Comment by sunshine-o
1 day ago
This is the only power they have left.
The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island so now the bureaucrats play a fantasy game where they are gonna enforce their rules and dominion in their former colonies or the digital world.
Same thing has been happening for a long time in America. Politicians are typically risk adverse and the real world has complicated problems so they make up a 'virtual' problem to 'fix', or to turn into a new political football.
Politics has become its own end: politicians have job security, and nothing changes except for the worse because constituents keep falling for the same tired shit.
This is demagogy 101: invent or exagerate a problem, and offer yourself as the only true solution. It's a recipe as old as bread, nothing particularly US centric.
It's peaking again in the USA though and it's immigrants. They have replaced the "Commie" (when it last peaked in the 50s) as an imagined threat that lies around every corner that seems to appeal to a certain large minority in the USA that needs something to blame for everything other than their own inaction and choice to not adapt.
That's so true with the current Republican controlled Congress bending a knee every time to the Mango in charge. Other than the occasional furrowed brow or momentary pause.
I don't know if that's really it. In the US, sure, there was a direct line of communication between all the large social media companies and the federal government. It was used to censor what was deemed "conspiracy theories" around covid and election interference. That could be seen as protecting politicians.
But in the UK, what I read about is cases where it offended someone, like the case of a an autistic teenage girl who was arrested after she made a comment to a police officer, reportedly saying the officer looked like her "lesbian nana." Obviously this doesn't threaten government control or politicians, so it doesn't exactly fit the same mold.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-ce...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/15nddel/autisti...
> The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island so now the bureaucrats play a fantasy game...
It seems to me like said loss of control is largely the result of other actions by the same bureaucrats.
This is part of a wider trend of trying to solve real world problems with the stroke of a pen. It’s not going well.
Banning 4chan is just part of the UK's efforts to prevent drought. Every jpg shared and string written helps drain the oceans:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/uk-government-ine...
4chan and websites like it have never been the problem.
Just give up a few more rights…for everyone’s safety. Think of the children!
“just one more law bro. i promise bro just one more law and we’ll be safe bro. it’s just a little more surveillance bro. please just one more. one more law and we’ll stop all the threats bro. bro c’mon just give me access to your data and we’ll protect you i promise bro. think of the children bro. bro bro please we just need one more law bro, one more camera, one more database, and then we’ll all be safe bro”
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You needed a /s for the very literal people downvoting you.
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I heard things about UK arresting people for social media posts but thought it was just a few cases cherry picked. But I recently looked up the scale of arrests and it's really insane.
Police are arresting over 12,000 people each year for social media posts and other online communications deemed “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” “obscene,” or “menacing.” This averages to around 33 arrests per day.
These arrests are primarily made under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, laws which criminalize causing “annoyance,” “inconvenience,” or “anxiety” to others through digital messages.
Utterly insane.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
It's more damning when you see who (and the cases) they don't arrest in the mean time.
Sadly this trend is echoed in the US as well since 2023 many have been arrested for their freedom of speech https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo
I don't think that's the same thing:
> The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack of attendance". It did not say whether she had been attending Columbia or another institution.
I think it's entirely different arresting people who overstay their visas or people on student visas that disrupt academic life. The UK regularly arrests citizens for offensive memes. There have even been cases where someone got a harsher sentence based on a tweet about sexual assault than the person who actually committed a sexual assault.
You can feel any way you'd like about free speech in America, but let's not conflate the two as being equal.
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By the way at that scale it is very counterproductive.
If you are gonna end up being arrested for protesting or giving your opinion, it is funnier to do it in the streets than on facebook. And it is probably much easier to be anonymous nowadays in the streets with a mask than on social media.
This is probably why the UK went in flame recently, the government cracked down on the Internet and people just went in the streets instead.
Wasn't there some documentary a few years ago about UK citizens protesting in masks? Narrated by that guy from The Matrix?
