Comment by Aurornis
12 hours ago
> but really, I think it's a good idea.
> Yes, it removes the "free" internet
> Yes, it opens up the way to a police state without anonymous internet access
Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state. Now the top voted comment (at least at time of me responding) is an open-arms welcoming of the internet police state and voicing support for removal of the free internet?
How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them? That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too? It's right there in the article. Think about how this has to be enforced: The only way to guarantee under-16s are banned from these sites is to force everyone to produce ID. You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
We're bringing it up because it's not being mentioned and we think it's important.
I that once freedom of speech and freedom to communicate and freedom to decent are gone they are gone for good.
I dislike very much that politicians like Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have tried to shut down dissenting voices by comparing them to paedophiles or saying this is just about access to porn.
I'm really angry about this. I don't want to live in a "nanny state" and will probably end up voting for a party I otherwise dislike just get this crap repealed.
Labour, Tories and Greens don't seem to care about personal freedom. I do and I'm fed having politicians and journalists that don't listen to me.
>We're bringing it up because it's not being mentioned
Huh? I must've read thousands of comments on this site over the years to the effect that any censorship of the internet would be wrong.
2 replies →
Destroying freedom isn't a fucking compromise. If algorithmic feeds are as bad as say, heroin, then the correct response is to regulate or ban them. You're arguing for the Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts, it's absolute fucking insanity.
We... are... talking about regulating and banning them. That is what is being done. Talking about regulating and banning them. Not
> Internet version of legalising heroin and installing a physical surveillance state to target the addicts
Whatever this is. We would be in agreement that would be bad. The debate is over whether this is that, rather than whether that is bad. Misunderstanding that makes all the discussion pointless.
1 reply →
Assigning infinite weight to one factor or consideration is sort of the definition of fanaticism, yes?
The monopoly on violence is trying to solve this problem, that's a bigger problem.
> I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.
I couldn't tell if this post was satire at first read.First it complains about not weighting tradeoffs, then it follows up with a demand that we ignore the tradeoffs as noise and just push through with the regulations.
You see the irony, right? You're stunned that people can't weigh tradeoffs, then you switch to dismissing tradeoffs as noise:
> People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.
Considering the second order and higher order consequences of regulations is the entire point.
You're just waving them all away with an assumption that they will be solved in the future.
Trying to shut down discussion about the consequences of government action as noise is scary. We've reached levels of moral panic that people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
It's terrifying that people think this way.
It's not satire.
> people like you are happy to close your eyes to any consequences and insist we let the government take control and do whatever they want right now, without considering the consequences.
Nobody said anything of the sort. That's the problem with trying to debate this: you're interpolating this stance into people who don't have it at all.
It's interesting that we suddenly can't regulate anything because of "freedom" and "speech" and it just happens to align perfectly with big tech interests.
The whole freedom and speech shit online is starting to feel like a big lie we have been sold so that big tech can just get richer.
Hey, if it's irrelevant noise then why are you crying about it?
Anyway, to make it the UK's problem even more, I will be doing what I can to eliminate the UK's traffic to as many services as possible. I have no interest in supporting the small island or it's people or their great red coat firewall.
Enjoy your wall.
> Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.
False. The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
“Torture is bad, but not being able to get information out of criminals is also bad. Some compromise must be made.” That’s just not how it works, is it?
Perhaps it may surprise you to know that's exactly how it works in some democratic countries - e.g. India and Japan - as the system does provide some leeway to the police on how they extract information from suspects. (India leans towards physical torture, while Japan to psychological torture). Moreover, Americans are often surprised to know that not answering police questions can in fact harm your defence in court in many countries, and police misconduct also does not necessarily exclude any evidence collected.
But where exactly is the line for torture? Is pre-trial or pre-charge detention torture? Solitary detention? Any forced labor at all?
> The whole point of fundamental rights is that they aren’t compromised on based on outcomes.
