies would care about anyway. The vast majority of these secret briefings could be public without revealing anything of real value to major adversaries. At most it would only confirm we're doing the things adversaries already assume we're doing (and already take steps to counter). The real reason they hide the politician briefings from the public is because voters would be creeped out by the pervasive surveillance and domain experts would call bullshit on the incomplete facts and fallacious reasoning used to justify it to politicians.
Even if a politician sincerely intended to preserve privacy and freedom before getting in office, they aren't domain experts and when confronted with seemingly overwhelming (but secret) evidence of preventing "big bad" presented unanimously by intelligence community experts, the majority of elected officials go along. If that's not enough for the anti-privacy agencies (intel & law enforcement) to get what they want, there's always the "think of the children" arguments. It's the rare politician who's clear-thinking and principled enough to apply appropriate skepticism and measured nuance when faced with horrendous examples of child porn and abuse which the law enforcement/intelligence agency lobby has ready in ample supply and deploys behind closed doors for maximum effect. The anti-privacy lobby has figured out how to hack representative democracy to circumvent protections and because it's done away from public scrutiny, there's currently no way to stop them and it's only going to keep getting worse. IMHO, it's a disaster and even in the U.S. (where I am) it's only slightly better than the UK, Australia, EU and elsewhere.
> The reason is that the surveillance state has gotten extremely good at presenting scary scenarios and examples of supposed "disaster averted because we could spy on everyone", or the alternative, "bad thing happened because we couldn't spy on everyone" to politicians in non-public briefings.
Those politicians who are vocal against mass surveillance tend to change their tune the moment they're in office and I doubt they were all intending to go back on their campaign promises from the start or that they were really convinced by horror stories of terrorists told over powerpoint in closed door briefings.
I wouldn't doubt if they were also giving politicians examples of the kind of dirt they already have on them and their families. This is one of the biggest risks of the surveillance state. Endless blackmail material made up of actual skeletons, as well as the resources to install new ones into anyone's closets whenever needed.
I don't think it's blackmailing. Total surveillance by itself is just a great tool (when you have it in your hands). Why give it up?
Do what we say or we might get a warrant and find that stash of CP that we installed on your hard drive. How do you even defend against planted digital evidence? It would be easy to fake and very difficult to disprove.
But when it comes to politicians and people with power, I think it's even worse than all of that. It's kind of obvious what Mr Epstein was getting up to with regard to blackmail.
> How do you even defend against planted digital evidence?
With your good name. In the end, it is not important what the politician had or did not have on the disk, but who the public will believe more, the secret services, who claim that there was something there, or the politician, who claims that he is being set up and groundlessly persecuted for the purpose of political pressure.
And as long as public opinion about the special services is what it is, politicians can safely stash CP on their disks without fear that they will be charged with anything even if they are found.
A big problem is private entities do so much spying, it becomes hard to argue against.
We collect tons of data on people to sell ads. Why not to save children?
Why do you think politicians are idiots?
Yes, many of them are really stupid people. But they are not idiots. I think 95 percent of them are perfectly aware of why the laws they pass are really needed. And they pass them EXACTLY FOR THIS, and not at all for protecting children and internet safety.
If these claims are accurate, then the solution is obvious: elected officials who are themselves domain experts in this. They can then explain to their colleagues why these arguments are bullshit.
But, I expect that that won't help because your claims don't tell the while story. Most representatives don't act in good faith and like the government that they're a part of having such power.
>2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.
As a rule of thumb, governments don't take actions which reduce their power.
The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I don't think they are accurate.
Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.
Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as ‘the government’.
There are many western democracies where there no single ruling party. 'The government' is made by an alliance of many different parties (eg: 25% + 15% + 10% + 5%.) They might share a common overall view of the world but each party can have a very different take on many subjects. The actual government has to do only what all of them agree upon, and the 5% party may have a disproportionate weight because that party leaving the government is as important as the 25% party leaving it.
So, the government is the people in the government and the small parties can be very vocal against it. Opposition from inside is a double edged tool to attempt to get more votes in the next elections, even from within the same coalition.
This is not working. A few decades later the biggest party is like 50% of the politicians.
My theory is that power accumulates like money so you end up having few people with all the power. It's not that original, I must've read it somewhere.
This isn’t power until it scope creeps into surveillance, to protect the poor kids obviously.
> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
It would be an extraordinary amount of work for a government that can barely keep up with the fires of its own making let alone the many the world is imposing upon them. Along with that, watching the horse trading going on over every change they make - I don't see how they ever get a meaningful final text over the line.
It's not a mainstream political priority at all to my knowledge, so I'm mostly curious why you disagree!
They should just do the same thing many governments the world over have done - adopt a version of the US constitution. Easy, clean, and only massively ironic.
Biggest mistake the Americans did was codify their constitution. I'll probably be pilloried for that but look at the evidence:
- US is about to have military on the streets during peacetime with no terror threat within a codified constitution
- UK has had military on the streets in response to terrorism in Northern Ireland (a real threat) and not for decades. The UK constitution is uncodified and spread over many (10+?) documents ranging from Magna Carta in the 1200s to the Bill of Rights in the 1600s to documents written in the 1800s and then more modern Acts of Parliament.
Importantly the UK constitution can slowly change which means the UK has never had a revolution and never will do. Whereas the US constitution is rigid which achieves the opposite: when it does change it'll be dramatic and as a result of another violent revolution.
The US constitution that's clear as mud about questions like "Is it possible for the president to do something illegal?" and "Does any part of the 14th amendment actually mean anything"?
That US constitution?
Why does this increase the likelihood of a (written I assume) constitution? I remember I saw a thing about David Cameron talking about wanting one. I think he also created a Supreme Court. I read into it and it seemed like there was no real reason for either a written constitution or a Supreme Court. Both of those things were popularized by the US's government so maybe that points to why.
None of what you said is true. The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court and moved to a different building (but otherwise essentially unchanged) in 2005 under Tony Blair's Labour government.
No, that's not accurate. The Supreme Court of the UK was established in 2009 so I was off by a year. That would have been under Gordon Brown.
> It creates a safer online world for some.
The thieves no longer have to hack servers in order to obtain sensitive data, they can just set up an age-check company and lure businesses with attractive fees.
In that sense it is safer (for criminals).
> 3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.
As an repetition of and an aside to all those pointing out that there is a constitution, what may find gaining some momentum after this are calls for a Bill of Rights, something England used to have[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
A British constitution makes no sense, power is delegated from the king not from the member states like in the US or Canada. The only way the UK could end up with a constitution that's meaningful and not performative would be after a civil war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
It may not make sense to you, but they've been arguing constitutional law there for hundreds of years.
Plenty of monarchies also have modern single-document constitutions, like Norway, Spain and Thailand.
We already have a constitution. It just isn't a written constitution:
> The United Kingdom constitution is composed of the laws and rules that create the institutions of the state, regulate the relationships between those institutions, or regulate the relationship between the state and the individual. These laws and rules are not codified in a single, written document.
Source for that quote is parliamentary: https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-com... - a publication from 2015 which considered and proposed a written constitution. But other definitions include unwritten things like customs and conventions. For example:
> It is often noted that the UK does not have a ‘written’ or ‘codified’ constitution. It is true that most countries have a document with special legal status that contains some of the key features of their constitution. This text is usually upheld by the courts and cannot be changed except through an especially demanding process. The UK, however, does not possess a single constitutional document of this nature. Nevertheless, it does have a constitution. The UK’s constitution is spread across a number of places. This dispersal can make it more difficult to identify and understand. It is found in places including some specific Acts of Parliament; particular understandings of how the system should operate (known as constitutional conventions); and various decisions made by judges that help determine how the system works.
https://consoc.org.uk/the-constitution-explained/the-uk-cons...
Right of course every state has a "constitution" but the contemporary connotation of the word means an enforceable law that meaningfully constrains the state's power.
The Bill of Rights or the Habeus Corpus meaningfully constrains the states power, and are cited in court proceedings.
Just because it isn't 1 document like in the US, it doesn't mean it's not a constitution.
I think what you mean by "contemporary connotation" with "American connotation".
In the UK that would probably be the Magna Carta [0] which is a written document that constrains the monarch's power, and the monarch was the state at that time (1215).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
Do you mean in the USA, perhaps? It's used more prevalently there, I think it's more likely for an average citizen to refer to a document than a collection of laws and customs. But I don't think that contex overtakes the original meaning.
The GP comment specifically refers to the contemporary connotation, and at least in English there is some consensus around constitutional governments in this modern sense (e.g. Ireland, India, Germany, etc.) as opposed to those that aren’t.
[dead]
You mean like a civil war between the Crown and Parliament?
It is the British monarchy that is performative, not their democracy.
Ironically, while I am absolutely not a monarchist, it provides a kind of stability to British democracy, because it mostly transcends party politics, unlike other presidential systems.
Indeed, the founding fathers of the US identified political parties as a threat to their republic.
And yet, there were defacto political parties in the delightfully misnamed federalist and anti-federalists. It was this divide that led to the first political parties.
Oh, they cannot be avoided really, except by a system where party allegiance cannot influence the choice (like hereditary power).
Arrow's theorem would cause them to emerge even then.
> this divide that led to the first political parties
Maybe in Britain. Parties were definitely a thing going back to Roman politics.
No, I meant in the newborn US. The OP founding fathers reference is Hamilton and the Federalists who feared the harms of political parties, but ultimately couldn't reconcile with the anti-federalists who ultimately formed the democratic-republican party.
Reboot doesn't mean improvement.
> If Ofcom permissibly determines that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service, and if the practical effect of that is that Wikipedia cannot continue to operate, the Secretary of State may be obliged to consider whether to amend the regulations or to exempt categories of service from the Act. In doing so, he would have to act compatibly with the Convention. Any failure to do so could also be subject to further challenge. Such a challenge would not be prevented by the outcome of this claim.
Basically, DENIED, DENIED, DENIED. Ofcom can keep the loaded gun pointed in Wikipedia's face, forever, and make as many threats as it likes. Only if it pulls the trigger does Wikipedia have a case.
Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK entirely. No visitors, no editors.
> Wikipedia should voluntarily remove itself from the UK entirely. No visitors, no editors.
No, it should remove servers, employees and legal presence from the UK. It's not their job to block UK people from accessing it just because the UK regime want them to. Let the regime censors actually put an effort to block them. Let them make a Great Firewall of the UK, why make it easy for them?
Because, as someone living in the UK, the only way people here are going to realise what's going on and apply meaningful pressure to the government is if these organisations force us to. And because once they've given up on one country, they'll give up on the rest just as easily.
Is there backlash for this sort of thing? When they did their blackout thing some years back, a lot of people who were sympathetic to the cause were also highly annoyed at the disruption to their workflows, to the point that if it had gone on much longer it might have backfired on Wiki. I've seen similar affects with protesters blocking roads and such. I always wonder if it's just a small minority or if it happens more widespread
Backlash? What are they gonna do - not look at the Wikipedia they don't have access to?
It's not funded by ads or anything, this literally is easier and cheaper for them, and Britain loses an enormous trove of knowledge.
What would the backlash possibly be? Someone in the UK starting their own censored Wikipedia would be a good thing in the long and short run.
Backlash but positive backlash.
> Someone in the UK starting their own censored Wikipedia would be a good thing in the long and short run.
I’m seeing that playing out with a Russian Wikipedia (forked as Ruwiki and heavily edited to be in line with Kremlin propaganda), and I don’t like it one bit. There’s not much you can do as it’s free/open content, but it still sucks.
Reminds me of Conservapedia, which was a Wikipedia fork with everything that the US religious right disliked removed.
Sure, but letting the UK government block wikipedia makes things _much_ clearer for everyone.
If they don't geoblock UK visitors then every person known to be involved with the operation of wikipedia potentially becomes an international fugitive and if they ever land on UK soil (or perhaps even Commonwealth soil), they could be jailed.
Not a fun way to live.
It's a lot harder to uproot people than servers.
https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Staff
They don't need to make anything - that capability has been there for years. It was mostly used to block sites with IIoC, but they also blocked access to various piracy related sites and things like that.
I generally agreed but this depends entirely on the US's willingness to cooperate with UK authorities. This would be the DOJ, FTC, etc. I dont think it would go straight the judiciary although someone can correct me on that if I'm wrong.
IANAL, but international law precedent has allowed countries to prosecute web services for providing services to a country where that service is illegal. A French NGO successfully sued Yahoo! for selling Nazi memorabilia, a crime in France, despite Yahoo! being a US company [0], and this was upheld by US courts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!
Nitpick: International law is treaties between countries, the UN, customs like diplomatic immunity, etc. Here it was just about US and French domestic law.
> and this was upheld by US courts.
No it wasn't. It was overturned on appeal. But Yahoo stopped selling Nazi memorabilia anyway.
I'm not a lawyer, but that's not how I read it. The appeal by Yahoo! was dismissed according to the wikipedia article, as I read it. How did you read it?
The first court ruled in Yahoo's favor and the appeals court ruled that neither it nor any lower court in the US had the power to adjudicate the matter altogether, which was kind of a loss for both yahoo and the French organization.
This is the part that gets me intrigued. It's quite difficult to parse, having so many conditionals... ifs, mays, woulds, "subject to further challenge", etc
It doesn't seem (to me) as definitive as some claim.
Hopefully, this ambiguous language opens the door for further challenges that may provide case law against the draconian Online Safety Act.
But this is how the law works? Even in the USA, the Supreme Court doesn't act on hypotheticals. They wait until someone brings an actual case.
Ofcom haven't ruled Wikipedia is Category 1. They haven't announced the intention to rule it Category 1. The Category 1 rules are not yet in effect and aren't even finalised. They aren't pointing any gun.
Wikipedia have a case that they shouldn't be Category 1 if that happens. But they went fishing in advance (or to use an alternative metaphor, they got out over their skis).
What else is the court to do but give a reassurance that the process will absolutely be amenable to review if the hypothetical circumstance comes to pass? That is what the section you are quoted says.
First, it's a statutory instrument that ministers will amend if it has unintended, severe consequences.
Second, the rules in question have not been written yet and they are being written in conjunction with industry (which will include Wikipedia). Because Ofcom is an industry self-regulation body.
That's not how lawmaking works in the UK.
I remember an example where the UK Government decided it's OK to rip CDs you own (no, really, it wasn't legal until then), and codified that in law. The parasites that run the UK Music trade organisation appealed and found that the UK had not sufficiently consulted them before deciding to make the law.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933
So - ripping is completely illegal in the UK. Always has been, always will be. Never rip a CD, not even once. Keep paying all your fucking money to the UK Music member corporations and never think you own anything, not even once.
But it illustrates that the UK's law-making is subject to judicial review, and government cannot make laws or regulations without consulting those affected by them how much of a hardship it constitutes to them. The judge here is merely saying we haven't seen the harm yet, and Ofcom can keep threatening indefinitely to cause harm, Wikipedia only have a case when they do cause harm. By contrast, passing the law making CD ripping legal, UK Music argued, using an absolute load of bollocks they made up, that it immediately caused them harm.
It's not that simple. The law the BBC article is referring to[1] was a regulation, i.e. secondary legislation, passed by resolution. Had it been primary legislation, the courts wouldn't have been able to overturn it (Parliament is sovereign).
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2014/9780111112700
> But it illustrates that the UK's law-making is subject to judicial review
This is misleading. Actual primary legislation isn't subject to judicial review. The only exception to that is a Judge can declare legislation incompatible with the ECHR - but even then that doesn't actually nullify the law, it only tells the government/parliament they need to fix it.
The bit that is subject to review is _secondary_ legislation, which is more of an executive action than lawmaking. It's mostly a historical quirk that statutory instruments count as legislation in the UK.
> government cannot make laws or regulations without consulting those affected by them how much of a hardship it constitutes to them
This is at best disingenuous.
There is no general requirement on government to consult. It is often referred to in various Acts, which are binding. There is a common law expectation that if the government has made a clear promise to consult that they have to.
But since the Glorious Revolution, parliament has proved to be supreme. It may have to be explicit in the laws it passes, but it can literally overrule itself as needed. Pesky EU human rights legislation is just a mere vote away from being destroyed.
A lot of what you are posting is not true. Take for instance your claim that "Ofcom is an industry self-regulation body"
Ofcom is a government-approved industry regulator, strictly speaking.
It is what in the UK gets called a Quango. A quasi-non-government-organisation.
It is not a government body. It is not under direct ministerial control.
It gets some funds from government (but mostly through fees levied on industry):
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c8eec40f0b...
