> Ludicrous to call William Perrin “the founder” of Ofcom or refer to it as “his” quango
From his own Carnegie UK webpage linked above:
> William was instrumental in creating Ofcom, reforming the regulatory regimes of several sectors and kicking off the UK government’s interest in open data.
William was awarded an OBE for his highly influential work at Carnegie UK with Prof Lorna Woods that underpinned the UK government’s approach to regulating online services.
How is he not a founder of Ofcom?
That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s just a verifiable statement of fact.
Or is it the use of the word founder you object to? If you prefer, “was instrumental in setting up and is closely related to the running of Ofcom”.
Both the use of “founder” and “the” are inaccurate and misleading (I notice you’ve switched to “a” without comment). He was a government adviser 20 years ago that was central to the work of creating Ofcom. How is he closely related to the running of Ofcom, today?
The conspiracy theory is your suggestion he is deriving some kind of financial benefit to Carnegie via Yoti - what is the basis for this? (I agree it would be a conflict of interest, though not hypocritical).
How is "algorithmic feed" related to safety? Or is it, along with seemingly arbitrary numbers like 7 or 34 millions, a way to target a specific platform for those who are afraid to spell the name explicitly?
One of the main motivations for this law was pro-suicide and pro-anorexia content being pushed to teenage girls. In particular Molly Russell's death received a lot of press coverage and public outrage at tech companies. The coroner's report basically said Instagram killed her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Molly_Russell
Of course if you get your news from HN then the motivation is actually something to do with limiting discussion of immigration or being dystopian just because.
But yes, if they could just name Instagram and TikTok they probably would.
The phrase they actually use is "content recommender system". The definition is in the link; you could maybe see some search features falling into it but I don't see how Wikipedia as it exists now is Category 1.
I think the general point is you are presenting something as a hardship that is a quality of life unachievable for most people (even in the UK), and unthinkable for most people in the recent past, even in the West.
You come across as out of touch and entitled. You live in the future - enjoy it!
I don't think this hypothetical behaviour would change the 95th percentile or any percentiles below it, would it?
If the income of everybody above the 80th percentile dropped to be equal to the 81st percentile, the 80th percentile income wouldn't change the ones above would just be very closely bunched.
(Last time I checked the opposite was true and they got more spread out)
I think it would, once you put in place mechanisms to move your income down to below £100k, you can and probably should tweak them further to reduce your tax bill even further.
Having lived in one and visited the other many times over, I can assure you that they are pretty similar in what makes them unsafe for certain groups of people.
Yup, nice town, friendly people. Bit run down and scruffy, but that’s hardly the fault of the people who live there, rather the economic policies of several decades that destroyed the region’s industry and has failed to encourage growth for a replacement - similar to the USA’s rust belt or similar post-industrial regions in Europe.
They're not really being arrested for criticising a law though.
They're arrested for supporting a group that's been banned for causing around £30 million's worth of damage to our national defences at a time of hightened national security.
There's the implication that Palastinian Action are going to continue attacking us.
If they just stuck to protesting they would have been fine.
And at the same time, while people burning down hotels have been arrested, other people who have been egging them on and causing "stochastic terrorism" have been left alone.
What gets classed as "support for" and "terrorism" is not evenly enforced.
I think this is an inaccurate description of what has been happening: people have criticised the government heavily for being extremely harsh on people "just making tweets". A woman was sentenced to nearly three years in jail for posting a message online that said "set fire to the hotels for all I care" (paraphrased).
These riots are spontaneous and "organised" via people getting riled up online. There isn't a central organisation that people see as leading these anti-migrant riots/attacks. They seem to be an emergent property of the protests. If there is a named group organising criminal action and it includes things that threaten/damage national security then that group should be banned.
Palestine Action was conducting organised criminal raids with the specific intent to cause damage to anything it felt was Israeli, Israel related, or somehow benefited Israel. A lot of the time the link was tenuous at best. They also attacked national security assets. Honestly this group's actions has done more harm than good for the Palestinian cause.
That can be a good thing depending on the group. I think people who support the NSDAP should be arrested. We know what happens if you don't arrest people who support the NSDAP because it happened once.
There are discussions in parliament about grooming gangs on X. These are soft-censored (you can't see it without passing the the age verification). Few people will be bothered to make an account to see a post and pass age verification. Therefore it slows the sharing of information.
It isn't about outright banning the discussion, because that will cause considerable push-back by the public. So you dress up a policy as doing one thing knowing that the effect will be another. I don't take anything the British State says at face value. If you do, you are simply being naive.
But we are only in the first week of the bill passing. After say 6 months or a year, most people who want to see things on those platforms will have done the age verification, and therefore there will be no "soft censoring" or slow down of information.
This seems like a non issues isolated to the initial period of being introduced.
Whenever one of these stories come up, we find there is a side missing. In this case, it's a school, so for safeguarding reasons they're not going to say anything at all about the children. Quite often "arrested for saying X" turns out to be "arrested for a lengthy campaign of targeted harrasment, culminating in X"
I do wish the search was a bit better; it could show the matching quote below the matching frame, and it doesn’t seem to support phrase queries.
A more advanced feature would be searching by speaking character too.