Sounds like Let's Encrypt would also fall under that.
This has got to stop. If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites, not the streets they walk on. I walk on them too. And don't use CP as a catch-all argument to insert backdoors.
Their big problem here is that previously, it was hard to find people with the same opinion as you. If you couldn't find someone in the same village who wanted to start a rebellion, it probably wouldn't happen. Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people. No one wants civil war. That is still not a strong enough reason to call road construction a hostile activity.
I'm back in Sweden after 12 years abroad. Time to read up on which parties are sane and which aren't when it comes to technical infrastructure.
That would be against everything european governments stand for.
I really struggle to understand why the hell this is always only applied to european governments? The idea to take 1984 as a book of requirements seems to extend *far* beyond europe.
Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
“An X user who posted two anti-immigration tweets been handed a 18-month jail sentence.”
Edit to point out 1. That is a quote and 2. The UK considers this Ok though https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjeykklwn7vo
Look I think there are problems with the UK's policy here, but this comment is either disingenuous or naive.
Because his post contributes nothing to the discussion.
> Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
What makes it the fastest?
> You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
Don't know about you but I'd rather be arrested for posting something in EU then be disappeared in any of the countries that you mentioned.
> And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
> That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
Read my comment again. The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy. It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...
This doesn't mean anything in isolation.
> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
Do we know each other?
> The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy.
No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.
> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?
It's pretty good proxy for freedom of speech, one of the features without which democracy is not possible.
>> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
> Do we know each other?
Probably not, but I can smell a state believer when I see him.
> No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.
If they are, it's a pretty low baseline. They are but a shadow of what they once were.
>> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
> I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?
The article I posted has a link [1]. There you can see the number of people arrested went up from 5502 in 2017 to 12183 in 2023. It's a pretty sharp decline in freedom of speech.
> I think it’s time for the British to gang together, hit the streets and start the slaughter.
> Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MPs’ houses and Parliament, we need to take over by FORCE.
I'm not sure what the punishment for such a clear but ineffective incitement to violence should be, but it shouldn't be nothing.
The argument is so fundamentally stupid that they should be embarrassed just putting it down in writing!
It’s the same with the multi billion ID cards and digital ID which is almost impossible for a government as incompetent as this one to implement.
The UK is rapidly declining as a close second, but calling it "European" (especially when UK citizens see themselves as non-European) is just a lazy generalization.
Could? I know of government employees who literally cannot do their job, yet somehow they've been employed for over twenty years. When I say they can't do their job, I mean they have to ask coworkers how to do something that is and always has been a job requirement, and they have to "ask for help" every time. People are actually enabling massive amounts of waste and inefficiency.
Then there are those who don't even have work to do, and will take offense if you ask them to justify their continued employment. As though they are owed a position in the organization tomorrow just because they have a position in the company today.
- intent
- imminence
- likelihood
If the UK had speech protections like the US (which I wish they would) then it would fail the imminence and probably the likelihood tests (you rightly note that it is ineffective).
it was the EU which had stopped many similar unhinged attempts from the UK when the UK was still a member
similar it had been the EU which had shut down various other surveillance nonsense of the EU
you are basically pretending the EU is a person with one uniform opinion and goals
but it's like the opposite of it, like in a lot of way
it's a union of states, each having a vastly different goals and culture and non of them having a "single uniform opinion" either but (in most cases) a more complex political field then the US (on a federal level)
Furthermore the most influential organ of the EU when it comes to making changes is literally a composition of the elected leaders of the member states. So for most big controversial decisions the driving and directing force isn't "the EU" but but the various elected leaders of the member states. For EU citizens blaming "the EU" instead of blaming your own elected leaders is common, but pretty counter productive, as it's basically pretending you have no power to change things.
Furthermore in the EU you have an additional parliament which (in general) needs to ratify laws and two high courts which can (and in context of mass surveillance repeatedly have) shut down misguided "laws", including in many cases local attempts at mass surveillance laws.
So while some parts of the EU have consistently pushed for mass surveillance in recent years other parts also have consistently moved against it.