But it operates within industry as the industry's regulator, and its approach has always been to operate that way (just as the other Of- quangos do).
Here is what appears to be their own take on it.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/cons...
This seems pretty consistent with what I said -- it is essentially a self-regulation body, promoting self-regulation but backed by statutory powers/penalties.
Now what else is untrue?
ETA: rate-limited so I am not able to properly respond to the below. Bye for now.
Your claim that Ofcom is in any way a "self-regulation body" is untrue. And frankly also a straight-up insane thing to say, sorry.
Ofcom was created by the UK government for the sole purpose of enforcing laws passed by the UK government [and sometimes interpreting those laws]. It acts on behalf of the State at all times, and is not empowered to do otherwise under any circumstances EVER.
You appear to be confused about what being a "quango" actually means in this case. "Quasi-NGO" means that while it appears to be a non-governmental organisation, it is not one. Ofcom's at arm's length because the majority of its daily legal obligations are closer to judicial than administrative, and it is UK custom (rightly) to not put judicial functions inside government departments.
While you're correct about Ofcom, the real distinction isn't really to the objective, but to the classification of its employees.
Ofcom, Gambling Commission, and the rest of the quangos are independent statutory bodies, and (this is a big distinction!) their employees are not civil servants.
Quangos include judicial tribunals and places like the BBC, or the Committee on Climate Change- it is a broad umbrella.
Quasi-autonomous, to be completely accurate. They consult regularly with the industry and ministers but the Office of Communications Act established Ofcom to be independent of both Government and industry. They're accountable to Parliament.
>Even in the USA, the Supreme Court doesn't act on hypotheticals.
Yes. To rephrase it, they cannot act until it's already too late, and the damage has already been done.And we wonder why things are so broken.
One of the most interesting things about this legislation is where it comes from.
Primarily it was drafted and lobbied for by William Perrin OBE and Prof Lorna Woods at Carnegie UK[1], billed as an “independent foundation”.
William Perrin is also the founder of Ofcom. So he’s been using the foundation’s money to lobby for the expansion of his unelected quango.
It has also been suggested that one of the largest beneficiaries of this law, an age verification company called Yoti, also has financial ties to Carnegie UK.
It’s difficult to verify that because Yoti is privately held and its backers are secret.
It’s not as if anyone was surprised that teenagers can get round age blocks in seconds so there’s something going on and it stinks.
1. https://carnegieuk.org/team/william-perrin-obe/
Another source to back up the first claim https://carnegieuk.org/blog/online-safety-and-carnegie-uk/
I would like to see much more thorough journalism on the origin of these laws
> It has also been suggested that one of the largest beneficiaries of this law, an age verification company called Yoti, also has financial ties to Carnegie UK.
Do you have any sources for this?
Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information. But it's also Wikipedia's greatest strength that it has been so open to basically everyone and that gave us a wide range of really good articles that rivaled the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Wikipedia is a product of the free internet. It is a product of a world that many politicians still don't understand. But those politicians still make laws that do not make sense, because they believe that something has to be done against those information crimes. And they also do it to score brownie points with their conservative voting base.
The internet has it's problems, no doubt about that. But what these laws do is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Actually, the water probably stays in, because it's not like those laws solve anything.
Attributing the actions being taken by the UK (and much of the EU) to a lack of understanding is a quite generous interpretation. That may have been true a generation ago, but it's not now.
Many of us think that they understand a free internet very well, specifically the threats it places on their uses (and abuses) of power, and that the laws are quite well designed to curtail that. The UK currently, without identity verification, arrests 30 people per day for things they say online.
I feel that the left and the right are tag teaming on this topic. Both sides want to track who says what on the internet for their own purposes.
I’ll add to this, no politician is on your side unless it means getting your vote to keep them in power. It’s hard to be an actual good person and get too far up in politics, especially in today’s environment.
So, yes, I believe they both want tracking to exist, because they both benefit massively from it.
I would add, some politicians are on your side on select matters, most are not.
Sad thing is people ignore a politician's actions and keep applying Yes or No to their marketing statements. They use social engineering wording just to get votes and then they will ignore that standing to support their own action of legislation crafting and voting.
By block and limiting access to information, such as Wikipedia, they are advocating for a dumb populous. Irony is that in order to have a strong national security, an educated populous is needed. They are the ones see beyond the easily deployed social engineering tactics and are better at filtering out misinformation.
I think it is a bit simpler than that.
People don't like their worldview challenged, no matter their ideology.
Politicians exploit this by offering ways to "help", but at the cost of transferring more power away from the people.
> world that many politicians still don't understand. But those politicians still make laws that do not make sense,
Nah, politicians understand it, they just understand it differently than us do - and they make laws in accordance to that understanding.
Don't give them the same excuse you give to children, they are adults.
Wikipedia has been introduced as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Anyone can publish problematic material or false information.
But the top articles are always perma-locked and under curation. Considering how much traffic those articles receive relative to the more esoteric articles, the surface area of vandalizable articles that a user is exposed to is relatively low. Also to that end, vandalism has a low effort-to-impact ratio.
n=1 I’ve used Wikipedia for many years with no immediately noticeable false information. And of course all the “citation needed” marks are there. I trust Wikipedia to be correct, I expect it to be correct, and Wikipedia has earned my trust. Maybe I don’t read it enough to see any vandalism.
Compared to LLMs, it’s extremely striking to see the relative trust / faith people have in it. It’s pretty sad to see how little the average person values truth and correctness in these systems, how untrusted Wikipedia is to some, and how overly-trusted LLMs are in producing factually correct information to others.
> And they also do it to score brownie points with their conservative voting base.
Care to remind me what side of the political spectrum was desperately trying to silence all health-related discourse that did not match the government's agenda just a few years ago?
By "conservative" I mean less digitally-minded people who are typically older. You have these people on the left, in the center and on the right along the classical political axis.
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Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
Remember the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" petition? It has gotten over half a million signatures and the response from the government was a loud "no".
> The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
Those petitions aren't really worth anything - governments have ignored ones with over six million signatures before.
And they also ignored this one a few years back that had just under 700,000 signatures to "make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account":
https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/575833
Ironically, the primary reason they gave for rejecting it was:
> However, restricting all users’ right to anonymity, by introducing compulsory user verification for social media, could disproportionately impact users who rely on anonymity to protect their identity. These users include young people exploring their gender or sexual identity, whistleblowers, journalists’ sources and victims of abuse. Introducing a new legal requirement, whereby only verified users can access social media, would force these users to disclose their identity and increase a risk of harm to their personal safety.
The other point is that recent polls suggest the British public are overwhelmingly in support of this legislation [0], which is not reflected in most of the narrative we see online. Whether they support how it has been implemented is a different matter, but the desire to do something is clear.
[0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
It's sadly an example of terrible leading question bias, to the point where I'm surprised that it even got a 22% oppose rate.
The percentages would change dramatically were one to write it as, "From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring adults to upload their id or a face photo before accessing any website that allows user to user interaction?"
Both questions are factually accurate, but omit crucial aspects.
I live in a country where 91.78% of the population voted for a referendum that bought back hard labour in prisons.
As one of the few who voted against it I have yet to encounter a single person who voted for it who both supports hard labour and realised that was in the question being asked.
Why do you claim the 1999 referendum reintroduced hard labor in NZ prisons? I've never seen anything to that effect. The reforms were related to bail, victims rights and parole.
It did not reintroduce hard labour. People voted to reintroduce hard labour. The referendum was non binding,
Let me guess - ‘do you support violent prisoners being given work in proportion to their crimes’ or something similar?
Oh far more deceptive than that.
"Should there be a reform of our justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offenses?"
Now let's play tldr with the law!
Luckily it was non binding and stands forever as an argument against binding referendums.
I'm not really seeing the deception here since it specifies hard labour and says it would apply to all serious violent offenses. How could you vote for this and not know you were voting for hard labour?
I don't know how you could vote for it, I didn't and was astonished that people did.
On the other hand. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44870087
I would probably not vote for it on principle, but my specific question was how the text as quoted could be considered deceptive.
In many respects I agree with you there, I almost went with softer language. The fact remains that it appears people were deceived. All of the advocacy pushing the referendum only focused on the first part. To this day I find people who are amazed that it mentioned hard labour and and that they voted for it.
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I guess think of it in terms of a vote that you had discussed and decided upon before you voted. Could you honestly say that you would read every word of the question or would you just look at the start of it to establish that it was the question under discussion and then trust that the discussion accurately represented what the question on the form would say. The length of the question, was I believe specifically designed to be long to prevent the frequency of its full publication.
I can easily point to deception in two words
1) Hard 2) Words
"Should there be a reform of our justice system" -> "should the law be passed"
"emphasis", "restitution", "compensation" -> too hard to skim, brain is bailing out
---
the only way to provide valid direct democracy is to provide more than enough explanations and rewordings from both sides of the debate *at the point of voting* to remove miscommunication
I agree that it's unnecessarily wordy, but I still don't think it's deceptive. If your brain is bailing out that fast maybe it's better not to vote.
People read "greater emphasis on the needs of victims" and stop processing afterwards.
I don't buy that, and even if they did that doesn't make it deceptive. I'm not arguing in favor of this increased punishment, it just seems to me that its stated plainly enough you can't seriously argue that people were tricked.
No, we didn't. We knew what we were voting for. And I'd vote the same way today.
Do you believe you are in the majority? I'm quite confident that being in favour of hard labour is a minority opinion in New Zealand.
I guess it is at least consistent with your belief that there is a mandate for Project 2025.
Wild stab in the dark - you live in Wellington.
I really don't understand how you can possibly believe that given your prior statement:
> I live in a country where 91.78% of the population voted for a referendum that bought back hard labour in prisons.
It is consistent with my experience that most people seem to not realise that they voted for hard labour.
That is indeed the entire theme of this thread, That people can give an answer to a question that in some way does not reflect their honestly held opinion.
idk, maybe they're actually in favor of hard labour (which was after all spelled out in the question) and they're just telling you what they think you want to hear so you don't bug them about it. A lot of people are happy to lie this way.
It is somewhat deceptive, or at least misleading, to bundle up the concepts of giving the victims compensation, and punishing the prisoners more aggressively.
Unless the prison labor is providing the compensation, but that would be totally bizarre and dystopian, haha. Not really the sort of thing you’d see in a civilized country.
"Hard labour for all serious violent offenses" seems almost refreshingly straightforward. Was there more in the actual referendum that was hidden? I grant that "serious violent offenses" is somewhat vague; was it overly broad?
That question clearly says hard labour. I'm sure some people didn't read it, but I think there also may be another effect there, where when talking to people in person, they realize you are morally opposed to forced hard labour, and don't want to seem like a bad person, so they pretend they didn't know. Sort of similar to the recent effect in the US where trump significantly underpolled as many voted for him but don't want to admit it.
If a new law mentions victims I assume they're trying to appeal to my emotions. The joke is on them because I am a robot in skin form.
Yeah, there are many terrible legal abortions in California with the referendum setup too.
There’s a classic yes minister skit on how dubious polls can be: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks&t=45s
This doesn't quite cover what you're looking for but I think a previous survey led with a question that mentioned uploading ID - https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202....
I can't find the survey it's entirety, but I think the above question was followed by (this is based on the number at the end of the URL, which I'm guessing is quesiton order) - https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
Are there any credible surveys on this topic that don't use the term "pornographic websites" in the survey question?
"Do you want CHILDREN to be MURDERED by RAPEISTS online or are you a good person?
Y/N
then proceeds to the tea break and brainstorms on how to empower the monarchy and conquer the world
No
Yeah. It's the "foot in the door technique." The same is being done with Chat Control.
It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily expanded to other things like scanning messages to prevent terrorism.
See also:
> Concern over mass migration is terrorist ideology, says Prevent
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/06/concern-over...
> It's very difficult to oppose a law ostensibly designed to fight CSAM. But once the law passes, it'll be easily expanded to other things like scanning messages to prevent terrorism.
Oh, look, you did it in literally two sentences. It turns out it's pretty easy to to oppose such law. Only there's simply no need to do it when you're the main beneficiary.
The problem is that one of the most secure places in the world is a maximum security prison. Hence many measures that drag us closer to the prison state do genuinely improve security.
It takes some balls for the society to say: No, we don't agree to yield an essential liberty in exchange to actual real increase of security. Yes, we accept that sometimes bad people will do evil things, because the only way to prevent that would inflict even more damage on everyone. Yes, we are willing to risk harm to stay free.
There is always plenty of people who are ready to buy more comfort in exchange for limitations of liberty that, as they think, will not affect them, because they are honest, got nothing to hide, always follow the majority... until it does affect them, but it's too late.
People constantly cite this poll as it is proof that British people want this.
You cannot trust the YouGov polling. It is flawed.
> Despite the sophisticated methodology, the main drawback faced by YouGov, Ashcroft, and other UK pollsters is their recruitment strategy: pollsters generally recruit potential respondents via self-selected internet panels. The American Association of Public Opinion Research cautions that pollsters should avoid gathering panels like this because they can be unrepresentative of the electorate as a whole. The British Polling Council’s inquiry into the industry’s 2015 failings raised similar concerns. Trying to deal with these sample biases is one of the motivations behind YouGov and Ashcroft’s adoption of the modelling strategies discussed above.
https://theconversation.com/its-sophisticated-but-can-you-be...
Even if the aforementioned problems didn't exist with the polling. It has been known for quite a while that how you ask a question changes the results. The question you linked was the following.
> From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
Most people would think "age verification to view pornography". They won't think about all the other things that maybe caught in that net.
All polling has problems like this, but YouGov has the same methodology for everything and usually gets within a margin of error of +-8. Even if they have an especially bad sample, the UK probably really does support the law.
Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
> All polling has problems like this, but YouGov has the same methodology for everything and usually gets within a margin of error of +-8.
The way the very question was asked is a problem in itself. It is flawed and will lead to particular result.
> if they have an especially bad sample, the UK probably really does support the law
The issue is that the public often doesn't understand the scope of the law. Those that do are almost always opposed to it.
> Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40.
It isn't about the pornography. This is why conversations about this are frustrating.
I am worried about the surveillance aspect of it. I go online because I am pseudo-anonymous and I can speak more frankly to people about things that I care about to people who share similar concerns.
I don't like how the law came into place, the scope of the law, the privacy concerns and what the law does in practice.
Even if you don't buy any of that. There is a whole slew of other issues with it. Especially identity theft.
Of course - control the question, and you guarantee the answers.
>Think about how many people are less comfortable with porn than tech interested males between age 18 and 40
Are you suggesting that techies do not have any sexual appetite? That runs counter to many stereotypes I've encountered
No i awkwardly phrased it. Im saying that demographic (also the majority here on HN) loves porn more than any other demographic.
Out of curiosity, what makes you say that the majority of HN loves porn? I've seen a few random references to it but nothing that would indicate that HN loves porn any more than any other community loves porn.
He is trying to cast the illusion that anyone that doesn't believe the YouGov polling on here (e.g. me) is suffering from cognitive bias.
While that is possible, it doesn't negate the fact I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov.
> I have good reasons to be suspicious of polling organisations such as YouGov
You have secret reasons to suspect all polling?
If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
> If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy.
What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
It's well-understood that leading questions and phrasing will get you any response to a poll that you want. That being the case, what good are any of them? They're only telling you something about how the issue was put rather than anything about the true preferences of the population.
> What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not?
I’d still call that statistical illiteracy. Polling, as a cohort, contains information. It’s dispersed across polls and concentrated among quality pollsters.
It’s never definitive. But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because we haven’t actually been to Andromeda.
> what good are any of them?
If I want to know, today, who will be in power tomorrow and what policies they could pass that would be popular, polling is useful. If I want to know what issues I can build a coalition around, and which to abandon because the people most passionate about them cannot bother to vote, polling is helpful.
> rather than anything about the true preferences of the population
They’re telling you how people think when they communicate and act. What is in their heads is unknowable. At the end of the day, I care how they will vote (and if they will vote) and if they will call (or are even capable of calling) they’re elected if pissed off or enthralled. Everything else is philosophical.
At the end of the day, whether by poll or advert, information is introduced to a population in a biased form because it’s promulgated by biased actors. Knowing which way that bias is trending and resonating is useful.
It isn't about something not agreeing with my vibes. I don't appreciate when people put words in my mouth. I never said all. I obviously meant some.
Firstly in my original post I stated why I don't believe YouGov to be accurate. It isn't just me that has an issue with thier polling.