The flip side of this is that convictions under the Communications Act have gone down compared to 2010, so it's a mixed picture:
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
It is hard to get good data on this, but it is probably a combination of overzealous policing (which is indeed bad) and an increase in arrests for behavior that arguably is a police matter, such as domestic abuse, harassment, etc. I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.
> I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.
There is simply more people online now than in 2010.
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Reads like narration from Adam Curtis.
"What happened next..."
> The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island
What do you mean by this?
Racism with extra steps.
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Could just as easily be referring to brexit.
America is like, 2 steps behind with an entire government following
isnt this everyone in power?
So ... if the USA was ok with kid pornography then everyone else in the world would be forced to be ok with that too?
Sorry but other countries are totally right to block whatever they deem to be USA shit.
Yes. UK has every right to block whatever they want. US has no obligation to assist them in any way.
While I disapprove of what the gov is doing here, I think it’s incorrect and unhelpful to put all the blame on them. AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.
The people in charge are largely hated by the electorate. They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)
Unless by "democracy" you mean "sleepwalking administration everyone hates" the current UK government is unusually undemocratic.
No post war U.K. government aside from the 2010-15 coalition had a majority of voters voting for the parties in power. 1951 came close I think.
However opinion polls consistently put support for the “anti porn” bill up high amongst multiple demographics.
The cause for this is a lack of computer literacy, in both government and the population, but that doesn’t really matter.
The electorate hated the politicians, then they still vote for the same guys. The general public doesn't care about politics, those who cared treats it like tribalism and don't want to learn what are actually happening, they don't want to think they only want to be told whatever feeding their brain chemistry.
> They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)
I’m reading this as you saying that the system is worse now that the monarchy and aristocracy have less power. Is that correct? If so, how do these unelected groups make it better?
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Tell me about this "quirk" and winning by "default" (and how this never applied to other recent elections).
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The paradox of politics : are hated whilst actually doing what the majority wants.
As we saw in the case of the Winter fuel Payments : if a policy is unpopular with voters, it is abandoned. The Online Safety Act is popular, so it will stay.
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I understand the people might wanna block porn on their kids mobile internet and home WiFi.
So why don't they mandate their ISP to implement this as an optional feature ?
Why do they instead try to boil the ocean by going after every website on the planet and outside of their jurisdiction?
The ISPs already do this. Most mobile networks are even opt-out, not in, to this feature. The new law is unnecessary overreach. They either don’t know what they are doing technically (alarming) or are just authoritarian (very alarming)
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My solution was to set my router to use the DNS server at 1.1.1.3 which blocks adult sites.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families...
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Their isps already offer this, actually. You have to show id to them to get it turned pff.
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I've posted this before, but it's relevant here:
'The UK’s Online Safety Act didn’t come from Parliament or the public'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ2AokZujC0 (watch from about 4:20)
> 'The UK’s Online Safety Act didn’t come from Parliament or the public'
It was debated at length in parliament and it was voted into legislation by parliament. It was developed by a Tory government and has been implemented by a Labour one.
I don't like the OSA but the whole 'robber baron' organisation thing in that video is just .. well Andrew Carnegie died more than a hundred years ago. He funded a lot of charitable organisations including one that has funded work in this area.
Most people are either blissfully unaware or don’t understand the ramifications of a policy until it becomes law
Democracy is a form of government, not an ideology. Just because +50% of an electorate thinks something is OK, doesn't make it so.
I agree. But it does matter if you want to do more then rant on the internet. If there is public support you need to educate people and change minds.
Parent was correctly pointing out that responsibility for whatever troubles the UK might be actually encountering should be distributed as democratically as its form of government actually is.
The form of government that applies democracy is rooted in the ideology that the majority knows best, which is the ideological version of democracy.
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It's not 50% of the electorate, in the UK it is the plurality (second best plus 1 vote) of 50% of the electoral seats plus 1 seat. That gives absolute power.
Anything can be turned into an ideology, even democracy.
> AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.
When were UK citizens polled on these policies before politicians started enforcing them? And I think after Brexit, the UK government learned never to ask the opinions of their citizens again, because they will vote in direct opposition of the political status quo out of sheer spite of their politicians.