This is false, we generally take away fundamental rights when there's justification for doing so. e.g. the first paragraph of https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47986 (and every other paragraph also; I'm sure there are UK equivalents). We enshrine fundamental rights in order to elevate them above baser considerations, but it's not like a paperclip-maximizer thing where we optimize 100% for protecting them over all other considerations. Nor should it be (for the obvious paperclip-maximizer failure modes).
Anyway, the debate here is not over "police state good" and I'm frankly disappointed in all the commenters who interpret anyone disagreeing with them as claiming that. I for example loathe the idea of a police state and I'm quite sure the people I'm replying to would find I agree with them on most issues related to that. But it is not black and white, despite everyone's attempts at portraying it as such. I would love to hear people's practical, viable, politically-tenable plans for doing something about industrial-scale addiction to social media which do not involve impinging on these freedoms at all.
Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.
I'd dig deeper on the problem though. More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Yet we have laws around child endangerment. I'm a big supporter of parental sovereignty, but I also acknowledge that if society operates the way it does, I can't immediately think of a good reason why "mental health endangerment" (which social media for kids very much is) wouldn't be included in the broader scope of endangerment.
1 reply →
Creativity requires limitations.
> More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.
Also yeah? Sure? You may not like that that’s the conclusion. Why does everyone say this like it’s some kind of gotcha? Children are incapable biologically of making good decisions.
But yes, I cannot make these decisions of myself and want the state to step in. It’s way too big a surface area.
2 replies →
OG internet was not swarming with multibillion dollar predators ready to exploit every single psychological trick to manipulate you for profit. If you can solve this, i welcome the OG internet to be free and open place to share ideas. Let me know your suggestions.
The mistake is thinking that regulation and removing the free internet is going to harm those corporations you dislike and leave the smaller sites untouched.
The more regulations are added, the harder it is for anyone other than the multibillion dollar corporations to set up the infrastructure needed to comply.
That small forum you visit and the chat space you hang out in have to geo block your entire region because their operator can’t take on the legal risk of accidentally violating one of the laws. You are, however, free to move the group to Facebook and continue your group chat on Discord after submitting to the ID verification process of both sites, however. Those are the sanctioned safe spaces that have teams of lawyers and developers ensuring compliance with the laws.
This is the future many here are inviting. They don’t see it that way because they’re imagining laws that say “Kids can’t use Facebook” but the actual laws are going to be written to say “Social sites that host user generated content must ensure that all users are over the age of…”
If a big player in a space is asking for regulation, always treat it as them pulling the ladder up to make things harder for new upstarts.
As an example, look at what Anthropic's response to the US making them pull Fable. They commended the action and said they believe there need to be permanent regulations around safety of released models with approval committees and mandatory testing.
They aren't recommending it purely because of safety, they want to add expenses to their competitors without so much money to burn.
And not just that, these networks are becoming a conduit for all kind of disturbed people to invade the privacy of kids and pollute their world, sometimes convincing them to harm themselves, including suicide. Let's face it, as the internet has become more and more accessible to just about anybody, needing to police the space was bound to become inevitable.
It doesn't surprise me at all. At least in the US, both major political parties fully embrace censorship and a police state. Sure the disagree on the details, but they agree pretty universally on the direction.
I believe this is the outcome of technocracy. Technocrats need power, they need a strong police to enforce their legislation, and they need censorship to maintain a narrative. It's a deeply authoritarian ideology, and it's infected much of the western world.
Yeah that's a very reasonable hypothesis. More generally, I assume it happens anytime power is centralized into too few hands - they will always want force to keep what they have.
Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
As much as it pains me, I’d rather have that than the brain rot being forced on young kids. And you can argue all you want about “parental control”, but there are too many parents who don’t care, plus peer pressure is a real thing.
I also think that at that age all the social media sites are a net negative.
> Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.
You wrote this in jest, right, right?
We do, objectively speaking. We have free elections, viable new political parties, working mechanisms of feedback from the population to politicians, and a constitution keeping up with the times (we had a constitutional change just this year).
>Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
There is certainly an angle where people are fed up with the current state of things.