Secondly, It is well known that many people are swayed by peer pressure and/or what is perceived to be popular. Therefore if you can manipulate polling to show something is popular, then it can sway people that are more influenced by peer pressure/on the fence.
Often in advertising they will site a stat about customer satisfaction. In the small print it will state the sample size or the methodology and it is often hilariously unrepresentative. Obviously they are relying on people not reading the fine print and being statistically illiterate.
Politicians, governments and corporations have been using various tactics throughout the 20th and 21st century to sway public opinion, both home and abroad to their favour.
This issue has divisive for years and has historically had a huge amount of push back. You can see this in the surge of VPN downloads (which is a form of protest against these laws), the popularity of content covering this issue.
Are you against any kind of content restriction whatsoever or just porn?
They may not be against content restriction, instead they may be against removal of user privacy or anonymity. If the proof of age thing was some kind of zero knowledge proof such that the age verifying group has no knowledge of what you're accessing, and the site you're accessing has no knowledge of you as an individual (beyond tells like IP address etc.) then perhaps they'd be more open to it?
There isn't any technology that can prevent sharing of age verification with third parties without tying your uses to your identity. To unmask someone in order to uncover sharing, you would require the ability to do it in general, which is incompatible with privacy/anonymity.
I am generally against content restrictions. I am actually OK with restrictions on pornography.
The UK government has engaged political censorship throughout my lifetime.
e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%931994_British_broa...
I still remember the stupid Irish dubbing on the news. I thought it was hilarious when I was 10.
Some of it the public are often unaware of e.g super injunctions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-injunctions_in_English_l...
The internet has made it much more difficult to censor. It is quite obvious to me that they wish to end online anonymity, which makes it easier for them to target people and thus easier to censor.
I believe that this is the precursor before massive political censorship.
As stated in my first reply on this subject. Even if you don't buy into that there are obvious problems with handing you ID over to third parties. There is no guarantee they can keep your data safe (and often haven't).
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He didn't say the majority of HN loves porn. He said that male demographic likes porn more than any other, and that demographic is the majority of HN. It doesn't logically follow that the majority of HN supports porn.
Fake statistics just to illustrate the difference. Males 18-40 support porn at 60%, which is higher than any other demographic. HN is 60% males 18-40. With these numbers, 36% of HN is males 18-40 who support porn, and if all other demographics on HN oppose it, then those 36% are the minority.
(By the way, I have no idea what the real numbers are, and don't really care. I'm just responding to an evident confusion about what was actually said.)
Statistics doesn't work that way, and if OP wanted to say that, they should have specified that, rather than saying the majority of HN is a demographic that likes porn. It may be true in a statistical sense, but that's not how it is read.
There is a couple of threads of people asking for help with porn addiction, you will find that the responses are in a funny way much like potheads, plenty of denialism.
Also, if you post anything critical of porn; you get downvoted with little exceptions. Try it, if the topic ever comes up, say something critical and your comment gets flagged and removed.
HN has a massive demographic overlap with problematic pornography consumers.
It's just a statistical correlation. Who loves porn demographically?
1) Men.
2) Men age 18-40 in particular.
3) No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
So a survey of HN users would show more pro-porn respondents than a survey of the UK or the US or EU as a whole.
> No evidence for this but in my experience tech people tend to like porn more than others for whatever reason.
This does not jibe with my experience. I think perhaps your experience is not a representative sample of tech people. But mine probably isn't either. So it's pointless for either of us to state an opinion here based on our experience with our own slice of tech people.
It's kinda funny how this is a subthread about how YouGov's polling on the Online Safety Act is flawed, but we're committing the same exact sins ourselves.
Tech people? I have met utter goons obsessed with porn that barely understand how their phone actually works.
A lot of them work in Westminster.
Old news, but I suspect there hasn't been a sudden outbreak of puritanism.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mps-peers-and-staff-...
In a number of recent polls in English speaking countries young men have been one of the strongest anti-porn demographics actually. I think HN being tech adjacent with the history and practical reality of how the internet works along with being more libertarian (or at least liberal) is going to bias that more than the gender distribution.
I don't put much faith in polls generally, but I put even less faith in polls where people are asked how they feel about porn. I don't think you can come to any reasonable conclusion from data of such low quality as is typical of polling these days.
Even in the absolute best circumstances where enough people are polled to be representative, and those people aren't asked any leading/misleading questions, and the identity of all those people are known, pre-selected without bias, and verified (preventing the same person/group of people voting 50 times or brigading some anonymous internet survey), and all of those people are 100% confident that their answers are private and won't be able to be used against them, you're still left with the fact that people lie. All the time. Especially about anything to do with sex. They also have terrible memories and their beliefs about themselves and their views often don't hold up when their actual behavior is observed. Self-reported data is pretty weak even when sex/shame/morality/fear of punishment don't come into play.
Without really digging into the specifics to try to work out how seriously you can take a given survey's results at all, it's best to just not to treat them seriously.
Sure but IIRC the statistics were relative to previous polls and the conversation was about how people talk about porn on the web not how they actually use it so I think in this case it actually works well.
Most questions you could guess a number somewhere vaguely near 50% and be right a substantial amount of the time given such massive error bars.
Thats a common fallacy because we tend to care about issues that are 50/50 or divisive. Most opinions are not divisive but thus dont get attention.
That seems like an implied constraint? You don't run polls asking if the sky is blue.
It seems like some things always remain the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
There is a Yes, {Prime Minister,Minister} for every occasion in tech.
As always, the devil is in the details. Very careful wording:
>do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?
"may" is doing the heavy lifting. Any website that hosts image "may" contain pornograohic content. So they don't associate this with "I need id to watch YouTube" it's "I need ID to watch pornhub". Even though this affects both.
On top of that, the question was focused on peon to begin with. This block was focused more generally on social media. The popular ones of which do not allow pornography.
Rephrase the question to "do you agree with requiring ID submission to access Facebook" and I'd love to see how that impacts responses.
It's funny, I actually interpret it differently; by using "may" vs omitting it would actually imply to include sites like YouTube and Facebook. Without the "may", to me it would imply only sites that have a primary intent of pornographic material, not sites that could include it accidentally.
“Why yes I do either support or oppose those rules. Thanks for asking.”
Odd - they also believe it wont be effective
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
The moment the Russia Ukraine war hit, the top 10 apps in Russia was half VPNs.
As long as websites don't want to lock out any user without an account, and as long as vpns exist, it'll be hard to enforce any of this. At least for now, that's one line big tech won't let them cross easily.
It isn't a requirement to enforce this. All it does is to ensure that you will be more at risk of breaking the law and that little detail will show that you intended to evade the law so your presumption of innocence gets dinged: apparently you knew that what you were doing was wrong because you used a VPN so [insert minor offense or thought crime here] is now seen in a different light.
Selective enforcement is much more powerful as a tool than outright enforcement, before you know it double digit percentages of the populace are criminals, that might come in handy some day.
> top 10 apps in Russia was half VPNs... and as long as vpns exist, it'll be hard to enforce any of this.
Russia found good way to enforce it, they changed the law and give out prison sentences for using VPNs
Not yet - only for searching extremist and terrorist content, no matter using VPN or not. Oh, almost the same content that is regulated by Online Safety Act in UK.
Yes it's quite possible for people to hold both those views.
> Whether they support how it has been implemented is a different matter, but the desire to do something is clear.
Isn't this the whole story of government policy? The stated policy so rarely actually leads to the hoped-for result.
That’s because the bedrock principle on which modern government is based is…
drum roll
Lie whenever it’s convenient because the public are children anyway and won’t or can’t understand.
Through this lens many things make more sense. They’re comfortable with lying because there are zero repercussions for lying.
They are not only children, but also goldfish who forget everything after 5 minutes
tbf it took from 1939 until about 5 years ago for people to forget that fascism is a bad idea.
They always name it the exact opposite of what it does.
If they name something the "Protect Children Act". You can be sure that what it does is put Children in Danger.
That means that on the face of it, it is difficult for someone to oppose.
Ok and how about if it was phrased;
"Are you in favour of requiring ages verification for Wikipedia and other websites"
"Are you in favour of uploading your ID card and selfie each time you visit a site that might contain porn"
Why are we conflating pornography and Wikipedia?
Wikipedia hosts pornography.
Are you referring to educational pictures of human anatomy? There’s quite a difference between that and porn.
No. I mean actual pornography.
For instance, a full copy of Debbie Does Dallas is on its Wikipedia article [NFSW, obviously].
I had the misfortune of talking with a few potheads, and HN's reaction to porn addiction is the same of potheads, denialism, mental gymnastics, and everything but accepting that porn can actually be problematic.
The only reason it doesn't have it's own DSM classification is a mere question of technicality, whatever it is a separate and distinct kind of addiction, or just a manifestation of other types of hyper-sexual disorder.
Follow-up question is big lulz: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
"And how effective do you think the new rules will be at preventing those younger than 18 from gaining access to pornography?"
-> 64% "not very effective / not at all effective"
The curtain twitcher/nanny state impulse is pretty strong
The Home Office is full of fascists, many of whom may - allegedly - have questionable personal habits and interests.
None of this has anything to do protecting the public. If that was the goal there are any number of other ways to manage this.
A good reminder that certain circles are just the vocal minority and under the surface society is mostly just NPCs.
Not a great lesson to take here.
1. Policy by default will always be planned and implemented by a minority. As well as those who comment to policy, or online.
2. You'll have some 20-30% of people who will say yes to anything if you phrase it the right way.
>These users include young people exploring their gender or sexual identity
And who would they need to hide from?
School bullys, parents, friends, community members, church leaders and many others I imagine. The idea was that it would have your real name and it was verified by your ID.
>parents
You do understand that there are creeps out there grooming children, right? Parents definitely do need to have oversight over their own kids.
Children should absolutely not have privacy on the internet.
The ID requirement is terrible, but saying that children need privacy to explore their sexuality on the internet is very problematic.
If this is the position the UK government holds then that brings into question their desire to protect children online in the first place.
Yep, I feel like there is a cognitive dissonance somewhere in there. On one thread about social media and internet affecting young people negatively, you have people saying parents should control their kids' exposure to the internet. And in another thread about ID laws, you have people saying kids should have privacy to roam the internet.
Parents have plenty of capacity to exercise control over their children.
For example, how about a law that says websites have to restrict access to pornographic content if the client's user agent sets an HTTP header indicating they don't want to see it? Now you don't have any privacy problems because the header contains no personally identifying information -- you don't even have to be under 18 to opt into it. But then parents can configure the kid's devices to send that header, without even impacting the kid's privacy to view content that isn't designated as pornographic, since the header is an opt-in to censorship rather than the removal of anonymity.
Also notice that an academic discussion of sexual identity isn't inherently pornographic but is something that can require privacy/anonymity.
Porn peddlers would probably pinky-promise not to disobey the user-agent and expose the kids to the content (and get them while they're young).
However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn peddlers better target children. We also know from recorded interviews with these predetors that they don't seem to actually mind exposing kids to porn.
https://x.com/arden_young_/status/1732422651950612937
That's not cognitive dissonance unless it's the same people saying both.
To be fair, those are not actually in opposition. Because they dont believe parents can actually do it.
They just want to throw responsibility and blame on parents, so that government dont restrict porn access. Parents are just a tool and scapegoats.
Shutting down the conversation by saying parents should have the last say is how we got these ridiculous laws in the first place.
What happens when someone wants to explore their sexuality by finding someone other than the pre-approved person from the parents?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Shafilea_Ahmed
I'm not sure how online privacy laws (or a lack of them) would spare a child who objected to marrying someone their parents wanted to force her to. Murdering your children is/was already illegal and the parents did that anyway. We can't worry about what the small number of psychopathic parents might do if kids don't have online privacy. We should instead try harder to make sure that kids are protected against their abusive parents regardless of the situation. There should have been places Shafilea could have gone to or reached out to for meaningful help and protection long before it got to the point of a murder.
That said, I personally think good parenting means giving children privacy, even online, and doing so increasingly at ages set according to the maturity/capability of the child. That's the sort of thing a parent is in a better position to assess than the government. I also think that this particular law is garbage. I just don't think "We must protect children from their parents by allowing them to access the internet in secret and anonymity" is a very compelling argument.
Minors are still humans who deserve rights. They should not be considered property of parents, regardless of fear mongering about grooming. Teenagers should have the right to access information without their parents knowing, as their parents can be just as, if not more dangerous to their health and well being as a hypothetical groomer. Many teens face real abuse from their parents over their sexuality. They should not be forced to live in the shadows or face abuse due to a "protect the kids" narrative.
I do, of course. It's just worth considering that not every parent is how you or I might like or imagine them to be.
For some children their parents finding out they're gay would cause a great deal of real world physical or phycological harm. It's a really tricky thing to navigate, but aside from saying 'no children should be allowed access to the internet unsupervised' it gets really difficult.
From people who would harm them?
Oh you're that anti-games, anti-porn guy, best to ignore anything you say.
I'm not anti-games.
>From people who would harm them?
Like who? I really hope you don't mean the kids' parents.
Problem is, parents are literally the most likely people to do that
this is coming across as intentionally obtuse questioning. Many people, including governments think that adopting specific sexual preferences and identities is wrong and worthy of criminal charges and harassment at a minimum.
I wish that we didn't always have to phrase things like this. Yes, it's true that the aforementioned folks may likely have more of a need for anonymity than I do as someone who isn't a member of any protected class; but that doesn't mean I don't have a legitimate right to it too. And, if this is the way we phrase things, when a government is in power that doesn't care about this (i.e. the present American regieme), the argument no longer has any power.
We shouldn't have to hide behind our more vulnerable peers in order to have reasonable rights for online free speech and unfettered anonymous communication. It is a weak argument made by weak people who aren't brave enough to simply say, "F** you, stop spying on everyone, you haven't solved anything with the powers you have and there's no reason to believe it improves by shoving us all into a panopticon".
Totalitarian neoliberalism sucks; your protest petition with six million signatures is filed as a Jira ticket and closed as WONTFIX, you can't get anyone on the phone to complain at, everyone in power is disposable and replaceable with another stooge who will do the same thing as their predecessor. Go ahead and march in the streets, the government and media will just declare your protest invalid and make the other half of the population hate you on demand.
Every totalitarian regime sucks, be it corporate, religious or socialistic.
It's quite right that petitions are (mostly) ignored in Parliamentary matters, IMHO.
MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their constituents. Bills are debated, revised, voted on multiple times. There are consultations and input from a board range of view points.
A petition is in effect trying to shout over all that process from the street outside.
It's a good deal more complicated than that.
MPs belong to political parties - consider what happens if an MP's constituents and an MP's party disagree?
They might be allowed to vote against the government, if their vote will have no effect on the bill's passage - but if they actually stop the bill's passage? They're kicked out of the party, which will make the next election extremely difficult for them.
MPs are elected for reasonably long terms - and that means they regularly do things that weren't in their party manifesto. Nobody running for election in 2024 had a manifesto policy about 2025's strikes on Iran, after all!
That flexibility means they can simply omit the unpopular policies during the election campaign. A party could run an election campaign saying they're going to introduce a national ID card, give everyone who drinks alcohol a hard time, cut benefits, raise taxes, raise university tuition, fail to deliver on any major infrastructure projects, have doctors go on strike, and so on.
Or they can simply not put those things in their manifesto, then do them anyway. It's 100% legal, the system doing what it does.
Don't be ridiculous. MPs get their input from their party superiors, and their party superiors get their input from the people who buy them.
It's been decades since the UK had any genuine bottom-up policy representation for ordinary people.
Petitions are the only mechanism which produces some shadow of a memory of a that.
Is it quite right that the public gets ignored all the time?
How do you force your representatives to actually represent their constituents?
I have just described how the public drives the democratic process to ensure everyone gets a voice, not just whoever shouts the loudest. That's the opposite of ignoring the public.
That's the nice-sounding theory, but I don't see any metrics on how well it works in practice. MPs aren't required to share the input from the public or publish lists of how they voted on every issue prior to elections. Representative democracy really includes very little accountability for the legislators.
If the public truly drove the democratic process we'd have proportional representation or something other than the current system.
Yeah who do these peasants think they are?
You vote for someone who says "I will create more jobs"
They instead propose a bill that will cut jobs
There's deliberation, but a lot of other people want to cut jobs
Is you shouting "hey, that is not what I voted for!" yelling and disrupting process, or calling out the fact that you were lied to and your representative is in fact not representing you?