In general while the EU needs a lot more transparency and some more democratic processes in some aspects a lot (not all) of the "stories told to make the EU look dump/bad" have a lot of important context stripped from that (like e.g. that a lot of the current push for surveillance comes from the locally elected leaders not the EU parliament or some other abstract "the EU" thing, it's your own countries leader/lead party(1) which does or at least tolerates that shit).
Don't get me started on locksmiths, oh the horror!
It's absolutely hopeless at protecting citizens from foreign threats.
95% of the arrests aren't actually arrests. The police send you a polite letter, you write a polite response, and at least 90% of the time the case is dropped.
Compare with various authoritarian dictatorships where if the police turn up at your door you're unlikely to survive.
And - unlike the US - no one is hauling random British brown people off the streets and sending them to prison camps.
The UK does have a far-right party desperate to end judicial oversight and remove legal protections from torture, etc, by ending support for the ECHR.
There's currently a huge online campaign, funded in part with foreign money and supported by most of the British press (foreign billionaire owned...), to make their far-right dictatorship seem like a political inevitability.
It isn't. But they're trying really really hard to pretend otherwise.
Putin is also really, really pissed at the EU for taking Russian money and using it for defence and reparations.
But - you know - if you start a war because you're a grandiose psychopath, that's what happens.
Check out the Pirate party's stance on integrity and internet:
they're not doing this to protect people, they're doing this to ensure there cannot be rebellion against unpopular policies. Organization is harder if all communications is monitored.
But this is how gov't get to be kept in check - the risk of "rebellion". If this risk is removed, you get authoritarian states - see north korea.
A spokesperson for Leicestershire police clarified that offences under section 127 and section 1 can include any form of communication and may also be “serious domestic abuse-related crimes”. [1]
It seems misleading to count arrests related to domestic abuse as "anti-free speech".
[1]: https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
The UK is a failing nation run by pedophile apologist imbeciles. This is just desperate flailing to hold onto power by any means.
The elected leaders like to blame the EU (or for those without an EU - any external body or even the mythical deep state) for everything adverse. The reality is these "failures" they blame on someone else are generally in alignment with their own policies goals and objectives.
This is a warning from the independent reviewer that the law is too potentially broad, not an argument to retain these powers.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69411a3eadb57..., pages 112 and 113
not some vague far away "the EU (personalized)" thing
which also mean you can locally enact pressure on them
furthermore the EU supreme court(s) might have more often hindered mass surveillance laws in member states then the council pushing for them...
and if we speak as of "now", not just the UK, but also the US and probably many other states have far more mass surveillance then the EU has "in general".
so year the whole "EU is at fault of everything" sentiment makes little sense. I guess in some cases it's an excuse for people having given up on politics. But given how often EU decisions are severely presented out of context I guess some degree of anti-EU propaganda is in there, too.
Give them a little time. They'll catch up. Comparatively to what the UK used to be it is sliding down, more and more. One should be more concerned about what is happening in their country rather than consoling themselves that there are worce places.
I wish I could say that was an unusual experience. In another jurisdiction it took two months and we finally got to the point where even providing specific coaching telling them that it wasn't working because they opened the TCP port numbers we said instead of UDP, even though UDP was heavily emphasized. The stonewalling and constant battling ended up delaying our launch to the point where the decision makers decided to just can it instead of fight with their own IT organization.
Now that said, I have worked with some truly incredible and brilliant people on the government side. There definitely are some fantastic people that work for the government. Unfortunately they seem to be in a minority.
Factually incorrect.
The European Parliament is elected. The Council is appointed, so there is no direct democratic incentive for the council to act on and no direct electorate to please.
On top of that the actually elected European Parliament can only approve (or turn down) directives authored by the Council. They have no authority to draft policies on their own.
To make matters even worse the European Council, which drafts the policies, has no public minutes to inspect. Which obviously makes it ripe for corruption. Which evidently there is a lot of!
Looking at the complete picture, the EU looks like a construct designed intentionally to superficially appear democratic while in reality being the opposite. The more you look at how it actually works, the worse it looks. Sadly.
Europe deserved something better than this.
Telegram is a terrible example. It is one of the few messengers that do not support end-to-end enrypted group chats. It is also heavily moderated. Your group will not be closed immediately but before anyone could pick up their pitchfork and certainly before it reaches a critical mass.
I think that puts the likelihood-factor at zero.
