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It's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online h

It's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere. At some level, I think it's reasonable that online spaces take some responsibility for staying clear of eg hate speech. But I'm not sure how you match that with the fundamental freedom of the Internet.

baggy_trough 2y ago
Governmental attempts to reduce "online hate" (however defined, as it is entirely subjective) are just going to make our problems worse.
staticautomatic 2y ago
Hate and radicalization are products of existential purposelessness. You can’t make them go away by preventing existentially purposeless people from talking to each other.
- notatty 2y ago
  [flagged]
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  No, you can't, but also theres is no reason why the law about allow these to be up. Plenty of people have racist thoughts, and that's not illegal (thoughts in general aren't), but go print a bunch of leaflets inciting racist violence and that is illegal. I see this as an internet analogy.
  - mjburgess 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Quran_burnings_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Quran_burnings_in_Sweden Does burning a religious book "incite violence" ? It causes it, for sure. Free expression brings about, in the fanatic, a great desire to oppress the speaker. That's why we have such a freedom in the first place.
  - thorncorona 2y ago
    It seems though that allowing a country which already has problems with “lawful free speech,” to tamp down more on free speech would bring issues no? Without mentioning the oxymoron that lawful free speech is.
  - staticautomatic 2y ago
    Yes, incitement is illegal, but you haven't said what kind of speech you actually have in mind. Rather, you've made a tautological assertion that we can't allow incitement because incitement is illegal.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > You can’t make them go away by preventing existentially purposeless people from talking to each other. At least you can limit the speed of radicalization. Every village used to have their village loon, he was known and ignored to ridiculed. But now all the loons talk to each other and constantly reinforce their bullshit, and on top of that they begin to draw in the normies.
mrtesthah 2y ago
Online hate is skyrocketing in large part because billionaires and authoritarian regimes are pumping in millions of dollars to uplift it. Let’s address this issue at its source.
- notatty 2y ago
  [flagged]
mjburgess 2y ago
Is it a thing? I mean we had the holocaust, Rwandan genocide and the transatlantic slave trade without the internet. The discovery, by the governing classes, that people are often less-than-moral is just as absurd as it sounds. More malign and insidious is that these governors think it is their job to manage and reform the people -- that people, oppressed in their thinking and association enough -- will be easy to govern. A riot, from time to time -- a mob -- a bully -- are far less dangerous than a government which thinks it can perfect its people and eliminate these. It is hard to say that this has ever ended well. It is certainly a very stupid thing in a democracy, when all the people you're censoring will unite, vote you out, and take revenge.
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  It is a thing for sure. How often it happens, I don't know. I read a number of stories about school children being cyber-bullied on some kind of semi-closed forum. Some of these ended in suicide. Hell, it uses to happen a lot on Facebook in the early days. I totally understand a desire to make it illegal, past a certain threshold. I can see how you start off legislating with this in mind, then 20 committees later you end up with some kind of death star legislation requiring every online participant to have a public key and court-attested age certificate, renewed annually. Clearly that's nonsense, but I do understand the underlying desire. Because without it, you have no recourse if you find something like this online. For action to be even available, there has to be a law that says it's illegal.
  - mjburgess 2y ago
    Of course hatred, bullying, etc. is real -- what I was referring to is some special amount or abundance of it as caused by free discussion on the internet (rather than, say, revealed by it; or even, minimised by it). We're not running the counter-factual where the internet does not exist, or was censored from the start, and where free expression and discussion has reduced such things. The salem witch trials are hardly a rare example of a vicious mob exploiting a moral panic to advance their own material interests -- this is something like the common case. It's hard to imagine running a genocide on social media -- more likely it would be banned as "propganda" so that a genocide could take place. We turned against the internet out of disgust at what? Was is the internet it itself, or just a unvarinished look at people? And if the latter, are we sure the internet didnt improve most of them, and hasnt prevented more than its caused? I see in this moral panic the same old childish desire to see our dark impulses as alien, imposed by a system, to destroy the system so that we can return to a self-imposed ignorance of what people are really thinking and saying. It's just victorian moralism and hypocricy all over again. Polite society is scandalised by the portrait of dorian gray, and we better throw the author in jail .
observationist 2y ago
You don't. "Hate speech" is code for "the government knows better and controls what you say." Yes, racism exists and people say hateful things. Hate speech is in the interpretation. The US has it right with the first amendment - you have to be egregiously over the line for speech to be illegal, and in all sorts of cases there are exceptions and it's almost always a case-by-case determination. Hateful things said by people being hateful is a culture problem, not a government problem. Locking people up because other people are offended by memes or shitposts is draconian, authoritarian, dystopian nonsense and make a mockery of any claims about democracy or freedom. Europe and the UK seem hellbent for leather to silence the people they should be talking with and to. The inevitable eventual blowback will only get worse if stifling, suppressing, and prosecuting is your answer to frustrations and legitimate issues felt deeply but badly articulated.
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  I see no reason why hate speech should be given the benefit of the doubt. And no, it's not because my government told me so, I have my own opinion, which is that freedom of speech ends where threats of violence appear. If you don't want it tolerated online, which I don't, you need some kind of legal statement saying so. Like a law that says, you can't do it, and websites can't just shrug their shoulders and say it's not their problem. I don't line this legislation as it seems to be excessive, but I disagree that the root issue it tries to address is a made up problem. EDIT it just struck me that in speech and otherwise, the US has a far higher tolerance for violence - and yes I do mean violence. Free speech is taken much further in the US, almost to the point of inciting violence. Liberal gun laws mean lots of people have them, logically leading to more people being shot. School shootings are so much more common, and it appears there is no widespread conclusion to restrict gun ownership as a result. Maybe that's a core difference. Europeans genuinely value lower violence environments. We believe all reasonable things can be said without it. That doesn't make this legislation good. But at least it makes sense in my head why some people glorify extreme free speech (bit of a tired expression in this age).