They did do that once,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477966 ("Wikipedia blackout page (wikipedia.org)" (2012))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative
That was part of a widespread protest against proposed bipartisan internet legislation in America.
On that occassion, it was very effective at getting the American government to back down.
Yet this looks nothing like their reaction to SOPA and PIPA. They even explicitly state that Wikimedia is not against the legislation on the whole.
> The Wikimedia Foundation shares the UK government’s commitment to promoting online environments where everyone can safely participate. The organization is not bringing a general challenge to the OSA as a whole, nor to the existence of the Category 1 duties themselves. Rather, the legal challenge focuses solely on the new Categorisation Regulations that risk imposing Category 1 duties (the OSA’s most stringent obligations) on Wikipedia.
---
I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
> Where did their conscience go?
Aaron Swartz is no longer with us.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Opposition_to_the...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Death
The old generation of idealists grew up and we raised no one to replace them. I know because I'm in that emotionally and ideologically stunted generation.
Why did they raise no one to replace them?
A lot of 1990s tech optimists thought that people with awful opinions were the unfortunate victims of a lack of access to books and education; and the strict gatekeeping of broadcast media by the powerful.
This new multi-media technology was going to give everyone on the planet access to a complete free university education, thousands of books, and would prevent the likes of Chinese state-run media suppressing knowledge about Tienanmen Square.
And after they receive this marvellous free education, all the communists and nazis and religious nutjobs will realise they were wrong and we were right. We won't need any censorship though, in our enlightenment-style marketplace of ideas, rational argument is all that's needed to send bad ideas packing, and the educated audience will have no trouble seeing through fallacies and trickery.
Also the greater education will mean everyone can get better jobs and make more money, and with this trade with China we're just ramping up they'll see our brilliant democratic system, and peacefully adopt it. The recently fallen Soviet Union is of course going to do the same, and it's going to go really well. We'll all live happily ever after.
This Bill Clinton chap has a federal budget surplus, now we're not spending all that money on the cold war, so we'll get that national debt paid off in no time too.
You may be able to figure out why this particular brand of optimism isn't so fashionable these days.
To be fair, we have lots of things that people in the '90 were just hoping for (in medicine, tech, average world wealth, etc), but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.
Also, I think tech optimists might have a tendency to ignore how slow changes actually happen (thinking of how many times we got promised self driving cars or fusion).
My impression is that the covid pandemic had a huge psychological impact on everybody which resulted in anger and fear surfacing at all levels, with bad implications (emotion based decision making, aggressiveness, conflict). No clue if this is real or if it is how it will play out on the long term...
>but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.
Yes. The techis mostly there, and a few decades later it's readily available and cheap enough to be almost universally available. But you can't make a horse drink. The old guard may have underestimated the power of a cult and this attraction to authoritarianism. I didn't believe it either some decade ago. But seeing it before my eyes shows the folly of man.
COVID was definitely an accelerator for all these bad traits to come out of the woodwork. It could have been any economic downfall, but a global pandemic requiring a simple behavior to not die really showed this odd. If "wear a mask or you'll die" can't convince some people, I'm not sure what can.
I wouldn’t say that optimism and idealism are no longer fashionable, but instead that original optimism (however true) was blinded by it’s own lack of knowledge. We should still be perusing optimist/idealist outcomes but not the ones from another era.
were you one of those believers at the start?
Economic infantilisation and the new productised and externalised way of being brought upon by social media. We were an autopilot society that thought it had no need to restate values or keep innovating. The things that used to matter like community bonds and values dont matter literally because we cant see them in an instagram post and they may as well not exist-
plus the media and public sphere dysfunction we see through the fact that we haven't seen any new celebrities or public intellectuals elected in the past 10 years, telling people ideas don't get you anywhere.
This will only get worse as we are at the end of progression of this culture and cultural consensus has split between educated legacy media and uneducated young new media which develops its own often incorrect assumptions about the world- like about mental illness assumptions. It's cultural ouroboros- we're destroying parts of ourselves because they've grown too different. We need a new way forward and a new culture of contentment that champions the human.
If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.
>If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.
Maybe I'm a bit dramatic here, but the subtext I seem to get is that "legacy media is dying out and we're not going to cede power easily. Even if we burn the country down with us."
There's no graceful transfer to the next generation like usual (or perhaps, there never was a graceful transfer to begin with). It has this apocalyptic feeling where the old guard wants to do any and everything they want and don't care what happens after they are gone. Not every boomer, but it's the generation with those people in power.
It's a fire sale on american imperialism, capital and cultural dominance, and everyone wants in. American leadership is geriatric and asleep at the wheel and the dementia vote is dangerous. Everyone sees this as the free for all it is.
There will always be those who seek to create order from chaos for their own benefit. We're seeing multiple groups trying to emotionally stunt this next generation and sow social discord. These are the same groups that have blackmail on the current sitting. China is more of a military threat but russia is far more of a cultural threat because they understand the west, which is nothing to joke about. Hungary is obviously also influential, due to their constant meetings in the us and hungary with the heritage foundation, and their help in formulating the presidential transition project. Our blue "friend" in the middle east is just as malicious, easily scorned and has a passion for retaliation.
Apathy and fatalism is ascendant in western leadership, just look at the culture behind davos and modern american tech start ups. Mass hardcore group sex parties of the wealthy and influential(davos and openai), designer drugs, an underlying humour on selling out the world and killing it with climate change. They don't care about the atomization of the individual or the sancitity of him either.
We need to identify the new poles of power to understand the currents that shape our world if we are to have any hope in fighting them.
*Belaurus not hungary- always mix them up :)
"suddenly"? Wikipedia has always supported fascist initiatives
>I personally find it rather frustrating that Wikimedia is suddenly so willing to bend over for fascists. Where did their conscience go?
I absolutely abhor the "Kids these days" sort of argument, but it does seem the case that we lowered the barrier of entry sufficiently in the tech sector that people who simply dont give a shit, or actively want to harm our values, now outnumber us greatly.
What has happened previously was we would rally around corporations and institutions that would generally work in our best interests. But the people driving those social goods in those entities are now the villains.
Not to mention all the mergers and acquisitions.
In Australia, during the internet filter debate, we had both a not for profit entity spending money on advertising, but also decently sized ISP's like iiNet working publicly against the problem. The not for profit was funded by industry, something that never happened again. And iiNet is now owned by TPG who also used to have a social conscience but have been hammered into the dust by the (completely non technical, and completely asinine bane of the internets existence and literal satan) ACCC and have no fight left in them for anything. When Teoh leaves or sells TPG, it will probably never fight a good fight ever again.
Its the same everywhere. We cant expect people to fight for freedom when the legislation just gets renamed and relaunched again after the next crisis comes out in the media. We lost internet filtration after christchurch, for absolutely no justifiable reason. And we lost the Access and Assistance fight despite having half the global tech industry tell our government to suck eggs.
The only real solution is to prep the next generation to fight back as best as possible, to help them ignore the doomsayers and help the right humans into the right places to deal with this shit.
> we lowered the barrier of entry sufficiently in the tech sector that people who simply dont give a shit, or actively want to harm our values, now outnumber us greatly.
I don't think it's a matter of number but activity. There are numerous ways that entities with no morals can make huge amounts of money by exploiting people online (via weaknesses in human psychology adapted for hunting on a savannah), both children and adults. It's hard to make money doing the opposite.
Hey hey hey.. hold on, wait a minuet. What did you just say about the ACCC. Those guys make sure we have good warranties and cracking down on scams. They are the good guys protecting us from the scammers and cooperate greed.
They also worked tirelessly at the behest of the largest 4 ISPs to ensure that the NBN would be as expensive and anti competitive as possible.
I share your general frustration, but as an unabashed Wikimedia glazer, I have some potential answers:
1. They lost this legal challenge, so perhaps their UK lawyers (barristers?) knew that much broader claim would be even less likely to work and advised them against it. Just because they didn't challenge the overall law in court doesn't mean they wouldn't challenge it in a political sense.
2. The Protests against SOPA and PIPA[1] were in response to overreach by capitalists, and as such drew support from many capitalists with opposing interests (e.g. Google, Craigslist, Flickr, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress, etc.). Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns with having to implement ID systems as they did about policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact will be on minors, which AFAIK are far from the most popular advertising demo. Certainly some adult users will be put off by the hassle and/or insult, but how many, and for how long?
3. Wikimedia is a US-based organization, and the two major organizers of the 2012 protests--Fight for the Future[2] and the Electronic Frontier Foundation[3]--are US-focused as well. The EFF does have a blog post about these UK laws, but AFAICT no history of bringing legal and/or protest action there. This dovetails nicely with the previous point, while we're at it: the US spends $300B on digital ads every year, whereas the UK only spends $40B[4]. The per-capita spends are closer ($870/p v. $567/p), but the fact remains: the US is the lifeblood of these companies in a way that the UK is not.
4. More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting children from adult content". We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of the day, people do seem concerned about children accessing adult content. IMHO YouTube brainrot content farms are a much bigger threat to children than porn, but I'm not a parent.
The final point is perhaps weakened by the ongoing AI debates, where there's suddenly a ton of support for the "we're protecting artists!" arguments employed in 2012. Still, I think the general shape of things is clear: Wikimedia stood in solidarity with many others in 2012, and now stands relatively alone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
[2] https://www.fightforthefuture.org/
[3] https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-cases
[4] https://www.salehoo.com/learn/digital-ad-spend-by-country
> Just because they didn't challenge the overall law in court doesn't mean they wouldn't challenge it in a political sense.
That's my point, though. This is the perfect opportunity to do so, and they aren't doing it. Instead, they are picking the smallest possible battle they can. That decision alone makes waves.
> Certainly Reddit et al have similar general concerns with having to implement ID systems as they did about policing content for IP violations, but the biggest impact will be on minors.
That's ridiculous. ID systems endanger everyone, particularly the adults who participate. This issue isn't isolated from capitalism. These ID systems must be implemented and managed by corporations, whose greatest incentive is to collect and monetize data.
> We can call it fascism all we like, but at the end of the day, people do seem concerned about children accessing adult content.
The think-of-the-children argument is the oldest trick in the book. You are seriously asking me to take it at face value? No thank you.
> More fundamentally, I strongly suspect that "big business is trying to ruin the internet by hoarding their property" is an easier sell for the average voter than "big government is trying to ruin the internet by protecting children from adult content".
If people really are blind to the change that has happened right in front of them, then we should be spelling it out at every opportunity. This is my biggest concern with how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a significant position politically, and are abdicating this crucial responsibility.
Some of it is probably about the scope of UK judicial review. Acts of Parliament are absolutely exempt from being struck down. The closest you can get is a "declaration of incompatibility" that a bill is incapable of being read in such a way as complying with the European Convention on Human Rights. If at all possible the courts will gloss and/or interpret hard to come up with a compliant reading. And an incompatibility declaration just suggests Parliament looks again: it doesn't invalidate a law by itself.
Executive acts, on the other hand, can be annulled or overturned reasonably straightforwardly, and this includes the regulations that flesh out the details of Acts of Parliament (which are executive instruments even when they need Parliamentary approval).
In short, judicial review is a practical remedy for a particular decision. "These regulations may unreasonably burden my speech" is potentially justiciable. "This Act could be used to do grave evil" isn't. If an act can be implemented in a Convention compatible way then the courts will assume it will until shown otherwise.
The consequences can look something like the report of this judgement. Yes, it looks like the regulations could harm Wikipedia in ways that might not be Convention compatible. But because interpretation and enforcement is in the hands of Ofcom, it's not yet clear. If they are, Wikipedia have been (essentially) invited to come back. But the regulations are not void ab inito.
Thanks for the detailed answers! Again, I share at least some of your underlying concern, and don't want that to be overshadowed. That said, some responses:
It looks like they've written three articles "strongly" opposing the "tremendous threat" posed by this bill: two when it was being considered[1,2] and another after it passed[3]. Yes, these articles are focused on the impact of the bill on Wikimedia's projects, but I think that's clearly a rhetorical strategy to garner some credibility from the notoriously-stuffy UK legislature. "Foreign nonprofit thinks your bill is bad in general" isn't exactly a position of authority to speak from (if you're thinking like a politician).More recently, they've proposed the "Wikipedia test" to the public and to lawmakers (such as at the 2024 UN General Assembly[6]) that pretty clearly implicates this bill. The test reads as such: Before passing regulations, legislators should ask themselves whether their proposed laws would make it easier or harder for people to read, contribute to, and/or trust a project like Wikipedia.
I was more making a point about why social media companies aren't involved than justifying that choice for them on a moral level. I suspect you have stronger beliefs than I about the relative danger of your name being tied to (small subsets of-)your online activity, but regardless, Wikimedia agrees, writing in 2023 that the bill "only protects a select group of individuals, while likely exposing others to restrictions of their human rights, such as the right to privacy and freedom of expression." It's still a valid argument. Again I wasn't really endorsing any position there, but I do think that in general the government should try to protect children. The only way I could imagine you disagreeing with that broad mandate is if you're a strong libertarian in general? This, I think, is the fundamental disagreement: I just don't see them as being in that significant of a position. Given today's news I wouldn't be surprised to see them throw up a banner on the Wikipedia homepage and/or do a solo one-day blackout reminiscient of 2012, but even those drastic measures are pretty small beans.The real nuclear option--blocking the UK from accessing Wikimedia sites--would certainly garner some attention, but it would cost them greatly in terms of good will, energy, and raw output from their (presumably quite significant) UK editor base. And when would it end? If the UK government chooses to ignore them, wouldn't it feel weird for Wikipedia to be blocked for years in the UK but remain accessible in brutal autocracies worldwide?
In the end, this feels like a job for UK voters, not international encyclopedias. I appreciate the solidarity they've shown already, but implying that they are weak for "abdicating [their] crucial responsibility" seems like a step too far.
...IMHO. As a wikimedia glazer ;)
[1] March 2022: https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/early-impressions-of-the...
[2] November 2022: https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/deep-dive-the-united-kin...
[3] May 2023: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/05/11/good-intentions-bad-ef...
[4] June 2023: https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/p...
[5] September 2023: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/09/19/wikimedia-fo...
[6] September 2024 & June 2025: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-wikipedi... // https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-wikipedi...
The UK spent the last weekend arresting hundreds of people for holding up signs with the words "Palestine Action" on them, while ignoring people marching around and giving Hitler salutes.
Anyone expecting sanity from the UK on this topic is being somewhat optimistic.
To reiterate - this is not about protecting kids. If it was about protecting kids it would be trivial to set up a blacklist of the most popular porn sites that need ID as a first step, and worry about other sites - like Wikipedia - later.
This is about setting up a mechanism for mass surveillance of future dissent.
The "think of the kids" argument is a Trojan horse - a standard and predictable populist appeal to protective emotions.
> The UK spent the last weekend arresting hundreds of people for holding up signs with the words "Palestine Action" on them
Did they arrest them for doing that or while doing that? I suspect it's the latter and it makes all the difference in the world.
[flagged]
Pretty telling what speech on the left and the right looks like.
For the left, it's:
> Eugene Debs, for example, was sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act after he spoke at a rally for peaceful workers telling them they were “fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder”... Likewise, in 1919, Schenck v. U.S., the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Socialist Party member after he sent anti-war leaflets to men across the country.
For the right, it's:
> It will not defend the First Amendment rights of pro-life pregnancy centers [...to trick desparate women into receiving useless propaganda instead of the medical care they were seeking] or small religious businesses [...to deny service based on rank bigotry]. It no longer defends religious freedom [...to deny adoptions to LGBT couples[1], to fire employees for receiving or abetting an abortion[2], and to perjure yourself in a senate hearing about your intention to make legal rulings on the basis of religion[3]], although it once did. And in a leaked internal memo, the ACLU takes the position that free speech denigrating “marginalized groups” should not be defended.
If you're ever in a position to write "marginalized groups" in scare-quotes, perhaps that should be a wakeup call...
P.S. It doesn't help that your links are to 1) a libertarian thinktank founded to oppose the New Deal, 2) the Heritage Foundation and 3) an opinion piece by Alan Dershowitz. The first is extremely biased, and the latter two are just plain bad-faith.
[1] https://www.lgbtmap.org/kids-pay-the-price
[2] https://laist.com/shows/take-two/heres-the-last-of-the-bills...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/feinstein-the-...
The next time somebody says the phrase "Fire in a crowded theater" to support free speech restrictions, remind them that this phrase comes from Schenck vs US (argued 1919), which was about whether you have the right to distribute antiwar pamphlets.
