If youre going to ask an Emergency Question and actually piss off the actual Shadow Minister in the process by elbowing in
Don't try to defend your defence record whilst trying to attack Labour
All mouth no substance
Eviscerated by erm Luke Pollard
He pays tribute to HEALY, explaining he's only here because HEALY asked him to stay
One wonders where the actual Shadow Minister is?
Pollard goes on to quietly explain
YES Labour are spending more
£11 Billion more in first Labour year than last Tory year
Working to phase out old technologies and build or purchase new
Biggest Armed Forces pay rise in 20 years
Biggest investment in Armed Forces housing stock in history, 9 billion over 10 years
intake up 11% Outflow reduced 8%
Ashen faced Tories totally exposed for 14 years of wilful neglect
Mate, the Tories did a Shit job on defence. Labour did a Shit job on defence before them, and are doing such a shit job now that the SofS and Minister both resigned in protest.
You trying to score party points on this is top quality cabaret, albeit one where I suspect you haven't realised how much of a tit you look.
Not as much avtit as the clusterfuck Tories
Btw
2010 defence spending was 2.5% of GDP was it not?
However
Badenoch calls Dan Jarvis, a former Army Officer a coward
Is told he's with the King
Swayne calls Jarvis a coward
Told he's been summoned by the King to be made a Privy Councillor
Leigh calls Jarvis a Coward
Is adminished by Speaker who has confirmed Jarvis is with the King
Utter Tory clusterfuck
Took defence spending from 2.5 % to below 2%
Labour increasing by 11 billion a yrar
No one no one can say Labour are not increasing defence spending
Not fast enough but who hollowed it out in the first place
Hollowed it out whilst taking funds from Putin Oligarchs, slipping security to meet the KGB and prostituting themselves for games of tennis, meals and dances with known Russian KGB Putin money nen
Thatcher got it right
THE ENEMY WITHIN
SAME OLD TORIES
CORRUPT TREACHEROUS TRAITORS
Have you ever thought you might be posting on the wrong site? I do regularly. This is a Tory blog which makes ConHome look like the Canary.
Give you head a wobble.
You keep making this point. It isn't true. Just have a look through the posts now in this thread - the number of posts by left of centre and right of centre posters is roughly 50/50.
Of course it's true.
There are an awful lot of fence sitters, but the pro-Tory posters are relentless at the moment and I'll count them for you. We have one, er, we have, er, one Labour poster and it was to him I was addressing my post.
We have a fair number of non-Tories who don't support Labour.
They are the fence sitters. I naturally include Lib Dems in their number.
So someone who is a Lib dem member, and even stands for the Lib Dems at election is a fence sitter?
A long term SNP supporter and voter is a fence sitter?
An avowed Green party member and voter is a fence sitter?
Really?
Almost right.
OK
@malcolmg - you are apparently a fence sitter who may vote Tory at the slightest provocation. How do you answer that?
He's a bloomin' Tory!
In John O'Farrell's "Things can only get better", he reflects in the ultra-left students he knew in the early 80s who used the word "Tory" to refer to anyoneto the right of Tony Benn. Perhaps you mean it in this sense?
A player bet against his team on multiple occasions, got found out and suspended. His college then got lawyers involved and unsuspended him. Massive rows continue. Maybe @Jim_Miller understands the details better than I do!
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB is a noticeboard. We come here, write something, and it goes up, in chronological order. PB takes no active decision to publish a statement. You can search the archives and the server will respond to your search, but again no active decision is made.
That’s how social media usually started. However, today’s social media generally involves the social media company choosing to promote certain comments (or videos or whatever) above others. You might post something to X, but whether 2 people or 200 million people see it is up to X. Most of that deciding involves algorithms rather than human input, but it’s active decisions by X to promote certain content in that way. That seems like a qualitative difference and takes X closer to being a publisher. (You could also talk about how bad X is at policing its adverts, which again are there as a result of an active decision.)
Mate, the Tories did a Shit job on defence. Labour did a Shit job on defence before them, and are doing such a shit job now that the SofS and Minister both resigned in protest.
You trying to score party points on this is top quality cabaret, albeit one where I suspect you haven't realised how much of a tit you look.
The government won't even spend what their own strategic defence review says that they need to spend. And poor old Keir is afraid to tell Rachel to sort it out or face the sack.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
Hence the focus on any algorithm more complex than "people you follow, in reverse chronological order".
As things stand, big SM companies are causing a lot of social harm by choosing to promote certain content over other content. That the choices are automated is neither here nor there.
And that's before we get to the recent tendency to pay people for engaging, enraging content, even when it's untrue.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
Also it is one person to another, not broadcast to the world.
Btw re age restrictions, current Apple ipads and phones (or rather their operating systems) do require age verification.
This is the sort of thing Meta (aka Facebook) has been arguing for – make the device responsible rather than the social media company. I've not read what HMG has in mind.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
Russian operatives ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely through social media and the messaging app Telegram, we found, creating fake online far-right and Muslim groups, which were used to organise acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear.
Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.
It wouldn't have been so bad that he did not if he had not essentially admitted he should have been. If he just didn't think he was responsible, however ludicrously, that would be something else.
Btw re age restrictions, current Apple ipads and phones (or rather their operating systems) do require age verification.
This is the sort of thing Meta (aka Facebook) has been arguing for – make the device responsible rather than the social media company. I've not read what HMG has in mind.
Please tell me again why they still have an ambassador here.
If they didn't we'd still want to talk to someone from there occasionally and it's easier to have that be the ambassador than officially kick them out but still engage with them somehow?
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB is a noticeboard. We come here, write something, and it goes up, in chronological order. PB takes no active decision to publish a statement. You can search the archives and the server will respond to your search, but again no active decision is made.
That’s how social media usually started. However, today’s social media generally involves the social media company choosing to promote certain comments (or videos or whatever) above others. You might post something to X, but whether 2 people or 200 million people see it is up to X. Most of that deciding involves algorithms rather than human input, but it’s active decisions by X to promote certain content in that way. That seems like a qualitative difference and takes X closer to being a publisher. (You could also talk about how bad X is at policing its adverts, which again are there as a result of an active decision.)
This is a fair point in that there are more active choices going on than they pretend. Not really convinced the current efforts are useful or proportionate though.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
Please tell me again why they still have an ambassador here.
