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So if I write a nasty note on a paper Airplane and throw it at you, might the manufacturer of the paper and pen get in trouble? ‘No, that’s absurd.’ Fine, what

So if I write a nasty note on a paper Airplane and throw it at you, might the manufacturer of the paper and pen get in trouble? ‘No, that’s absurd.’ Fine, what about an unpleasant email? Should an email provider auto screen potentially harmful messages? None of this seems very logically consistent and just seems to stem from a desire to fix a problem (people being nasty to each other) in the most heavy handed and legally clumsy way imaginable.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
Amazingly, the above story happened in the UK, the UK's health system is failing totally, the NHS has under-invested in mental health services on a massive scale for decades (for example, all the gambling addiction clinics in the UK were funded by gambling companies until 2020), and this happens and people immediately round on...Twitter? It is genuinely very confusing that a mental health problem has turned into tech regulation. Particularly when mental health treatment is so obviously lacking (and part of the reason why no-one asks the question about the NHS is due to lobbying, the NHS has the most powerful lobbying group in British politics). Btw, just anecdotally, the people pushing for this are (imo) the worst people in British politics. Bill Cash, all the Brexit hardliners (who, btw, were regarded as too incompetent and mad by the people who can the Vote Leave campaign). These people sit in safe seats, there is no risk from deselection, and they just sit there and come up mad ideas year after year (the person above who points out that British politicians tend towards authoritarianism are correct...this is being led by the furthest right portion of the Tories).
- pydry 4y ago
  >It is genuinely very confusing that a mental health problem has turned into tech regulation. They never cared about mental health, only the ability to put controls on what we see and hear.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    I don't think it is about that because these controls don't apply to non-children. But I think we are certainly heading in this direction. One major thing in the UK is that politicians complain often about people criticising them on Twitter. They read out the hateful tweets they receive with ill-disguised glee, and suggest direct moderation (already happening to a certain extent, in line with EU regs). Celebrities also push this line heavily, milking social media for advertising cash and complaining that their critics should be removed from the platform. ...I just don't get it. If you are interested in parallels, there is an interesting parallel with the introduction of the printing press to England. This spurred massive growth in political pamphlets which offered all kinds of fictitious nonsense about prominent people. Attempts at censorship failed, and that industry grow into news. We have been here before, we lucked out last time, we may not be able to do so again (censorship in China certainly indicates that govts have the resources to censor more effectively than ever before).
    - kneebonian 4y ago
      "Give me a child until he is 4 and I will have him for the rest of his life." - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov EDIT: "I am the walrus" - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
    - shortcake27 4y ago
      > I don't think it is about that because these controls don't apply to non-children. But they do. In order to “comply” with these types of regulation, legal content is either put behind identity verification (which is both expensive and invasive), or is just removed completely. This absolutely affects non-children.
      - ectopod 4y ago
        Yes. The identity verification seems like the point of this nonsense.
- gadders 4y ago
  >> These people sit in safe seats, there is no risk from deselection, You realise this is because their constituents agree with their policies, right?
gadders 4y ago
>>So if I write a nasty note on a paper Airplane and throw it at you, might the manufacturer of the paper and pen get in trouble? That's not really the correct analogy. A more accurate one would be: >>What if I went out of my way to gather up every single nasty note ever written about you, and made it my business to make sure you saw every one of them? That's what the algorithm was doing.
yamtaddle 4y ago
If you created a system (whether it's human or computer matters not a whit) that took incoming paper airplanes on one side and decided, based on the content of the messages written on them, who to send them to, and that system had a tendency to shower vulnerable people with harmful crap, yeah, of course you should get in trouble. Like, super-obviously, yes. If at any point you knew it was happening and didn't put the brakes on the whole project, probably lots of trouble.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago

Amazingly, the above story happened in the UK, the UK's health system is failing totally, the NHS has under-invested in mental health services on a massive scale for decades (for example, all the gambling addiction clinics in the UK were funded by gambling companies until 2020), and this happens and people immediately round on...Twitter? It is genuinely very confusing that a mental health problem has turned into tech regulation. Particularly when mental health treatment is so obviously lacking (and part of the reason why no-one asks the question about the NHS is due to lobbying, the NHS has the most powerful lobbying group in British politics). Btw, just anecdotally, the people pushing for this are (imo) the worst people in British politics. Bill Cash, all the Brexit hardliners (who, btw, were regarded as too incompetent and mad by the people who can the Vote Leave campaign). These people sit in safe seats, there is no risk from deselection, and they just sit there and come up mad ideas year after year (the person above who points out that British politicians tend towards authoritarianism are correct...this is being led by the furthest right portion of the Tories).

pydry 4y ago
>It is genuinely very confusing that a mental health problem has turned into tech regulation. They never cared about mental health, only the ability to put controls on what we see and hear.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  I don't think it is about that because these controls don't apply to non-children. But I think we are certainly heading in this direction. One major thing in the UK is that politicians complain often about people criticising them on Twitter. They read out the hateful tweets they receive with ill-disguised glee, and suggest direct moderation (already happening to a certain extent, in line with EU regs). Celebrities also push this line heavily, milking social media for advertising cash and complaining that their critics should be removed from the platform. ...I just don't get it. If you are interested in parallels, there is an interesting parallel with the introduction of the printing press to England. This spurred massive growth in political pamphlets which offered all kinds of fictitious nonsense about prominent people. Attempts at censorship failed, and that industry grow into news. We have been here before, we lucked out last time, we may not be able to do so again (censorship in China certainly indicates that govts have the resources to censor more effectively than ever before).
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    "Give me a child until he is 4 and I will have him for the rest of his life." - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov EDIT: "I am the walrus" - Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
  - shortcake27 4y ago
    > I don't think it is about that because these controls don't apply to non-children. But they do. In order to “comply” with these types of regulation, legal content is either put behind identity verification (which is both expensive and invasive), or is just removed completely. This absolutely affects non-children.
    - ectopod 4y ago
      Yes. The identity verification seems like the point of this nonsense.
gadders 4y ago
>> These people sit in safe seats, there is no risk from deselection, You realise this is because their constituents agree with their policies, right?

gadders 4y ago

>>So if I write a nasty note on a paper Airplane and throw it at you, might the manufacturer of the paper and pen get in trouble? That's not really the correct analogy. A more accurate one would be: >>What if I went out of my way to gather up every single nasty note ever written about you, and made it my business to make sure you saw every one of them? That's what the algorithm was doing.

yamtaddle 4y ago

If you created a system (whether it's human or computer matters not a whit) that took incoming paper airplanes on one side and decided, based on the content of the messages written on them, who to send them to, and that system had a tendency to shower vulnerable people with harmful crap, yeah, of course you should get in trouble. Like, super-obviously, yes. If at any point you knew it was happening and didn't put the brakes on the whole project, probably lots of trouble.