At issue was whether antiwar speech can constitutionally be punished as espionage, which can be a capital crime under US law, punishable by death.
Whether you're allowed to to speak in ways that Congress considers too close to 'creating a clear and present danger of a significant evil that Congress has power to prevent'. Whether you could criminalize speech deemed disloyal or detrimental to the war effort.
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921, and among other things, his administration dramatically expanded the precedential authority of the federal government in authoritarian directions, particularly with regards to things like surveillance and censorship. The Sedition Act of 1918 "broadened the scope of prohibited speech to include any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the U.S. government, flag, or military", and the Espionage Act of 1917 "made it illegal to interfere with the military, obstruct recruitment, or convey information that could harm the U.S. or aid its enemies. "
It took the Warren and Burger courts of the 60's/70's to reel this back in and re-establish many of the Constitutional rights you were taught about. It's unclear whether the pendulum will swing back the other way precedentially, but doubtless Trump would prefer carte blanche to target dissidents.
Three links from manifestly right-wing organisations decrying the lack of free speech on the left are not exactly convincing.
Linking from right-wing organizations does not make the facts presented in the articles less true… you should critique the content of the articles, not their origin.
Brandolini's Law is relevant. If we havs to carefully point-by-point critique every point our opponent makes, while they get to use ChatGPT to write nonsense at fifty times human reading speed, we lose.
To work around this, when a bullshit-producing organization is cited, it's proper to ask for an alternative citation from an organization that produces mostly non-bullshit. If it truly isn't bullshit content, there should be many, so cite one.
It's just spam filtering. I don't reply to "forward this to ten people you know or suffer eternal damnation" but my ignorance doesn't mean they're right. If you put important content in an email starting with "Dear Sir or Madam, I have a business proposal, I am a Nigerian prince" that's on you and the fact that I ignore your email doesn't mean I agree with whatever you wrote in the email.
Except that in this particular case these were not bullshit articles. I had time to read them and I agree with them. You should read the articles before calling them names….
> Except that in this particular case these were not bullshit articles.
They are, though. I had time to read them, too, and agree with the "bullshit" assessment. Each relies on the deeply bad-faith idea (in each case, from people/groups all quietly permitting much more significant First Amendment violations go unchallenged, like the President extorting law firms and colleges for millions of dollars) that the ACLU must take up every case that comes their way. That has never been the case; if the Heritage foundation wants that, they can step in and help fund.
A good portion of the ACLU's job is to determine which cases will meaningfully advance civil rights; which cases will lead to precedent or outcomes that support their goals.
If they are not bullshit content, then please prove it by citing the same content from a not bullshit source. There should be plenty.
In other words, if your email really isn't a Nigerian prince scam, why did you choose to begin it with the words "I have a business proposal for you - you see, I am a Nigerian prince"?
Neither the left or the right wants anything. People inside each group do. This is an important distinction that pundits love to invert.
I have a very hard time taking any of your sources seriously, particularly when it comes to any categorization of "the left".
FEE is a conservative libertarian think tank. Heritage Foundation is the most infamous conservative think tank. Alan Dershowitz is most famous for defending Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein, and decided to leave the Democratic party as soon as it showed signs of becoming a bit less Zionist.
These are prime examples of pundits who love to frame the "the left" as a singular cohesive boogeyman. You may not intentionally be picking on the left, but the sources you have cited make a living picking on a version of "the left" that they invented.
Then I recommend you have a look at the polling numbers on free speech presented here: https://www.natesilver.net/p/free-speech-is-in-trouble
I am so much not willing to listen to what heritage specifically has to say on the topic. Could you pick less hypocritical and less eager to lie resources to "definitely not pick up on left totally both side"? Heritage foundation literally where Project 2025 was created and published.
Also, I definitely love the track record of "the measure of free speech is your willingness to defend nazi and never use words to support the left":
> To be sure, the ACLU will still occasionally take a high profile case involving a Nazi or Klan member who has been denied freedom of speech, though there are now some on the board who would oppose supporting such right-wing extremists. But the core mission of the ACLU — and its financial priority — is to promote its left-wing agenda in litigation, in public commentary and, now, in elections. If you want to know the reason for this shift, [...]
Yeah, their litmus test is always willingness to defend nazi AND not have left like opinions. If you are aligned with right wing specifically, you are fine. Just dont you dare to have left like opinions. Total neutral.
Sure, here are some liberal leaning sources saying things you might not like if you believe these things, including vile things said by extremist groups, should be censored:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
https://archive.is/TpU8Q
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/31/how-the-resurge...
Please note: I 100% abhor white supremacy and any kind of racism. But you can and should defend the right to free speech without agreeing with that speech.
We need to support the speech of all groups we detest - baby eaters, satanists, polygamists, racists, sexists, murderers, capitalists, Marxists, televangelists, etc. - in order to champion free speech for all. Once that freedom disappears, it won't come back. Then the systems of censorship and oppression will be used against us.
I'm LGBT. I know what it was like to grow up when my "lifestyle" was taboo. I know how easily and quickly society can change. I don't want to ever have my freedom removed or to be put into a box.
If you're uneasy about this, remember that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from judgement. If you say something disgusting, you'll lose credibility and business from most people. Crowds already effectively censor. But we don't need the government or public squares becoming thought police and building automated systems to muzzle and detain us. Once those systems get built, we're done for.
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> We need to support the speech of all groups we detest - baby eaters, satanists, polygamists, racists, sexists, murderers, capitalists, Marxists, televangelists, etc. - in order to champion free speech for all.
Except that, in practice the defense of self styled free speech advocates did not extended to left, gay, radical feminists, progressives anyone not far right.
In what world is NY times left leaning.
> If you're uneasy about this, remember that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from judgement.
Somehow that part did applied to only selected groups. Criticising right and conservatives was treated as grave danger to free speech by the self styled free speech advocates.
The big crisis of free speech is never about speech rights of anyone left of center. Literally even now.
> Except that, in practice the defense of self styled free speech advocates did not extended to left, gay, radical feminists, progressives anyone not far right.
It absolutely has.
LGBT rights:
https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-202...
NAMBLA:
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-statement-defending...
HIV:
https://www.aclu.org/cases/outmemphis-v-lee
BLM:
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/in-a-major-win-for-our-r...
Women's rights:
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-rejects-ap...
I’m so tired of this false divide. Its the wealthy vs the rest of us.
I don’t want to go right or left. I want to move forward and leave this stupid, stupid mess behind.
Possibly naive question, why should Wikimedia do anything at all? Do they have a legal presence in the UK?
If not, why not just say "we aren't a UK based organization so we have no obligations under this law"
Let the UK block Wikipedia.
IANAL, but I assume this could open Wikimedia leadership to charges of contempt and eventually lead to needing to avoid visiting the UK or other extraditing countries and potentially pave the way for asset seizures. You generally don't want to antagonize world power governments.
That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not wikimedia’s responsibility to ensure people from the UK don’t hit their servers by typing wikipedia.org into the browser bar.
That does make sense, but then that would mean that any business not doing business in UK would not have to follow the rule, which would make the rule worthless. But I hope I am wrong.
According to UK law, it is.
Can you cite said law for us?
It's the Online Safety Act. As the government says about the OSA:
"Ofcom is the independent regulator for Online Safety. [...] Ofcom has strong enforcement powers"
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/online-safety-act
Okay, so what does Ofcom say?
"It doesn’t matter where you or your business is based. The new rules will apply to you (or your business) if the service you provide has a significant number of users in the UK, or if the UK is a target market."
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
The UK isn't a world power.
They have nuclear weapons, are in the G7, are a permanent member of the UN Security Council, 6th highest GDP in the world. What are your criteria?
Jimmy Wales lives in London.
If Wikimedia blocks access from UK it has control over response page and can write there accurate description of the reasons why access is blocked.
As ridiculous or absurd as this idea might seem, it's probably the most succinct and likely effective response to this kind of situation. The UK is betting the rest of the world doesn't reciprocate.
Not ridiculous, the only way to stop injustice is to fight.
Yes. HTTP 451 "Unavailable For Legal Reasons" was made for this moment.
No, they should block with a very visible message, tailored to the british public. I know what that status message means, you know it, but the general public doesn't. They need the black page with big letters they used before with sopa/pipa/etc.
You can return a 451 error with a descriptive page, same as how sites have custom 404 pages
We need new 6xx codes. "Requests that are fine, need no redirection and have no errors but are blocked because of politics, overbearing laws or regime"
That's what 451 means.
It's "user error, you are trying to access the site from some dystopian society that prohibits it".
Yeah but I want to know if I should submit, protest or revolt. I need more codes :)
451 is such a good reference though, other codes just wouldn't be the same :(
It's largely meaningless to anyone US-based sci-fi nerds, and by itself it tells the user nothing about which jurisdiction the legal issue is in.
The 451 response's body will contain further instructions.
For example, "An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles":
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7725
I wish all non-UK entities which may be affected by this law just dropped the UK. But unfortunately it seems they have too much money invested in not doing that.
But I'm sure even if that happened, the public consensus would just be "good riddance".
This is an absolutely bizarre country to live in.
This after the gaffe with the postal services, we are going to see some innocent folks being branded.
In general, I think we need a shift in society to say "yea, screw those kids". We don't put 20km/h limits everywhere because there's a non-zero chance that we might kill a kid. Its the cost of doing business.
Having privacy MEANS that it is difficult to catch bad people. That is just the price. Just swallow it and live with it.
> "yea, screw those kids".
Well, at the very least, the American government is already aiming for that
Problem with Wikipedia specifically going all-in on a UK block is, due to the licence, there's nothing to stop someone circumventing the block to make a OSA-compliant Britipedia mirror with minimal effort.
Except the effort and money needed to be OSA compliant. As the whole enwiki is permissively licensed everyone is welcome to do it though.
Fairly easy, just make it a read-only mirror.
And Wikipedia continues on without having to worry about UK regulations. What's the downside for Wikipedia?
Does WP do this anywhere else?
I wonder what happens if they simply don't comply. Will the UK at any point ask ISPs to ban Wikipedia?
I think just getting blocked is no big deal, but they'll probably get fined as well, that is the problem
What mechanism does the UK government have to extract fines from Wikipedia?
“Pay this or we will concoct some criminal charges on your entire leadership team, append each of you to interpol lists and formally request your extradition” is probably a good start.
Probably, my understanding is theyve already implemented IP blocking to other sites.
they should indeed. The rest of the world should not have to suffer for draconian & fascist laws in the UK
Problem is that all that most people want out of Wikipedia is ingested in LLMs and for unfathomable reasons people now go to those first already. So the general public might not even notice Wikipedia being inaccessible.
I thought people here didn’t like when American companies tried to strongarm democratic governments abroad?
1) There are multiple posters on this site, they sometimes have contradictory opinions.
2) Lots of people like it when a company does an obviously good thing, and dislike it when a company does an obviously bad thing. I guess you’ve made a happy discovery: it turns out the underlying principle was something about what the companies were trying to accomplish, rather than some reflexive “American companies are bad” silliness.
I'd like to add, it's fine and dandy to have the stance that huge corporations in general shouldn't throw their weight around to shape politics, that's still not the world we live in and that must be acknowledged.
Even if I'd rather have Wikipedia stay put, it does matter to me if they push for something I support as opposed to something that I'm against.
Not to dismiss bee_rider's sibling comment, like at all, but: Wikimedia's nature and purpose might be distinguished from your generic "American" tech "company".
one of the good ones right
Well, it's a non-profit. Technically still a company, but that's an essential difference, to say the least!
There is more than one poster on this site; it's safe to assume there's more than one opinion.
It turns out reductionism is stupid and people have different opinions
> Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
It is a gamble. If people increasingly get their “encyclopedic” information via AI, then it might make almost no noise and then the govt will have even more leverage.
I commented basically the same and also got down voted. Do people just down vote comments that make them sad?
In the age of AI chatbots having consumed all of Wikipedia, its relevance has waned. So I don't think they have the same pull as they did before.
In the recent ChatGPT 5 launch presentation, ChatGPT 5 answered a question about how airplane wings produce uplift incorrectly, despite the corresponding Wikipedia page providing the correct explanation and pointing out ChatGPT’s explanation as a common misconception.
AI chatbots are only capable of outputting “vibe knowledge”.
Yeah, but even so people use that nonsense, not checking if anything is correct. I suspect not enough people would notice that Wikipedia is inaccessible, sadly.
What is this corresponding Wikipedia page?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#False_explanation...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle
Under the Misconceptions header
Wikipedia is a moving target. Content today is not the content of yesterday or tomorrow. This is like saying all knowledge that humanity can gain has already been accomplished.
My personal test usage of AI is it will try to bull shit an answer even when you giving known bad questions with content that contradicts each other. Until AI can say there is no answer to bull shit questions it is not truly a viable product because the end user might not know they have a bull shit question and will accept a bull shit answer. AI at it's present state pushed to the masses is just an expensive miss-information bot.
Also, AI that is not open from bottom to top with all training and rules publicly published is just a black box. That black box is just like Volkswagen emissions scandal waiting to happen. AI provider can create rules that override the actual answer with their desired answer which is not only a fallacy. They can also be designed to financially support their own company directly or third party product and services paying them. A question about "diapers" might always push and use the products by "Procter & Gamble".
Its relevance has absolutely not waned, more relevant than ever. Models need continuous retraining to keep up to date with new information right?
Despite having consumed all of Wikipedia, it still can't accurately answer many questions so I don't think it's relevance or value has waned. AI has not got anywhere near becoming an encyclopedia and it never will whilst it can't say I don't know something (which Wikipedia can do) and filter the fact from the fiction, which Wikipedia does uses volunteers.
Doesn't AI essentially use the concept of volunteers as well with RLHF?
Good point, it's similar to some extent. Although clearly the quality of the work that the people doing RLHF on the major LLMs is rather low in comparison with those volunteering at Wikipedia.
There were no "good" volunteers qualifier used though. Obviously, some RLHF "volunteers" are better than others just like some used by Wiki are better than others. I wonder if there's edit battles between RLHF like we've seen on Wiki?
Besides the fact that LLMs still make up stuff?
Yea great, make everyone even dumber by forcing them to use AI slop
> Wikimedia should block UK access. That will get the attention of media and popularity contest politicians might change their mind.
Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
I'm quite critical of the implementation of this legislation but the idea of an American company throwing their weight around trying to influence policy decisions in the UK gives me the ick.
Fair enough if the regulations mean they just don't want to do business there but please don't block access to try and strong arm the elected government of another nation.
Well, that would be tricky, since Wikipedia is not a business, and is nor is it specifically American. (Other than a foundation in the US that runs the servers) . There are Wikipedias in many of the world's languages!
If the UK effectively bans public wikis above a certain size (even if by accident), then it is the law of the land that Wikipedia is banned. Or at least the english wikipedia, which is indeed very large. And if it is banned, then it must block access for the uk, under those conditions. Depending on the exact rules, possibly the uk could make do with the Swahili wikipedia?
That said, the problem here is that it is a public wiki of a certain size. One option might be for Wikipedia to implement quotas for the UK, so that they don't fall under category 1 rules.
Another option would be to talk with Ofcon and get things sorted that way.
By Wikipedia I meant the foundation of course. I'm not sure localisation automatically makes them a multinational entity. Windows is available in Chinese but we both understand that Microsoft is not a Chinese company.
It is fair to say it's not a business, but essentially there's no difference to my feeling that private entities from other countries shouldn't be throwing their weight around in local democracy.
Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it continuing to operate there?
The Wikimedia Foundation is not in charge of the Wikipedias per se (though as always, once you have a central organization, it starts stretching its tentacles) .
Wikipedias are not merely localized versions of each other, they're truly independent.
If you happen to know two languages and want to quickly rack up edits (if that's your sport), arbitraging knowledge between two Wikipedias is one way to go.
Wikipedia is not throwing their weight around. They are merely pointing out that the law happens to make their operating model illegal, and surely that can't be the intent. If they are illegal, they cannot operate. Is "very well, we disagree, but if you truly insist, we shall obey the law and leave" throwing your weight around?
And yes, I get the impression that the UK's letter of the law could lead to a categorization with rules that (a) Wikipedia simply cannot comply with, and still be a Wikipedia. So in that case Wikipedia would be effectively banned.
But we're not there yet. Hence the use of proper legal channels, including this court case. Ofcom is expected to make their first categorizations this summer, so this is timely.