  - mrandish 2y ago
    > Free speech is taken much further in the US, almost to the point of inciting violence. Yes, that's where we (here in the U.S.) draw the legal line. But almost inciting violence is not inciting violence. Since the U.S. made free speech the focus of the very first rule in the constitution, an enormous amount of jurisprudence and precedent has emerged around exactly how to make those tricky case by case judgements. Whether one agrees with it or not, it's easily the most evolved, detailed and real-world tested (over many decades) body of free speech law humanity has. Because it's deep, complex and controversial, there's also quite a bit of misunderstanding and misinformation about U.S. free speech law. I see incorrect assertions and assumptions quite often in mainstream media outlets who should know better. Here's a good primer on some of the most common misunderstandings: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/free-speech-cliches-media-should-stop-using/596506/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/free-speec... I've studied and read a lot about free speech and the first amendment as I find it fascinating. It took me quite a while to really understand how and why the U.S. implementation got to where it really is (and not the exaggerations and extrapolations that sometimes get amplified). In terms of free speech current practice and precedent, I now think the U.S. has got it just about right in the tricky balance between ensuring the open exchange of ideas (even unpopular ones) against preventing actually real and serious defamation, libel and incitement. To be sure, the U.S. system is based on the principle that it's not the job of the current government in power to force adults to be nice, reasonable or respectful in either words or tone. Freedom of speech means the freedom to be wrong, stupid, or mean, to be insulting or offensive - even to provoke or inflame should you choose to. While the government won't send men with guns to force you to shut up, other citizens are also free to exercise their rights to tell you (and everyone else) you're an asshole, that you're wrong and exactly why. They are equally free to be rude, offensive and even hateful against your ideas and you. One of the key ideas behind the U.S. constitution is every fundamental right granted to all citizens comes with matching responsibilities for all citizens. In other words, no right is free - they have actual, personal costs for each citizen. In the case of the first amendment, the responsibilities include tolerating speech that's wrong, boorish, offensive or even hateful. As well as the responsibility to exercise your own good judgement on which speech to ignore, reject and/or counter. The open marketplace of ideas, like all markets, is two-sided. Another responsibility is accepting the consequences of exercising your free speech unwisely. Your fellow citizens are free to ignore, argue, yell back, openly mock or just laugh at you. Ultimately, the framers of the constitution believed the majority of citizens can figure out for themselves who's an idiot and who's worth listening to. Which ideas are worth considering and which are important to stand against.
verisimi 2y ago
> online hate and radicalization really is a thing People have always had opinions. Some people think other people's opinions are poor. Talking online was already covered by the law (eg laws re slander). Creating the new category of 'hate speech' is more about ensuring legal control of messages on a more open platform (the internet) in a way that wasn't required when newspapers and TV could be managed covertly. It is about ensuring that the existing control structures are able to keep broad control of the messaging.
- notatty 2y ago
  [flagged]
mihaaly 2y ago
UK is sensitive about verbal manners, that is 'of utmost importance' (among all the others of course), just to use one of the most popular phrase here. If you suffer some outrageous impact in your life and complain in bad manner you may be punished further some way, socially or even contractually. One example is the TOC of Natwest. They close your account immediately if your conduct is offensive or discriminatory towards the staff. What counts as offensive? That detail is not expanded. Cannot be. It is a bit worrisome for those paying attention being nice to others as well. How to do that exactly? Where is the limit nowadays or in that situation? It is often people get offended nowadays for example by looking at upsetting things, or could feel discriminated. The bbc.co.uk is flowing with articles of people felt very intensive about something unpleasant. Be very careful about your conduct or you bank will kick you out. We are not even talking about hatefulness or radicalization.
- teamonkey 2y ago
  I once saw someone propose a national service where you are required to work in a customer-facing job for a year, and I think about that a lot.
j8k99kuyr 2y ago
[flagged]
kypro 2y ago
> But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. I'm not trying to be edgy, but genuinely why do you care if someone says or believes something you feel is hateful? Personally I'm not convinced this is even a problem. I'd argue this is something that the government has been radicalising people in the UK to believe is a problem by constantly telling us how bad people hating things is. Hate doesn't cause any real world harm – violence does. And if you're concerned about violence then there's better ways to address that than cracking down on online communities. In regards to radicalisation, this is a problem imo. I think it's clear there is some link between terrorism and online radicalisation, but again, I'd question how big a problem this is and whether this is even right way to combat these issues... If you're concerned about things like terrorism or people with sexist views, then presumably you'd be more concerned about the tens of thousands of unvetted people coming into the country from extremist places like Afghanistan every year? It's not like online radicalisation is causing white Brits to commit terror attacks against Brits... This is obviously far more an issue of culture than online radicalisation. So I guess what I'm asking is what radicalisation are you concerned with exactly and what do you believe the real world consequences of this radicalisation are? Do you believe the best way to stop Islamic terrorism in the UK is to crack down on content on the internet? Do we actually think this will make any difference? I don't really see the logic in it personally even if I do agree that some people do hold strange views these days because of the internet.

