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UK toughens Online Safety Act with ban on self-harm content
- atemerev 1y agoThis is a damn s*icide for the country, they are unaliving themselves on turbo, aren't they?
- cs02rm0 1y agoIt's not great here. Send help.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoI'm sorry but the word "turbo" evokes a model of environmentally damaging Internal Combustion Engines (ICE). Your comment is doubly offensive i will have to report it.
- pcdoodle 1y agoHey! quit having fun down here!
- philipallstar 1y agoThis makes sense. Start with the content that's hard to fight against.
- hermannj314 1y agoNice. I am tired of tobacco, alcohol, and gambling content. I am glad to see encouraging people to self-harm with these products is now banned. Oh wait...self-harm just includes suicide. I guess it is still fine to comvince people to destroy their lives as long as it has a revenue curve behind it.
- unglaublich 1y agoHey let's not forget sugar, cars and kitchen stairs.
- hermannj314 1y ago"I think your foyer staircase would be more aesthetic wthhout a handrail" is the new "unalive yourself" It is a long con, but the expected value of self-harm is still positive and it is legally protected speech in the UK.
- pjc50 1y agoWhat? Telling people to kill themselves is definitely not in the legally protected range?
- hermannj314 1y agoI am sure you can still encourage people to commit probabilistic self-harm in the UK. You can't tell someone to kill thelselves but you show alcohol ads to an alcoholic or encourage someone to modify their staircase to increase risk of fall death. My point is this law is a stupidly narrow definition of self-harm.
- dekken_ 1y agoIt's performative, distractionary grand standing. Dealing with the symptoms, not the causes.
- normalaccess 1y agoIt's more than that.. Its a white night trogon horse designed to consolidate power and oppress the people.
- dekken_ 1y agoYeah, communism is slavery. We seem to need to relearn this periodically.
- pjc50 1y agoThe Labour party - well, both parties - has got a lot of money from gambling companies over the years. https://www.thenational.scot/news/24624306.labour-took-1m-donations-gifts-gambling-firms/ https://www.thenational.scot/news/24624306.labour-took-1m-do...
- morkalork 1y agoSo where does Papa Roach - Last Resort fall under this, will YouTube be blocked?
- voidUpdate 1y agoI keep seeing youtube putting the little "you're not alone" banners under videos that report about suicide, and even a couple that have no relation to it. Since the rules are apparently the duty of the company to uphold, does that mean these videos will be banned too?
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoAnd, as usual, that quickly translates into unexpected moments. My feed at one point showed Epstein video ( forget the exact context, but it was a podcast of some sort going over various IC connections ) and immediately underneath was a suicide prevention note. Unintentional dark humor abounds. Anyhoo, UK has been weird lately, but as most things, new equilibrium will be reached.
- voidUpdate 1y agoI was watching a summary video of the Mother Horse Eyes story which had a suicide note below it, and I'm pretty sure no suicide was even mentioned
- j1elo 1y agoIt starts like this and before you know it they'll be banning Hollow Knight Silksong because people play too long and can get dehydrated.
- brookst 1y agoSlipper slope arguments are lazy and reflect binary “it must be one extreme or the other” thinking. To see how silly it is, just turn around: if they allow self-harm videos, before you know it they’ll be mandating that ALL videos be about self-harm. Seem reasonable?
- tryauuum 1y agoI usually remember the story from my personal experience in Russia, from long time ago A soldier killed himself with a rifle A local newspaper was asked to remove the page because "it contains information harmful to children", namely guides how to kill yourself. Because there is such a law. They complied
- elpocko 1y agoIt's not reasonable because it makes no sense. "If they allow self-harm videos, before you know it they'll allow ALL videos.", there you go. The slippery slope argument is warranted because it's true: the law was about pornography, then it was extended to include non-pornographic content, and we can be sure more stuff will be banned in the future, as it always happens with these laws.