This is what governments do when they want to avoid public scrutiny. This is not the win you are looking for.
>This doesn't mean anything in isolation.
For anyone who cares about free speech, this is very scary and very troubling, regardless of any other factors at play.
How great it would be to have a select few evil masterminds, a clear enemy to roil against! That isn't reality, though. Would the super-secret council of puppet masters have allowed Trump to become president of the USA (again) and ruin the economy? You'll have an answer to that, obviously. It matters little. Reality is far more complex, shadow masters prefer stability over chaos, and the world is generally full of competing and opposing interests.
A few rich men might hold a lot of power in their hands, I give you that; but unless you limit "the world" to mean an arbitrary smaller region of earth, nobody is in charge of it all.
no please read what I wrote
_local elected leaders_
they are the leaders each member state democratically elected in their own way
and that makes a lot of sense the EU isn't a country after all so using the already democratically elected leaders makes a lot of sense
> They have no authority to draft policies on their own.
yes neither did I claim so, the EU is by far not perfect
> Which evidently there is a lot of!
yes, but that is mainly a reflection of corruption in local Politics
Yup. There is a huge amount of resentment about handouts for pensioners, a lot of disagreement with any kind of new 'islamophobia law', anger about actual and perceived reneging on pre-election promises, still a lot of anti asylum-seeker sentiment, anger about grooming/rape gangs etc.
And Labour are worried about Reform making big gains again in local elections next year.
Bahaha, as if that's any better.
Guess cops showing up to your door for being mean to someone online is just an inevitability when there is no "second amendment" equivalent in said country.
Sad state of affairs, if they weren't british I'd almost feel bad.
Which means that the truly good people are basically quirky people with strong work ethic/believe in the mission that happened to join the organization for some reason.
That's some pretty classic conspiracy theory stuff. No evidence of anything nefarious, just heavily implied.
The "fun" part of this is that the person writing the message on these apps might not even be a local person involved, but some person far away in another country just trying to stir up some shit.
That's terrorist speech tho. My problem is that everyone can reasonably get on board with banning speech that indicates violent action, and that the reliance on "muh free speech!!!" has been a net negative for actually defending the right of people to have privacy, because people rely on that sans any other (better) arguments.
So, uh, yes. It's definitely something that the federal authorities take a dim view on.
The second problem is that American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue, so to an onlooker who is not in the USA, when people talk about "free speech", it comes across as someone defending someone's right to say incredibly harmful, violent things about Jewish people, Transgender people, and so on. I think for most people outside of the USA (and, to be honest, most minority populations within the USA) you should consider "free speech" as being an incredibly tainted phrase for that purpose.
The flipside of all of this is that fascism is very, very possible even with freedom of speech (actually it seems to rely on it, given how virulent the spread of outright Nazi rhetoric has been in the USA so far). Freedom of speech is not the sole thing that holds up a democracy and it weakens your arguments for you to rely upon it like this.
Don't play into their propaganda. Governments don't like it because they're protecting themselves and their power; making it harder for people to find each other and organize and rally is one of many ways governments do that. (There's a reason authoritarian governments regularly shut down cell networks.)
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
I'm not trying to win anything, and I do support privacy. I just think any argument, especially those citing specific numbers, should be based on an accurate description of reality.
> Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.
Perhaps your point would be clearer if you indicated what specific conditions you believe are missing. Maybe the tweeter had no followers? Idk, I can only vaguely guess at what you're referring to.
This is untrue, as I've previously pointed out here [0] and here [1].
[0] >>41488099
[1] >>45412989
That's what they say, but that's a smokescreen. They do it because they believe it helps them consolidate and keep power.
The famous US Supreme Court case[0] that explicitly confirmed that "Nazi speech is free speech" was brought to the court by the ACLU[1], a left-leaning organization that defends things like LGBTQ rights. Your take is completely divorced from factual reality.
American conservatives aren't "framing" it. They are restating what the US Supreme Court has already determined in a case brought to the court by the liberal left. This is a principled defense of free speech that has historically been supported by people across the political spectrum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
It sure is not. I'm not going to list all the examples I know as embarrassing some departments does not end well but I have to share this one. I tried to email someone at the California DMV a couple decades ago. My email bounced and I got a strange routing error. I assumed the problem was on my end. The first thing I did was dig their MX records and what did I get? 2 MX records with RFC1918 address space (10.0/8). I managed to get through to a real person on the phone and that went nowhere. They eventually fixed it some months later but they probably enjoyed the email silence.
