Labour would add "legal but harmful" BACK into the online bill

[ResisterRex]

Of course they would. FFS

order-order.com/2022/12/04/phillipson-labour-would-restore-legal-but-harmful-clause-for-online-content/

If it's not possible to make extreme porn illegal, then I don't see how this would be more enforceable, in the end.

As far as kids, I think the approach of trying to control the internet is ass-backwards. 75 years from now, if we haven't reverted to barbarism, I think people will be shocked and horrified that we allow kids on the internet, or to be involved in gaming in the way it exists now, at all.

It's like trying to make cigarettes less harmful so they are ok for kids to smoke.

I think this is largely where I am.

I find parents who say freely that their 6 year old goes on YouTube all the time without supervision absolutely insane.

My best friend found out the hard way that a popular cartoon on YouTube that was all the rage in her son's class wasn't for kids. When she watched it herself she was disturbed by what was going on. She's since restricted YouTube access.

But yeah I've talked a little about this on the Susie Green thread and how much it frightens me and how inappropriate it is for 14 year olds to be on discord. When you've seen 30 year olds acting in a certain way to 14 year olds on gaming channels yourself it certainly gives you a certain perspective. Not only that but moderators were also extremely young, naive and occasionally most definitely part of the problem. It's been some years since I've been involved in gaming but I dont expect its improved. Indeed I think what I saw back then was really was a precursor to some of the problems that would later happen with twitter moderation tbh.

To be honest I think online content should be regulated in the same way as print content but we are miles off that

If it's not possible to make extreme porn illegal, then I don't see how this would be more enforceable, in the end.

And this is the problem. Its "too hard" to enforce standards, so let's just leave the harmful stuff out there.

Unfortunately I feel this is an example of where GC feminists are working against women. Rather than blanket oppose the bill, so all sorts that harms women and girls continues online, we should be focusing on tightening up the legislation so it is clearer what "legal but harmful" covers

Porn in general will be inaccessible to children because of age verification so far as I understand it. Any platform that hosts it will have to make sure children cannot access it.

I'd prefer the harmful to be illegal, much prefer precise laws not vague ones.

Porn is damaging to society qnd promotes misogyny and violence towards women so it being less accessible to children is only part of a response

They can't legislate at the speed of harmful content, so a blanket term is quicker and more useful.

It's a bit like the problems they were having with "legal highs" not being covered by drugs legislation

I think they could define "harmful" in a way that makes a law specific enough to be useful. I don't think people being offended would be coveted, if they were careful.

Not its not better.

As for speed. The issue we see now have been around for at least 15 years. They haven't fundamentally changed. All thats changed is, how people are seeing them now.

If I go back to what I saw going on 15 years ago, none of these concerns in the public eye are new to me. Nor are they likely to change at a speed faster than parliament is able to legislate.

These issues have not come out of nowhere despite what you might think.

Porn today is not the same as porn 15 years ago
The level of rape/death threats made to women today are not the same as 15 years ago
The algorithms that funnel certain types of content to users without any human even looking aren't the same today as 15 years ago
The levels of men accessing CSA is not the same as15 years ago, and there's evidence legal porn is a gateway to CSA

The issues may not have changed but the technology has which has accelerated the scale of the harm.

With VR/deep fakes etc that's only going to get worse

Actually, I would argue what was going on in niche gaming circles wasn't far off whats now mainstream. But thats a whole different story.

I can tell you a pile of stories about skype chat, revenge porn and harassment via facebook which involved contacting work colleagues and relatives and eventually led to the police getting involved. From 10 years ago (not me btw). I can tell you about unsolicted dick pics on pre-twitter chats (I forget the name - maybe msn chat or icq. It was a long time ago). I remember people with sock puppet accounts trying to game Facebook games via Facebook and Bebo. Some of this dates back to 2004. So of it is around 2010. But certainly before I took up residence on MN.

Honestly its ugly and the history of it goes back a long way. If you go off and ask about it on KF or 4Chan people there will tell you how long it dates back and how dark it gets.

The only thing that has changed is the scale of it and how mainstream its become.

Politics is only just catching up with real life - to me that shows not that these are new issues but just how far behind the curve politicians and the media are with this and how there needs to be a lot much political involvement from people who have knowledge and experience of this.

Even without the "legal but harmful" wording, platforms can decide in their terms of service what they think is harmful, so if they decided saying women don't have penises was harmful, they could remove those posts. As long as it is clearly set out in their terms of service.

However, there is a new offence going in (which has been thought through by the Law Commission) - the threatening communications offence will capture communications which convey a threat of serious harm, such as grievous bodily harm or rape.

The government is also intending to put forward an amendment which would criminalise the sharing of a person’s intimate images without their consent.

In addition, the Victim’s Commissioner, Domestic Abuse Commissioner and Children’s Commissioner will be added as statutory consultees which means Ofcom must consult with them when it is drafting the codes of conduct that the likes of Facebook will have to comply with.

So there are things in there to help women.

