Former UK Supreme Court Judge Calls Out Online Safety Bill As Harmful By Itself:
We have discussed at great lengths the many problems of the UK's Online Safety Bill, in particular how it will be a disaster for the open internet. Unfortunately, it appears that important politicians seem to think that the Online Safety Bill will be a sort of magic wand that will make the "bad stuff" online disappear automatically (it won't).
It appears that more people — and prominent ones at that — are now speaking out against the bill. Former UK Supreme Court judge, Jonathan Sumption, has published a piece in the Spectator, the old school UK political commentary magazine that is generally seen as quite conservative. Sumption warns that the Online Harms Bill will, itself, be quite harmful.
The real vice of the bill is that its provisions are not limited to material capable of being defined and identified. It creates a new category of speech which is legal but 'harmful'. The range of material covered is almost infinite, the only limitation being that it must be liable to cause 'harm' to some people. Unfortunately, that is not much of a limitation. Harm is defined in the bill in circular language of stratospheric vagueness. It means any 'physical or psychological harm'. As if that were not general enough, 'harm' also extends to anything that may increase the likelihood of someone acting in a way that is harmful to themselves, either because they have encountered it on the internet or because someone has told them about it.
This test is almost entirely subjective. Many things which are harmless to the overwhelming majority of users may be harmful to sufficiently sensitive, fearful or vulnerable minorities, or may be presented as such by manipulative pressure groups. At a time when even universities are warning adult students against exposure to material such as Chaucer with his rumbustious references to sex, or historical or literary material dealing with slavery or other forms of cruelty, the harmful propensity of any material whatever is a matter of opinion. It will vary from one internet user to the next.
While I don't necessarily agree with all of his characterization, there is something fundamental in here that I wish so many other people understood: this is all relative. Some people find certain content offensive. Others find it benign. There is no objective standard for "harmful" speech, especially when (as with the UK bill), it includes stuff that the law itself admits remains "legal."
As Sumption notes, making these kinds of calls at scale, when no one can even agree what the content is, is bound to be a disaster (and, for what it's worth, he underplays the scale here, because while he's showing how much happens every minute, it's even more crazy when you realize how much content this means per hour or day, and how impossible it would be to monitor it all).
If the bill is passed in its current form, internet giants will have to identify categories of material which are potentially harmful to adults and provide them with options to cut it out or alert them to its potentially harmful nature. This is easier said than done. The internet is vast. At the last count, 300,000 status updates are uploaded to Facebook every minute, with 500,000 comments left that same minute. YouTube adds 500 hours of videos every minute. Faced with the need to find unidentifiable categories of material liable to inflict unidentifiable categories of harm on unidentifiable categories of people, and threatened with criminal sanctions and enormous regulatory fines (up to 10 per cent of global revenue). What is a media company to do?
He also has a response to those who insist this can all be handled by algorithms. It can be handled by algorithms if you're happy to accept a huge number of errors — both false positives and false negatives.
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday August 26 2022, @05:05PM (8 children)
I keep waiting for the big internet companies to respond to one of these laws by just all simultaneously withdrawing from the country in question. This certainly seems like a good candidate for that. Label all potentially harmful content or be fined 10% of global revenue? Let's see how the electorate feels about doing without Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 26 2022, @06:38PM
Maybe they'd go outside and play [youtu.be].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday August 26 2022, @08:29PM (6 children)
You're not thinking like a sociopath the way corporations do. The only real value any company has is money, and they will decide based on that, period.
There are 3 numbers that matter:
1. F (for fine) = 10% of global revenue
2. U (for United Kingdom) = net profits from operating in the UK
3. C (for cost) = Cost of developing the tools to approximately comply with the UK's demands, plus any legal costs involved in talking to regulators to keep them off their backs
If F < U and F < C, they'll continue operating in the UK and pay the fines.
If C < F and C < U, they'll comply with the new law.
If U < F and U < C, they'll abandon the UK market.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Touché) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday August 26 2022, @09:10PM (2 children)
You seem to have completely forgotten the option where they arrange to have the law changed. Which was kind of my original point. Recently, lawmakers around the world have noticed that their citizens are unhappy with the internet giants. And so they are trying to score some political points by regulating them. Given enough attempts, they might actually come up with a way to effectively regulate the internet. The internet giants certainly don't want that. So their interests are best served by convincing the public that their legislators are too clueless to pass good legislation. They are far more likely to pass legislation that effectively outlaws the internet. It would be a PR coup for them to be able to say "The people who brought you Brexit followed up by outlawing the internet. Sadly, we had to stop operating there. Now their society has collapsed, and they are burning their kindles just to stay warm." It might scare other countries into backing off. This is not the kind of stunt they can try in the US. The market is too big to pull out of. And its not the kind of stunt they can pull in China. China would be happy to replace them with home grown alternatives. But the UK, they could be the perfect example of why you don't mess with the internet giants.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday August 26 2022, @10:51PM
This is the UK, not the US, and I think there's less overt corruption in the House of Commons than there is in the US Congress. As for the idea of threatening them, this is lame duck Boris Johnson we're talking about, and he's long past giving a tosh what the effects of his policies are on his country.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2022, @11:55PM
"convincing the public that their legislators are too clueless to pass good legislation"
This is the UK - if they are legislators, then, by definition they are too clueless to do anything.