It's the foundation who are involved in this court action and who is the topic of this thread. The code uploaded to GitHub wouldn't change the geographic basis of Microsoft either...
But that said I want to be clear that I have no issue with the Foundation's current actions or position in the court system. I was responding only very specifically to the suggestion above that they "should" block Wikipedia access immediately in order to force the hand off the British government.
I agree that wikipedia going dark in the uk would -as yet- be premature at this juncture.
Wikipedia should just continue to operate as normal in its U.S. jurisdiction. If the UK government want to block it, then so be it on their own head.
Exactly my point.
> Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law?
Wikipedia is certainly large enough, in terms of traffic. And as anyone can edit it, it would seem to be a user-to-user service, making it a Category 1 provider, equivalent to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.
And their wiki page about 'breasts' certainly shows photographs of female nipples. Their pages on penises are likewise illustrated. They also have pages about suicide and self-harm.
Wikipedia is also a website we could reasonably expect children to access.
And Wikipedia did lobby the government, before the act was passed, to make it clear they weren't subject to it, which the government opted not to do.
So it would certainly appear they are subject to it.
> Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it continuing to operate there?
This isn't so much up to feeling as it is up to interpretation of the law. If there isn't a good way for Wikipedia to hide parts of itself and the law requires that it does, then it is effectively banned by the letter of the law.
The question of it continuing to operate exists because it is an obvious good to society that the law is yet to act on shutting down themselves. Right now it continues to exist in the UK despite being illegal due to the good will (or incompetence if you're not feeling generous) of the UK government.
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
Blocking, making it clear why your blocking and that you will continue to block until it changes is respecting the decision.
You call it strong arming, I call it malicious compliance. Wikipedia hosts images, it "may contain pornographic material". Make anyone trying to search up a top 5 website see it before their eyes on how this isn't just a way to affect pornhub.
>respect the democratic decisions
Let the peope have a say in the going ons instead of lying to get elected, and maybe we can call it democratic again.
Or they should not do business in them. To me this means block access. If you don't then they're supposed to block access to you anyway so who is strong arming who?
As I said in my first comment: if it makes doing business in the UK unpalatable then they are of course free to halt their operations. I was specifically responding to the suggestion above that they should do so as a bargaining move to force the government's hand.
The Wikimedia Foundation isn't "doing business" in the UK, they're a nonprofit. Their mission statement is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
Part of fulfilling that mission is opposing laws that restrict free knowledge and open access, so why should they not use their huge presence as a bargaining tool? Doing so directly aligns with their purpose.
Because there are legal avenues of protest awarded to them by the United Kingdom. They also definitely "do business" there even if they aren't in it for profit.
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
Well, the OSA was put into law by the Tories in 2023. The democratic decision of the UK was that they resoundingly rejected what the Tories were doing in the landslide win for Labour in the 2024 GE. I'd quite like UKGOV to respect the democratic decisions of the country and if they won't, I'm quite happy for other people to push back via the courts, public opinion, etc.
That's not how democracy works. When there's a change in government they don't just abandon all laws the previous one passed.
The current government is more than able to use their democratic mandate to appeal or change the law.
>When there's a change in government they don't just abandon all laws the previous one passed.
Tell that to the US please.
>The current government is more than able to use their democratic mandate to appeal or change the law. °
Yes, but they probably a won't without a lot of push back. Here's the push back
The Tories' loss had nothing to do with what anybody thought of the OSA, a bill which most people hadn't heard of until last week.
But you already knew that.
And which was supported by Labour.
The bill had broad cross party support and passed without opposition from the Labour party.
> Or they could respect
Blocking is respecting the law!
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
In what way would blocking access from the UK be not respecting the law?
Also, that won't necessarily do anything. Russia forked wikipedia into Ruwiki after the invasion of Ukraine and it worked out for them.
> Or they could respect the democratic decisions of the countries they do business in?
They do that by staying out of such countries. Many US companies don't want to work with EU GDPR and just block all european IPs, wikipedia has full right to leave UK. They are under no obligations to provide service to them in the same was as pornhub is under no obligation to provide services in eg. a country that would require them to disclose IP addresses of all viewers of gay porn, etc.
Saying that it was a democratic decision without people actually being asked if they want that (referendum) is just weaseling out instead of directly pointing out that it's a bad policy that very few brits actually wanted. Somehow no one uses the same words when eg. trump does something (tarifs, defunding, etc.), no one is talking about democratic decisions of americans then.
Wikipedia has the full right to say "nope, we're not playing that game" and pulling out, even if an actual majority of brits want that.
I know that and I've been clear about it several times. If business subs unpalatable they gave every right to withdraw. I was responding to the suggestion above that they should do so explicitly as a bargaining chip.
And parliamentary representative democracy is still very much democratic even without referenda on every little issue.
Is it "democratic" when both parties agree on everything of substance and elections don't change anything no matter who wins? Because that's how "democracy" has worked in the UK for at least as long as I've been alive.
Also, no-one asked for this bill, both parties support it, it received basically no debate or scrutiny and was presented as a fait accompli. Where's the democracy exactly?
There are any number of criticisms I would happily join you in directing at the British parliamentaey system but I don't think relying on American businesses to pressure the government would actually be the win for democracy you seem to suggest?
None of this is responsive to the specific criticisms made, and nor are the follow-up replies.
I didn't say anything prescriptive, I'm just disputing your use of the word "democratic".
For all it's issues I think you would be hard pressed to argue that the United Kingdom isn't a democracy in the common sense of the term.
For all it's issues, it's practically bad faith to argue that the UK is a democracy in the spirit of the term. I believe that's how the EU works with law?
Oh yeah, they left that.
I have no idea what this means.
Representives not representing their constituents makes democracy a sham. If you think representatives as of late are acting in good faith, I question yours.
The correct time for major service providers to shift their weight and start pulling out of any jurisdiction necessary to get their point across has already come and gone. The second best time would be as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, the Internet world we live in today isn't the one I grew up in, so I'm sure things will just go according to plan. Apparently a majority of Britons polled support these rules, even though a (smaller) majority of Britons also believe they are ineffective at their goals[1]. I think that really says a lot about what people really want here, and it would be hard to believe anyone without a serious dent in their head really though this had anything at all to do with protecting children. People will do literally anything to protect children, so as long as it only inconveniences and infringes on the rights of the rest of society. They don't even have to believe it will work.
And so maybe we will finally burn the house to roast the pig.
[1]: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
I think this is actually a better place to draw the line than the EU’s Digital Services Act, for example. It's just the UK. Blacking out service for EU would be a more bitter pill to swallow.
This is how we should have stopped the cookie banners
In Russia there is a plan to make special SIM cards for children, that would not allow registration in social networks. Isn't it better than UK legislation?
The whole idea that every site or app must do verification is stupid. It would be much easier and better to do verification at the store when buying a laptop, a phone or a SIM card. The verification status can be burned in firmware memory, and the device would allow only using sites and apps from the white list. In this case website operators and app developers wouldn't need to do anything and carry no expenses. This approach is simpler and superior to what UK does. If Apple or Microsoft refuse to implement restricted functionality for non-verified devices, they can be banned and replaced by alternative vendors complying with this proposal. It is much easier to force Apple and Microsoft - two rich companies - to implement children protection measures than thousands of website operators and app developers.
Rare case of Russian doing something more honestly. Implementing it as a device flag sent to websites, and making it easy to set for the device of any minor, is an elegant and unintrusive solution.
If you get w3.org and major browser and os vendors in on it, it simply becomes a legally enforced an universal parental control without much drawbacks.
But that would not permit the complete tracking of identity of all individuals in a country with their ptivate Internet activity and political stance.
And that's a massive loss to the true purpose of any law pretending to protect children; Just like the multiple attempts to outlaw encryption or scan all private or messages.
The UK legislation extends beyond cellular access, as I'm sure Russia's does as well.
That solution reminds me of the evil bit. However, if someone has the skills or resources to unset the bit, they likely are allowed to anyway.
https://archive.org/details/rfc3514
In case with Windows laptop, the verification proof might be for example, a digitally signed serial number of the motherboard (and the OS is itself signed to prevent tampering). While it's possible to work around this, an average kid or adult is unlikely to do it. And in case with a phone there is almost zero chance to hack it.
> Isn't it better than UK legislation?
Not at all, because SIM cards are bound to your real identity. So the government knows exactly which websites you visit.
I don't understand your comment, the government knows which sites you visit anyway because it can see the SNI field in HTTPS traffic.
The main point is that the verification is done on the device. The device has a digitally signed flag, saying whether it is owned by an adult user or not. And the OS on the device without the flag allows using only safe apps and websites sending a "Safe: yes" HTTP header. User doesn't need to send your ID to random companies, doesn't need to verify at every website, and website operators and app developers do not need do anything and do not need to do verification - they are banned from unverified devices by default. It is better for everyone.
Also, as I understand the main point of the Act is to allow removing the content the government doesn't like in a prompt manner, for which my proposal is not helpful at all.
What about open source browsers that don't respect this convention?
The Online Safety Act is a hideous piece of legislation. I hope Wikipedia block the UK.
(I am a UK citizen).
I think the better option is wikipedia to pull all operations out of the UK that might be there and NOT block UK IP addresses. Stand up for the British people, thumb their nose at the British government. Let the UK put up a "Great Firewall of Great Britain" so the British people understand how close their government is flirting with fascism, while they still have time to remove the fascist leaning politicians.
Act like an authoritarian regime, get treated like other authoritarian regimes.
For the record, I'm not actually against age verification for certain content. But it would have to be:
1) private - anonymous (don't know who is requesting access) and unlinkable (don't know if the same user makes repeated requests or is the same user on other services).
2) widely available and extremely easy to register and integrate.
The current situation is that it's not easy, or private, or cheap to integrate. And the measures they say they will accept are trivially easy to bypass - so what's the point?
I worked in a startup that satisfied point 1 back in 2015. The widely available bit didn't come off though when we ran out of runway.
Age verification should be done at the point of buying a laptop or a SIM card, the same way as when you buy alcohol. And there would be no need to send your ID to a company so that it ends up on the black market eventually.
there's some irony that the EU is set to have a fairly anonymous solution like next year. they could have waited or tried to use similar tech for this, in theory
Important to note: Their anonymous solution is reported to be temporary until their digital ID system is released[1], which does not offer that same anonymity, but rather functions as a server-side OpenID-based authentication system.[2] While you can share only your age with an online service, it still creates an authorization token, which appears to remain persistent until manually removed by the user in the eID app. This would give the host of that authentication system (EU and/or governments) the ability to see which services you have shared data with, as well as a token linked to your account/session at that service. There is also no guarantee that removing an authorization will actually delete all that data in a non-recoverable way from the authentication system's servers.
[1] https://itdaily.com/news/security/eu-temporary-app-age-verif...
[2] https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-presentations-1...
Good catch, that does seem a lot worse. :/
This is about the Category 1 duties arriving by 2027, not this year's tranche of rules (such as age gating).
Interesting - do you have a link to it?
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
It's anonymous to the sites or companies you use it with and not to the government, but that would still be more robust than the uks checks so far. it's only end of 26 though, I thought it was at the end of this year instead.
And that really shows the difference in how the EU operates Vs the UK.
They see a general need which the market cannot easily satisfy on its own - it needs standardisation to be cheap and interoperable, and it needs an identity backed by a trusted authority. So they establish a framework and legislation to make that possible.
The UK instead just states it's illegal not to do it, but without any private and not-trivially bypassed services available.
Proactive vs reactive.
It is often said that legislation tends to lag behind technology. At last, the UK is beating the world by legislating ahead of it!
Add to that 3) Verifiable to a lay person that the system truly has those properties, with no possibility of suddenly being altered to no longer have those properties without it exceedingly obvious.
This whole concept runs into similar issues as digital voting systems. You don't need to just be anonymous, but it must be verifiably and obviously so — even to a lay person (read your grandma with dementia who has never touched a computer in her life). It must be impossible to make changes to the system that remove these properties without users immediately notice.
The only reason why paper identification has close to anonymous properties is the fallibility of human memory. You won't make a computer with those properties.
It's easy to demonstrate (3) for an age verification system - practical experience will amply demonstrate it to everyone.
Voting is very different - you do need to be able to demonstrate the fairness of the process verifiably to everyone - not just crypto nerds. Age verification - well, some people might get around it, but if it generally seems to work that is good enough.
China is doing great. Not saying the UK will do well, just that authoritarian regimes can be successful as states although not great for the commoners.
China only started doing great when they relaxed their ultra-centralized economic rules a little bit in the 1990s.
Read business books and news from the 80's - 90's, and they almost never mention China - it's all Germany, UK, Japan, USA. The stats tell the same story - China spent half a century going nowhere fast.
After liberalizing their economy, China spent the 90's quietly growing, and only started making real waves in the news around 2000.
All this to say that economic authoritarianism has never worked and there's no reason to suppose that the social kind is going to fare any better for anyone either.
Economic liberalism isn't really relevant to the question of social authoritarianism. While an enterprising individual in guangzhou can sell whatever he wants to the world without much state involvement, he can't really go around discussing Tibetan sovereignty for example.
My current theory is that one leads to the other but we’ll see how that works out for our friend in Guangzhou.
My point is centralization doesn’t work, so maybe social authoritarianism has deleterious cultural effects that will show up generations from now.
Success of authoritarian regimes depends on the competence (and alignment) of the leadership. Not something we have much of here.
Leaving the market never works - in Russia, once another Western site or app gets blocked, several local competitors instantly pop out. That's how the market works, there are always people hungry for money.
The Russian market is artificially distorted.
China has the same story - all Western companies are successfully replaced with no issues (except for CPU and GPU vendors).
Then let them? And the UK gets a dogshit ripoff Wikipedia. Authoritarian supporters suffer, that's the hard lesson people need to understand.
This costs Wikipedia nothing - they are not funded by ads. And, in exchange, they don't get sued or any of their employees arrested.
if they block the UK, 20 UK specific copies will spring up overnight
it will achieve absolutely nothing, except to destroy their "market share"
It would shield them from legal liability which is more than nothing.
That is the primary reason to ban UK visitors.
They do seem to be considering banning only users after the 7 millionth - 1 visitor every month to avoid being classified as category 1 instead. That would let them avoid some of the most onerous parts of the OSA that would require stripping anonymity from editors and censoring whatever Ofcom says is "misinformation" and "disinformation."
Won't users just go to AI summaries ?
The UK is spearheading this charge, but if they are successful it will have paved the way for many more governments to embrace these policies. How this plays out is important for people living in every western country.
The US has been implementing similar bans sporadically as well. It's being done on a state-by-state basis due to the limited federal power structure of our government making it more difficult for minority power groups like fascists to push legislation.
I do believe the social factors leading to support for these bans are quite a bit different, but the core minds behind them are of the same creed.
I'm really confused about what would realistically happen if Wikimedia just decided to ignore those regulations.
They have surely ignored demands to censor Wikipedia in more authoritarian countries. What makes the UK different? Extradition treaties? Do they even apply here?
I have the same confusion about Signal's willingness to leave Europe if chat control is imposed[1], while still providing anti-censorship tools for countries like Iran and China. What makes the European laws they're unwilling to respect different from the Iranian laws they're unwilling to respect?
> They have surely ignored demands to censor Wikipedia in more authoritarian countries. What makes the UK different? Extradition treaties? Do they even apply here?
The UK has the authority to arrest them (anyone who owns a website) if they ever set foot in the UK if they feel they either haven't censored it adequately enough or refuse to do so.
It's one of the reasons why Civitai geoblocked the country.
Yes, there are unilateral policies and treaties that let the US and the UK collaborate in legal action (going through US institutions to judge them), some of them referenced in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal/Legal_Policies -- a keyword might be letters rogatory
Wikimedia also seems to have a presence in the UK https://wikimedia.org.uk/ that presumably would be affected.
In most cases they might have enough pull to get folks blacklisted by payment processors, but wikimedia in particular might win that one.
A variety of things could happen:
- Employees become accountable for their company's actions - Wikimedia could be blocked - Other kinds of sanctions (e.g. financial ones) could be levied somehow
In practice what will likely happen is Wikimedia will comply: either by blocking the UK entirely, making adjustments to be compliant with UK legislation (e.g. by making their sites read-only for UK-users - probably the most extreme outcome that's likely to occur), or the as-yet unannounced Ofcom regulations they've preemptively appealed actually won't apply to Wikimedia anyway (or will be very light touch).
What if they simply don’t pay any sanctions?