baggy_trough 2y ago

Governmental attempts to reduce "online hate" (however defined, as it is entirely subjective) are just going to make our problems worse.

staticautomatic 2y ago

Hate and radicalization are products of existential purposelessness. You can’t make them go away by preventing existentially purposeless people from talking to each other.

notatty 2y ago
[flagged]
rich_sasha 2y ago
No, you can't, but also theres is no reason why the law about allow these to be up. Plenty of people have racist thoughts, and that's not illegal (thoughts in general aren't), but go print a bunch of leaflets inciting racist violence and that is illegal. I see this as an internet analogy.
- mjburgess 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Quran_burnings_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Quran_burnings_in_Sweden Does burning a religious book "incite violence" ? It causes it, for sure. Free expression brings about, in the fanatic, a great desire to oppress the speaker. That's why we have such a freedom in the first place.
- thorncorona 2y ago
  It seems though that allowing a country which already has problems with “lawful free speech,” to tamp down more on free speech would bring issues no? Without mentioning the oxymoron that lawful free speech is.
- staticautomatic 2y ago
  Yes, incitement is illegal, but you haven't said what kind of speech you actually have in mind. Rather, you've made a tautological assertion that we can't allow incitement because incitement is illegal.
mschuster91 2y ago
> You can’t make them go away by preventing existentially purposeless people from talking to each other. At least you can limit the speed of radicalization. Every village used to have their village loon, he was known and ignored to ridiculed. But now all the loons talk to each other and constantly reinforce their bullshit, and on top of that they begin to draw in the normies.

mrtesthah 2y ago

Online hate is skyrocketing in large part because billionaires and authoritarian regimes are pumping in millions of dollars to uplift it. Let’s address this issue at its source.

notatty 2y ago
[flagged]

mjburgess 2y ago

Is it a thing? I mean we had the holocaust, Rwandan genocide and the transatlantic slave trade without the internet. The discovery, by the governing classes, that people are often less-than-moral is just as absurd as it sounds. More malign and insidious is that these governors think it is their job to manage and reform the people -- that people, oppressed in their thinking and association enough -- will be easy to govern. A riot, from time to time -- a mob -- a bully -- are far less dangerous than a government which thinks it can perfect its people and eliminate these. It is hard to say that this has ever ended well. It is certainly a very stupid thing in a democracy, when all the people you're censoring will unite, vote you out, and take revenge.

