UK ISPs block around 1500+ domains through High Court orders and police make 12k+ arrests a year for online speech. You don’t need a formal firewall when the effect is the same in practice.
I don't really get why this is surprising or actually particularly worrying.
30 arrests a day for something in a population of seventy million people, a large proportion of whom are online in some way, is not that much.
And it's not 30 arrests per day for saying things the government don't like or that are politically incorrect, is it? It's mostly for things that rise to the level of threats or harassment or cause alarm.
On the one hand it's a new conduit for threatening conduct, and on the other hand, it's probably replacing some.
I'd note something that comes up when this number is mentioned often enlightens the context: that people often use this figure to say "that's more than in Iran or Russia", as if the number itself is actually meaningful. Nobody's going to arrest you in Russia for abusing transgender people; nobody's going to arrest you in Iran for encouraging the punishment of promiscuity or gay people. In either case they might turn a blind eye if you threaten the lives of those people. But the things they would arrest you for — criticising the government or the war — you know not to even say out loud when not among friends. Because the punishment is not the mild inconvenience you would get in the UK.
There are bigger problems in the UK with misunderstanding policing of speech in the real, physical world: the Palestine Action stuff is being much more obviously mishandled. I think it's much more important to focus on getting the government to handle that more logically and sanely.
>And it's not 30 arrests per day for saying things the government don't like or that are politically incorrect, is it?
We don't know, as offence type isn't provided by police services.
The key takeaway is that arrests have risen since 2020 while convictions have not. Given the sole evidence needed for a conviction is also needed for an arrest, you'd think convictions would rise at almost the same level. But it looks like people are being arrested and later released for perfectly legal speech. That would arguably be seen by many as an impairment of freedom of expression.
> The key takeaway is that arrests have risen since 2020 while convictions have not.
Yes, but this also coincides with the pandemic which put more people online and created a lot of anger and harassment of nurses, doctors, government officials, and it also coincides with growing activism in the trans debate space, which has undoubtedly led to more actual harassment.
> But it looks like people are being arrested and later released for perfectly legal speech.
But you just said we don't know, because offence type is not provided?
If there has been a rise in the amount of harassment due to the pandemic, then why have actual convictions dropped compared to before the pandemic. I refer to the graph of convictions per year in the HoL report linked above.
>But you just said we don't know, because offence type is not provided?
If someone is arrested but not convicted, we must presume innocence. "Legal speech" isn't a type of offence.
I'm sure people are so confused by someone using the long established English dictionary definition of racism and not the new far left interpretation of the word that now includes social power structures that conveniently allows non-whites to be racist without being called out.
So at first you're sympathising with discriminating against those that you see as suffering less and then your big idea is treating people equally and that's a 'hard sell'. That is like being a basic good fucking human, it's not a novel idea.
Sorry if it was unclear that’s not what I meant to imply.
First, acknowledging the thinking behind a common opinion is not the same as sympathizing with it. It’s only stating a concept I disagree with.
Secondly, it’d be nice to take credit for this, big fucking idea, but unfortunately it’d be thousands of years too late. I explicitly mentioned the source.
Finally, I don’t see how it’s not a novel idea. If you started asking people to think kindly about rich Wall Street bankers or cable company executives would everyone he instantly on board?
I know those are extreme examples but that was the point of the story. What’s indeed not novel is to say, think well of all people.
The hard part is when you try to actually apply it equally, including to less popular but highly privileged classes of people.
I don’t claim that I can do it all the time, I’m sure I don’t in fact. However for any ideal shouldn't it be ok to try and work towards it over time?
I actually thought it was a well made parody site, funner zooming/mmhmm, the bs marketing speak. On further inspection it actually looks like it could be useful in presenting slides, like a corporate obs or something.
Poaching has a much broader meaning than the one you describe. It's simply taking someone's property without permission. With modern employment contracts (non-competes/no outside work/drug tests...) I believe the comparison to property is quite apt.
I don't think I understand. Under what circumstance does a company A recruiting away employees from company B count as "taking away B's property without permission"? There is no permission needed by law to offer a better employment contract to, well, anyone.
I would be wary of that -- I assume it's likely that a CDN would often time out in case of error, which means you might be looking at 30 or 60 seconds until JavaScript works on your page.
Knowing how many read a comment would help with comment assessment but how do you get that information. I suppose we could track scroll positions, I'm not sure how reliable it would be.
It'd be cool if websites could use eye tracking, then we could easily tell what got read. Maybe in the future.
