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.
[0] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
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.
Y/N
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
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
Anyone that phrases a referendum like that ought to be sentenced to hard labor themselves for attempting to subvert democracy.
On the other hand. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44870087
[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.
Yes?? It's not like a school exam where the questions are secret until you see it in the voting booth, and even if it were, you should still read the question carefully. I'm all for things being written as clearly as possible but at some point you have to acknowledge that voters have a responsibility to think about what they're voting for.
I guess it is at least consistent with your belief that there is a mandate for Project 2025.
> I live in a country where 91.78% of the population voted for a referendum that bought back hard labour in prisons.
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.
This is incredibly anecdotal, a major victim of selection bias, and also there are possibly effects of agreeableness here b/c it seems like you may be part of a vocal minority on this issue (and I mean that with absolutely no negative connotations). That said, I don't automatically reject vibes based determinations like this because often the high bandwidth of personal interaction can outweigh the problems with low bandwidth questioning in polls. But in this case, when 90% voted in favor, I have a hard time believing it. I think that what you can safely conclude from your experience is that a lot of people didn't know what they were voting for. If you wanted to say maybe it was really 75-25 I could go with that, but 91% in favor (in an actual vote and not a poll) is pretty convincing to me.
And there is no way you can convince me 91% of New Zealand voters, where this is the common policy stance [https://www.mbie.govt.nz/business-and-employment/employment-...], had any clue they were voting for forced hard labor for prisoners. Especially considering how relatively cushy the current standards are for prisoners.
I’m sure with enough lawyers and PR folks could also write (and pass) a CA popular thingy which calls for all males to be kicked in the groin too.
That said, I’m also a big believer in voters getting what they voted for - only way they’ll learn. Besides, a few kicks to the groin might teach them a lesson!
It baffles me that you people think we didn't know what we voted for in a referendum question expressed in a single sentence which included the words,
> Should there be a reform of our justice system [...] imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?
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.
Isn't this the whole story of government policy? The stated policy so rarely actually leads to the hoped-for result.
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.
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.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
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.
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.
Russia found good way to enforce it, they changed the law and give out prison sentences for using VPNs
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.
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.
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
While that is possible, it doesn't negate the fact 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.
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.
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 am suspicious of polling because I have a decent understanding of statistics. That is the opposite of statistical illiteracy.
> 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.
That isn't the argument being made. Nobody said it is "useless". I said I was "suspicious of polling organisations". Polling can be and has been used to manipulate public sentiment.
Therefore it is prudent to be suspicious of any polling.
That's fair in the context of, you're a political operative who is trying to enact specific policies as your occupation and you therefore have the time to go through and carefully inspect numerous polls to derive a well-rounded understanding. But that's also quite disconnected from how polls are typically used in the public discourse.
Ordinary people don't have time to do that, so instead political operatives will commission a poll to get the result they want, or find one from a reputable pollster who unintentionally made a phrasing error in their favor, or just cherry pick like this: https://xkcd.com/882/
And then use the result to try to convince people that the public is actually on their side and it would be ineffective or costly to oppose them. Which, unless you have the time to go carefully read a hundred different polls to see whether the result is legitimate, means that the sensible strategy is to give polls no weight.
Or to put it another way, on any politically contentious issue there will always be at least one poll saying X and another saying not-X, which means that in the absence of a more thorough analysis that exceeds the resource availability of most members of the public (and even many legislators), neither has any information content because the probability of a poll existing with that result was already ~100%.
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.
Similarly we could easily devise many solutions that can prove the age in the privacy - respecting ways (like inserting the age-confirming token inside the pack of cigarettes which an adult could then purchase with cash, etc)
Many ways.
But then anyone can post the token on the internet where anyone can get it, the same as they could do with anything cryptographic that you put on the back of cigarettes or whatever. Unless you have a way of tracing it to the person who did it in order to impose penalties, which is precisely the thing that would make it not private/anonymous, which is why they're incompatible.
If you're going to do one then do the first one -- just make it actually untraceable -- but understand that it won't work. It would never work anyway because there are sites outside of your jurisdiction that won't comply with whatever you're proposing regardless, so the thing that fails to work while not impacting privacy is better than the thing that fails to work while causing widespread harm, but then people are going to complain about it and try to impose the thing that does cause widespread harm by removing privacy. Which is why the whole thing should be abandoned instead.
I was just commenting on the claimed inability to make the system work AND be anonymous.
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).
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.
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.
Old news, but I suspect there hasn't been a sudden outbreak of puritanism.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/mps-peers-and-staff-...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
"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"
"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"
For instance, a full copy of Debbie Does Dallas is on its Wikipedia article [NFSW, obviously].
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.
MPs are elected to Parliament, they get input from their constituants. 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.
How do you force your representatives to actually represent their constituents?
Petitions have a place, which is to inform of a point of view and of the opinion of a portion of the public. That's a form of lobbying. But that's it, we should certainly not expect that a law be repelled because of a petition, and rightly so.