- perihelions 1y ago> "Tech companies to be legally required to prevent this content from appearing in the first place, protecting users of all ages." The typical algorithmic implementation would ban this HN discussion itself, for containing the string "self-harm" and various other keywords on the page. That's often how it ends up, for anyone who's been paying attention. Legitimate support websites are censored, for discussing the subjects the attempt to support. Public health experts get misclassified as disinformation—they use the same set of keywords, just in a different order. Inexpensive ML can't tell them apart. Important news could be automatically suppressed before anyone would even realize it's authentic news. How could one discuss on an algorithmically "safe" platform, for instance, the allegation that the President of the United States paid the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to rape an underage child, who later killed herself? That's four or five "high-priority" safety filters right there.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoSounds like a big tech problem then. Big tech has no responsibility and shall not be held accountable because their moderation is too shitty!
- perihelions 1y agoThe problem is narrower and more nuanced than "held accountable": the problem is that the accountability is asymmetric. There's no incentives against algorithmically deleting good content by error. If you impose large financial and legal risk on one side (type I errors), and basically nothing on the other (type II), a public corporation will very rationally optimize for the incentives you've given them. That means: the cheapest possible moderation, with aggressive filters committing Type II errors all day. Look at how Microsoft GitHub consistently deletes innocent projects without warning, like SymPy, over LLM hallucinations. That moderation style's a direct consequence of the large financial costs of copyright lawsuits. If you introduce similar financial/legal risks in other areas, you should expect similar results.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dghf 1y agoSo no more M*A*S*H theme-song on YouTube?
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoI wonder how many people necked a bottle of paracetamol thinking it would be painless.
- IAmBroom 1y agoThat's not in the lyrics, so what's your point here?
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago“suicide is painless, it brings on many changes “
- blueflow 1y agoCool. How will banning the content about it fix the youth's mental health?
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoThere is an argument to be made for preventing further damage along the lines of 'monkey see, monkey do, monkey pee all over you'. That said, I agree that it is a very low hanging fruit and harvesting that fruit has a lot of consequences.
- bArray 1y ago> [..] putting stricter legal requirements on tech companies to hunt down and remove material that encourages or assists serious self-harm, before it can destroy lives and tear families apart. Does this include smoking, excessive eating, eating sweets, etc? What about listening to sad music? > This government is determined to keep people safe online. Vile content that promotes self-harm continues to be pushed on social media and can mean potentially heart-wrenching consequences for families across the country. "Vile" is very emotionally charged, who decides it? Will it be the next government that gets to decide it? Bare in mind, the (recently) ex-Deputy Prime Minister of the current government called her opposition "scum" [1], an extremely negative word. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59081482 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59081482
- delichon 1y ago> Does this include smoking, excessive eating, eating sweets, etc? What about listening to sad music? Or "voting against your own interests"? I can't deny that some voting patterns amount to self harm.
- bArray 1y agoWell, we only need to look a "democratic" dictatorships to see how the government helps to prevent you from voting from the wrong person. And why stop at voting? The government could also be responsible for preventing 'harmful' thoughts. Police in the UK are regularly deployed for "non-crime hate incidents", so that they can tell people that they haven't committed a crime, but they will make a note of it in a secret database that affects your employability.
- cjs_ac 1y agoIn the UK, 'self-harm' is used specifically to refer to what used to be called cutting [one's] wrists. It's not intended to mean any action that has negative consequences for oneself. The quote about 'This government is determined to keep people safe online,' is a 'we're good people' statement for the media - remember, this is a press release. Remember, these are politicians: they have no understanding of abstraction and generalisation, and think that generalisation is the act of creating stereotypes.
- pjc50 1y agoNote that one of the few taboos still maintained by traditional news media, despite their questionable ethics elsewhere, is not reporting on suicides as such because it is known to encourage copycats. Hence a lot of young celebrities being reported as "died suddenly" (which in practice means either suicide or overdose, accidental or intentional) Will this result in more spread of ridiculous euphemisms like unalive? Probably. Will this result in us being able to get people banned from social media for telling other people to kill themselves? Probably only with very intermittent enforcement.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoWho are these people who are censoring perfectly ordinary and inoffensive words? The way it's going soon the only thing that can safely be discussed will be flowers and sunshine. Wars and death will end simply because people won't be able to discuss them.