Another one involved a 3 letter agency that should know better and could not figure out how to install an intermediate certificate on their website. They expected me to instead install their certificate on all of our servers and got mad & huffy puffy when I refused. I am not naming them but after a couple years they figured it out.
I don't think their real intention is to stop criminals, it's just the smoke screen similar to ChatControl and other similar legislations prohibiting privacy elsewhere.
This is to protect minors of course. Did you think about the children ?
Telegram, whether it's true or not, claims they are not a large platform (so if this is a lie, it may really pay off).
https://sumsub.com/blog/age-verification-on-social-media/
"WhatsApp is now a Very Large platform in the EU, and will face tougher regulation"
https://www.theverge.com/news/614445/whatsapp-channels-very-...
The solution for government is simple: stop being scumbags whose only purpose is making people's lives more and more miserable by optimizing for total control and corporate profits.
What right-wing institutions have noticed all around the world is that you can just kind of ignore all that shit now. Centrists are flailing around begging for an explanation for "how this could happen" and folks on the left, marginalized for years in favor of free markets, are just kind of facepalming and saying we told you so.
You need to put it in writing somewhere that there's a limit on governmental authority and enforce the hell out of it. You need to do the same to clamp down on the power of special interests and corporations. More than anything, you need robust mechanisms that make government representatives vulnerable to the voting public. The people need to be the ones that they scramble to please and when we get mad that should be dangerous and difficult for those holding the reins of government. Their existence needs to depend on the mandate of the public.
Yes. Previously this capability was reserved for the CIA.
I do not think you understand the optics of how this looks outside of your USA-centric echo-chamber audience.
I think what’s happening isn’t some evil plot to quell opposing voices, but more likely the UK government thinking they’re actually passing laws to reduce rioting and online abuse. And the censorship effects are a side effect of these laws.
Some might consider this opinion naive but take this counterpoint: laws require a majority to pass. So if these censorship laws were written to squash opposing voices, then we’d be dealing with a literal conspiracy involving hundreds of people. I don’t believe all politicians are only in it for themselves (though I do believe many are), so you’d expect at least 1 MP to speak out if such a conspiracy existed.
Governments of both flavours are ignoring the voting public, for various reasons, e.g. they are signatory to agreements that no longer work for the public but are difficult to break, the public is increasingly economically irrelevant compared to businesses, and, of course, the greedy self-interest of the politicians themselves.
I agree with you on the third paragraph, but it's also the reason that I believe the US will be okay compared to other Western democracies (an opinion I'm not sure you would share, judging by your post). The Constitution is already a thing, and is on its own a declaration that certain rights derive from a higher authority than government. The second amendment in particular is under siege (again, by the left), but does equalize things in a way that many of its opponents are reluctant to admit.
People lie and they use doublespeak.
The idea that "they're coming for your guns" is something we can begin to discuss when the first step to curb our mass shooting problem is actually taken. For now, it's a little ridiculous to infer that there's any kind of 'siege' on the second amendment given that we have them all the damn time and they're not slowing down.
I would ask folks in the EU whether they think they're leaning left at the moment. Reading their news it doesn't seem to be the case [0 1 2 3].
Just out of curiosity - in what concrete way do you think the second amendment serves as an equalizer? Do you imagine that the government sees an armed populace as any kind of a threat?
Leaving the left-right debate behind for just a second - I smell that there is something perhaps we may agree on. Representation is fundamentally broken. Even given our ideological differences, how do you feel about direct democracy? I think we'd benefit.
0 - https://www.ibanet.org/The-year-of-elections-The-rise-of-Eur...
1 - https://ecfr.eu/publication/rise-to-the-challengers-europes-...
2 - https://fortune.com/europe/2025/02/25/europe-far-right-movem...
3 - https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/12/24/european-polit...
