Comment by wat10000
7 months ago
I think you’re being overly charitable in thinking this happens because they don’t understand these things. The main thing is that they don’t care. The purpose of passing legislation to protect the children isn’t to protect the children, it’s to get reelected.
If we can get the voters to understand the things you mention, then maybe we’d have a chance.
It’s more than just politicians not caring: Big Tech firms hite people on millions of dollars per year to lobby and co-operate with governments, in order to ensure that processes like this result in favourable outcomes to them. See e.g. Nick Clegg.
Lawmakers also make and pass laws because it's their job, not because a new law is needed. They feel it's literally their job to come up with new bills to pass, for no reason other than "it's my job".
Imagine a society so stable it doesn't need new laws or rules. All the elected representatives would just sit around all day and twiddle their thumbs. A bad look in their eyes.
This is how it should be of course.
However we are not in a stable society like that.
Things change - e.g. 50 years ago no online chats, no drones, very little terrorism, travel was more costly and slower, medical drugs were less efficient, live span was shorter.
I agree with your broader point - but this article is about the UK and I can assure you, 50 years ago the UK did not have "very little terrorism"
2 replies →
> protect the children isn’t to protect the children, it’s to get reelected
The next UK general election is ~5 years away so this makes no sense.
The more likely reason is that it's simply good policy. We have enough research now that shows that (a) social media use is harmful for children and (b) social media companies like Meta, TikTok etc have done a wilfully poor job at protecting them.
It is bizarre to me how many people here seem willing to defend them.
Does British campaigning not look very far into the past? In the US, an opposing candidate would absolutely say “the incumbent voted against the protect-children-from-online-predators act five years ago, don’t reelect them, vote for me” and it would be effective.
LOL what campaigning? A couple of weeks before the election I get a few leaflets through my door with a few paragraphs about some person I never heard of and maybe some bullet points. People just pick political party and then vote for whoever has their logo next to the name.
I think you're being underly charitable. The vast majority of congress critters are pretty smart people, and by Jeff Jackson's account, even the ones who yell the loudest are generally reasonable behind closed doors due to incentives.
The problem is that the real problems are very hard, and their job is to simplify it to their constituents well enough to keep their jobs, which may or may not line up with doing the right thing.
This is a truly hard problem. CSAM is a real problem, and those who engage in its distribution are experts in subverting the system. So is freedom of expression. So is the onerous imposition of regulations.
And any such issue (whether it be transnational migration, or infrastructure, or EPA regulations in America, or whatever issue you want to bring up) is going to have some very complex tradeoffs and even if you have a set of Ph.Ds in the room with no political pressure, you are going to have uncomfortable tradeoffs.
What if the regulations are bad because the problem is so hard we can't make good ones, even with the best and brightest?
It's ridiculous to say that a bad law is better than no law at all. If the law has massive collateral damage and little-to-no demonstrated benefit then it's just a bad law and should never have been made.
It seems far too common that regulations are putting the liability / responsibility for a problem onto some group of people who are not the cause of the problem, and further, have limited power to do anything about the problem.
As they say, this is why we can't have nice things.
> responsibility for a problem onto some group of people who are not the cause of the problem
You don't think Meta, TikTok etc are the cause of the problem ?
I appreciate that Lfgss is somewhat collateral damage but the fact is that if you're going to run a forum you do have some obligation to moderate it.
6 replies →
> What if the regulations are bad because the problem is so hard we can't make good ones, even with the best and brightest?
To begin with, the premise would have to be challenged. Many, many bad regulations are bad because of incompetence or corruption rather than because better regulations are impossible. But let's consider the case where there really are no good regulations.
This often happens in situations where e.g. bad actors have more resources, or are willing to spend more resources, to subvert a system than ordinary people. For example, suppose the proposal is to ban major companies from implementing end-to-end encryption so the police can spy on terrorists. Well, that's not going to work very well because the terrorists will just use a different system that provides E2EE anyway and what you're really doing is compromising the security of all the law-abiding people who are now more vulnerable to criminals and foreign espionage etc.
The answer in these cases, where there are only bad policy proposals, is to do nothing. Accept that you don't have a good solution and a bad solution makes things worse rather than better so the absence of any rule, imperfect as the outcome may be, is the best we know how to do.
The classical example of this is the First Amendment. People say bad stuff, we don't like it, they suck and should shut up. But there is nobody you can actually trust to be the decider of who gets to say what, so the answer is nobody decides for everybody and imposing government punishment for speech is forbidden.
> The answer in these cases, where there are only bad policy proposals, is to do nothing.
Or go further.
Sometimes the answer is to remove regulations. Specifically, those laws that protect wrongdoers and facilitators of problems. Then you just let nature take its course.
For the mostpart though, this is considered inhumane and unacceptable.
11 replies →
And sometimes good regulations are really hard to swallow for the uninformed, while bad regulations sound really good on paper.
"children are getting raped and we aren't going to do anything about it because we want to protect indie websites" sounds a lot worse than "this is a significant step in combatting the spread of online child pornography", even if reality is actually far more complicated.
> This is a truly hard problem.
CSAM is NOT a hard problem. You solve it with police work. That's how it always gets solved.
You don't solve CSAM with scanners. You don't solve CSAM with legislation. You don't solve CSAM by banning encryption.
You solve CSAM by giving money to law enforcement to go after CSAM.
But, see, the entities pushing these laws don't actually care about CSAM.
> You solve it with police work. That's how it always gets solved.
My dude, I’m sorry to tell you, but the problem usually is law enforcement. For so many things. You try barely training people who already like beating people up and then give them a monopoly on legal violence.
Btw, the reason the cops were invented in Britain was to put down riots by the populace bc they were so poor[1], and in America it was to divide poor whites and poor blacks and turn the poor whites into slave catchers.[2]
[1] https://novaramedia.com/2020/06/20/why-does-the-police-exist...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/13/876628302/the-history-of-poli...
“Their job is to simplify it to their constituents well enough to keep their jobs” sounds awfully similar to what I’m saying. Maybe “don’t care” is a little too absolute, but it doesn’t make much difference if they don’t care or if they care but their priority is still keeping their jobs.
They want to protect their political control, so they break any way for the opposition to effectively organize. Things like unlimited immigration, Net Zero 2050, and dekulakization of the agricultural sector are widely unpopular, so they just have to get everyone who has anything to say against these programs to be politically powerless.
I am all for unlimited immigration (for law-abiding people who can earn their living, of course), Net Zero 2050 (burning oil and coal for heating and energy generation is blasphemy), and getting rid of agricultural subsidies. That’s good for the economy and the environment.
Net zero is widely popular.
Everything else you listed are right wing conspiracy theories.
>> Everything else you listed are right wing conspiracy theories.
Apparently this isn't:
"Just seven electric-vehicle charging stations have begun operating with funding from a $5-billion US government program created in 2021, marking “pathetic” progress, a Democratic senator said on Wednesday."
https://nypost.com/2024/06/05/business/democratic-senator-bl...
1 reply →
Net Zero 2050 involves so much economic depravation that is neither good for business interests, or good for the public's economic well being, such that the only way it could ever happen would be in some sort of authoritarianism. The adherents are nevertheless undeterred, thus I think Ecological Totalitarianism has a good chance of becoming the Bolshevism of the 21st century.
1 reply →
> it’s to get reelected.
I doubt this. Legislation is written by committee and passed by democracy. Most of the voting public don't look up the voting records which are available to them. Most of the voting public can't name a third of the members of parliament.
If there is a conspiratorial take, the one about regulatory capture is more believable.