- stetrain 1y agoThese more recent euphemisms have mostly come from creators on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, etc. who are either rightly or wrongly concerned that using certain words leads to their content being demonetized. Advertisers don't want their ads to appear next to certain keywords, platforms use content detection to match those criteria, so creators are monetarily incentivized to avoid them. Capitalism!
- n8m8 1y agoI spend a lot of time on TikTok and it's because of how restrictive the algorithm is in suppressing certain keywords regardless of context. The community is strong on TT, here are a bunch: - Cute winter boots (ICE officers) - Gardening (420) - pdf/pdf file (pedophile) - :watermelon-emoji: (Palestine) - neurospicy (neurodivergent) - bird website (X) - LA Music festival tour (protests) Not sure if I see more of the 'algospeak' because the problem is real, because I've interacted with algospeak content before and it's just giving me more of it, or if creators don't really need to do it anymore but just still do.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoThey're going to keep "toughening" it until they have a more restrictive internet than any so-called Authoritarian Regime. Today it's 4chan, Kiwi Farms, WPD, pirate sports sites, libgen, Anna's place... Tomorrow it'll surely be every forum where moderation isn't absolutely draconian. I wonder if they're going to try to ban Twitter.
- yupyupyups 1y agoI wouldn't mention 4chan and libgen in the same sentence.
- morkalork 1y agoWhy not? Sure the content and motivations are worlds apart but they're still under the government banhammer together
- yupyupyups 1y agoSure, I understand that. I just think we need to remember that some content is simply undesirable, especially for kids. An alternative method to protect society from harmful content would perhaps be more readily available and advanced firewalls for consumers, orgs and schools. Currently, opt-out of filth on the internet (however you like to define it) can be prohibitively difficult for the general consumer. The market has been very backwards in this respect, which has given some powerful elements in society an oppertunity to exercise tyrannical control by imposing a nation-wide Chinese firewall as the solution. If we had recognized the problem of harmful content in the first place, and offered solutions, we would've had more bite against these tyrannical schemes.
- 1GZ0 1y agoSo they're going after mukbang YouTubers now?
- betaby 1y agoIt's a copy-cat of the Russian regulations from 2016. I suppose if the West does it, it's all good. See https://sdelano.media/suicideisbad/ https://sdelano.media/suicideisbad/ (in Russian)
- przmk 1y agoWho in this thread is saying it's all good?
- toshinoriyagi 1y agoI don't think many people in the west think the Online Safety Act is good. Particularly on Hacker News it has been heavily criticized from what I have seen.
- petermcneeley 1y agoCan you guys in the UK see this page? https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-services-benefits/medical-assistance-dying.html https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-servi...
- cjs_ac 1y agoYes. Remember, the Online Safety Act has nothing to do with ISPs, and instead regulates website publishers. This change to legislation has just been announced; of course the Canadian Government hasn't had a chance to update its website.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- commandlinefan 1y agoWhat about this one: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/?
- fidotron 1y ago[flagged]
- dotnet00 1y agoReddit has this thing where, if someone reports your comment for self-harm, regardless of validity, they send you an automated (and IMO useless at best, harmful at worst) "we're here for you" DM. It's often used as a way to anonymously imply that you should kill yourself, so I wonder if this sort of thing would affect that and how. Though, overall, I think the censoring of self-harm stuff is already beyond ridiculous. Terms like "self-unalive", "self-terminate", "sewerslide" make a very serious issue sound like a joke. Blinding ourselves to isn't going to make these problems go away.
- IAmBroom 1y agoIn this thread: a WHOLE LOT of people advocating Slippery Slope arguments (and even defending them as such, explicitly). I can't decide if the bill is toothless and meaningless, or a well-planned first step towards complete control of speech and groupthink. Or both, somehow.