If they didn't we'd still want to talk to someone from there occasionally and it's easier to have that be the ambassador than officially kick them out but still engage with them somehow?
No, tell them to F off and make it clear we don't negotiate with terrorists.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB.com doesn't use an algorithm to promote the most contentious and divisive comments (we do that organically by responding to the most contentious and divisive comments).
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
Cheers! Essex go top of the (cricket) County Championship.
Admittedly for now, but they're there!
Top three, Essex, Sussex and Somerset are all non-Hundred/Test ground counties and have most wins, finally getting in front of the counties with pitches resulting in maximum batting points and draws.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB.com doesn't use an algorithm to promote the most contentious an divisive comments (we do that organically by responding to the most contentious and divisive comments).
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
Or revise them to be less harmful but they showed no interest in doing that until threatened with regulation.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB is a noticeboard. We come here, write something, and it goes up, in chronological order. PB takes no active decision to publish a statement. You can search the archives and the server will respond to your search, but again no active decision is made.
That’s how social media usually started. However, today’s social media generally involves the social media company choosing to promote certain comments (or videos or whatever) above others. You might post something to X, but whether 2 people or 200 million people see it is up to X. Most of that deciding involves algorithms rather than human input, but it’s active decisions by X to promote certain content in that way. That seems like a qualitative difference and takes X closer to being a publisher. (You could also talk about how bad X is at policing its adverts, which again are there as a result of an active decision.)
This is a fair point in that there are more active choices going on than they pretend. Not really convinced the current efforts are useful or proportionate though.
I’m not convinced they are either, but I think something should be done and this is someth… oh, yeah, that’s not a good argument, is it?
I would rather social media companies changed their ways, but they’re pandering to Trump right now.
Russian operatives ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely through social media and the messaging app Telegram, we found, creating fake online far-right and Muslim groups, which were used to organise acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear.
Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.
The social media companies don’t seem to be doing enough about this sort of thing, so I suggest government should.
See also the Iranian linked trials, one that concluded in the last fortnight and the ongoing trial on Johannes Natland (one of my daughters college friends was working at the hotel on the morning of his arrest).
It very much gives the impression of the UK being rather like the Munich beer hall in the relevant Pink Panther film as far as foreign assassins goes.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
You don’t appear to be engaging with the many ills social media causes that others have mentioned.
Please tell me again why they still have an ambassador here.
If they didn't we'd still want to talk to someone from there occasionally and it's easier to have that be the ambassador than officially kick them out but still engage with them somehow?
No, tell them to F off and make it clear we don't negotiate with terrorists.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB.com doesn't use an algorithm to promote the most contentious and divisive comments (we do that organically by responding to the most contentious and divisive comments).
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
That might be a sensible move except we know the Government would not accept that as sufficient.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
Happy days of SW radio and the thrill of listening live to Moscow, Peking and Australia! If you think the BBC cannot and would not be sued for libel broadcast over the radio I have bridge......
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
If youre going to ask an Emergency Question and actually piss off the actual Shadow Minister in the process by elbowing in
Don't try to defend your defence record whilst trying to attack Labour
All mouth no substance
Eviscerated by erm Luke Pollard
He pays tribute to HEALY, explaining he's only here because HEALY asked him to stay
One wonders where the actual Shadow Minister is?
Pollard goes on to quietly explain
YES Labour are spending more
£11 Billion more in first Labour year than last Tory year
Working to phase out old technologies and build or purchase new
Biggest Armed Forces pay rise in 20 years
Biggest investment in Armed Forces housing stock in history, 9 billion over 10 years
intake up 11% Outflow reduced 8%
Ashen faced Tories totally exposed for 14 years of wilful neglect
Mate, the Tories did a Shit job on defence. Labour did a Shit job on defence before them, and are doing such a shit job now that the SofS and Minister both resigned in protest.
You trying to score party points on this is top quality cabaret, albeit one where I suspect you haven't realised how much of a tit you look.
Not as much avtit as the clusterfuck Tories
Btw
2010 defence spending was 2.5% of GDP was it not?
However
Badenoch calls Dan Jarvis, a former Army Officer a coward
Is told he's with the King
Swayne calls Jarvis a coward
Told he's been summoned by the King to be made a Privy Councillor
Leigh calls Jarvis a Coward
Is adminished by Speaker who has confirmed Jarvis is with the King
Utter Tory clusterfuck
Took defence spending from 2.5 % to below 2%
Labour increasing by 11 billion a yrar
No one no one can say Labour are not increasing defence spending
Not fast enough but who hollowed it out in the first place
Hollowed it out whilst taking funds from Putin Oligarchs, slipping security to meet the KGB and prostituting themselves for games of tennis, meals and dances with known Russian KGB Putin money nen
Thatcher got it right
THE ENEMY WITHIN
SAME OLD TORIES
CORRUPT TREACHEROUS TRAITORS
Have you ever thought you might be posting on the wrong site? I do regularly. This is a Tory blog which makes ConHome look like the Canary.
Give you head a wobble.
You keep making this point. It isn't true. Just have a look through the posts now in this thread - the number of posts by left of centre and right of centre posters is roughly 50/50.
Of course it's true.
There are an awful lot of fence sitters, but the pro-Tory posters are relentless at the moment and I'll count them for you. We have one, er, we have, er, one Labour poster and it was to him I was addressing my post.
We have a fair number of non-Tories who don't support Labour.
They are the fence sitters. I naturally include Lib Dems in their number.
So someone who is a Lib dem member, and even stands for the Lib Dems at election is a fence sitter?
A long term SNP supporter and voter is a fence sitter?
An avowed Green party member and voter is a fence sitter?
Really?
Almost right.
OK
@malcolmg - you are apparently a fence sitter who may vote Tory at the slightest provocation. How do you answer that?
He's a bloomin' Tory!
In John O'Farrell's "Things can only get better", he reflects in the ultra-left students he knew in the early 80s who used the word "Tory" to refer to anyoneto the right of Tony Benn. Perhaps you mean it in this sense?
No Malcolm is only hostile to the Conservatives because of their unionism. Although I can't square the circle of Malcolm supporting Alba run by the revolutionary communist Salmond.
Dreadful. I honestly thought Spain were a lot better than this.
The World Cup is a marathon not a sprint. Spain often start slowly and look amazing only from the quarter final onwards.