rich_sasha 2y ago
It is a thing for sure. How often it happens, I don't know. I read a number of stories about school children being cyber-bullied on some kind of semi-closed forum. Some of these ended in suicide. Hell, it uses to happen a lot on Facebook in the early days. I totally understand a desire to make it illegal, past a certain threshold. I can see how you start off legislating with this in mind, then 20 committees later you end up with some kind of death star legislation requiring every online participant to have a public key and court-attested age certificate, renewed annually. Clearly that's nonsense, but I do understand the underlying desire. Because without it, you have no recourse if you find something like this online. For action to be even available, there has to be a law that says it's illegal.
- mjburgess 2y ago
  Of course hatred, bullying, etc. is real -- what I was referring to is some special amount or abundance of it as caused by free discussion on the internet (rather than, say, revealed by it; or even, minimised by it). We're not running the counter-factual where the internet does not exist, or was censored from the start, and where free expression and discussion has reduced such things. The salem witch trials are hardly a rare example of a vicious mob exploiting a moral panic to advance their own material interests -- this is something like the common case. It's hard to imagine running a genocide on social media -- more likely it would be banned as "propganda" so that a genocide could take place. We turned against the internet out of disgust at what? Was is the internet it itself, or just a unvarinished look at people? And if the latter, are we sure the internet didnt improve most of them, and hasnt prevented more than its caused? I see in this moral panic the same old childish desire to see our dark impulses as alien, imposed by a system, to destroy the system so that we can return to a self-imposed ignorance of what people are really thinking and saying. It's just victorian moralism and hypocricy all over again. Polite society is scandalised by the portrait of dorian gray, and we better throw the author in jail .

observationist 2y ago

You don't. "Hate speech" is code for "the government knows better and controls what you say." Yes, racism exists and people say hateful things. Hate speech is in the interpretation. The US has it right with the first amendment - you have to be egregiously over the line for speech to be illegal, and in all sorts of cases there are exceptions and it's almost always a case-by-case determination. Hateful things said by people being hateful is a culture problem, not a government problem. Locking people up because other people are offended by memes or shitposts is draconian, authoritarian, dystopian nonsense and make a mockery of any claims about democracy or freedom. Europe and the UK seem hellbent for leather to silence the people they should be talking with and to. The inevitable eventual blowback will only get worse if stifling, suppressing, and prosecuting is your answer to frustrations and legitimate issues felt deeply but badly articulated.