--
The UK is a "Dimocracy" - government of the dim, for the dim, by the dim.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2022, @10:00PM
> There are 3 numbers that matter:
Come on, try harder, there must be a fourth, with symbol "K".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday August 27 2022, @04:31AM (1 child)
Skewing that is the problem that expending C does not guarantee not incurring F. When 'harm' is not defined and there exists no objective measure of what might cause it, no algorithm can be better than a guess.
In practical terms, that means that U will need to be a multiple of F and a multiple of C. Even guessing the needed multiplier is hard, which strongly tilts the decision towards withdrawal from the UK market. That's even before considering the risk that other countries might consider similar legislation if this is anything less than a disaster for the UK.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday August 27 2022, @10:39AM
It doesn't guarantee that they won't end up paying the fine, but odds are that the UK government isn't eager to get into a protracted legal battle with a well-funded multinational if they can help it, and if the multinational in question is showing all the signs of making a good-faith effort to comply with the law they're going to have a tough time winning their case. Especially if the multinational's efforts are done in a conversation with the regulators about exactly what the specifications of their system will be.
That's how I was measuring "C": The cost of genuinely attempting to comply.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Spam) by Santarchus on Friday August 26 2022, @06:13PM (9 children)
They at least are going to ban aristarchus from the whole internets, right? What would be the point if he was still allowed to just run around, posting comments that mock and deride conservatives?
(Score: 3, Funny) by unauthorized on Friday August 26 2022, @06:14PM (8 children)
Take your meds.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Santarchus on Friday August 26 2022, @06:20PM (7 children)
OH NOES! Unauthorized reply to the illegal post! There ought to be a law!
(Score: -1) by Santarchus on Friday August 26 2022, @06:30PM (6 children)
And, wow! Instant -25 karma! Such a nice place, SN.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Friday August 26 2022, @07:18PM (5 children)
Spamtarchus would be funnier
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Friday August 26 2022, @09:41PM (4 children)
He tried that....
(Score: -1, Spam) by PartingSweetSorrow on Friday August 26 2022, @10:34PM (3 children)
And it is true!! Can't have free-ranging aristarchus broccoli riding to invade Arkansas, and renaming it Aristarchusas.
(Score: -1, Troll) by PartingSweetSorrow on Saturday August 27 2022, @05:48AM (2 children)
I must say, thank you Oh High Mucky Muck Janrinok, for not quashing me right away. I would like to be a contributor to the discussions here, if there are to be any such going forward.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday August 27 2022, @06:48AM (1 child)
No, you are banned.
(Score: 0, Spam) by Beneductis on Sunday August 28 2022, @11:46AM
We are changing his name to Janrinok the Destroyer!!, with extra banning and destruction. No future discussions, I take it. So Sad, too Bad.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 26 2022, @06:40PM
The fact that you might be offended does not obligate me to change my my thoughts, my words, or my actions. If I say that gingers are ugly, anyone can be offended, but it doesn't change how I perceive gingers. Alternatively, if I say gingers are beautiful, you can be equally offended, and it makes no difference to anyone. You may hang out in the girl's room and sulk for hours, that's your right. Enjoy your shitty life.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday August 26 2022, @07:11PM (3 children)
I don't know if this bill is good or bad or what but I find the author's inability to find a legal definition of "harm" to be incredibly unconvincing.
Somehow we've managed to figure it out for the entire civil legal system here in the US. I'm sure you Brits are capable of similar.
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday August 26 2022, @07:44PM (1 child)
Harm is a well defined legal term. And it includes just about everything. https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/harm [thefreedictionary.com]
That is why in the normal course of events, you need to prove a lot more than harm when you try to sue someone: https://www.champaignpersonalinjurylawyer.com/articles/the-four-elements-of-a-tort/ [champaignpersonalinjurylawyer.com]
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday August 27 2022, @04:38AM
Your link redirects to "Injury"...
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday August 26 2022, @08:40PM
You'll usually find drivel in The Spectator.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by stretch611 on Friday August 26 2022, @07:31PM
I get harmed every day... So do billions of other internet users...
... by marketing, tracking, and anything that stores my personal data and/or preferences.
All these things are quite harmful to pretty much everyone on the internet.
Time to ban all social media and advertising companies on the entire internet.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Captival on Saturday August 27 2022, @03:09AM (1 child)
>important politicians seem to think that the Online Safety Bill will be a sort of magic wand that will make the "bad stuff" online disappear automatically (it won't).
No politician thinks this. What they actually think is that this is one more useful tool to oppress anyone the government doesn't like for whatever reason. Just like Al Capone and his taxes, the more laws there are, the more likely an average person is guilty of SOMETHING.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday August 27 2022, @02:11PM
I think your motivation is wrong. In UK politicians are motivated mostly by votes. Someone obviously thinks that this will position the Tory party well with the leftish #metoo crowd and the techy crowd don't have enough votes or this isn't a big enough issue for them to win the maths.