But generally speaking, the overall HN has been trending towards anti-free-internet and embracing the police state for a long time. I am pretty sure people can run an LLM on HN comments over the years.
> Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?
I suspect it's because people of our generation (I'm assuming) grew up with similar experiences to ours and had kids, and want to protect them. To be fair it's worse now than when we were growing up; I can't imagine how awful it must be to grow up in the age of social media.
Why do you think we lost free internet right now? In my opinion we lost it when all corporations switched to mass surveilance. Now we just stop pretending that social media corporations are not responsible for anything.
“Suddenly”? Remember all the “net neutrality” bullshit years ago that was all about begging the government to regulate the Internet? This has been going on since the early 00s probably. If you’re old enough to remember the 90s and earlier Internet then yes, it’s a strange thing to see, but that ship has sailed, circumnavigated the globe, and been decommissioned.
There are very likely people who's work is to shill... Also here... If not influencing editors of entire sites even. But they are only needed until it becomes full though crime to even think outside of newspeak ;)
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit
Reddit is a cesspool and an example of how we're in a post-peak internet like the OP says. If you actually browse Reddit the way the vast majority of people do now (i.e. not Old Reddit that masks the decline), it's crazy engagement-farming patterns everywhere, and not much of a community any more when many comments are hidden by default.
Most people today just like to fire off one-sentence comments; if you seek substantial discussion, you'll often now stand out as a weirdo on the spectrum, and may even draw downvotes and "lol wall of text bro" comments.
Yes, I follow close-knit little subs off the main page. There has been a flow of users away to WhatsApp groups, of all things -- it's that bad.
Let's look at an actual case study of a police state.
I think we can agree that a state-controlled paramilitary force executing a political opponent in broad daylight, on camera, is pretty far along the "police state" spectrum, right? This kind of thing is entirely incompatible with freedom, and should be a wake up call for the civil society to weed out anything that led to that, root and branch.
Enter the execution of Alex Pretti. Days after it happened, it transformed into yet another partisan issue, a topic for discussion, something that can possibly be justified. Effectively, it was normalised on the social and classic media. Media that, in the US, are pretty "free" [].
Negative freedoms are insufficient to stop a police state. What stops the police state is political engagement and regulation, and that requires a more nuanced understanding than just "either free of regulation or embracing the police state".
: …for moneyed interests to control and influence. For all their problems, I'd argue that BBC is substantially freer than say Fox News.
it takes very little effort from those who control the media to turn terminally online cattle for/against anything, because they are almost completely uncritical of their side of the establishment. pander to them 95% of the time, and you can use the remaining 5% to push whatever agenda you like.
among the least controversial things I can give as an example without getting silently downvoted and flagged, would you have ever imagined that particular demographic demanding draconian copyright laws? yet, here we are, copyright is good now.
As an engineer, I tend to view solutions in terms of tradeoffs and not absolutes. 20 years ago the free and open internet was great. Now I think we’ve gone too far. And more to the point, I think freedom is protected by regulation, not by handing decisions over to whatever billionaire won a cage match.
This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.
A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.
I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.
> A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do.
So the teenagers bypass it and use other sites while us adults are handing our IDs over just to use basic websites?
How is this good?
I’m becoming something of an accelerationist on this issue. I think we’re at a dead end with like 5 companies controlling most of the internet. If this pisses people off and encourages them to get active politically or create new modes of communication. Great!
Freedom has to be more than “you can choose any walled garden you want!” We need more spaces that aren’t mediated.
I feel like we’ve accepted this terrible definition of freedom, out of fear it could get worse, not because we love what we have.
But not to worry, I feel comfortable having contrarian views, because my one vote isn’t going to radically change the world.
4 replies →
The internet as it is sucks in no uncertain terms.
While I dislike some of those regulations, I have no will to fight for the status quo.
> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too?
Consider that I have a profound hatred for both YouTube and Reddit.
Why should I care?