I get your point about petitions and direct democracy being a form of who shouts louder (in the media, advertising, # of campaign events etc), but this is equally true of regular elections. It's even more so in a first-past-the-post system like the UK, whose two major parties have no interest in shifting to a proportional representation system because it would advantage smaller parties at their expense, even though the result would more closely reflect public preference.
In my view, parliamentary systems developed a few centuries ago have their advantages but also come with a great deal of historical baggage (systems that benefit a particular class of candidate and so forth), and they're buckling under the pressures of a real-time information society where people know transparency and timely publication of information are technically possible but such goods are systematically withheld from the public.
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?
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.
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.
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.
And who would they need to hide from?
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.
What happens when someone wants to explore their sexuality by finding someone other than the pre-approved person from the parents?
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.
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.
However, as we have seen before, 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.
Content filters only affect law abiding users and providers. The hallmark of an effective policy is to make it as easy as possible to comply with it. Setting a header is pretty damn easy to implement and enforce by the government. It also displays trust in law abiding citizen, who will comply with the law, because they know that it serves their best interests, rather than being shoved down their throats against their will.
The alternative will have exactly the same or - far more likely - worse results, because the cost of verifying every user's age is far too high to be implemented by the vast majority of sites on the internet. It's more likely that when law abiding citizens are faced with laws that are impossible to implement that they just throw up their hands up and close up shop or move somewhere else.
In the second scenario their services might still be accessible in the UK and need to be blocked by the UK government, the online safety act achieves essentially nothing in this scenario.
We're talking about a law. If you distribute pornography to someone who sent the header in that request, it would be a violation of the law. But that law doesn't have any ID requirements or privacy problems, unlike the proposed one.
> 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.
To begin with, "targeting children" is preposterous. It assumes that they would not only not care but prefer to have children as users than adults, even though children are less likely to have access to money to pay for content/subscriptions and purposely targeting children would get them into trouble even under longstanding existing laws.
On top of that, the header isn't specifying that the user is under 18, it's specifying that the user agent is requesting not to be shown pornography. It's as likely to be set when the user is a 45 year old woman as a 14 year old boy, so using it to distinguish between them wouldn't work anyway.
Porn companies don't have any kind of monopoly or brand loyalty and the ones shady enough to do something like that are exactly the ones that won't still be in business by the time today's kids are adults, so anyone doing it wouldn't be the one deriving a benefit from it.
Even normal companies don't care about customers decades from now because the thing they do teach in business school is discount rates. A dollar in 10 years is worth less than half that today. Likewise, managers get bonuses and promotions on the basis of present-day profits rather than something that happens a generation from now when they're likely to be at a different company anyway.
The premise that they're expected to do that on a widespread basis is ridiculous. Instead it will be one fool who writes something along those lines in an email which is then published because media companies love publishing anything which is bad PR for someone they don't like, regardless of whether it was ever widely implemented or implemented at all. It isn't an actual business strategy for real businesses.
Targeting them has a lower return than targeting people who are of age.
Specific to targeting teenagers, porn users are mostly under 30, so your statement about 14-18 being around the same as 18-80 is irrelevant. About not being able to pay at 14-17, sure, let's go with that, but they start paying after that. We are talking a few years here. Companies do have incentives to create customers just a few years down the line.
Let me ask a few rhetorical questions. How do you think social media became popular? How did tiktok, snapchat, facebook, instagram become popular? Even yikyak became popular because they targeted teens. Why has so much advertising been targeted to teenagers for decades now? Hell, how did onlyfans become popular? All these companies have massive incentives to target teenagers.
So your stance of these porn companies not targeting teenagers is just being willfully obtuse.
This discussion started from the categorisation error. Technical means should be irrelevant here.
They just want to throw responsibility and blame on parents, so that government dont restrict porn access. Parents are just a tool and scapegoats.
This is a dangerous semantic drift that ignores how teenagers are in the process of developing into adults, and so need the parent supervision of them to be slowly relaxed. (Especially since, if handled poorly, they tend to rebel, and cause much more damage.)
And, as a reminder, not all erotic or erotic-adjacent (or other "adult topics") works are porn,
and depending on the jurisdiction the age of consent is often less than 18
(16 in UK, though I am sure there are important details hidden behind this single number),
though I do understand that there might be new, unique challenges here in the Internet era, with laws that might not have caught up yet.
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.
Sexuality is part of the human condition that doesn't start on one's 18th birthday just because over-protective parents want complete control of their child.
It's weird that parents believe they need to control every facet of their child's life, down to being able to learn about why they feel the way they do. It's a form of abuse and coercion.
Oh you're that anti-games, anti-porn guy, best to ignore anything you say.
>From people who would harm them?
Like who? I really hope you don't mean the kids' parents.