There are huge flaws with our current democratic systems: like sure we can vote, but after the people we vote for get into power, we have no control over what they do until next election cycle. So you can be a democracy on paper while your government is doing things you don't approve of.
Most people I talk to in the west, both here in Europe and in North America, don't seem to approve of what their government is doing on important topics, and at the same time they feel hopeless in being able to change that because either the issues are never on the table, or if they are, the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.
So given these issues ask yourself, is that really a true democracy, or just an illusion of choice of direction while you're actually riding a trolly track?
> the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.
Why is this allowed? Why aren't there laws in place to hold politicians accountable for the promises they make to get elected?
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That’s a form of political change - direct representation democracy and recall legislation are both possibilities. The solution is to make electoral change happen, not to complain that everything is hopeless on the internet.
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The UK hasn't elected a government on 50% or more of the vote since the 1950s:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/717004/general-elections...
It is hard to call minority rule democratic, really. I've no issue with your point on the OSA and think it is widely supported, but let's be realistic, representation in the UK is virtual on matters like this: widely supported, but mostly by coincidence.
2-party electoral systems (likely to bear >50% majority governments) are also not very democratic, in a way. There's no perfect system, but I prefer minority governments to a 2-party duopoly. YMMV.
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I think you're making the original poster's point for them. It's very clear a minority government is not the one forcing OSA on people. They don't even have the power.
Arguably, minority rule is more democratic than majority rule, because minority rule isn't "the minority does whatever they want".
Both major parties in the UK supported this.
> generally supported by the voters
you could say the same about the US... that doesn't make it right and it doesn't mean people aren't violently voting against their own best interests.
It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!
This is not a slippery slope; this is a spring trying to return to the center. The harder the resistance at the extremes, the more energetic the oscillation will be, so if we want to minimize that, work on undermining the intolerable extremes.
The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.
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> AIUI, the UK is a democracy
The House of Lords disagrees and the Monarch disagree. Sometimes they cosplay as a democracy.
Neither the House of Lords or the Monarch can actually stop Parliament passing a law. They can in some cases slow them down, but if Parliament really wants a law passed it will happen.
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“Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos”
The goal of the policy is supported by the voters. The polls used to measure this are shifty at best about the implementation details. Who doesn't want to prevent kids from looking at pornography? But plenty of things are popular if you ask people in a way that makes them ignore how it plays out in real life. Laws against tall buildings are a pretty good example. Land reform was extremely popular in many socialist countries until it actually happened. I'm sure you can think of other examples.
In this case the ministers know what the problems are. The policy is not new or unique to the UK and it has been done better in Louisiana of all places:
https://reason.com/2024/03/18/pornhub-pulls-out-of-seventh-s...
> The difference is in the details of complying with Louisiana's law. Verifying visitor ages in Louisiana does not require porn sites to directly collect user IDs. Rather, the state's government helped develop a third-party service called LA Wallet, which stores digital driver's licenses and serves as an online age verification credential that affords some privacy.
> Land reform was extremely popular in many socialist countries until it actually happened
Actually, land reforms were spectacularly popular—and very successful—in many countries like Guatemala or Vietnam (coincidentally, two places that were invaded by the US in an attempt to revert those reforms, one successful and the other not).
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really?
From my anecdotal evidence, is that it's fucking stupid and hated
Weirdly, the majority of the British public a) support age verification, b) aren't willing to use age verification themselves and c) don't think it'll actually work.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
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They have fair and competitive elections, no?
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there's a reason anecdotes aren't data. While people are more divided on the effectiveness, there's pretty overwhelming pubblic support for laws like the Online Safety Act.
https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
It's always slightly surprising to see Americans online react to this thinking there is some Illuminati conspiracy happening. Britain and Europe are not the US, we don't have much of an interest of having 4chan dictate public policy.
It's also a good lesson in how effective platforms like Twitter can be in manipulating public perception, given that the same users now seem to be able to openly agitate over there.
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Behold, the power of the anecdote.