They might ban the CEO and employees from entering their country or arrest them when they travel.
Having moved out of the uk many years ago, being banned from there, may not be such a bad thing.
The worst thing is, people will vote out the labour government, and the tory bastards (who will say they are 'the party of freedom) will tell the country "Well, it wasnt us".
Its worth noting of course, that this is Tory law which was given a grace period before implementation. Labour have chosen to continue its implementation and not repeal it.
They don't apply. Delivering this kind of thing is obviously allowed in the US, so there's presumably no mutual criminality.
.... so far it is. Current politicians are certainly working at the state level to stop anonymous internet usage. Currently limited to pr0n sites, but you can bet that's just the first notch of increased heat on that poor frog in the cooking pot
Kind of funny after the authors of the law complained service providers were interpreting it overzealously.
No, if Wikipedia falls under it anything meaningful does. You have once again failed to understand the internet.
Many sites were overzealously interpreting it.
The difficulty of compliance depends on both how big the size is and the kind of site it is. Many small site overlooked both of those factors.
The underlying issue remains unaddressed if only Wikipedia-scale sites of “significant value” get special exemption.
The whole idea that the UK government, or anyone, can distinguish between "worthy" and "unworthy" exceptions is absurd in itself. The fact that they recognize there are exceptions blows a hole in the whole thing.
The OSA is already written such that only very large sites are potentially caught by the most onerous rules (at least 7 million MAU for Category 1; at least 3 million MAU for Category 2B). Smaller sites are automatically exempted.
This isn't to say that the OSA is a universally good thing, or that smaller sites won't be affected by it. However, this request for judicial review wasn't looking to carve out any special cases for specific large sites in favour of smaller sites.
>Smaller sites are automatically exempted.
No, they're not. I don't know why people keep repeating this "7 million active users limit" idea, it's nowhere to be found in the actual rules. Tiny forums have already had to close because they didn't want to deal with the legal risk:
https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli...
Page 64 defines a Large Service as "A service which has more than 7 million monthly active United Kingdom users".
The first two forums in your "in memoriam" list I tried looking at (Sinclair QL Forum & Red Passion Forum) are both still up.
Quite. Sites that have resources and influence will be fine - they can either comply with the rules or will be given soft exemptions. It's small and new communities that will suffer.
I was just vacationing in the UK last week and ran into this ridiculous thing trying to browse (entirely non-pornographic, fwiw) Reddit threads. Which I opted not to read rather than going through the hassle and privacy breach.
Also got to experience the full force of the cookie law, which I hadn't realized I was only seeing a fraction of here in Canada.
Why not just get a cheap VPN for traveling or set up tailscale to your home router?
Because it was only a few days. If I'd been there longer I would have.
The cookie law is not in UK but in EU, no?
Much of it comes from GDPR law which was passed prior to brexit. After brexit, the UK kept most of the regulation under the "UK GDPR", meaning it does apply in the UK as well.
9 our of 10 online businesses will simply ban English users altogether. Which will be good for England as it will allow it to develop local competition without global multinationals' boot on their necks.
At least wikipedia has an out in the legislation by disabling content recommendation engines for UK users, this includes:
1. “You may be interested in…” search suggestions on the Wikipedia interface—these are algorithmic, content-based recommendations.
2. Editor suggestion tools that propose pages to edit, based on prior activity. Academic systems helping newcomers with article recommendations also qualify.
Most links within articles—like “See also” sections or hyperlinks—are static and curated by editors, not algorithmically chosen per user. That means they do not meet the recommender system definition.
The legislation text for reference:
"Category 1 threshold conditions 3.—(1) The Category 1 threshold conditions(10) are met by a regulated user-to-user service where, in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, it—
(a)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom users that exceeds 34 million, and
(ii)uses a content recommender system, or
(b)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom users that exceeds 7 million,
(ii)uses a content recommender system, and
(iii)provides a functionality for users to forward or share regulated user-generated content(11) on the service with other users of that service.
(2) In paragraph (1), a “content recommender system” means a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service. "
Category 1 means you have some additional duties, but it is not necessary to e.g. be obliged to verify your users' age.
On a slightly related note, has anyone else noticed an increase in social media attacks on Wikipedia, kind of like this? https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1954276775560966156
Post reads: "Periodic reminder that Wikipedia has a squillion times more money than they need to operate the actual website, and all marginal donations go to the fake paper-shuffling NGO that attached itself to the organization for the purpose of feeding on donations from rubes."
Quoted post reads: "I have no interest in giving Wikipedia money to blow on fake jobs for ovecredentialed paper-pushers, but if the banner said “Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia and he’d like to buy a yacht” then I’d pull out my wallet immediately."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Long-time WP contributor and apologist here. I still think Wikipedia does more good than bad (for all its sins), is the greatest collaborative human work of our time, and there is some merit to the idea of having a giant pile of money to be able to fight government-scale battles like this one. But the story of the bureaucrats settling in and leeching donations at scale is basically accurate.
I've contributed content to Wikipedia and broadly agree with the sentiment. Users are guilted into thinking donations go towards the cost of serving the encyclopedia, which is not really where the money goes.
“Wikipedia is one of the best resources humanity has ever produced” and “The Wikimedia Foundation spends money frivolously while soliciting donations with messages that make users think their money is going towards the project they actually care about” are not statements which are incompatible with each other.
Wikimedia does by and large an OK job (the endowment they set up in particular was a great move), but it’s incredibly bloated in ways that should be curtailed before it gets worse. It’s reasonable to want better for a resource as important as Wikipedia.
We don’t want another Mozilla.
I happened to come across some of this recently and after an independent review, decided to stop donating to them.
There’s just no way to donate to just Wikipedia (to specially only the server costs or upkeep) but ignore whatever else the organization is up to.
Same story with Mozilla, there’s no way to donate to just the development of Firefox.
It’s all good though, there’s loads of other charities that I can donate to.
This has been a criticism for a decade or more
Correct, it is especially of note given the publicity of Wikimedias funding and balances.
There is a million more greedy companies than Wikimedia, there is also other places that could use your money though, i.e Internet Archive, which is always desperate for donations.
I don't understand why Wikipedia would fall under Category 1. Am I looking at the wrong thing, or does the definition in 3.(1) not require the service to use an algorithmic recommendation system (which Wikipedia does not do)?
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2025/9780348267174
I'm not sure if this Wikipedia's official policy but at https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/wikipedias-nonprofit-hos... they do say:
> Definition of content recommender systems: Having any “algorithm” on the site that “affects” what content someone might “encounter”, is seemingly enough to qualify popular websites for Category 1. As written, this could even cover tools that are used to combat harmful content. We, and many other stakeholders, have failed to convince UK rulemakers to clarify that features that help keep services free of bad content — like the New Pages Feed used by Wikipedia article reviewers—should not trigger Category 1 status. Other rarely-used features, like Wikipedia’s Translation Recommendations, are also at risk.
> Content forwarding or sharing functionality: If a popular app or website also has content “forwarding or sharing” features, its chances of ending up in Category 1 are dramatically increased. The Regulations fail to define what they mean by “forwarding or sharing functionality”: features on Wikipedia (like the one allowing users to choose Wikipedia’s daily “Featured Picture”) could be caught.
"Content forwarding or sharing functionality" seems like it would cover any website with a URL.
So it means every website is Category 1. How convenient.
As I understand it, they refer to some of the moderation tools and the likes, which are not part of the typical Wikipedia experience.
Everybody including the judges seem to agree this is dumb but it's the current law.
I agree, it does seem odd. They do promote bits of their content on the main page, I assume with an algorithm, but it's hardly like a social media feed.
Last time I checked, many many years ago, the front page was just an ordinary wiki page like any other, and its content was manually added.
Could well be manually added.
Because laws are not interpreted in a logical way. Especially the laws with a 'safety' aspects.
Wikipedia is based in San Francisco. Why can't they just tell the UK to pound sand?
Adding to what others said, they can just let UK block Wikipedia, but as a foundation that tries to share knowledge I think they're obliged to try avoid that. So they're doing just that right now, by challenging the law.
Wikipedia's "gone black" before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA..., IMO blocking access to the whole of UK would've been a big move that could've been effective.
They presumably have editors in the UK, foundation members who live or work or travel there
they would at least want to block the UK from accessing it first?
Because some of Wikipedia's editors are based in the UK.
The random article button uses algorithms to decide what content to show to the user.
More HN comments here,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44721403 ("Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations (wikimediafoundation.org)"—189 comments)
Worth noting that was before the High Court's further judgments today, and the article has been updated. The full judgment is here: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Wikimedi...
To me, that judgment reads like a fairly strong warning to Ofcom. The outcome section makes it clear that although the request for judicial review has been refused at present, that refusal is predicated on the fact that Ofcom has currently not ruled that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service. If Ofcom were to rule that Wikipedia is a C1 service, the Wikimedia foundation would have grounds to request a review again -- and, between the lines, that request might well succeed.
So, is Wikipedia really a Category 1 service? From https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2025/9780348267174, it seems to come down to whether Wikipedia is a site which uses a "content recommender system", where that term is defined as:
> a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service
There's plenty of flexibility in that definition for Ofcom to interpret "content recommender system" in a way that catches Facebook without catching Wikipedia. For instance, Ofcom could simply take the viewpoint that any content recommendation that Wikipedia engages in is not "in respect of the user-to-user part of that service."
After today's judgement, and perhaps even before, my own bet is that this is exactly the route Ofcom will take.
If Ofcom permissibly determines that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service, and if the practical effect of that is that Wikipedia cannot continue to operate, the Secretary of State may be obliged to consider whether to amend the regulations or to exempt categories of service from the Act. In doing so, he would have to act compatibly with the Convention. Any failure to do so could also be subject to further challenge. Such a challenge would not be prevented by the outcome of this claim.
Seems pretty logical.
Again I think people outside of the UK perceive Ofcom to be a censor with a ban hammer. It's an industry self-regulation authority -- backed by penalties, yes, but it favours self-regulation. And the implementation is a modifiable statutory instrument specifically so that issues like this can be addressed.
In a perfect world would this all be handled with parental oversight and on-device controls? Yeah, maybe. But on-device parental controls are such a total mess, and devices available so readily, that UK PAYG mobile phone companies have already felt compelled (before the law changed) to block adult content by default.
ETA: I am rate-limited so I will just add that I am in the UK too. Not that this is relevant to the discussion. There is no serious UK consensus for overturning this law; the only party that claims that as a position does not even have the support of the majority of its members. I do not observe this law to be censorship, because as an adult I can see what I want to see, I just have to prove I am an adult. Which is how it used to work with top shelf magazines (so I am told! ;-) )
I suppose it's not really the done thing to say this, but if you disagree with me, say something, don't just downvote.
As someone in the UK: Ofcom is a censor, that by leaving these things unclear are further having a massive chilling effect that is absolutely already being felt.
The issue here is not parental oversight. It's the massively overly broad assault on speech.
The UK PAYG block is a good example of a solution that would have had far less severe impact if extended.
Pretty sure the PAYG block is circumvented by simply changing the APN in the carrier settings using freely available information online - that's how 3Ireland works and VodafoneIRL IIRC. It also had the annoying consequence of blocking all 'adult' sites - which included sites of historic interest and things like the internet archive.
The problem with 'child safety' in the UK has almost nothing to do with pornographers or 'toxic' influences as viewed through the lense of neo-Victorian morality anyway.
Instead, it is a societal powderkeg of gang indoctrination and social deprivation leading to a culture of drug-dealing, violent robberies, and postcode gang intimidation. This bill is simply a cheap and easily supported deflection from the dereliction of duty of successive governments towards the youth of the country since Blair.
In short, it is nothing but an electoral panacea for the incumbent intolerant conservative voting base; moral-hysteria disguised as a child safety measure.
This is inherently obvious when you assess the new vocabulary of persecution and otherness - detailing 'ASBO Youth', 'Chavs', 'NEETs and NEDs' and their inevitable progression to 'Roadmen'.
The Netflix series 'Top Boy' is the Sopranos equivalent of how this culture operates and how children are indoctrinated into a life of diminished expectations in a way that is often inescapable given their environment and cultural norms around their upbringing.
Even with this plethora of evidence and cultural consciousness, the powers that be are smugly insistent that removing PornHub is more important than introducing Social Hubs and amenities - and those that argue otherwise are derided as 'Saville's in the new parlance.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/online-saf...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgery3eeqzxo
Normalizing those mosquito devices and trying to drive teenagers out of public life, banning kitchen knives in some attempt to keep kids from getting used to blades...
the UK strategy on kids is very very strange to me. I can't follow the logic at all. Do they expect them to silently sit at home, not using the Internet, not going anywhere with friends, and end up well adjusted adults anyway?
Because these trials and tribulations are designed to disenfranchise the lower classes - regardless of age, the protected classes tend to be unimpeded by societal measures in the UK.
If teenagers Felicity or Joshua need to purchase a knife, or access questionable internet content, it'll be an assumed part of their privilege that they'll be able to do so. Similarly they are unimpacted by anti-social behaviour orders or restrictions on their entitlement to exist in public spaces unmolested, as this is the demographic insulated by their memberships to 3rd spaces such as Social and Sporting clubs - a fry cry from their lower-class urban peers resigned to hanging around the Tesco carpark.
Seems like It’s just too dangerous for Wikipedia or many others to risk though - the potential penalties in the law are just too huge as far as I’ve seen.
For a lot of sites, the safe response has just been cautious over-blocking as far as I can see (or smaller UK-based services just shutting down) but you can imagine why Wikipedia don’t want to do that.
But you’re right that encouraging much better parental controls would have been better than passing this bad law - I’ll give you that one.
[flagged]
> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".
Suppression of information is not safety, it’s control.
To all of the commenters recommending that Wikipedia block UK visitors: This is incredibly short-sighted in the age of LLMs, where Wikipedia does not need to exist in a country in order for the benefit of its existence to be felt. Such a move would likely just drive people to obtain dubious regurgitations of Wikipedia’s (freely available) content via their favorite LLM chatbot, in my opinion.
Option 1: enabling "dubious regurgitations of information"
Option 2: enabling draconian abuse of power, violation of privacy, and mass surveillance
How is the state of the art as far as blocking LLMs from accessing a site?
Wikipedia loses court challenge
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/wikipe...
Somehow this rhymes with the US's "War on Drugs", and it makes me very afraid:
Similarities I see:
* In the years leading up to government action, a mass hysteria was well cultivated in the media (evil drug users committing abhorrent crimes).
* When launched, the public was overwhelmingly in favor of it (In 1971, 48% of the public said drugs were a serious problem in their community [1]).
That's where we are now. THEN:
* It got worse for decades (By 1986, 56% of Americans said that the government spent "too little" money fighting drugs [1]).
* Following many years of lobbying, some rights are slowly restored. (NORML and other groups fighting for legal medical, then recreational use; mushrooms are legal in few places, etc).
* It's still going on today. (Over 100,000 people currently serving prison sentences for drug-related offenses [2]).
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/6331/decades-drug-use-data-from...
[2] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html
US should slap travel bans on UK politicians travelling to Disney parks and similar in Florida with their families. And/or with their older children visiting NYC. The combined pressure of the wives and their children, will knock sense in their thick skulls quickly. In the sense of - being stupid is not cost free. Atm it's cost free for them, and costly for me.
The US is moving in the same direction.
US is not exactly desirable location for tourism right now.
And like, appeal of of florida Disneyland as a dream place to go to was never all that huge abroad. The Disney cult/dream is more of an American thing.
Wouldn’t think this kind of law could ever have popular vote. Could anyone that support this law explain why they think it is good?
Just leaving this here, in case things really start going south and people realize they need to stack up on knowledge supplies (note: I am not affiliated with them, I just think that Wikipedia, among other resources, is too valuable to let it fall through the cracks):
> When there is No Internet, there is Kiwix Access vital information anywhere. Use our apps for offline reading on the go or the Hotspot in every place you want to call home. Ideal for remote areas, emergencies, or independent knowledge access.
https://kiwix.org/en/
I'm confused.. can't they appeal High Court decisions (since the UKSC was formed after the government didn't like the High Court's decisions in the Diego Garcia thing)? [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_Ki...
Okay but what if I want zero safety
Can I have zero safety if I choose that?
Is Wikimedia Foundation a UK entity? Otherwise why should it concern itself with some country's regulation? USA does not have a global jurisdiction. But it has global leverages.
It has UK based editors and users. Employees of the foundation surely travel to the UK. They take donations from UK users. Their network peers with UK based ISPs.