What happens is that you get arrangements like the EU demanding migration quotas that the populations of various individual countries despise, or an automobile market that gets progressively more expensive as environmental legislation puts ever more pressure on manufacturers. And of course, if you're saving the world, who needs cars anyway? We should all be living Hong Kong style to save the environment, so we need more urban density.
In short, there are three core institutions, the "technocratic" European Commission, the European Parliament elected by direct popular vote, and the Council ("of the EU"/"of ministers") made up of the relevant (in terms of subject matter) ministers of the standing national govs. The law-making procedures depend on policy areas etc. but usually in the policy areas where EU is fully competent, the Commission — the democratically least accountable of the three bodies — by default makes the initiatives and negotiates/mediates them further along with the Parliament and Council, but only the last two together really have the power to finally approve actual legislation, usually either Regulations (directly applicable in member states as such — so an increasingly preferred instrument of near-full harmonisation), or Directives (requiring separate national transposition / implementation and usually leaving more room for national-level discretion otherwise as well).
While not fully comparable to nation-state parliaments, the powers of the EU Parliament have been strengthened vis-à-vis both the Commission and the Council, and it's certainly long been a misrepresentation to say that they, e.g., only have the power to "approve or turn down" proposals of the Commission and/or the Council.
Is that a bad thing? I've got friends in the UK crying out for something like ICE so keen to understand why it's viewed as rapid decline.
And what do you do when the criminals can successfully prevent focus? Whether by encryption or by locked doors keeping cops out or by letting it be known that grasses get concrete shoes?
You and I and everyone on this site knows why encryption is important. We all know that the internet fundamentally can't work without it; not only but also online banking and online shopping. We here know it keeps all of society safe from hackers and blackmailers. It's common knowledge amongst us that it keeps critical infrastructure secure.
I think there's a genuine disconnect in the halls of government from all that: They're used to a world with humans that are flawed and who make mistakes, but those mistakes are at a personal scale. To err is human, to really foul up, as the saying goes, requires a computer, and I don't think popular culture has internalised what that means, despite the existence of all the websites with near-instant content lookup — look at how hacking is seen in pop culture, how it's akin to lock picking rather than programming: the perception is of one person's skill against a puzzle box, the reality is automation where once the puzzle is solved, the lock picked, every safe in the world opens in the blink of an eye.
Laws and press opinions about the need for government backdoors treat it like allowing police to break into houses: "got a warrant, then it's fine"; they don't realise it's more like "fake uniforms, ID badges, and warrants are available on most streets".
That doesn't make the problem category this is supposed to solve go away. There's a few reasons why I'd like to maximally liberalise the laws, one of them is so that criminal prosecution can be more tightly focussed on what matters. Other reasons include "people should be aware of all the laws that affect them, and it's not OK when the system is so complicated you have to be a lawyer to even get that far".
To what extent does the US have the right to maintain its borders? The idea that anyone should be able to enter the country illegally and be given the right to due process presupposes that the state has the resources to deal with the volume of people who decide to do that. And in most of the world, it would be uncontroversial to suggest that people entering a country illegally have -- effectively, if not necessarily legally -- zero recourse should the state decide to remove them.
>The idea that "they're coming for your guns" is something we can begin to discuss when the first step to curb our mass shooting problem is actually taken. For now, it's a little ridiculous to infer that there's any kind of 'siege' on the second amendment given that we have them all the damn time and they're not slowing down.
There is a sustained anti-gun lobby, and California has taken significant steps to restrict gun ownership. The US is too far gone for any one government to be able to swoop in and completely remove all guns, so the goal is long-term. Sway people's opinions, change the culture, and implement controls that skirt the edge of violating the second amendment, or set a precedent for limits on the second amendment. I don't live in the US, but even what I see as an outsider looking in makes it clear that this is happening.
Governments as an organization are perfectly capable of putting down an armed population, but individual members of a government certainly do see an armed population as a threat. I know for a fact that senior members of the (large, US) company that I work for take security very seriously. And though I don't support or condone shooting government officials and CEOs in any way, shape or form, I do believe that all peaceful negotiations, whether they be between employees and employer, or citizens and government, are purchased through a credible threat of violence. Otherwise, there are no negotiations, just suggestions. We're the lucky ones who got to live through a time when those fights have already been had, but there's nothing to say they won't need to happen again.