I think the thing for me is just how enforcable this is going to be with social media based outside the UK.

The idea that the government will close down twitter or facebook is hard to believe given that they use both for pushing their political agendas.

Equally, I'm not sure fines will cut it either.

I think this part of things needs to be considered as much as the content of the law too.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan
Read that and tell me that this stuff is new and hasn't been around for the best part of 15 to 20 years.

4chan was personally never my bag (precisely for the reason that it was too much for me) but I certainly associated a lot with people who did and the influence of it was significant in early internet culture.

That influence has just spread and grown.

I don't know if you are arguing with me, but if you are you misunderstand my point. My point is the same as what you wrote:
"The only thing that has changed is the scale of it and how mainstream its become."

Mainstream availability and use of what used to be "niche" porn is changing how men view women and children

The views that used to be confined to 4chan/incel forums are now mainstream on twitter and YouTube. Today YouTibe showed my 11 year old a video "educating" him about Red Pill. That wasn't happening 10- 15 years ago. YouTube barely existed 15 years ago.

Legislation hasn't kept up with the Internet. And trying to target a fast changing world with wording targeted at today's tech won't work either.

I don't think Labour will win at all.

I'm saying that we can see how this is going and likely to go even now.

Legislation shouldn't be preemptive - otherwise its open to abuse for 'the things in the future we don't know and yet understand'.

Gamers know how to game. So don't give them something to game. Cos thats what they'll do if you have vague wishy washy law.

Its part of the culture...

What you need is the politicians to get to grips with a culture thats over 20 years old. They should be living within 5 years of the culture. Otherwise they are widely out of touch.

If you aren't narrow and specific with a culture which celebrates gaming the system, you aren't going to win. Trust me.

People were saying a decade ago there was a problem. No one took it seriously.

Gamergate
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)

Harassment and Twitter
While organized through anonymous message boards such as 4chan and Reddit, Gamergate harassment was most prominent on Twitter. Michael Salter, a University of Western Sydney criminologist, writes that Twitter's design and architecture was "highly conducive" to such abuse campaigns, allowing Gamergaters to overwhelm users' ability to individually block the large numbers of fake or "sockpuppet" accounts used to send abusive and harassing messages.[123]

Twitter was criticized for its inability to respond quickly and prevent harassment over the service. Within the United States, Twitter and other social media sites are not liable for content posted by third-parties of their service under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996), and so have no legal obligation to police malicious content such as harassment and threats.[124] Brianna Wu, shortly after becoming a target of harassment, stated that Twitter facilitated harassment by the ease with which anyone could make a new account even after having an earlier account blocked, and challenged the service to improve its responsiveness to complaints.[125] Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic said Gamergate is an "identity crisis" for Twitter, and by not dealing with harassing users, the platform is failing to protect victims.[126]

Early on during Gamergate, software developer Randi Harper started the "Good Game Auto Blocker" or "ggautoblocker", an expanding list of known Twitter accounts that were tied to the Gamergate hashtag which could be automatically blocked, therefore reducing the degree of harassment received.[127] In November 2014, Twitter announced a collaboration with the non-profit group "Women, Action & the Media" (WAM), in which users of Twitter can report harassment to a tool monitored by WAM members, who would forward affirmed issues to Twitter within 24 hours. The move, while arising in the wake of the Gamergate harassment, was due to general issues of the harassment of women on the Internet.[128][129][130] In May 2015, WAM reported that of 512 reported harassment instances by the tool during the month of November 2014, 12% of those were tied to the Gamergate controversy based on the ggautoblocker list, with most harassment occurring from single-instance accounts targeting a single person.

Everyone knew. No one cared.

Labour are simply reminding us that, however awful the alternatives might be, they are even worse. For that, we should probably be grateful.

I know about gamergate thanks. I've worked in tech for 20 years.

Noone took it seriously then and noone is taking it seriously now. At least admitting there is material that's "legal and harmful" was an acknowledgement. But now that's been taken out because of "free speech" (which we managed perfectly well with print content)

How the fuck are you so naive about internet culture then???

Wow.

You've just blown my mind.

Booom!

I'm not naive. I just have a different opinion to you.

How would you police the Internet so that porn using men don't get funnelled into watching child sexual abuse, and in doing so become criminals themselves and drive an ever increasing number of children being abused for porn?

How do you make it so young people don't watch loads of enthusiastic anal porn, think that's normal and end up with girls with anal injuries as a result?

How do you make it so algorithms don't funnel Red Pill/Kill All Men/Pro-Ana/incel videos to teenagers and young people?

You can't legislate for every type of harm.

Don't tell me this was the same problem 20 years ago as it is today. 20 years ago YouTube and Twitter didn't even exist.

I literally don't get why my posts have enraged you so much RTB. I have said its the scale and pace of change of the tech that's the problem and not that the issues are new.

Surely you can see that tech today bears very little resemblance to tech even 5 years ago?

The pace of change isn't nearly as rapid as you make out though.