They are starting so slowly here they are at serious risk of dropping 2 points. Jamal is on now but the pace of their passing is so slow and cumbersome.
Dreadful. I honestly thought Spain were a lot better than this.
The World Cup is a marathon not a sprint. Spain often start slowly and look amazing only from the quarter final onwards.
They are starting so slowly here they are at serious risk of dropping 2 points. Jamal is on now but the pace of their passing is so slow and cumbersome.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB.com doesn't use an algorithm to promote the most contentious and divisive comments (we do that organically by responding to the most contentious and divisive comments).
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
That might be a sensible move except we know the Government would not accept that as sufficient.
If the UK government announced a law making platforms with algorithms legally publishers, the White House would be on the phone in seconds.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
Happy days of SW radio and the thrill of listening live to Moscow, Peking and Australia! If you think the BBC cannot and would not be sued for libel broadcast over the radio I have bridge......
I used to enjoy Radio Tirana and their critique of "Soviet State Imperialism",
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB.com doesn't use an algorithm to promote the most contentious and divisive comments (we do that organically by responding to the most contentious and divisive comments).
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
That might be a sensible move except we know the Government would not accept that as sufficient.
If the UK government announced a law making platforms with algorithms legally publishers, the White House would be on the phone in seconds.
As I said earlier I would just require an audit of what the algorithm showed the user
Available to parents on demand and to others on approved request of court order.
That would allow parents to block things child weee trying to look at and track what’s going on and would solve a lot of other issues - as it would allow you to identify what sort of comments need to be blocked long term to avoid radicalization
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB.com doesn't use an algorithm to promote the most contentious and divisive comments (we do that organically by responding to the most contentious and divisive comments).
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
That might be a sensible move except we know the Government would not accept that as sufficient.
If the UK government announced a law making platforms with algorithms legally publishers, the White House would be on the phone in seconds.
As I said earlier I would just require an audit of what the algorithm showed the user
Available to parents on demand and to others on approved request of court order.
That would allow parents to block things child weee trying to look at and track what’s going on and would solve a lot of other issues - as it would allow you to identify what sort of comments need to be blocked long term to avoid radicalization
That would get the White House on the phone as well - that would expose the algorithms.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
Happy days of SW radio and the thrill of listening live to Moscow, Peking and Australia! If you think the BBC cannot and would not be sued for libel broadcast over the radio I have bridge......
The BBC has editorial control. Social media companies do not. At least not in advance of something being posted.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB.com doesn't use an algorithm to promote the most contentious and divisive comments (we do that organically by responding to the most contentious and divisive comments).
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
That might be a sensible move except we know the Government would not accept that as sufficient.
If the UK government announced a law making platforms with algorithms legally publishers, the White House would be on the phone in seconds.
As I said earlier I would just require an audit of what the algorithm showed the user
Available to parents on demand and to others on approved request of court order.
That would allow parents to block things child weee trying to look at and track what’s going on and would solve a lot of other issues - as it would allow you to identify what sort of comments need to be blocked long term to avoid radicalization
That would get the White House on the phone as well - that would expose the algorithms.
And that's the problem.
With hindsight, it probably wasn't a good idea to let social media companies grow rich enough and powerful enough that they could essentially buy the US government. But it's a bit too late now.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
"Uncle Keir" thinks social media makes young people "unhappy"..which is presumably why so many use it..💩
Panorama on BBC2 right now is covering the Starmer Russian arson trial case thingy (with Brexit part 2 later tonight) for PBers not watching the sports.
Went looking for stats on child suicides which is a lot harder to find than I expected.
One very surprising stat I found from the ONS study a couple of years ago was that teenagers with parents who have a degree are 1.7x more likely to commit suicide than those whose parents do not.
This is absolutely not me trying whataboutism. This has nothing to do with the social media debate in my view but I post it as I found it a surprising stat. Not sure why it should be the case.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
Social media is a…well…media. If I suggest a riot in a pub it won’t go any further unless I’m holding a megaphone and stand by a window. The same cannot be said for Facebook.
Yes, I’m sure like any analogy mine breaks down under any level of scrutiny, but so does yours. But pubs are not media channels.
We regulate what radio stations and television stations can broadcast. Social media channels can’t stop what’s inputted into them but they can control how it is disseminated and to whom. And they should. Like any other media.
Russian operatives ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely through social media and the messaging app Telegram, we found, creating fake online far-right and Muslim groups, which were used to organise acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear.
Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.
The social media companies don’t seem to be doing enough about this sort of thing, so I suggest government should.
According to the BBC report, the police were informed about the nefarious activities of this group, and did nothing. They broke a dozen laws, so why don't we try using those to stop the activity, rather than grabbing more power over speech to supress the resulting chatter?
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB.com doesn't use an algorithm to promote the most contentious and divisive comments (we do that organically by responding to the most contentious and divisive comments).
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
That might be a sensible move except we know the Government would not accept that as sufficient.
If the UK government announced a law making platforms with algorithms legally publishers, the White House would be on the phone in seconds.
Yes, that is a strong argument in favour of the idea.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
"Uncle Keir" thinks social media makes young people "unhappy"..which is presumably why so many use it..💩
Loads of examples of people doing stuff that they know makes them miserable in all but the shortest term.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
"Uncle Keir" thinks social media makes young people "unhappy"..which is presumably why so many use it..💩
Loads of examples of people doing stuff that they know makes them miserable in all but the shortest term.
It's a decent working definition of addiction.
I still genuinely don't know where I stand on this issue. It's quite refreshing.
Don Quixote, Pedro Almodavar, Julio Iglesias, Francisco Goya, can you hear me? Your boys just took one hell of a drawing.
But none of these compare with the achievements of Cape Verdean Amber Rose, former girlfriend of Kanye West, one of the most highly paid creators on Only Fans, and author of How to be a Bad Bitch
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
Social media is a…well…media. If I suggest a riot in a pub it won’t go any further unless I’m holding a megaphone and stand by a window. The same cannot be said for Facebook.
Yes, I’m sure like any analogy mine breaks down under any level of scrutiny, but so does yours. But pubs are not media channels.
We regulate what radio stations and television stations can broadcast. Social media channels can’t stop what’s inputted into them but they can control how it is disseminated and to whom. And they should. Like any other media.
It seems to me that the only way to effectively do that would be to shut them down. And therein lies the problem.
