5d ago

Everything the right - and the left – are getting wrong about the Online Safety Act

www.theguardian.com

Everything the right - and the left – are getting wrong about the Online Safety Act | George Billinge

Dubbed the UK censorship act these days, will it survive the political backlash we are witnessing? Will big tech work to get it right rather than cut off the UK? Can the UK put a stopper back in the bottle? Is this really about social media when it is pornhub doing the blocking? No mention of the fediverse in this article either sadly, but a good read nevertheless. And he has got something right: the US megas have been extreme amplifiers. But Pornhub is Canadian

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I mean, if small forums are having to shut down, it isn't a big tech issue. It's an overreach of regulation issue.
- I agree. But I suspect most small forums are still exempt reading this article and the law. If you don't have potential to cause harm (no porn essentially) you don't need to do anything. But this has yet to be tested in a court to set any case law yet and so forums are understandably being very cautious
  
  I wouldnt be so confident in that. The wikimedia foundation are already in legal proceedings arguing against the act being drawn so widely that they would be included with the likes of instagram and twitter as a large scale social media company just due to their talk pages.
  
  User to user communication is considered a risk - so any forum falls under this law.
  Small sites are not exempted (see reply for petition to remove this legislation).
  No leg to stand on there - it's a solid unworkable overreach.
Also in the guardian today is an article on how the combo of proscribing Palestine Action and introducing the online safety act is causing platforms to censor information about Gaza. His counter-argument in this article is that Meta were censoring information on Palestine already, but Meta had always been overzealous in their content moderation, now it's every platform.
He says in this that he's worried being too specific would be more authoritarian but I would say the opposite is true - if what needs censoring is too vague, platforms are gonna be extreme in what they block and put behind age verification because the fines are so high. And vague guidance can be used to justify blocking anything. It only entrenches big tech further because small sites can't afford the age verification or the risk of a £10 million fines.
It's not about censorship. If I can still access everything then it's not being censored, it's about being able to use the internet without having to hand over personal information. If I walk into a shop to buy a porn mag the shopkeeper doesn't take a photo of me and my ID and promise to get rid of it later.
- But the shopkeeper can check your ID, and could remember your name and face. How do you propose doing that instead online? Because like it or not, the UK government were elected to do this
  
  like it or not, the UK government were elected to do this
  that feels a bit of an overstatement ... the OSA is a Tory invention, so not electing Labour would not have changed that
  It's not like there would have been any point voting for the Pirate Party or some other party just because you didn't want the OSA to come into force.
This article was clearly written by someone who has no idea how technology works, but knows how to spin up buzzwords.
This is also the man who wrote the law.

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