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)

I can list examples of politicians promising things and then backtracking or making decisions that benefit them or their retinue directly but it’s so entrenched in the zeitgeist I’d be genuinely shocked if you didn’t know any examples yourself.

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.

So we’ve established a baseline of possibility, we can work from here.

That’s not the case here; there is genuine disagreement about whether the Online Safety Act will be a success.

Yes, politicians are people too, there will be disagreements between them, most have no idea what they are talking about with regard to this so that discussion probably won’t actually help anyone, but such is life.

it is quite popular with the public - a clear majority of people do believe it will be a success.

Same with brexit, popular support isn’t necessarily an indicator of a good idea.

Whether it will be is not a matter of objective fact

Agreed

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.

Indeed, and by that rationale there’s no basis for saying this is a good idea with regard, specifically, to the protection of children.

Which is why many people say this isn’t about the protection of children, because they have no way of proving it, or really even a vague idea of how to measure it , at all.

There is however precedent for this kind of attempt at control to be poorly implemented and abused in other areas, such that there is a provable downside.

So if there’s no provable upside but there is a somewhat provable downside, which option should be used.

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.

That’s a different discussion, but yes, ethics, morals etc.

The situation is wholly different than the Brexit bus.

It’s a different scenario yes, but it proves the possibility of that type of action, which it seems you were denying by saying “they’re just idiots they couldn’t possibly be doing bad things”

There is an example of action not based in incompetence.

Citation needed.

Indeed, this is personal opinion/anecdote.

I can give you examples of shady politicians doing shady things but probably not enough to demonstrably push it over that 50% line.

In the same way you can’t prove incompetence over intentional malice.

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.

That level of naïveté is staggering ( and also conveniently skips over power as a motivator )

Even if we don’t agree on the percentages i think we can agree that there is a level of political corruption, a quick buck doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak from recent memory, i could probably dredge up some more.

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.)

That’s why i stated it as me saying, not as an objective fact, though i see that might not be clear.

Also remember the predictive analysis based on previous actions.

I the absence of hard proof i’m pretty sure you’ll agree that opinions can be formed using predictions based on past actions of the person and similar situations and scenarios.

as i said earlier(NOTE: this was actually in a different reply, but the point stands)

it’s not:

“it won’t actually save the children, so that can’t be their intent.”

so much as it is

“Previously, on multiple occasions they have proven to not be doing things for the stated reasons, it’s perhaps reasonable to work under the idea that they may be doing this again”.