• Senal@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 day ago

    It being a real and powerful motivational force means it’s one of the more useful covers.

    Just because it motivates the voters/customers doesn’t mean it’s the genuine reason behind a decision.

    I cannot think of a single recent “think of the children” based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.

    Can you?

    • FishFace@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      23 hours ago

      I cannot think of a single recent “think of the children” based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.

      Are you judging the motivation purely based on the effects? Otherwise, how are you working out what goes on inside people’s heads?

      I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better. It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.

      • Senal@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        19 hours ago

        Are you judging the motivation purely based on the effects? Otherwise, how are you working out what goes on inside people’s heads?

        A combination of the effects, the prior actions, reactions and consequences of the subject and others in similar categories/contexts (to the extent i actually know/pay attention).

        I don’t know of another way of performing predictive analysis.

        Also that didn’t answer the question.

        I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better. It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.

        I’m genuinely not sure what you are saying here, but i’ll go line by line, tell me if I’m reading it incorrectly.

        I think given that we all agree that there are voters who think this will protect children makes it crazy to think that politicians must somehow know better.

        I don’t know what this means, there are voters who genuinely believe this, yes, i think i follow that bit.

        I’m not sure what you think is crazy here (i’m not disagreeing, i just don’t understand) , do you mean to say the politicians do or don’t know better ?

        It is well-accepted online that politicians are out-of-touch when it comes to technology, so it’s not like they understand the subject of this article.

        This i agree with, i can also anecdotally add first hand experience of the consequences of such lack of understanding.

        Not sure how it ties in to the other sentence though.

        • FishFace@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          7 hours ago

          I’ll try to rephrase:

          It makes more sense that politicians are simply like ordinary voters and are wrong and misguided when it comes to the internet (in this regard and others), and genuinely believe that the Online Safety Act is helpful for its stated purpose, than that they are using it as some nefarious way of helping out Google. The simple reason is that politicians are people too and just as susceptible to being wrong as voters are; we don’t actually need to hunt for any greater reason than that.

          Besides that, we constantly talk about how politicians catastrophically fail to understand technology (I believe the Online Safety Act makes mention of hypothetical encryption-backdooring technology that is simply impossible). For politicians to have a different true motive - i.e. their stated motive is false - we are essentially saying that they couldn’t possibly have made got this wrong, there must be some corrupt reason for it - but we don’t actually believe they couldn’t have got it wrong because we’re constantly complaining about how they very obviously do get it wrong.

          I also mentioned (but you didn’t mention being confused by it) that the UK government isn’t really friendly to American big-tech firms, who are universally opposed to the Act as a whole because of its threat to end-to-end encryption.

          • Senal@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            2 hours ago

            Politicians are people too, sure.

            Doing a bad job of implementing a self serving plan doesn’t excuse the self serving plan.

            That’s some ‘boys will be boys’ nonsense.

            Take brexit and Alexander as example, his intent was to do something shitty for self gain, he’s not an idiot no matter how it seems.

            There’s no chance he believed that ridiculous tagline about the NHS funding and Europe, even if he did, someone at some point would have pointed it out to him.

            He did it anyway, that’s intent.

            Regardless of the outcome, he did something he knew was shitty, for whatever reason he had.

            These people might be idiots, but their intent is usually to do something shady, that they are incompetent and do a shitty job of it isn’t the point.

            Wrt to the America thing, I agree, I’m not saying the government is working with tech companies, im saying their intent usually isn’t ‘save the children’, at that point we absolutely should be hunting for the reasons, because if it isn’t the reason they have stated, what are they hiding?

            • FishFace@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              39 minutes ago

              Doing a bad job of implementing a self serving plan doesn’t excuse the self serving plan.

              But you haven’t provided any reason to believe it’s self-serving (other than it is actually quite popular, so it will probably help to get them re-elected)

              There’s no chance he believed that ridiculous tagline about the NHS funding and Europe, even if he did, someone at some point would have pointed it out to him.

              He did it anyway, that’s intent.

              I agree. In that case, the tagline was objectively false and it was printed anyway, so we can conclude pretty safely that the people in charge of making it were lying. That’s not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success. It is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success. Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact - not only can we not see the future, there is also no objective way to balance the benefit of decreasing harm to children by preventing access to harmful content with the cost of preventing their access to useful information and the cost of increased friction and privacy breaches to everyone else. If there’s a 0.01% chance of photographs of people’s IDs being leaked online due to this, but a 90% chance that more than 100,000 children will be prevented from seeing content advocating suicide, is that OK? We don’t know if those are the correct percentages and, even if we did, that is a moral question, not a factual one.