They have enough touch points with the UK that complying not complying with UK law could cause significant problem.
Now is the best time to remember: if there's something you value online, download it. There's no problem with downloading the entirety of wikipedia, and it's actually pretty easy and light to do so. Get your favorite songs, movies, etc. too ASAP
An honest question - which devices can be used for secure communication if phones get government-borked for "children/foreign interference" purposes?
an unborked phone
To me the online safety act is a latency tax and nothing more. Sucks for others though. I feel bad for them, it’s not right.
If the UK orders a Wikipedia block to its ISPs, it would be a good thing, to raise public awareness of the OSA. Wikipedia should do nothing and wait.
From about ten years ago, ISPs were required to block web sites which were unsuitable for children by default. Any ISP's customer (the person paying for internet access, who would therefore be over 18) could ask for the block to be removed. Requiring individual web sites to block access was unnecessary if the intention was to prevent children accessing those sites.
My understanding is that the default "block" just worked through the ISP's DNS servers. So that only works if the parents know to restrict the ability of their kids to change their DNS servers on their local devices (which is not set up by default) and the kids don't know how to get around it.
>Requiring individual web sites to block access was unnecessary if the intention was to prevent children accessing those sites.
Hmm. So Reddit, Youtube, etc. would be blocked by ISPs by default?
Which is why they will not do it. Nothing popular will be blocked or shut down.
I'm no longer convinced that nothing popular will be shut down, assuming that includes voluntarily withdrawing from the UK market. A couple of days ago, this popped up:
> The Science Department, which oversees the legislation, told companies they could face fines if they failed to uphold free speech rules.
> A spokesman said: “As well as legal duties to keep children safe, the very same law places clear and unequivocal duties on platforms to protect freedom of expression.
> “Failure to meet either obligation can lead to severe penalties, including fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue or £18m, whichever is greater.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/09/social-media...
They seem to be putting social media platforms between a rock and a hard place, particularly as political debate in the UK is starting to heat up somewhat. I suppose the best to hope for at this point is that fines for infringing free expression never materialize.
Porn is popular!
True, but its not going to get blocked. AFAIK all the big porn sites are happily implementing age verification. Why not? Its an excuse to gather data, to increase numbers of registered users or some other form of tracking, and to raise a barrier to entry to smaller competitors.
Other aspects of the OSA have similar effects on other types of sites such as forums vs social media.
> Why not?
Because only 10% of visitors actually do it. It might not be as bad as this because probably anyone who was actually going to pay for the porn would be ok with giving them their credit card number anyway. Bad for advertising income though.
Some are not, an ironically, Ofcom's website now provides a handy list of websites you can visit without age verification (in their list of companies they are investigating)
> AFAIK all the big porn sites are happily implementing age verification
I don’t know what you had in mind by “big porn sites”, but the biggest one I know of (Pornhub) is not doing that.
They decided to voluntarily withdraw from the US markets where age verification became required (TX, GA, etc.), and wrote a pretty good blog post explaining their rationale (which revolved around the idea that letting third parties to just receive and process ID documents just so that users could watch porn was both not secure at all and absurd).
I just tried to visit pornhub and was prompted to verify my age.
> Please verify your age > > To continue, we are required to verify that you are 18 or older, in line with the UK Online Safety Act. > To view your verification options, please visit our Age Verification Page. As part of this process, you will be asked to create a new account on Pornhub - this will automatically create a new account on AllpassTrust as well. > By proceeding, you acknowledge and agree to Pornhub’s and AllpassTrust’s Privacy Νotices and Pornhub’s and AllpassTrust’s Terms & Conditions.
> Pornhub is dedicated to developing state-of-the-art security features to protect its community. Pornhub is fully RTA compliant, which means that devices with appropriately configured parental controls will block access to our content. We encourage all platforms in the adult industry to use this technology, along with all available safety and security protocols. We also recommend that all parents and guardians use technology to prevent their children from accessing content not intended for minors.
> Our parental controls page explains how you can easily block access to this site.
Only privately though. No politician is going to admit to watching porn. Any campaign to save porn isn't going to attract many public supporters.
https://news.sky.com/story/neil-parish-mp-accused-of-watchin...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12535038
Neither of those are relevant. One watched porn at work. Another had her husband expense his porn. And they were both caught rather than admitting it.
We're talking about just watching porn in private, normally. Find me an MP that admits to that.
Not many people are going to say this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7yIlGlUZac
Wild. People compelled by law to produce id before accessing an online encyclopaedia. Shouldn't we be encouraging good behaviours like learning?
That won’t help them build a profile on you though and then, through the help of AI determine if you’re a threat because you’ve been displaying a pattern of looking at things you shouldn’t be.
The debate(s) here is (are) premature.
What are the consequences of simply disregarding the UK ruling? Does Wikipedia have British employees, offices, or financial assets?
What I hate most about this latest push is that people in their 30s are trying to convince us all that blocking children's access to porn and such is the issue. As if most people don't agree with that in the abstract.
Not only people in their 30s, but it's who I see making a fuss about it. Presumably because they are now parents of children newly reaching this age.
They are completely ignoring that they are entering a debate that's been going on for longer than they have been alive, and are just arguing from a source of "common sense" gut feelings. They are literally a third of a century behind on this issue, but it doesn't stop them talking about it.
They are incompetent on this issue (nothing bad about that. I'm incompetent in most things), but they are also stupid because they don't let that incompetence stop them.
They are too incompetent to understand that they just did the equivalent of entering a room full of mathematicians with a collective thousands of years of math knowledge, and saying "how about just making 2+2=5? You could make 2+2=4, so you smart people should be able to do it". How do you even start with someone this ignorant? They don't even understand what math is.
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" — "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
UK Online Safety Act has a much bigger scope than porn.
In fact you've picked probably the least offensive, which is not to say uncontroversial, part of the law to argue with. Its illegal to distribute porn to minors just like its illegal to let underage people gamble on your poker app.
Yet people in factor of age verification laws for porn still have concerns with this because it's just a totally open-ended backdoor into content moderation across the internet.
I wish I could agree with you, but this is not how things work. My experience says that if there's enough people wishing for 2+2 to equal 5, that will become the socially accepted standard, and the whole society will get organized around 2+2=5. Will it be less efficient? Yes. Will people care? No.
If UK really believes in their ideology then they just need to copy China and implement the China Firewall™ for the UK.
FYI, Wikimedia Foundation just wants a carve out/exception to be able to opt out of category 1 duties.
How would they collect fines in this scenario?
To be clear I totally agree with you. But they are playing a game.
Does Online Safety Act covers only HTTP? I mean does it cover say bittorrent? Or any outgoing TCP connection?
As if this is even a consideration in the law.
They are clueless to whatever an internet protocol is. Effectively, if it uses the "internet" and you interface with it from a device, it is subject to the ruling.
And if i were a lawyer i'd use the legal system - specifically i'd start by challenging OSA on the undue burden grounds for say BitTorrent - bringing in some experts, etc.. If not successful - such ruling would effectively prohibit all unauthenticated network activity - would make the cost of OSA clear to the public. If successful, i'd show that the same content OSA worried about - like p.rn - is widely available on BitTorrent, and thus having limitations for HTTP while not for BitTorrent is capricious or something like this.
You're allowed to say porn
Block the UK. Ridiculous behavior.
Isn't the lesson here that every website should just block UK access?
This is about the duties of a "category 1 service" under the Online Safety Act. Wikipedia is one mostly because of their size, I believe. These duties are quite onerous, and over the top (someone might say that the government is seeing adults are real "snowflakes" these days):
Large user-to-user services, known as Category 1 services, will be required to offer adult users tools which, if they choose to use, will give them greater control over the kinds of content they see and who they engage with online.
Adult users of such services will be able to verify their identity and access tools which enable them to reduce the likelihood that they see content from non-verified users and prevent non-verified users from interacting with their content. This will help stop anonymous trolls from contacting them.
Following the publication of guidance by Ofcom, Category 1 services will also need to proactively offer adult users optional tools, at the first opportunity, to help them reduce the likelihood that they will encounter certain types of legal content. These categories of content are set out in the Act and include content that does not meet a criminal threshold but encourages, promotes or provides instructions for suicide, self-harm or eating disorders. These tools also apply to abusive or hate content including where such content is racist, antisemitic, homophobic, or misogynist. The tools must be effective and easy to access. [1]
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...
Only editors engage with each other on Wikipedia, right? Can they just ban sign up and edits by/from the UK?
Conducting risk assessments and impact assessments regularly. Providing transparency reports and cooperating fully with Ofcom.
This is the sort of regulatory compliance that has stifled European businesses for decades. Useless overhead.
Could it be that the massive Wikipedia war chest of money can actually be used for something now?
If the incessant banner ads said, "Hello, this is a special plea from Jimmy Wales, get in, we're saving the Brits from themselves", then maybe I'd actually donate.
Wikipedia ought to block edits from the UK. Giving in to fascism emboldens it.
I wonder why Wikipedia does not ban access from the UK due to this ruling ? I think doing that will get them an exemption rather quickly.
Do they even need to? Seems like they can just eliminate all the jobs in the UK and let the ISPs ban them when the time comes.
Right - in terms of liability there is nothing the UK can do to them if they aren't operating there. Up to the UK to block them with the Great British Firewall if they still aren't happy.
Having said that, if Wikipedia geo blocked the UK it would send a powerful message to everyone living here.
My read of the article is that it's still an ongoing legal battle, even after this one judgement.
So maybe yes, but maybe no, depending on how things pan out in subsequent rulings?
I don't think any movement like that has worked yet.
>I think doing that will get them an exemption rather quickly.
Some of us prefer civilization, though.
Going to be downvoted, but I support the move to make Wikimedia (and other websites that distribute user-generated content) to verify identities of their users (editors). It is ok to be responsible for what you're posting. We are living in the age of global irresponsibility.
And it doesn't mean Wikimedia must make the identities public. Same as any other website -- real identity to be provided only to authorities following a court order.
Also, there's a ton of bots and paid agents working full-time to shift political opinions to their political agenda.
Think your position through and try to determine if there is any possibility of unintended consequences.
Parliamentary democracy has proven absolutely useless in defending alienable rights like freedom of speech.
I have been trying to think what sort of system is ideal to replace them. I think there has to be some kind of strong constitution that guarantees aforementioned rights. But I also think it's instructive to look at America wrt how that can go awry - ie their constitution is routinely ignored, and a lot of the political decision making is done by fifth columnists lobbying for a foreign nation.
Regardless, we need to start having these conversations. It's not a matter of getting different people into Westminster. Westminster is illegitimate. Let's think about what's next and how we can get there peacefully.
I am not surprised. Every time I mention the draconian laws around digital speech when flying into london, hackernews historically said I was being ridiculous.
The UK has some of the oddest laws I have seen from a western nation.
Just ignore the law, what are they going to do about it? Block Wikipedia in the UK?
It's a shame both sides can't lose
So, theoretically, this would have revealed the identity of one of the biggest trolls in Wikipedia history: BrownHairedGirl.
Wikipedia is so bad at simplest PR.
It should close itself before elections to burn the politicians that try to screw it.
It's a dangerous game to play, spending credibility to influence stuff.
Not that it's unthinkable or anything, but my impression is that people are not quite aware that it ain't free.
If wikipedia can show the Jimmy Wales banners, then sure it can go for the throat of some politicians.
It allready collects few hubdred million per year, spends like 10 on wikipedia itself and rest goes for political projects. They could do something useful for once.
(On a side note: all those money and they dont use it to track the cliques / country level actors across admins...)
Of course it did. This is all completely arbitrary and the powers that be will do what they want and this is what you asked for, nay, begged for during covid.
> The government's lawyers argued that ministers had considered whether Wikipedia should be exempt from the regulations but had reasonably rejected the idea.
It's funny, I'm coming up on my citizenship application and I sure as fuck won't ever be voting for Labour. I would rather create my own party and fail then vote for them (or conservatives or Reform). It's amazing how accurate The Thick Of It is.
Just turn off Wikipedia for the UK until it gets fixed.
At what point is is time to put this very real island on a virtual island and just block all traffic that seems to be coming from there? Maybe they're right and all their meddling will really make the internet better, in which case I hope they enjoy their own private improved internet very much while I enjoy my inferior one in which I am not forced to aid materially in the government's surveillance of me.
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44863487
Maybe this is good. On balance, perhaps Wikipedia has become too important a cultural asset for anonymous editors.
Here in Canada there is Bill S-210 Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act aka "think of the children".
I don't think the politicians thought of or could conceive of the technological requirements needed if this passes. It's just a knee-jerk bill sponsored by self-professed Conservative Senator Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne. Conservatives of the CPC party in Canada are much farther right of center more evangelical religious than the old Progressive Conservatives PCs were.
Note that Senators in Canada are not like US Senators.
i run a pretty large wiki, few mill users a month, and will be ignoring these laws. i'm from the US for reference.
Were it my decision to make... I'd ban the UK. If they wants to live in the dark ages, let them.
There are too many Big Tech bootlickers on YCombinator who enabled this. All of a sudden, they get to act surprised and morally superior. I guess this is who the gatekeepers let in, people who publicly seem moral but when push comes to shove they will always act evil.
How exactly did "Big Tech bootlickers on YCombinator" enable the UK's parliament to enact authoritarian censorship laws? Pray tell.
It's disappointing that their argument was more "exempt up" and less "this is an unworkable law".
Not sure what comes next but wikipedia blocking UK followed by perhaps a study or two about harm done to the economy may be a good start to get the morons in charge to see the light
This whole saga tells me that nobody in UK gov knows wtf their doing on anything online. (This act was introduced under conservatives and passed under liberals)
It's an interesting thing but I think their specific concerns are somewhat overcooked.
As another commenter pointed out in the earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44721712
> The categorisation regulations are a statutory instrument rather than primary legislation, so they _are_ open to judicial review. But the Wikimedia foundation haven't presented an argument as to why the regulations are unlawful, just an argument for why they disagree with them.
Ofcom's SI could simply be modified to exclude research texts, and it could even be modified to exclude Wikipedia specifically; there's no obvious problem with that considering its scale and importance.
If you go through Ofcom's checker:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
The answers are 1) yes, 2) yes, 3) no, 4) probably "No, but...", 5) no, 6) no.
But the answer to getting out of the problem entirely might be to change the answer to question 6 -- that is, register Wikipedia as an education provider in the UK (since it is already used in that capacity).
I mean Wikipedia have actually exhibited at BETT, the main educational tech show here; Jimmy Wales did a keynote.
> And it could even be modified to exclude Wikipedia specifically;
That's certainly a potential workaround. But carve outs often mean that similar communities become hard to create!
I don't doubt that. But again, it is secondary legislation. It's highly amenable to ministerial and parliamentary scrutiny, and it will be amended.
That is exactly the problem. It's unpredictable, and in the hand of a government with a serious authoritarian and pro-censorship attitude.
I get the feeling that that's why Wikimedia UK is taking this particular course.
Also creates system for brown envelopes, so only well connected to the establishment could get an exemption.
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All US companies should boycott the UK in solidarity. See how fast the regulators walk back the bill.
We can't even get American companies to take a stand against authoritarianism in their own country.
why would they? This is great for the large media corps:
- Increases barrier to entry for smaller competitors
- Reliable user data (age, race, who knows what else) derived from video age verification
Anecdote:
My mom recently visited Spain. The process of buying a local SIM card was as follows:
• Show your US passport at a major local cellular provider’s store (Movistar) to have its number associated with the SIM.
• During SIM activation, open a browser page that accesses the phone’s camera.
• Scan the first page of your passport.
• Point the selfie camera at your face, then close your eyes and smile when prompted.
> then close your eyes and smile when prompted
I was about to ask about this, but then I realized it must so that you can't just point it at a photo of someone.
The UK law is significantly less stringent and better thought out than equivalent age verification laws already in place in a bunch of US states....
I think those age verification laws don't target as many sites though, right? not Wikipedia at least
Ah yes, what about the US.
Which law are you talking about by the way?
I was mostly familiar with laws that required porn companies to verify their user's age. That is a lot more targeted and less offensive than UK Online Safety Act Regulations IMO. I mean it's already illegal to distribute porn to minors - that's just requiring them to enforce it at the expense of porn watcher's anonymity. Whereas the UK Online Safety Act is more like a backdoor for content moderation across the internet.
The online safety act being a more well thought out step on this slippery slope doesn’t mean it isn’t leading to the same horrible end. We are just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.