>I would ask folks in the EU whether they think they're leaning left at the moment. Reading their news it doesn't seem to be the case [0 1 2 3].
Incumbent governments in western Europe are mostly left wing, especially by US standards. The population is pushing right as a response to those governments refusing to address valid concerns of the voting public. This is why right wing "populist" parties are on the rise, but they aren't in power yet. The push for surveillance has been bipartisan at best, and more realistically driven by the political left under the guise of limiting hate speech.
>Leaving the left-right debate behind for just a second - I smell that there is something perhaps we may agree on. Representation is fundamentally broken. Even given our ideological differences, how do you feel about direct democracy? I think we'd benefit.
I agree that representation is fundamentally broken across much of the west, but I believe that the cause is ultimately a crisis of sovereignty.
As an example: it's no secret that there's a major backlash against migration in many western countries, but with the volume of people coming across, what do you do? You can't shoot them, and if you spend resources shipping them home, a non-trivial (and generally privileged and insulated) chunk of your population wants to save the world and will protest. And the business lobby is all over it because they like the idea of lower wages, so you've also got an army of neoliberal economists and lawyers telling you why you should just let all these people stay. Then you've got all the NGOs that your country is signatory to that want you to invest resources in helping illegal migrants, and in the case of Europe, the EU might try to directly tell your government it needs to do its fair share of taking those people anyway. And even if an individual member of government privately thinks there's an issue with an unpoliced border, the party number-crunchers are telling them that these people vote for the party, so letting them stay and giving them a path to voting actually helps the bottom line. And of course, you've also got a few investment properties...
The end result of all of this is that governments change, but the course stays the same, because in the absence of a government that is willing to risk never being in power again no one is willing to do anything. At worst, you get voted out, the next group does the same thing until people are angry again, and then you get voted back in.
Which of course brings us to Trump. A lot of what Trump is doing, at least to me, is reasserting US sovereignty. He's forcing US companies to heel through the H1B visa change and tarriffs, rattling treaties to get allies to absorb some of the expenditure of maintaining security, and enforcing the nation's border. These aren't historically radical concepts. If the US is going to be a country where the government has an opinion and can advocate for itself as an entity, this probably needs to happen, because no one wants to fight for a shared economic zone. And eventually, if a government can't enforce its borders and exercise its monopoly on violence, another entity will fill that void.
I guess this is a long way of saying that I have no issue with direct democracy, but I don't know that it's the answer, because I don't think it addresses the real problem. Maybe it circumvents some of these issues, but how does a direct democracy raise and maintain an army? Or pass a budget?
In your linked post [1] you suggest that this figure is completely wrong. To demonstrate this, you linked to a FOI request for the Metropolitan Police which shows that the actual figures for 2023 are 124 for Section 127 of the Communications Act and 1,585 for Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act. This is, ironically, completely wrong. These figures are only applicable for the Metropolitan Police in the Greater London area, if you want figures for the UK you need to file FOI requests for all 45 territorial police forces in the UK. This is what The Times did, and 37 of them responded.
The Standard(1) attempts to address the claim of whether the UK arrests more people for social media posts by looking at figures from other countries, fails to point out a country with more arrests for social media posts, and concludes that open and liberal societies will have more arrests for social media posts because we are more free to do so. Go figure.
You also suggest that racial harassment, domestic abuse, stalking, and grooming are covered under the law, which is somewhat true, The Times quoted a spokesperson from Leicestershire police which stated that the laws cover any communications and may deal with cases of domestic abuse, and this is often the only example given to explain the figures. However it should be noted that the Communications Act(2) only covers electronic communications that are 'grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character' (or posts a message known to be false for the purposes of causing 'annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety', prior to 2024), and the Malicious Communications Act(3) while covering letters, EC, articles, etc, only applies if the communication is 'indecent or grossly offensive' (or a threat, prior to 2024).
For some of those issues it can be easy to point to communications that are 'grossly offensive' or threatening/menacing, however there are other more applicable laws to choose from such as the Public Order Act, the Crime and Disorder Act, and the Domestic Abuse Act which largely covers hate crimes and domestic abuse. An order of magnitude more people are arrested for hate crimes under these and similar laws than they are for malicious communications. The Protection from Harassment Act which covers harassment and stalking, the Serious Crime Act covers controlling and coercive behaviour, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act for revenge porn, and the Sexual Offences Act which covers an incredible amount of offences (it's a large act), including everything related to grooming.