              The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.

              but their intent is usually to do something shady

              Citation needed.

              People don’t go into politics to line their pockets - not in the UK anyway. It’s just not that lucrative. People go into politics mostly for the right reasons (that is, they want to change the country in a way they believe will be better - even if you disagree about that) and some of them are natural grifters who try and make a quick buck off it as well.

              im saying their intent usually isn’t ‘save the children’

              Again, nobody in this thread or elsewhere has provided any evidence that this is not their intent. The only argument put forward comes down to “it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.” But that is not how it works. People can disagree about things and on this particular matter most people disagree with you (and me.)

      • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        22 hours ago

        politicians must somehow know better.

        No, no, the accusation is that politicians are lying.

        Let’s phrase this another way. Asking every single website in existence to implement and maintain an ID database and monitoring system is expensive, yes? So, why wouldn’t private companies shift some of this responsibility off to a 3rd party who specializes specifically in this service?

        If I were google, I would:

        • One, be very excited about tying a user’s account analytics to their government personhood; can’t multiple-credit-cards your way out of that one.
        • And two, already be looking at my own 3rd-party user login service as a means of beating out all competition in this space.

        The only thing left to do is lobby. Politicians might not have this vision, but they do understand really expensive dinners.

        • FishFace@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          8 hours ago

          No, no, the accusation is that politicians are lying.

          In order to be lying, they must know better - that’s my point. You can’t have a nefarious plan without understanding the plan.

          The only thing left to do is lobby. Politicians might not have this vision, but they do understand really expensive dinners.

          That is more of an uphill battle in an environment like Europe or the UK where politicians are deeply skeptical of American big tech companies.

          • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            5 hours ago

            The plan is that they like money, and they’ll say whatever they have to to get more money. Or power, maybe.

            I don’t really need to know what their motives are, though, anyway. If they were saying that spilling gasoline over a fire would put out the fire, I know that they’re either lying for some reason, or they’re really fucking stupid. Kind of a distinction without a difference.

            where politicians are deeply skeptical of American big tech companies.

            I could believe that people are. Especially after recent events. But… you really think your right wing isn’t in bed with capital? Google was just an example, you know.

            • FishFace@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              3 hours ago

              If the right wing were in bed with big tech, they would never have passed this Act, which all big tech companies hate because it imposes serious duties and costs on them.

              I don’t really need to know what their motives are, though, anyway.

              Then you shouldn’t pretend that you do.

              It’s perfectly reasonable to argue about how shit the law is, but it’s not reasonable to advance without evidence the view that politicians made the law for some underhanded purpose. Have you trawled the MPs’ Register of Interests to find whether its supporters were wined and dined by those companies? Do you have an explanation for why their request was supposedly “let us become age-verifiers” rather than “don’t force us to moderate our products more”?

              No; you and others don’t have any of this because you haven’t done that journalistic work (and because it probably doesn’t exist). You’re just pissing conspiracy theories into the pot.

              • Senal@programming.dev
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                2 hours ago

                By that rationale you world also need to prove that they are misunderstood upstanding citizens.

                Because both interpretations are deviations from the stated intent and outcome, why would yours not also need journalistic rigour?

                Just because yours is a slightly positive spin doesn’t mean its not conjecture against the provided facts.

                • FishFace@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  49 minutes ago

                  You’ve probably heard “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.” This is an example of that.

                  Because both interpretations are deviations from the stated intent and outcome

                  They are not. Both are deviations from stated outcome, but not stated intent.

                  People on your side of this seem to think that, because politicians are saying that something will happen and you disagree with that, they must actually also believe that the outcome will be as you believe, but are lying about it.

                  Not only is this poor reasoning, it’s really quite arrogant. When it comes to predicting outcomes, there is often genuine disagreement. I think you need a good reason to conclude that this can’t possibly be a case of politicians disagreeing about the outcome and no-one has come up with such a good reason - no-one has said, “actually, the minister for DCMS was reported to have met with the bosses of Google, Microsoft and Facebook and a source in the department said they lobbied for age-verification”. All anyone has given is the same argument I have been pointing out:

                  1. age verification is bad
                  2. politicians must know it’s bad OR politicians are corrupt
                  3. therefore politicians supported this for corrupt reasons.

                  Can I walk you again through how this argument does not work?