I know I am an old cynic but I don't for a second think that Starmer actually cares about the 'social ills' of social media. He just wants to do something that makes him look decisive and also would be very happy to neuter a medium of dissemination over which he has no control
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
We don’t hold pubs responsible for what people say in them, but we do hold them responsible for what they sell (lots of rules around alcohol, food hygiene rules too), who they employ, what amounts they sell drinks in, what information they have to display, who they sell too (not allowed to sell to those who are inebriated), including lots of rules around children. Pubs’ main business is drinking and food, and that’s where most of the regulations affecting them are. And they have been regulated for centuries, possibly millennia, possibly multiple millennia.
Social media’s main business is people saying things. Social media, as a new technology, is comparatively little regulated. Social media clearly has some ills associated with it: frequent libel, inflames violence, foreign actors abuse it, fraud and other crime, misinformation, addictiveness, societal polarisation etc. Social media has played a role in child suicides, eating disorders, bullying, and more.
This isn’t about the government restricting discourse. There are clearly major problems associated with social media. I’m not saying that banning kids from using it is the best solution, but I find your line of reasoning here unconvincing.
Russian operatives ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely through social media and the messaging app Telegram, we found, creating fake online far-right and Muslim groups, which were used to organise acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear.
Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.
The social media companies don’t seem to be doing enough about this sort of thing, so I suggest government should.
According to the BBC report, the police were informed about the nefarious activities of this group, and did nothing. They broke a dozen laws, so why don't we try using those to stop the activity, rather than grabbing more power over speech to supress the resulting chatter?
The possible failings of the police don’t mean we shouldn’t also look at updating the law.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
Social media is a…well…media. If I suggest a riot in a pub it won’t go any further unless I’m holding a megaphone and stand by a window. The same cannot be said for Facebook.
Yes, I’m sure like any analogy mine breaks down under any level of scrutiny, but so does yours. But pubs are not media channels.
We regulate what radio stations and television stations can broadcast. Social media channels can’t stop what’s inputted into them but they can control how it is disseminated and to whom. And they should. Like any other media.
It seems to me that the only way to effectively do that would be to shut them down. And therein lies the problem.
I know I am an old cynic but I don't for a second think that Starmer actually cares about the 'social ills' of social media. He just wants to do something that makes him look decisive and also would be very happy to neuter a medium of dissemination over which he has no control
There are numerous possible approaches short of shutting them down. Social media existed without algorithms pushing certain content. Social media used to have more moderation (before Trump). Social media still exists in Australia (the model Starmer is following) and still has very robust political debate on it. Etc.
Russian operatives ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely through social media and the messaging app Telegram, we found, creating fake online far-right and Muslim groups, which were used to organise acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear.
Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.
The social media companies don’t seem to be doing enough about this sort of thing, so I suggest government should.
According to the BBC report, the police were informed about the nefarious activities of this group, and did nothing. They broke a dozen laws, so why don't we try using those to stop the activity, rather than grabbing more power over speech to supress the resulting chatter?
The possible failings of the police don’t mean we shouldn’t also look at updating the law.
It is a repeated pattern that police do not enforce the law, then complain that they need more power. Police spend more than enough time policing speech already - an unhealthy amount of time. Vandalism is a crime. The graffiti being racist is an aggravating factor. Conspiracy to do all of the above is probably a crime. Do your actual job with the powers you have, then come back and talk about needing more.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
We don’t hold pubs responsible for what people say in them, but we do hold them responsible for what they sell (lots of rules around alcohol, food hygiene rules too), who they employ, what amounts they sell drinks in, what information they have to display, who they sell too (not allowed to sell to those who are inebriated), including lots of rules around children. Pubs’ main business is drinking and food, and that’s where most of the regulations affecting them are. And they have been regulated for centuries, possibly millennia, possibly multiple millennia.
Social media’s main business is people saying things. Social media, as a new technology, is comparatively little regulated. Social media clearly has some ills associated with it: frequent libel, inflames violence, foreign actors abuse it, fraud and other crime, misinformation, addictiveness, societal polarisation etc. Social media has played a role in child suicides, eating disorders, bullying, and more.
This isn’t about the government restricting discourse. There are clearly major problems associated with social media. I’m not saying that banning kids from using it is the best solution, but I find your line of reasoning here unconvincing.
And I find the arguments in favour of limiting access to social media equally unconvincing. Your shifting the goalposts here to bring in the business purpose of social media as if that has any bearing just convinces me more that you have no serious arguments in favour of this censorship.
Russian operatives ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely through social media and the messaging app Telegram, we found, creating fake online far-right and Muslim groups, which were used to organise acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear.
Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.
The social media companies don’t seem to be doing enough about this sort of thing, so I suggest government should.
According to the BBC report, the police were informed about the nefarious activities of this group, and did nothing. They broke a dozen laws, so why don't we try using those to stop the activity, rather than grabbing more power over speech to supress the resulting chatter?
The possible failings of the police don’t mean we shouldn’t also look at updating the law.
It is a repeated pattern that police do not enforce the law, then complain that they need more power. Police spend more than enough time policing speech already - an unhealthy amount of time. Vandalism is a crime. The graffiti being racist is an aggravating factor. Conspiracy to do all of the above is probably a crime. Do your actual job with the powers you have, then come back and talk about needing more.
The current social media proposals haven’t come from the police, so I don’t see how that’s relevant here.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
We don’t hold pubs responsible for what people say in them, but we do hold them responsible for what they sell (lots of rules around alcohol, food hygiene rules too), who they employ, what amounts they sell drinks in, what information they have to display, who they sell too (not allowed to sell to those who are inebriated), including lots of rules around children. Pubs’ main business is drinking and food, and that’s where most of the regulations affecting them are. And they have been regulated for centuries, possibly millennia, possibly multiple millennia.
Social media’s main business is people saying things. Social media, as a new technology, is comparatively little regulated. Social media clearly has some ills associated with it: frequent libel, inflames violence, foreign actors abuse it, fraud and other crime, misinformation, addictiveness, societal polarisation etc. Social media has played a role in child suicides, eating disorders, bullying, and more.
This isn’t about the government restricting discourse. There are clearly major problems associated with social media. I’m not saying that banning kids from using it is the best solution, but I find your line of reasoning here unconvincing.