It's really down to whether Wikipedia feels that compliance would go against the organization's principles. If so, blocking the UK is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If another organization steps in to mirror Wikipedia in a way that complies with UK law, there's no downside for Wikipedia - they maintain their principles and the UK continues to have at least some access to free information.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3477966 ("Wikipedia blackout page (wikipedia.org)" (2012))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA...
On that occassion, it was very effective at getting the American government to back down.
> 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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
A lot of voices on the left [1] are now pro-censorship. As long as you're censoring the opinions they don't like, it's totally fine.
We used to have an ACLU and EFF that would fight for free speech regardless of political belief. They defended the most reprehensible groups on both sides because "unless all speech is free, none of it is free". The ACLU has stumbled in that regard [2-4].
[1] I'm not picking on the left. Both the left and the right want to censor the other side. They're united in installing the means of control, they're just unclear about who will wield the power. Someone will win, and it probably won't be you. You should support near-absolute free speech if only to selfishly protect yourself. Once it's gone, it's gone forever.
[2] https://fee.org/articles/the-aclu-is-no-longer-free-speechs-...
[3] https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/commentary/the-acl...
[4] https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/391682-the-final-na...
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.
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.
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"?
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-...
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
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.
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.
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...
The hill article even articulated exactly that position openly.
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 don’t want to go right or left. I want to move forward and leave this stupid, stupid mess behind.
These words do mean things. The left is the ideology of supporting less tall power hierarchies, and the right is the ideology of supporting taller power hierarchies. Wealthy left-wing people don't stay wealthy for long, hence almost all wealthy people are right-wing.
Note a common misconception - in the American context, note the Democrats are not left. Trying to contort the definition of left to make the Democrat party fit the definition muddies the meaning severely. However many left-wing Americans do vote for the Democrat party, because game theory makes it the optimal vote if you're left-wing.
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
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.
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.
This is the perfect opportunity to do so, and they aren't doing it. Instead, they are picking the smallest possible battle they can.
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.
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.
This is my biggest concern with how Wikimedia is behaving: they are in a significant position politically, and are abdicating this crucial responsibility.
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...
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.
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.
My point is that it is not a strong argument. It isn't an argument at all! Instead, "think of the children" is a thoughtless appeal to emotion. The irony is that my position comes from actually thinking of the children. Censorship does not help children at all. Instead, it degrades well moderated platforms, which incentivizes children into interacting with poorly moderated platforms.
> I just don't see them as being in that significant of a position.
That's incredible to me. What website could possibly be more important to laypeople? Maybe YouTube or Facebook, I suppose, but neither of those could begin to replace Wikipedia.
> The real nuclear option--blocking the UK from accessing Wikimedia sites--would certainly garner some attention.
That's an understatement. Everyone would notice. Even more interestingly, it would illustrate to everyone the absurdity of internet censorship: everyone would immediately learn a workaround, because it's impossible to actually censor the internet.
Aaron Swartz is no longer with us.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Opposition_to_the...
I wonder what happens if they simply don't comply. Will the UK at any point ask ISPs to ban Wikipedia?
It's "user error, you are trying to access the site from some dystopian society that prohibits it".
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.
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.
AI chatbots are only capable of outputting “vibe knowledge”.
Under the Misconceptions header
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".
Yea great, make everyone even dumber by forcing them to use AI slop
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Blocking, making it clear why your blocking and that you will continue to block until it changes is respecting the decision.
>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.
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.
If they were to block the UK that would just be them no longer “doing business” in the UK, which you seem to agree is perfectly acceptable?
You seem to think that the Wikimedia Foundation exists outside of a political context but the reality is their sheer existence is political and always will be.
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.
The current government is more than able to use their democratic mandate to appeal or change the law.
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
But you already knew that.
Most people weren't aware of the Online Safety Act. I would argue it wasn't even any of the policies.
The Tories were in power for 14 years previously. During that time we had 5 prime ministers all of which were seen as weak and ineffective. People were sick of the Conservative party. This includes some of their most ardent supporters.
People were sick of the Conservative party, this includes people that had previously voted for the Conservatives.
The election had low voter turn out. It wasn't that Labour won, it was more like the Conservatives lost and by default Labour took power because they were the only other choice.
Blocking is respecting the law!
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?
Oh yeah, they left that.
The Brexit referendum was in the 2015 Conservative party manifesto [1]. If Labour had won the 2015 election then there would have been no referendum and the UK would still be in the EU. Or if people had voted differently in the referendum, the UK would still be in the EU.
The person I was responding to suggests that elections have never changed anything in the UK within their lifetime. Unless they are less than 10 years old, this is clearly false.
[1] https://www.theresavilliers.co.uk/files/conservativemanifest... (p. 30)
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.
And parliamentary representative democracy is still very much democratic even without referenda on every little issue.
In what way would blocking access from the UK be not respecting the law?
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.
Well, at the very least, the American government is already aiming for 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.
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.
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.
"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...
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