The CPS largely discourage using communications offences (unsourced, but (4) is a good starting point), possibly because of the mens rea requirements for 'grossly offensive' or causing distress or anxiety, possibly because the sentencing limit for either communications act limited at 6 months or 12 months for malicious communications (also 6 months for offences prior to 2022), possibly because it has to weigh whether the sentencing is within the public interest with regards to the chilling effect it can have on speech, especially when concerns about Article 10 of the ECHR are brought up, but it has recommended using these acts as a fallback. Prior to 2015 revenge porn wasn't a specific offence but could still be considered under the communications acts for instance.
All of this to say, if the communications acts are being used as a fallback for the issues you mention, it can't be seen as anything other than a failure that the more specific legislation fails to address issues of or prosecuting issues of 'grossly offensive' or 'threatening' communications appropriately, which seems unlikely, but if it is the case, why then is the sentencing rate so pitiful? 10%? For 'racial harassment' and domestic abuse? In a country that records around 130k hate crimes and 230k cases of domestic abuse (of which 35% are related to malicious communications, do the maths) yearly? When the bar is as low as racial slurs or 'threats'?
For a number of high profile cases you could perhaps make the case that the arrest was justified, but these cases are high profile for a reason, they're testing the limits of what can be considered 'grossly offensive' that aren't covered by other more applicable laws. But even then, there are high profile cases simply because the police had absolutely no business arresting anybody(5). For it to be the case that these laws, specific to 'grossly offensive' and 'threatening' behaviour, are being used to address these issues it needs to be demonstrated, and I don't think that has been the case, and the issue of wasted police time needs to be addressed when 90% of arrests didn't need to be made. The last point is especially relevant at a time where petty crime has all but decriminalised over the past decade and when police chiefs are suggesting citizens are the ones that need to do something about shop lifters(6).
In the greater context of the conversation, it should be obvious that police are arresting people for social media posts, regardless of whether you agree with the intent or not, and it should be obvious that the police are interested in policing social media given the absurd number of Non-Crime Hate Incidents being recorded, also around 13,000(7) a year, and I can't see things getting better with the introduction of the OSA. Blaming these issues on a 'right-wing narrative' seems naive at best and missing the forest for the trees at worst. Labour having absolutely abysmal polling issues should suggest that this isn't a partisan issue in the slightest.
(0) https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
(1) https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...
(2) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127
(3) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/27/section/1
(4) https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/communications-o...
(5) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o
(6) https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/its-up-to-the-public-to-stand-...
(7) https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2024-11-19/debates/0DE7E...
"Can"? Sure. "Does"? Now that's debatable. Still waiting for the latest scandal to wrap up. Any day now. Surely it was the last. Surely the limp response hasn't led to more. _Surely_ arresting people for talking about it on social media hasn't led to more of it going on.
I feel like this needs updating, sometimes it is greed, other times it also very much is malice, sometimes making those appear as incompetence or just "complex circumstances" is beneficial.
Like how you have a culture war in the US while the rich rob you blind. How you have the "us vs them" politics while checks and balances are dismantled (including accurate reporting on science), alongside social support programs. How around 2020 companies rose prices across the board while claiming supply chain issues, just for those prices to never really come down. Same with the global DRAM manufacturing and the effects across the board on RAM, GPUs and storage - the companies just don't give a shit about consumers, they are choosing this. Also how the housing market is completely unreasonable. Same with US trying to break up EU and increasingly siding with Russia.
Sometimes there's just malice or greed, even when it's not just a small group of shady people in a dark room, but rather entire social groups whose interests and ideologies just happen to align. A lot of people aren't even trying to serve the greater society in the slightest, the prevailing attitude increasingly seems to be "fuck you, I got mine". It doesn't seem entirely new, though, since the whole millennial generation largely got saddled with that economy by those who came before, what's going on is just a bit more open now. Also using US as a good example here, but obviously similar issues are on the rise in Europe as well and elsewhere.
