Google joins attacks on Britain over free speech online

“Google has accused Britain of threatening to stifle free speech in an escalation of US opposition to online safety rules.

The regulator Ofcom is planning to prevent posts going viral that include “potentially illegal” material, such as hate speech or calls to violence.

However, Google warned that proposals to require tech giants to detect and suppress such “potentially illegal” posts risk “undermining users’ rights to freedom of expression”.

Google said the measures would “necessarily result in legal content being made less likely to be encountered by users, impacting users’ freedom of expression, beyond what the [Online Safety] Act intended”.

Ofcom rejected the claims this weekend, insisting there was “nothing in our proposals that would require sites and apps to take down legal content”.”

Resist this with everything you have.

“Donald Trump’s allies have repeatedly criticised Britain’s pioneering legislative attempt to curb abuse and other harms online.”

I cant think why Trumps allies would criticise legislation that tried to curb hate speech and voilence

While I think we should all push back against things like this, Google are already fine with moderating away content *they* don’t like, so it is perfectly clear they don’t give a shit about free speech.

I can’t remember Google publicly attacking or lobbying against China’s censorship when Google operated there. Funny that.

It’s insane that this sub seems to be fine with the fact that we have no free speech in this country.

They are correct as the OSA requires platforms to pro-actively remove priority harmful content and also to prevent content harmful to children from going into recommender systems.

This is prior restraint censorship. You are censored before even being able to publish.

The only way you can do that proactively is with mass AI and algorithmic moderation. This moderation uses keywords and perceptual hash matching image recognition.

For some types of content like CSAM it’s very good and accurate. For others like ‘what is a public order offence, or terrorism, or misogyny that are highly contextual and difficult to judge it’s awful.

The OSA created mass censorship where all the penalties on firms are for non compliance and the only free speech duty is a legally weak duty to ‘have particular regard to free expression.

There is a legitimate argument that the lines about what is potentially harmful in the OSA are too fuzzy, and there needs to be more guidance and an assurance that good faith efforts won’t result in a big fine.

But there really isn’t an argument that content providers shouldn’t be responsible for the content they publish. This type of material is *already* illegal, and if I print out leaflets and hand them out in the town square I’ll get fined. Why should that be different when it’s published online?

There’s a different question about whether “incitement to religious hatred” should be illegal in the first place – in my opinion that gets too close to suppressing criticism of religious ideologies.

Tech companies do have a responsibility to manage the content they publish, and they constantly try to shirk it because it costs them money.

You only have to see the lack of censorship on scam websites that litter Facebook adverts to know they and Google don’t give a stuff as long as it pays money. I’ve tried countless times to complain about offensive adverts (to me) on Google mail and they do precisely nothing.

As much as Trump wouldn’t like it, the internet like other forms of communication should have rules governing what is acceptable. Like other forms of communication there has to be a boundary between free and unacceptable speech.

This government has enacted a radical program of censorship and surveillance which was not in the manifesto.

Yesterday, I tried to read a substack article which was critical of immigration in Sweden (I assume, I never got that far). It was blocked on the basis of the online safety act and asked for my ID. If I uploaded my ID I am worried that I would find myself somehow flagged as politically undesirable, maybe singled out for more surveillance, and so I backed out out of the article and didn’t read it. I know I could use a vpn, but still.

We were told this was to stop kids looking at BDSM, so why does it apply to substack where people share essays about ideas? Why did it apply on day 1 to footage of the Epping protests when there was no gore or death? My point is that this was always, from literally day 1 about political speech.

Just remember that Farage will inherit these powers if you are so morally bankrupt that you don’t care about the free speech of your opponents, and that the british version of ICE will have these powers to silence any criticism of their actions, track individuals who are critics, cut their access to banking, work and government services with the digital ID, full view of their internet connection records and porn preferences (along with vague and hyper restrictive definitions of extreme porn – if a hand goes near a neck you’re a sex offender now).

You’re free to say anything you want, I’m completely against censorship and government deciding what information your allowed to access that isn’t related to national security.

You should also face the consequences of everything you say regardless of when or where you say it.

Protect your freedom but own what you say. If you encourage others to commit illegal actions, then own it and take the slap on the wrist or jail time.

Defamation (libel and slander) laws still apply even on the Internet, hate crime laws still apply on the Internet.

Edit: Terms of service for platforms like reddit and meta that are private companies still apply on the Internet.

Google doesnt like the suggestions because it would cost them money to moderate and harms their business model, which benifits from controversial content going viral. They are dressing it up as “free speech” because it sounds better than “it would cost us money”. In reality it is about requiring companies to moderate potentially illegal content before letting it go viral; nothing new would be made illegal and it would not impact free speech on anything new, it would just require a lot more proactive moderation.

Not that I agree with the idea, it sounds poorly thought through by people who don’t really understand technology and would cost a great deal. But unlike the online safety act this seems like a practicality issue more than anything else.

**”The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”**

**- Adolf Hitler**

I feel like the UK gave up trying to protect/control the borders so will now just focus on controlling everything in the digital space.

Google should just fuck right off and stop sticking it’s nose where it’s not wanted 🖕

Common theme I’m not noticing in comments is the issue being reduced to overly simple stances around free speech. The UK isn’t the USA. We don’t have free speech as a core right which other legislation pilots around.

Furthermore there will never be a solution that makes everyone happy, even if you exclude all the bad faith actors.

People aren’t wrong to approve or disapprove of certain things being done by government’s but the government ultimately has to pick a position and go with it, and inevitably someone will be unhappy.

The tech giants do not have the UK’a interests at heart, and arguably they don’t particularly care about the USA either. They also don’t really care about free speech.

What they want is to be free to whatever they want up to and including suppression of views they dislike and promotion of views they do.

In the absence of any state regulation there ceases to be any democratic controls over online content. People may dislike a given elected government but they can at least vote that government out of power if enough people want change.

We don’t get to vote on who runs the tech giants executive teams.

The worst rule is the coming wave of age verification  laws in the USA 
which will force users to  sign in or send Id to websites  to view legal content 

Google is right  UK does not need another law to block  online content 
Small UK websites have closed cos they cannot afford to check the age of every one uses the website 

It’s not googles job to censor the internet 

“Google, one of many American tech companies who have recently given millions of dollars to Trump, joins attacks on Britain over free speech online”