Very disturbing turn of events

> Last October, Prime Minister David Cameron condemned Facebook's decision to allow videos showing people being decapitated back on its pages. > He said it was "irresponsible" of the social network.

Watching videos of LiveLeak of people being executed by all the sides in Syria, Iraq, Chechnya, Lybia, Afghanistan has taught me more about those conflicts than the BBC, CNN etc. The narco Cartels releasing videos of their hideous torture and murder has totally changed my mind about the cocaine trade.

The truth is liberating. Cameron is unwittingly turning himself into the King Canute of myth, trying to prove that he can turn off the tide of truth. Canute was trying to demonstrate the powerlessness of kings. Cameron thinks he has power. He will get wet feet just the same.

Remember when they said filtering would just be for porn?

And then just for pirates and porn?

Now coming to you based on being an extremist in the eyes of government!

This is a different filter-attempt than the porn filter. As the article says that can be turned off. This is more in line with the piracy filters, but implemented by government not the courts after private cases.

The big brother spokesperson suggests that if content is to be blocked it should be after a court order. I'd prefer for most of it not to be blocked.

> Last October, Prime Minister David Cameron condemned Facebook's decision to allow videos showing people being decapitated back on its pages.

That was a weird decision, especially when they had earlier been deleting images of breast feeding women.

My point was more general than about a specific blocking methodology: that people who were defending specific blocks all pointed out how they would be targeted, but the social acceptance of one seems to encourage people to try for more.

But there have always been calls to block those three things.

Sinn Fein members used to have their voices dubbed in news broadcasts because of UK law and that was in the 1980s.

Material useful for terrorism has been illegal for some time. This article talks about not just keeping those videos illegal but blocking them from entering the country. That's not a new thing. The UK has been preventing plenty of material from entering the country if they can.

The UK has censored some forms of pornography for many years, and people importing magazines would have had them removed.

This "slippery slope" argument fails not because there isn't a slippery slope, but because we're so far down it already and have been for years.

Just wait until they use the fact that you turned off the filter against you.

Regarding the material on the Facebook and co, since such material is behind SSL inside of a widely used sites, the government will request the certificates to be able to do the protection.

and soon critics of the regime will also need to be filtered to combat "foreign hosted slander".

> The BBC has also been told it has proved difficult for the government to act against sites hosted abroad, both in the Middle East and in the US, where freedom of speech is protected by the constitution.

As a European, I'm a bit jealous of US free speech protections.

That's why most authors have moved there like Rushdie and Hitchens claimed to have moved to the US because of the stifling UK slander laws where any politician could accuse a critic of slander and the onus was on the critic to prove they haven't slandered instead of the other way around.

Still, not like politicians in the US haven't tried to dismantle free speech protections under the phony excuse of "hate speech" remember the Obama administration pressuring youtube to censor that "innocence of muslims" video?

Meanwhile in my pathetic country, silly anti-bullying reactionary legislation has led to all sorts of censorship on written "bullying" prose, and of course politicians were the first to use the laws against each other and their critics.

We've been lucky that the 1st Amendment has been respected by the courts.

Oh yes, we must protect people from being exposed to certain ideas. Else they might be convinced those ideas are true. This is for everyone's protection.

Don't be silly, everyone has already decided that these ideas are wrong. They're not very interesting and you don't need to see them.

Have these guys considered that maybe instead of filtering the world to make it seem a better place, just work on making it a better place?

That's more expensive and they need to other bits to be shitty to help the war-driven economy.

I see UK is becoming the new China when it comes to internet freedoms.