Such bill harm freedom of expressions on every platform.
You don't have to be a rockets scientist to see the negative repercussions of legal threats against online content. This is a deeply anti-democratic bill. Exemptions for everyone would be most prudent.
This bill will likely never become law. This is not just because it's poorly written, very loosely defined and completely tech-illiterate. It's because moral panic is the only thing the current UK government can rely on to whip votes and distract from the failures of all of their actual policies. Actually passing an actual law would make it harder to continue the panic...
I don't either. I just think politicians would rather make speeches about the "problem" than fix it.
That's why this bill has been weeks from passing for about 5 years now... (the current incarnation is from May 2021, but there were a bunch of older versions with other names).
The difference that is supposed to justify this exception is that moderation is decentralized on wikipedia and centralized on platforms like facebook. In fact wikipedia also has centralized moderation, such as when the foundation banned a bunch of admins of the arab wikipedia recently and facebook also has decentralized moderation, like in facebook groups.
Petty bureaucratic safety rules are bad enough where I live but I'm sure damn glad I don't live in the UK where stupid rulemaking has gotten out of hand.
Every time I visit there it seems to have gotten worse. One really has to wonder why the UK left the EU when it's so rule-crazy; after all Brussels leads the world in trivial and annoying rulemaking—so you'd reckon the British would be truly at home there.
I wish someone would tell me what's happened to the British, they've gone from gung ho empire builders who conquered and ruled half the world to now being so timid they're almost too frightened to leave the house for fear of never returning.
The simple solution for Wikipedia to adopt would be to flag all requests from UK IP addresses to pages that are likely to offend the delicate British sensibility with a big red sign to the effect 'Your UK Government has deemed you not responsible enough to view this content'. Going on recent UK trends that'd likely be about half of Wiki's content.
Even then such warning are unlikely to resolve the problem as the UK public would be too timid to do anything about it.
As was aptly said by a poster before the comment was removed it's sad and pathetic that Wikipedia doesn't have the guts to oppose this stupid law.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 18.2 ms ] threadYou don't have to be a rockets scientist to see the negative repercussions of legal threats against online content. This is a deeply anti-democratic bill. Exemptions for everyone would be most prudent.
Don't bet on it. From my observation I no longer believe the British public have sufficient gumption to oppose such laws.
That's why this bill has been weeks from passing for about 5 years now... (the current incarnation is from May 2021, but there were a bunch of older versions with other names).
Every time I visit there it seems to have gotten worse. One really has to wonder why the UK left the EU when it's so rule-crazy; after all Brussels leads the world in trivial and annoying rulemaking—so you'd reckon the British would be truly at home there.
I wish someone would tell me what's happened to the British, they've gone from gung ho empire builders who conquered and ruled half the world to now being so timid they're almost too frightened to leave the house for fear of never returning.
The simple solution for Wikipedia to adopt would be to flag all requests from UK IP addresses to pages that are likely to offend the delicate British sensibility with a big red sign to the effect 'Your UK Government has deemed you not responsible enough to view this content'. Going on recent UK trends that'd likely be about half of Wiki's content.
Even then such warning are unlikely to resolve the problem as the UK public would be too timid to do anything about it.
As was aptly said by a poster before the comment was removed it's sad and pathetic that Wikipedia doesn't have the guts to oppose this stupid law.