Nice. I am tired of tobacco, alcohol, and gambling content. I am glad to see encouraging people to self-harm with these products is now banned.
Oh wait...self-harm just includes suicide. I guess it is still fine to comvince people to destroy their lives as long as it has a revenue curve behind it.
I keep seeing youtube putting the little "you're not alone" banners under videos that report about suicide, and even a couple that have no relation to it. Since the rules are apparently the duty of the company to uphold, does that mean these videos will be banned too?
> "Tech companies to be legally required to prevent this content from appearing in the first place, protecting users of all ages."
The typical algorithmic implementation would ban this HN discussion itself, for containing the string "self-harm" and various other keywords on the page. That's often how it ends up, for anyone who's been paying attention. Legitimate support websites are censored, for discussing the subjects the attempt to support. Public health experts get misclassified as disinformation—they use the same set of keywords, just in a different order. Inexpensive ML can't tell them apart.
Important news could be automatically suppressed before anyone would even realize it's authentic news. How could one discuss on an algorithmically "safe" platform, for instance, the allegation that the President of the United States paid the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to rape an underage child, who later killed herself? That's four or five "high-priority" safety filters right there.
> [..] putting stricter legal requirements on tech companies to hunt down and remove material that encourages or assists serious self-harm, before it can destroy lives and tear families apart.
Does this include smoking, excessive eating, eating sweets, etc? What about listening to sad music?
> This government is determined to keep people safe online. Vile content that promotes self-harm continues to be pushed on social media and can mean potentially heart-wrenching consequences for families across the country.
"Vile" is very emotionally charged, who decides it? Will it be the next government that gets to decide it? Bare in mind, the (recently) ex-Deputy Prime Minister of the current government called her opposition "scum" [1], an extremely negative word.
Note that one of the few taboos still maintained by traditional news media, despite their questionable ethics elsewhere, is not reporting on suicides as such because it is known to encourage copycats. Hence a lot of young celebrities being reported as "died suddenly" (which in practice means either suicide or overdose, accidental or intentional)
Will this result in more spread of ridiculous euphemisms like unalive? Probably. Will this result in us being able to get people banned from social media for telling other people to kill themselves? Probably only with very intermittent enforcement.
Reddit has this thing where, if someone reports your comment for self-harm, regardless of validity, they send you an automated (and IMO useless at best, harmful at worst) "we're here for you" DM.
It's often used as a way to anonymously imply that you should kill yourself, so I wonder if this sort of thing would affect that and how.
Though, overall, I think the censoring of self-harm stuff is already beyond ridiculous. Terms like "self-unalive", "self-terminate", "sewerslide" make a very serious issue sound like a joke. Blinding ourselves to isn't going to make these problems go away.
In this thread: a WHOLE LOT of people advocating Slippery Slope arguments (and even defending them as such, explicitly).
I can't decide if the bill is toothless and meaningless, or a well-planned first step towards complete control of speech and groupthink. Or both, somehow.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] threadOh wait...self-harm just includes suicide. I guess it is still fine to comvince people to destroy their lives as long as it has a revenue curve behind it.
The typical algorithmic implementation would ban this HN discussion itself, for containing the string "self-harm" and various other keywords on the page. That's often how it ends up, for anyone who's been paying attention. Legitimate support websites are censored, for discussing the subjects the attempt to support. Public health experts get misclassified as disinformation—they use the same set of keywords, just in a different order. Inexpensive ML can't tell them apart.
Important news could be automatically suppressed before anyone would even realize it's authentic news. How could one discuss on an algorithmically "safe" platform, for instance, the allegation that the President of the United States paid the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to rape an underage child, who later killed herself? That's four or five "high-priority" safety filters right there.
Does this include smoking, excessive eating, eating sweets, etc? What about listening to sad music?
> This government is determined to keep people safe online. Vile content that promotes self-harm continues to be pushed on social media and can mean potentially heart-wrenching consequences for families across the country.
"Vile" is very emotionally charged, who decides it? Will it be the next government that gets to decide it? Bare in mind, the (recently) ex-Deputy Prime Minister of the current government called her opposition "scum" [1], an extremely negative word.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59081482
Will this result in more spread of ridiculous euphemisms like unalive? Probably. Will this result in us being able to get people banned from social media for telling other people to kill themselves? Probably only with very intermittent enforcement.
Today it's 4chan, Kiwi Farms, WPD, pirate sports sites, libgen, Anna's place... Tomorrow it'll surely be every forum where moderation isn't absolutely draconian.
I wonder if they're going to try to ban Twitter.
See https://sdelano.media/suicideisbad/ (in Russian)
It's often used as a way to anonymously imply that you should kill yourself, so I wonder if this sort of thing would affect that and how.
Though, overall, I think the censoring of self-harm stuff is already beyond ridiculous. Terms like "self-unalive", "self-terminate", "sewerslide" make a very serious issue sound like a joke. Blinding ourselves to isn't going to make these problems go away.
I can't decide if the bill is toothless and meaningless, or a well-planned first step towards complete control of speech and groupthink. Or both, somehow.