I'm not convinced by the rest of your argument. For example:
> there are other more applicable laws to choose from such as the Public Order Act, the Crime and Disorder Act, and the Domestic Abuse Act which largely covers hate crimes and domestic abuse
Isn't it possible that people get arrested on multiple charges - both for malicious communications and for harrassment, say?
> In the greater context of the conversation, it should be obvious that police are arresting people for social media posts
Yes, but what's not obvious (or even likely) is that 12000 people are being arrested for "online comments" [0], or that the UK leads the world in such arrests. Sentences have been handed out for various other activities, such as sending photographs or abusive private emails. That's the bit that makes it a right-wing narrative: taking a statistic and giving it a misleading interpretation that happens to support your cause. Has Tommy Robinson said anything in defense/support of Joey Barton? I'm guessing not, because the victims were neither Muslim nor immigrants.
[0] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...
You would also have to contend with the problem where you've decided that it is incitement, as if conviction is a formality, even though:
- investigation
- charging
- court process
all come before conviction, which is convenient but not particularly bright or persuasive when they're mentioned in the comment you replied to.
Lobbying is only tiny if you look at the individual amounts. Most lobbyists only put forth $5-10,000 at a time because they're not doing it at a national level. But it's the fact that so many do it in so many different places that makes it a threat. Somebody running to be on the city board can have their entire campaign financed by a single donor. A mayor can have their entire income for the year matched by two lobbyists laying the groundwork for a national campaign. One Senator or House member having seven to eight lobby sponsors can almost match their guaranteed salary for that year. There are entire divisions of the finance departments of companies that are dedicated to budgeting for lobbying over the fiscal year. It's a massive force, composed of nearly $4,000,000,000 in "contributions" in 2024 alone.
No. It presupposes that every human being deserves to be treated with dignity no matter the circumstances. But I don't expect you to agree with me. Your interpretation of contemporary life in the USA is clearly distorted, but again, I don't expect you to agree. You're being lied to, fwiw.
> what do you do? You can't shoot them
There's no reason for me to engage with you further if this is how you think.
I remember when I found out that a highly intelligent friend believed the earth was six-thousand years old. But at least he had the excuse that his idiotic religion was pushed on him since birth. Intelligent people on this site are sometime incapable of basic media literacy and I find it wholly depressing.
Keep voting against your interests while others of us fight you tooth and nail to try to make the world better for everyone (rather than just our own teams), even including you.
Which is why people like me have to fight people like you tooth and nail. Despite having a very privileged life, probably similar to yours, I still want the best for everyone, not just my team. I pointed this out in my prior comment. You've now confirmed that you're too selfish to vote against your interests for the betterment of humanity. And you apparently have no sense of shame about it. Have a great holiday.
Have a good holiday as well!
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/ice-apprehension-o...
> I have zero shame for voting in favor of the interests of myself and the people that matter to me.
...and you shouldn't. It's better than fine to do so and you ought to work towards things that benefit you. This is something a lot of people seem to misunderstand when I talk about anything political, and it's likely a failing in how I communicate. I don't think that people should sacrifice themselves for the common good just because "it's the right thing to do". It isn't and that's never what I'm driving at.
When I (and perhaps others who share part of my worldview) talk about governance and lobbying and similar stuff, it's not out of a sense of pure morals or ethics - these are issues of ecosystems. Some shapes of systems are healthy and robust and others are self-destructive. Mesh networks are strong, centralized (and unreplicated) control systems are fragile - as an SWE you know this to be true.
What I'm arguing here is that it's in your interest to exist in an environment that:
- prevents an accumulation of power or control too tightly, to avoid single points of failure in decision and governance
- avoids recursive loops which have a habit of wastefully consuming resources and starving critical systems
- maintains flexible responsiveness to environmental conditions due to being reactive to the state of all constituent stakeholders / subsystems / individuals
The issue with the top 1% of the top 1% having too much power is that it breaks all those safeties, and is actually bad for those people too. What will happen in this kind of a situation is that the excessively empowered will desiccate the environment for everyone - including themselves.
You already see it playing out in the form of crumbling infrastructure, ballooning homelessness, economic shocks, and the empowerment of bad actors who take advantage of the disenfranchised masses. This is bad for you, too.