And I find the arguments in favour of limiting access to social media equally unconvincing. Your shifting the goalposts here to bring in the business purpose of social media as if that has any bearing just convinces me more that you have no serious arguments in favour of this censorship.
The purpose of social media, and the intent of its owners, is clearly relevant here.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
Social media is a…well…media. If I suggest a riot in a pub it won’t go any further unless I’m holding a megaphone and stand by a window. The same cannot be said for Facebook.
Yes, I’m sure like any analogy mine breaks down under any level of scrutiny, but so does yours. But pubs are not media channels.
We regulate what radio stations and television stations can broadcast. Social media channels can’t stop what’s inputted into them but they can control how it is disseminated and to whom. And they should. Like any other media.
It’s why I have no time for the “hurty words on Facebook” narrative. It’s much, much worse to post something inflammatory there than in a drunken rant with your pals in the pub.
Also - I know people take the piss out of Bluesky but the reason it’s so dull is precisely because it doesn’t push dopamine via an algorithm. As a self-diagnosed social media addict, the fact I don’t feel compelled to spend more than 10 minutes there at a time is a good thing.
I’m not sure this ban is the right intervention but there’s no doubt something needs to happen.
Russian operatives ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely through social media and the messaging app Telegram, we found, creating fake online far-right and Muslim groups, which were used to organise acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear.
Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.
The social media companies don’t seem to be doing enough about this sort of thing, so I suggest government should.
According to the BBC report, the police were informed about the nefarious activities of this group, and did nothing. They broke a dozen laws, so why don't we try using those to stop the activity, rather than grabbing more power over speech to supress the resulting chatter?
The possible failings of the police don’t mean we shouldn’t also look at updating the law.
Actually they do. Why keep passing new and more draconian laws if the police won't even bother to uphold the ones we already have?
The police are oh so keen to find reasons to arrest people for incitement or hate crimes whch might cause offence but are unwilling or incapable of dealing with real crimes even when the evidence is staring them in the face.
What is really funny is I can see the police arresting someone for supposedly inciting an attack whilst not bothering to do anything to prevent the actual attack itself. Such is the state of modern law enforcement.
Disagree with what the law (apparently) is or not, the Palestine Action case today, as reported at least, seems to be another like the Begum case where the senior court essentially chided a lower court for substituting its own view of what the correct decision should be on what is essentially a political judgement call (within the law), rather than simply assess whether the politician had the power to make the decision so long as they followed appropriate steps.
Like that Begum case, it would presumably be open to a future government to limit its own discretion or stop the power in question being exercised, but new governments rarely seem keen on that - they presumably trust that they won't misuse the power like their opponents, so it's ok to retain.
Please tell me again why they still have an ambassador here.
If they didn't we'd still want to talk to someone from there occasionally and it's easier to have that be the ambassador than officially kick them out but still engage with them somehow?
No, tell them to F off and make it clear we don't negotiate with terrorists.
Nations talk to their enemies, always have done. Backchannels when it is not official. Russia is definitely an enemy, but I don't see what the UK gains from expelling the ambassador.
The 'don't negotiate with terrorists' thing is just a line from TV shows and movies. Doesn't mean we casually do it all the time or anything, but even places at outright war exchange communications.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
Social media is a…well…media. If I suggest a riot in a pub it won’t go any further unless I’m holding a megaphone and stand by a window. The same cannot be said for Facebook.
Yes, I’m sure like any analogy mine breaks down under any level of scrutiny, but so does yours. But pubs are not media channels.
We regulate what radio stations and television stations can broadcast. Social media channels can’t stop what’s inputted into them but they can control how it is disseminated and to whom. And they should. Like any other media.
It’s why I have no time for the “hurty words on Facebook” narrative. It’s much, much worse to post something inflammatory there than in a drunken rant with your pals in the pub.
Also - I know people take the piss out of Bluesky but the reason it’s so dull is precisely because it doesn’t push dopamine via an algorithm. As a self-diagnosed social media addict, the fact I don’t feel compelled to spend more than 10 minutes there at a time is a good thing.
I’m not sure this ban is the right intervention but there’s no doubt something needs to happen.
'Something must be done... this is something... we must do it!'
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
Social media is a…well…media. If I suggest a riot in a pub it won’t go any further unless I’m holding a megaphone and stand by a window. The same cannot be said for Facebook.
Yes, I’m sure like any analogy mine breaks down under any level of scrutiny, but so does yours. But pubs are not media channels.
We regulate what radio stations and television stations can broadcast. Social media channels can’t stop what’s inputted into them but they can control how it is disseminated and to whom. And they should. Like any other media.
It’s why I have no time for the “hurty words on Facebook” narrative. It’s much, much worse to post something inflammatory there than in a drunken rant with your pals in the pub.
Also - I know people take the piss out of Bluesky but the reason it’s so dull is precisely because it doesn’t push dopamine via an algorithm. As a self-diagnosed social media addict, the fact I don’t feel compelled to spend more than 10 minutes there at a time is a good thing.
I’m not sure this ban is the right intervention but there’s no doubt something needs to happen.
'Something must be done... this is something... we must do it!'
This has never been a good argument for new laws.
The first question* when proposing a new law is always what is the gap in the current law that needs addressing? A lot of the time greater focus on existing laws will get the job done.
If there is an actual gap, would the new law actually address the issue? It's surprising that sometimes the answer will be that it won't really.
And if it will, the question will be is it a proportionate response, or are their secondary consequences arising from it which mean it is not a reasonable answer?
*Actually the real first question I suppose should be whether X is an actual problem at all, since different parties and groups will often have different views on that.
Went looking for stats on child suicides which is a lot harder to find than I expected.
One very surprising stat I found from the ONS study a couple of years ago was that teenagers with parents who have a degree are 1.7x more likely to commit suicide than those whose parents do not.
This is absolutely not me trying whataboutism. This has nothing to do with the social media debate in my view but I post it as I found it a surprising stat. Not sure why it should be the case.
I suspect it's down to parental pressure, pressing their kids take the same path or be regarded as a failure. It's pretty hard for a teenager to deal with that.
A lot of kids, regardless of their parents education, may just be happier being a gardener or a brickie than a banker or accountant.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
Happy days of SW radio and the thrill of listening live to Moscow, Peking and Australia! If you think the BBC cannot and would not be sued for libel broadcast over the radio I have bridge......
