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The UK’s Online Safety Act is a licence for censorship – and the rest of the world is following suit
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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It's really inconsequential why they want this. Their success means endgame.
The actions have consequences, and whether I'm breaking a window with a hammer to check how fragile it is or to go outside, it will have both those consequences.
You can have "disinformation and extremism" campaigns with only presenting truth or things posted by real people. Just like with political representation. Representatives are a subset of citizenry. The visible posts are a subset of all things posted. Except you can pick any subset you want, if you, say, classify posts by emotion and people by political alignment and what not.
One can have so much more believable bots today, that they won't be distinguishable from people, but those are beneficial as pressure, making the situation clear for normies, - with transparent identities of people, signing and globally addressing posts, you wouldn't fear bots and you wouldn't need a digital ID to access a website. And additionally you would have a way to double check the "color" of recommendations you get.
Thus the solutions they are picking are stabilizing the "disinformation and extremism" environment. With today's bots it will soon be utterly visibly useless to communicate over social media without what I've described. Which means, superficially paradoxically but really not, an end to such campaigns' efficiency.
So the claim of this helping fight such campaigns I have disproved.
There's no "situation". "Situations" develop much faster. Such a "situation" didn't transpire in the early 00s Internet, despite plenty of people in it and no identities and regulation.
What "situation" would really look like, I have described - herds of LLM bots infesting social media, which would be beneficial for propaganda of a small amount of interested powerful parties, but will just make social media sour when everyone uses such. Which is fine, there is a technical solution, they just don't like it. They want the "situation" they describe, but in their favor. It's very convenient, a weapon evil useless jerks didn't have for a long time.
OK, I'm in Russia and don't affect anything. You protest, I'll cheer.