rich_sasha 2y ago
I see no reason why hate speech should be given the benefit of the doubt. And no, it's not because my government told me so, I have my own opinion, which is that freedom of speech ends where threats of violence appear. If you don't want it tolerated online, which I don't, you need some kind of legal statement saying so. Like a law that says, you can't do it, and websites can't just shrug their shoulders and say it's not their problem. I don't line this legislation as it seems to be excessive, but I disagree that the root issue it tries to address is a made up problem. EDIT it just struck me that in speech and otherwise, the US has a far higher tolerance for violence - and yes I do mean violence. Free speech is taken much further in the US, almost to the point of inciting violence. Liberal gun laws mean lots of people have them, logically leading to more people being shot. School shootings are so much more common, and it appears there is no widespread conclusion to restrict gun ownership as a result. Maybe that's a core difference. Europeans genuinely value lower violence environments. We believe all reasonable things can be said without it. That doesn't make this legislation good. But at least it makes sense in my head why some people glorify extreme free speech (bit of a tired expression in this age).
- mrandish 2y ago
  > Free speech is taken much further in the US, almost to the point of inciting violence. Yes, that's where we (here in the U.S.) draw the legal line. But almost inciting violence is not inciting violence. Since the U.S. made free speech the focus of the very first rule in the constitution, an enormous amount of jurisprudence and precedent has emerged around exactly how to make those tricky case by case judgements. Whether one agrees with it or not, it's easily the most evolved, detailed and real-world tested (over many decades) body of free speech law humanity has. Because it's deep, complex and controversial, there's also quite a bit of misunderstanding and misinformation about U.S. free speech law. I see incorrect assertions and assumptions quite often in mainstream media outlets who should know better. Here's a good primer on some of the most common misunderstandings: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/free-speech-cliches-media-should-stop-using/596506/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/free-speec... I've studied and read a lot about free speech and the first amendment as I find it fascinating. It took me quite a while to really understand how and why the U.S. implementation got to where it really is (and not the exaggerations and extrapolations that sometimes get amplified). In terms of free speech current practice and precedent, I now think the U.S. has got it just about right in the tricky balance between ensuring the open exchange of ideas (even unpopular ones) against preventing actually real and serious defamation, libel and incitement. To be sure, the U.S. system is based on the principle that it's not the job of the current government in power to force adults to be nice, reasonable or respectful in either words or tone. Freedom of speech means the freedom to be wrong, stupid, or mean, to be insulting or offensive - even to provoke or inflame should you choose to. While the government won't send men with guns to force you to shut up, other citizens are also free to exercise their rights to tell you (and everyone else) you're an asshole, that you're wrong and exactly why. They are equally free to be rude, offensive and even hateful against your ideas and you. One of the key ideas behind the U.S. constitution is every fundamental right granted to all citizens comes with matching responsibilities for all citizens. In other words, no right is free - they have actual, personal costs for each citizen. In the case of the first amendment, the responsibilities include tolerating speech that's wrong, boorish, offensive or even hateful. As well as the responsibility to exercise your own good judgement on which speech to ignore, reject and/or counter. The open marketplace of ideas, like all markets, is two-sided. Another responsibility is accepting the consequences of exercising your free speech unwisely. Your fellow citizens are free to ignore, argue, yell back, openly mock or just laugh at you. Ultimately, the framers of the constitution believed the majority of citizens can figure out for themselves who's an idiot and who's worth listening to. Which ideas are worth considering and which are important to stand against.

verisimi 2y ago

> online hate and radicalization really is a thing People have always had opinions. Some people think other people's opinions are poor. Talking online was already covered by the law (eg laws re slander). Creating the new category of 'hate speech' is more about ensuring legal control of messages on a more open platform (the internet) in a way that wasn't required when newspapers and TV could be managed covertly. It is about ensuring that the existing control structures are able to keep broad control of the messaging.

notatty 2y ago
[flagged]

mihaaly 2y ago

UK is sensitive about verbal manners, that is 'of utmost importance' (among all the others of course), just to use one of the most popular phrase here. If you suffer some outrageous impact in your life and complain in bad manner you may be punished further some way, socially or even contractually. One example is the TOC of Natwest. They close your account immediately if your conduct is offensive or discriminatory towards the staff. What counts as offensive? That detail is not expanded. Cannot be. It is a bit worrisome for those paying attention being nice to others as well. How to do that exactly? Where is the limit nowadays or in that situation? It is often people get offended nowadays for example by looking at upsetting things, or could feel discriminated. The bbc.co.uk is flowing with articles of people felt very intensive about something unpleasant. Be very careful about your conduct or you bank will kick you out. We are not even talking about hatefulness or radicalization.

teamonkey 2y ago
I once saw someone propose a national service where you are required to work in a customer-facing job for a year, and I think about that a lot.

j8k99kuyr 2y ago

[flagged]

kypro 2y ago

> But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. I'm not trying to be edgy, but genuinely why do you care if someone says or believes something you feel is hateful? Personally I'm not convinced this is even a problem. I'd argue this is something that the government has been radicalising people in the UK to believe is a problem by constantly telling us how bad people hating things is. Hate doesn't cause any real world harm – violence does. And if you're concerned about violence then there's better ways to address that than cracking down on online communities. In regards to radicalisation, this is a problem imo. I think it's clear there is some link between terrorism and online radicalisation, but again, I'd question how big a problem this is and whether this is even right way to combat these issues... If you're concerned about things like terrorism or people with sexist views, then presumably you'd be more concerned about the tens of thousands of unvetted people coming into the country from extremist places like Afghanistan every year? It's not like online radicalisation is causing white Brits to commit terror attacks against Brits... This is obviously far more an issue of culture than online radicalisation. So I guess what I'm asking is what radicalisation are you concerned with exactly and what do you believe the real world consequences of this radicalisation are? Do you believe the best way to stop Islamic terrorism in the UK is to crack down on content on the internet? Do we actually think this will make any difference? I don't really see the logic in it personally even if I do agree that some people do hold strange views these days because of the internet.