Online Safety Bill Etc

[jem]

Originally Posted by RichardCoulter

Children of today have a different mindset to adults and us when we were Children. To them it would be unthinkable not to be part of social media.

Also, it's better to deal with the bullies than let them carry on humiliating/denigrating their victims behind their back. You can bet your life that the other kids will let the victim know what's been said the day after at school.

Parents of children that have taken their own lives met with the PM today to urge him to stand up to platform owners, key takeaways from the meeting include:

Timeline for Action: Starmer told parents and campaigners that "game-changing" efforts to tackle online harm would be announced in "weeks, not months" rather than years.

The Parents' Demands: Families carried photos of their children and urged the government to show the "political courage" to ban social media for children under 16 until platforms can definitively prove they are safe.

Parental Access to Data: Several parents highlighted the tragic fact that they still cannot access their late children's online data to find out what content influenced their deaths, pushing the PM for legislative change on this front.

I can’t really argue against your goals and wishes; but again the devil is in the detail.

“......and urged the government to show the "political courage" to ban social media for children under 16 until platforms can definitively prove they are safe.”

OK easy enough, just as banning the carrying of knives has stopped all stabbings, hasn't it - it’s trivial to ban, but how do you enforce it? And however can you possibly absolutely define that they are safe - define ‘safe’, in such a way that will stand up in Court. Your definition of what is safe content might be radically different to mine.

Parental Access to Data - that may be a red line that the social media companies wont cross. Remember they are mostly American, and if they simply refuse to obey any UK law, and go to the White House, offer a few million towards paying for the ‘People’s Ballroom’.....?

"Several parents highlighted the tragic fact that they still cannot access their late children's online data to find out what content influenced their deaths...”

OK, think of it from the social media company’s perspective, they may not well know who that individual actually was, they may have signed up with false names and details etc. So they get a demand to hand over that person's information to someone who ‘claims’ to be the parents, but they have no way to be absolutely sure. They make one mistake, being under US jurisdiction, the legal ramifications don’t bear thinking about. You can see why their knee-jerk reaction will be ‘absolutely not’. Jog on!

None of the above means that I am not understanding of the issue, or that something does need to be done. But not a case of ’something needs to be done, this is something, therefore it must be done’.

Technical measures are simply not going to work; it’s education, it’s parental responsibility, and yes I know that’s not a given but you really shouldn’t punish or cause inconvenience for everyone because of the actions of a minority - I believe it is called ‘collective punishment’, somewhat frowned on!

[Carth]

Much of what jem has written above should be copy/pasted into an email and sent to every MP and every person in any Gov. Dept. involved in 'child safety'

Most won't bother reading it, those that do will simply think . . we know what we're doing and carry on

[RichardCoulter]

Originally Posted by jem

I can’t really argue against your goals and wishes; but again the devil is in the detail.

“......and urged the government to show the "political courage" to ban social media for children under 16 until platforms can definitively prove they are safe.”

OK easy enough, just as banning the carrying of knives has stopped all stabbings, hasn't it - it’s trivial to ban, but how do you enforce it? And however can you possibly absolutely define that they are safe - define ‘safe’, in such a way that will stand up in Court. Your definition of what is safe content might be radically different to mine.

Parental Access to Data - that may be a red line that the social media companies wont cross. Remember they are mostly American, and if they simply refuse to obey any UK law, and go to the White House, offer a few million towards paying for the ‘People’s Ballroom’.....?

"Several parents highlighted the tragic fact that they still cannot access their late children's online data to find out what content influenced their deaths...”

OK, think of it from the social media company’s perspective, they may not well know who that individual actually was, they may have signed up with false names and details etc. So they get a demand to hand over that person's information to someone who ‘claims’ to be the parents, but they have no way to be absolutely sure. They make one mistake, being under US jurisdiction, the legal ramifications don’t bear thinking about. You can see why their knee-jerk reaction will be ‘absolutely not’. Jog on!

None of the above means that I am not understanding of the issue, or that something does need to be done. But not a case of ’something needs to be done, this is something, therefore it must be done’.

Technical measures are simply not going to work; it’s education, it’s parental responsibility, and yes I know that’s not a given but you really shouldn’t punish or cause inconvenience for everyone because of the actions of a minority - I believe it is called ‘collective punishment’, somewhat frowned on!

A well thought out post with some good points made.

Just to add that supporters of legislation would say that banning under 16's is less about punishment and more about protecting children from the harms that these sites can cause.

Even if they are not targeted by sexual predators, scammers, blackmailers etc, they are designed to be addictive. A survey of today's 16 to 24 year olds on yesterdays Womans Hour said that they wished for things to be different for the next generation of young people.

[RichardCoulter]

On last night's 'Peston' young people were asked what would make them feel safer online. The top answer was to ban those who say inappropriate things & the bottom one was to ban all u16's from social media.

[Sirius]

Originally Posted by RichardCoulter

On last night's 'Peston' young people were asked what would make them feel safer online. The top answer was to ban those who say inappropriate things & the bottom one was to ban all u16's from social media.

In the abattoir the sheep where asked what would make them feel safer, the top answer was a good sheep dog, the bottom answer was being turned in to lamb chops.

If you ask the people a question that is loaded that includes affecting them and removing something they will always say that is the least they want.