The BBC has editorial control. Social media companies do not. At least not in advance of something being posted.
You treat lack of editorial control as if it is a force of nature, unfortunately unavoidable. This ends up with a publisher being liable for everything while losing ground, income, and place in the world to immensely powerful 'non-publishers' (LOL) who accept no responsibility for damage or damages but manage to monetise the process at the same time as killing legitimate publishers.
Because of the free for all from the start you now take as unalterable a wild west - like the pre-copyright America which stole from Dickens and others.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
Social media is a…well…media. If I suggest a riot in a pub it won’t go any further unless I’m holding a megaphone and stand by a window. The same cannot be said for Facebook.
Yes, I’m sure like any analogy mine breaks down under any level of scrutiny, but so does yours. But pubs are not media channels.
We regulate what radio stations and television stations can broadcast. Social media channels can’t stop what’s inputted into them but they can control how it is disseminated and to whom. And they should. Like any other media.
It’s why I have no time for the “hurty words on Facebook” narrative. It’s much, much worse to post something inflammatory there than in a drunken rant with your pals in the pub.
Also - I know people take the piss out of Bluesky but the reason it’s so dull is precisely because it doesn’t push dopamine via an algorithm. As a self-diagnosed social media addict, the fact I don’t feel compelled to spend more than 10 minutes there at a time is a good thing.
I’m not sure this ban is the right intervention but there’s no doubt something needs to happen.
'Something must be done... this is something... we must do it!'
This has never been a good argument for new laws.
Agree. Though that can sometimes mean a much more substantial and comprehensive law, rather than a lot of the lightweight kneejerk stuff we get nowadays.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
Happy days of SW radio and the thrill of listening live to Moscow, Peking and Australia! If you think the BBC cannot and would not be sued for libel broadcast over the radio I have bridge......
The BBC has editorial control. Social media companies do not. At least not in advance of something being posted.
You treat lack of editorial control as if it is a force of nature, unfortunately unavoidable. This ends up with a publisher being liable for everything while losing ground, income, and place in the world to immensely powerful 'non-publishers' (LOL) who accept no responsibility for damage or damages but manage to monetise the process at the same time as killing legitimate publishers.
Because of the free for all from the start you now take as unalterable a wild west - like the pre-copyright America which stole from Dickens and others.
Lack of editorial control is an option for those who want free speech, and it is not a bad thing.
Sites with editorial control are not "losing ground" unless their editors are worse than nothing.
A win is a win of course and a Burnham win would sap Reform's momentum. Camp Starmer though will certainly spin any narrow Burnham win with Reform and Restore combined having more than the Labour vote as showing that replacing Starmer as PM with Burnham is not going to suddenly lead to another landslide Labour victory
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
That comparison does not quite work - a mobile phone call is not posted on the internet by the phone company, archived forever, and indexed by Google.
What does that matter? If that were the only issue then it should be sufficient to get the site to take down the offending post and action should only be taken against them if they fail to do so. Otherwise it is exactly the same. The site is acting as the messenger system just like the phone.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
PB.com doesn't use an algorithm to promote the most contentious and divisive comments (we do that organically by responding to the most contentious and divisive comments).
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
That might be a sensible move except we know the Government would not accept that as sufficient.
If the UK government announced a law making platforms with algorithms legally publishers, the White House would be on the phone in seconds.
It would be a start. To ordinary common sense, if the owner of a social media site knows enough about what is on it to individually advertise its contents to millions of individuals, recognising their unique interests, they know enough to be liable as publishers for that content.
(PB has its moments, but doesn't (yet) push the drunken ramblings of particular contributors to six year olds because they also watch Bluey. And PB, at its worst, in comparison with the delights available on the internet, has the tone of an annual meeting of a branch of the Women's Institute.)
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
Happy days of SW radio and the thrill of listening live to Moscow, Peking and Australia! If you think the BBC cannot and would not be sued for libel broadcast over the radio I have bridge......
The BBC has editorial control. Social media companies do not. At least not in advance of something being posted.
You treat lack of editorial control as if it is a force of nature, unfortunately unavoidable. This ends up with a publisher being liable for everything while losing ground, income, and place in the world to immensely powerful 'non-publishers' (LOL) who accept no responsibility for damage or damages but manage to monetise the process at the same time as killing legitimate publishers.
Because of the free for all from the start you now take as unalterable a wild west - like the pre-copyright America which stole from Dickens and others.
Lack of editorial control is an option for those who want free speech, and it is not a bad thing.
Sites with editorial control are not "losing ground" unless their editors are worse than nothing.
1/ Iran has reportedly assessed that Donald Trump is "mentally incompetent" and has incorporated psychologists into its negotiating team to adapt the wording of the proposed agreement "as if the recipient were a [mental] patient ... whose capacity is limited."
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
As has been said, that’s a poor parallel.
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
Its a far better parallel than the Guardian which has been used here.
Maybe arguing about which metaphor is better for social media is a bit of a dead end. Social media is neither like old media or a mobile phone company, while it has similarities to both. We should have rules specific for social media.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
Everything produces social ills. The government does nothing about 99% of them because they either don't care or they are working in their favour. That is an argument for shutting down pubs, banning public marches and protests, and prosecuting people just for showing support for those who the gvernment disagrees with.
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Governments regulate most things to stop social ills. We regulate pubs and public marches extensively, and have done so for centuries. Sorry, have you teleported here from some sort of libertarian utopia? (I’m obviously using the original etymology of “utopia”.)
We don't hold pubs responsible for what people say in them. If we did there would be no pubs left - again something that might suit the Government very well. And we already regulate social media. What is being proposed goes way beyond that.
Social media is a…well…media. If I suggest a riot in a pub it won’t go any further unless I’m holding a megaphone and stand by a window. The same cannot be said for Facebook.
Yes, I’m sure like any analogy mine breaks down under any level of scrutiny, but so does yours. But pubs are not media channels.
We regulate what radio stations and television stations can broadcast. Social media channels can’t stop what’s inputted into them but they can control how it is disseminated and to whom. And they should. Like any other media.
It’s why I have no time for the “hurty words on Facebook” narrative. It’s much, much worse to post something inflammatory there than in a drunken rant with your pals in the pub.