I feel like you only picked the parts from my comment you cited and then decided to ignore the rest. I specifically explained WHY I am in favor of those aspects you question.
Yes, it is what I want. Would it be, in an ideal world? No. But we don't live in that world, we live in reality. You only focus on the positive aspects of the internet and frame it that way. Try this one instead:
Do you not realize that you are being brainwashed by billionaires? Companies abuse your mind, track your behavior, collect your data, all to exploit you. They want to you to become addicted, to waste your entire life consuming their content, to become antisocial and alone.
This is our current reality. So, yes, if the cost is that the goverment knows who I am while browsing to remove all of that from our lives again, it would be what I want.
Because we've been conditioned to believe that every good thing harbors a dark and sinister secret, that every attempt at improving our situation contains a fatal flaw.
It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.
The posters account is 89 days old, it's a shill.
Why shocked? When the internet got popular and the normies started flooding in the culture of the internet changed.
I’m more shocked in how authoritarian so-called “liberals” have gotten in the last 3 decades. I have to specify I’m a “classical” liberal now in order to not appear as if I desire a police state.
> The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state.
I grew up on that internet too (the freedom part). Do you really believe it is the same internet now?
Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam. IRC and newsgroups have been hijacked by centralised Messengers and Social Media firms run by BigTech. They can ban you on these platforms for no reasons, without much recourse, holding your digital life hostage. Last year, I learnt that the much vaunted "free speech" no longer exists online - I have to fight and waste time with everyone - from the moderators to the platform "community managers" - to publish any factual pro-palestine or anti-Israli-right posts because these are being heavily censored on all western platforms (and unfortunately all English language communities are western platforms). Election manipulations by foreign platforms are also another danger every sovereign nations now faces.
> How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them?
So I wouldn't say that people are being "naive". We don't want to live in an "echo chamber" controlled by western or Chinese BigTech corporates and their ideas of techno-fascism. Not to mention that we really cannot ignore any more the societal and political impact of some of these platforms - Facebook / Whatsapp are responsible for causing many social unrest around the world and even genocide (How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ).
The negative psychological impact of social media addiction is so obvious even in adults. So imagine how much worse it is on kids / teens - it truly would be irresponsible to not regulate it.
> That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?
Oh, very true! That is something to be very wary of. And the answer to that is to also fight for stronger privacy regulations and prevent government overreach. Not trust the government or the corporates to behave.
Here, you will have to understand and accept that unlike in America, where mistrust of government is inherent in the political structure (the US Presidential system favoured a weak central government because the makers were distrustful of a powerful Federal government) is very much in contrast to other parts of the world. Europeans expect and have more trust in their governments to regulate some aspects of their society, while the rest of the world prefers a "strong" Central government (and thus it is expected that the government will regulate many aspects of society). That is something fundamentally different vis American politics vs the rest of the world, that perhaps befuddles Americans.
In a democracy though, I don't see anything wrong in "trusting" your government more than local or foreign corporates (or even a foreign country - for all the talk about how America stood for "free speech", my experience with American / western owned platforms censoring my political ideas and beliefs has made me increasingly cynical if they ever truly believe in democratic values; so yeah - I guess you could also say that all this is also perhaps a backlash to current western politics).
> Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam.
Someone should tell my mail server that because it happily delivers emails to Apple and Google and Microsoft destinations.
(I will concede that it is much more of a ballache these days than it was 25 years ago but such is the way when capitalism intrudes with adequate legal oversight.)
Yes, I should have added it is harder now because it now requires "constant vigilance" - receiving mail is easy and fine and dandy, it's the delivery part that has now become a real pain because of the BigTech gatekeepers. It's the same with social media communities too.
> You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?
No, I want more. I want us to not be able to use these sites at all.
The modern internet has become a cesspool. There’s some good stuff here and there but it’s not worth the overly negative downsides. Reddit is mostly bots. YouTube is becoming clickbait slop. Social Media platforms are ruining society.
We need an alternative to the internet. Not long ago, we did not have all these things and it was one of the best times to be alive.