Originally Posted by RichardCoulter

The top answer was to ban those who say inappropriate things

"say inappropriate things" ? Well thats really vague.

[Carth]

The whole thing is a big box of vagueness

[jem]

Originally Posted by Paul

"say inappropriate things" ? Well thats really vague.

Indeed, although many laws are deliberately vague as it is impossible to absolutely clarify what is allowed and what isn’t. An example would be ‘possession of an offensive weapon’, well we are all guilty of that, I assume we all have kitchen knives. The object is not offensive in itself, it’s how we act with it - if I have a wheel brace in the boot of my car, that’s fine, take it out and run around town waving it menacingly - that’s another matter.

You can’t absolutely define ‘inappropriate things’, what you could do, in theory, is have every single social media post moderated and checked by a human, who makes a judgement call or whether or not this is ‘appropriate’ before it is available to view, not retrospectively.

In practice though the sheer scale makes this impossible, care to guess how many social media posts are made each day? It’s in the billions! You could employ the entire population of the planet, moderating them and you still wouldn’t be able to keep up.*

In an earlier post I did mention ‘collective punishment’ which I think was misinterpreted as assuming I was talking about punishing all under-16s. My bad, I wasn’t clear enough.

What I meant to say is OK ban social media for under 16s, how do you do that?
Well, you obviously have to age check, and that often requires handing over information to a third party to verify your age.

Now I have no social media presence, don’t really require or want one, but if I did, would I be happy handing over details to some random company to prove that I’m not 14? Absolutely not, so I might well go to considerable lengths to bypass said age restrictions. If I, as an adult can easily do this, and I promise you, it’s not difficult, knowledge of how to do it will go round schools and under 16s like wildfire.

And that’s what I meant, everybody is punished, everybody has to risk their data with some organisation which, I suspect, put in the lowest tender bid for the job, and might well have all the security resilience of a damp piece of tissue paper! Or actively break the law and work around it!

At best, it achieves very little of worth, and worse, you have set up a wonderful trove of personal information, just waiting to be hacked.

* and yes I am aware that if the entire population of Earth is employed in moderating messages then they won’t be sending messages, so it’s a sort of negative feedback loop. Look it’s just hyperbolae, yes?

[nffc]

Originally Posted by jem

Indeed, although many laws are deliberately vague as it is impossible to absolutely clarify what is allowed and what isn’t. An example would be ‘possession of an offensive weapon’, well we are all guilty of that, I assume we all have kitchen knives. The object is not offensive in itself, it’s how we act with it - if I have a wheel brace in the boot of my car, that’s fine, take it out and run around town waving it menacingly - that’s another matter.

You can’t absolutely define ‘inappropriate things’, what you could do, in theory, is have every single social media post moderated and checked by a human, who makes a judgement call or whether or not this is ‘appropriate’ before it is available to view, not retrospectively.

Case law helps a lot with this - for example the usual test for dishonesty comes from Ivey v Genting Casinos and is in two stages, basically that the person thought their conduct was dishonest, and that a reasonable person would think it is dishonest too - the concept of "what would an honest/ordinary/reasonable person do/think/etc" already exists across several other examples of case law.


I'd imagine that in principle they could introduce some sort of statutory measure saying "posts outside the conduct of reasonable person" or something to that effect and then let courts decide through case law how that is going to be interpreted, but then they would probably not want to put too much through courts because of the time involved in these proceedings.


Some forums/social media sites already do pre-mod posts but in busier sites it's just not practical to do that for everyone

[RichardCoulter]

When I suggested pre moderated posts, from what I remember, Chris (moderator on here) said that the problem with this is that the site is then effectively endorsing what has been written & this could cause legal problems for them.

[jem]

Originally Posted by RichardCoulter

When I suggested pre moderated posts, from what I remember, Chris (moderator on here) said that the problem with this is that the site is then effectively endorsing what has been written & this could cause legal problems for them.

I don’t believe that this would cause any legal problem; I came across the following link, with the usual caveat of not blindly trusting anything you find on the internet, it does appear to set out the legal responsibilities.

https://internetlawcentre.co.uk/lega...tors-in-the-uk

Basically, operators of a website which allows for user-generated content are not liable for it, as long as once notified that said content is potentially illegal or defamatory, that they take action within a reasonable time - and that doesn’t necessarily mean that the post is deleted.

But pre-moderated posts is a logistical issue rather than anything else. When I logged in, I was told there were 23 unread post since my last login, about 20 hours ago. So let’s estimate 30 new posts a day (and I’m sure that one of the mods or admins may well, pitch in and claim that the actual average number is far higher). But someone has to be on standby to read 30+ posts a day 24/7 and make a judgement call as to whether or not they are appropriate, and allow or deny them - it’s almost a full-time job!

But, ultimately, this is a private forum, the admins and mods are free to run it however they see fit - hypothetically if they only want to allow left-wing leaning or right-wing leaning views and delete all others - that’s their prerogative. I think (and just to disclose I and not a lawyer), I suspect they would be fine. Of course, in reality, the said forum just becomes an echo-chamber and no longer functions as a way of exchanging ideas - cough ‘Truth Social’, cough. Or try criticising Elon on X and see how long your posts and account lasts!

In theory, all posts being pre-moderated before being made visible on here is probably viable. But X, Facebook, Instagram, etc. which are many, many, many orders of magnitude larger, no it’s just not viable?