Also - I know people take the piss out of Bluesky but the reason it’s so dull is precisely because it doesn’t push dopamine via an algorithm. As a self-diagnosed social media addict, the fact I don’t feel compelled to spend more than 10 minutes there at a time is a good thing.
I’m not sure this ban is the right intervention but there’s no doubt something needs to happen.
The bottom part is how I feel too.
However, if I think about general principles, I think it's the hardware that is the issue. I believe more in police arresting users for possession and dealers for dealing, and making drug use impossible, than 'smashing the networks' - because where there's demand, something will meet it. So is it really just smartphones that kids shouldn't have? No screens bigger than a smartwatch until you're 16. Potentially only phones that give you six hours' use until 18? Kids on screens are damaging their development. I'm on mine too much - if I'd had a smartphone all through school goodness knows what I'd be.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
Happy days of SW radio and the thrill of listening live to Moscow, Peking and Australia! If you think the BBC cannot and would not be sued for libel broadcast over the radio I have bridge......
The BBC has editorial control. Social media companies do not. At least not in advance of something being posted.
You treat lack of editorial control as if it is a force of nature, unfortunately unavoidable. This ends up with a publisher being liable for everything while losing ground, income, and place in the world to immensely powerful 'non-publishers' (LOL) who accept no responsibility for damage or damages but manage to monetise the process at the same time as killing legitimate publishers.
Because of the free for all from the start you now take as unalterable a wild west - like the pre-copyright America which stole from Dickens and others.
Lack of editorial control is an option for those who want free speech, and it is not a bad thing.
Sites with editorial control are not "losing ground" unless their editors are worse than nothing.
Your 'lack of editorial control' is for others the 'opportunity to cash in to the tune of billions on an uncontrolled loophole in law and policy while wrecking lives and trashing swathes of creative industry'.
Russian operatives ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely through social media and the messaging app Telegram, we found, creating fake online far-right and Muslim groups, which were used to organise acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear.
Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.
The social media companies don’t seem to be doing enough about this sort of thing, so I suggest government should.
According to the BBC report, the police were informed about the nefarious activities of this group, and did nothing. They broke a dozen laws, so why don't we try using those to stop the activity, rather than grabbing more power over speech to supress the resulting chatter?
The possible failings of the police don’t mean we shouldn’t also look at updating the law.
Actually they do. Why keep passing new and more draconian laws if the police won't even bother to uphold the ones we already have?
The police are oh so keen to find reasons to arrest people for incitement or hate crimes whch might cause offence but are unwilling or incapable of dealing with real crimes even when the evidence is staring them in the face.
What is really funny is I can see the police arresting someone for supposedly inciting an attack whilst not bothering to do anything to prevent the actual attack itself. Such is the state of modern law enforcement.
Like many in the public sector, they want an easy life.
Regarding the proposed social media ban for under 16s... The devil is naturally in the detail, particularly around enforcement, but the intent is hard to argue with.
Allowing social media companies to optimise children’s attention and emotional development around engagement metrics may prove to be one of the most damaging public policy failures of the early 21st century.
We impose rigorous safety standards on toys, medicines, food, cars, playgrounds and school buildings. We demand evidence, testing, regulation and oversight before exposing children to even relatively minor risks.
Yet somehow we collectively decided it was perfectly reasonable to hand children devices connected to platforms whose business model depends on maximising engagement, harvesting attention and encouraging compulsive use, then act surprised when rates of anxiety, self-harm, sleep deprivation and social dysfunction started moving in the wrong direction.
If a toy manufacturer discovered a mechanism that kept children compulsively pulling a lever hundreds of times a day, we would ban it. If a food company deliberately engineered products to create dependency in children, there would be parliamentary inquiries. Yet when technology companies use behavioural psychology to achieve similar outcomes, we call it innovation.
Whether a ban is practical is a separate question. But the idea that society should simply shrug and accept unlimited access to algorithmically-curated social media for 12 and 13 year-olds has always struck me as one of the stranger orthodoxies of the digital age.
Future generations may look back on it in much the same way we look back on cigarette adverts featuring doctors.
Totally agree - the way policymakers accepted the guff about them not being publishers was also remiss. I appreciate they aren’t a book publisher or even a newspaper publisher - but they are still the gatekeeper on what gets published, and promoted and demoted.
I don't see why they are less responsible for people publishing comments via their sites than a newspaper publishing comments.
I guess it’s not directly equivalent. Newspapers consider what is published whereas social media platforms publish everything automatically.
Here is the heart of the issue. We got off on the wrong foot. From the get go it should have been obvious that internet platforms are publishers with the same duties as Oxford University Press or The Times. They should not be able to claim the defence that they allow any old libellous or illegal rubbish to be posted any more than the Guardian can. Why should they?
If I posted and published random unchecked stuff from any source on my front door, visible to any passer by in a busy street, I could rightly be sued, and if bad enough rightly be visited by the old bill. Why is it any different for those who publish on the internet.
Because it started on the wrong foot it soon became unstoppable.
(I realise of course that PB is just such a site!)
If you use a mobile phone to make a threatening phone call to someone should the mobile phone company be held responsible?
No.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
I could get on a shortwave radio and broadcast abhorant views to the entire world. The scale of the audience doesn't matter. Unless of course like the Government you want to have complete control of the message. Once again, that is the real reason for these attacks on social media.
Happy days of SW radio and the thrill of listening live to Moscow, Peking and Australia! If you think the BBC cannot and would not be sued for libel broadcast over the radio I have bridge......
The BBC has editorial control. Social media companies do not. At least not in advance of something being posted.
You treat lack of editorial control as if it is a force of nature, unfortunately unavoidable. This ends up with a publisher being liable for everything while losing ground, income, and place in the world to immensely powerful 'non-publishers' (LOL) who accept no responsibility for damage or damages but manage to monetise the process at the same time as killing legitimate publishers.
Because of the free for all from the start you now take as unalterable a wild west - like the pre-copyright America which stole from Dickens and others.
Lack of editorial control is an option for those who want free speech, and it is not a bad thing.
Sites with editorial control are not "losing ground" unless their editors are worse than nothing.
Your 'lack of editorial control' is for others the 'opportunity to cash in to the tune of billions on an uncontrolled loophole in law and policy while wrecking lives and trashing swathes of creative industry'.
And that's it. YouTube amateurs from nowhere are doing the right sort at big broadcasters out of their godgiven rightful revenue and attention.
1/ Iran has reportedly assessed that Donald Trump is "mentally incompetent" and has incorporated psychologists into its negotiating team to adapt the wording of the proposed agreement "as if the recipient were a [mental] patient ... whose capacity is limited."
1/ Iran has reportedly assessed that Donald Trump is "mentally incompetent" and has incorporated psychologists into its negotiating team to adapt the wording of the proposed agreement "as if the recipient were a [mental] patient ... whose capacity is limited."
Comments
You don't currently need to have an account or sign in to anything to watch a YouTube video.
Will this change? Or are they just banning accounts with sign in that then feed you stuff.
What about something like the Sky Sports YouTube channel where they show various sport for free. Will that be banned to under 16s?
Admittedly for now, but they're there!
A player bet against his team on multiple occasions, got found out and suspended. His college then got lawyers involved and unsuspended him. Massive rows continue. Maybe @Jim_Miller understands the details better than I do!
And while I wouldn’t hold the mobile phone company responsible, I would expect the mobile phone company to be good members of society and engage with the government on what they can do to minimise any harms associated with their product, which they generally do. Compare that to, say, X making underage porn and ignoring multiple governments internationally for weeks.
The publisher analogy is even more ludicrous. A publisher - whether of a book or a newspaper - has to take an active decision to publish a statement, an article or an opinion. They are acting as editor for the published piece. That is not the case with social media, chatrooms etc.
If you want it to be like that then say goodbye to social media entirely - and to online freedom of expression. Because no social media company is going to be able to police comments in advance in the way you wish without seriously reducing the amount of legitimate comment that is published. Which of course in the end is exactly what the Government wants. Total control of the media.
Oh and you will be saying goodbye to PB as well.
That’s how social media usually started. However, today’s social media generally involves the social media company choosing to promote certain comments (or videos or whatever) above others. You might post something to X, but whether 2 people or 200 million people see it is up to X. Most of that deciding involves algorithms rather than human input, but it’s active decisions by X to promote certain content in that way. That seems like a qualitative difference and takes X closer to being a publisher. (You could also talk about how bad X is at policing its adverts, which again are there as a result of an active decision.)
As things stand, big SM companies are causing a lot of social harm by choosing to promote certain content over other content. That the choices are automated is neither here nor there.
And that's before we get to the recent tendency to pay people for engaging, enraging content, even when it's untrue.
The guy behind this sort of trash,
https://www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tiktok-fake-news-creator-hate-immigrants
is clearly culpable for shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre for money. But the platform is also responsible for making it a profitable thing to do.
The more important question is what should those rules be? Do you agree that social media can produce some social ills? What should governments do about that?
This is the sort of thing Meta (aka Facebook) has been arguing for – make the device responsible rather than the social media company. I've not read what HMG has in mind.
There is a difference discernible from outer space between a facility allowing a two way conversation as might happen routinely anywhere - like over the fence or in a shop - and a facility to communicate to an infinite audience accessible to the entire planet, that audience including the facility provider.
It requires special ingenuity, and trillions at stake, for people to be able to elide the phone call and Twitter or Facebook, but fail to elide Twitter or Facebook and the Oxford University Press or The Sun.
Accounts based in Russia posted lies about the motive for the arson attacks targeting Starmer, which were spread by figures such as far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8r2l352z2do
The social media companies don’t seem to be doing enough about this sort of thing, so I suggest government should.
It's the use of algorithms to choose which content is presented to the user, which rightfully makes Facebook a publisher (in my view) but PB.com not (except of the articles at the top of the thread).
The social media companies could always bin the use of the algorithms if they didn't want to be classified as publishers.
I would rather social media companies changed their ways, but they’re pandering to Trump right now.
It very much gives the impression of the UK being rather like the Munich beer hall in the relevant Pink Panther film as far as foreign assassins goes.
Not the most exciting
Actually... maybe you are on to something here given that is exactly what the Government has been trying to do.
Available to parents on demand and to others on approved request of court order.
That would allow parents to block things child weee trying to look at and track what’s going on and would solve a lot of other issues - as it would allow you to identify what sort of comments need to be blocked long term to avoid radicalization
Spain 0-0 Cape Verde
Don Quixote, Pedro Almodavar, Julio Iglesias, Francisco Goya, can you hear me? Your boys just took one hell of a drawing.
Spain 1.22bn
Cape Verde 54mn
With hindsight, it probably wasn't a good idea to let social media companies grow rich enough and powerful enough that they could essentially buy the US government. But it's a bit too late now.
Over 30? Fuck off, grandad.
I assumed it was Reform as it is their sort of tactic but the quotes in the thread header seesm to imply it is Labour opponents of Burnham.
Is that correct?
They are using that line because they expect it to be very close.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mQKM8tE8-E
I love that his idea of casual is to take off his tie.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRcKMFh2/
One very surprising stat I found from the ONS study a couple of years ago was that teenagers with parents who have a degree are 1.7x more likely to commit suicide than those whose parents do not.
This is absolutely not me trying whataboutism. This has nothing to do with the social media debate in my view but I post it as I found it a surprising stat. Not sure why it should be the case.
Yes, I’m sure like any analogy mine breaks down under any level of scrutiny, but so does yours. But pubs are not media channels.
We regulate what radio stations and television stations can broadcast. Social media channels can’t stop what’s inputted into them but they can control how it is disseminated and to whom. And they should. Like any other media.
It's a decent working definition of addiction.
I know I am an old cynic but I don't for a second think that Starmer actually cares about the 'social ills' of social media. He just wants to do something that makes him look decisive and also would be very happy to neuter a medium of dissemination over which he has no control
Social media’s main business is people saying things. Social media, as a new technology, is comparatively little regulated. Social media clearly has some ills associated with it: frequent libel, inflames violence, foreign actors abuse it, fraud and other crime, misinformation, addictiveness, societal polarisation etc. Social media has played a role in child suicides, eating disorders, bullying, and more.
This isn’t about the government restricting discourse. There are clearly major problems associated with social media. I’m not saying that banning kids from using it is the best solution, but I find your line of reasoning here unconvincing.
Also - I know people take the piss out of Bluesky but the reason it’s so dull is precisely because it doesn’t push dopamine via an algorithm. As a self-diagnosed social media addict, the fact I don’t feel compelled to spend more than 10 minutes there at a time is a good thing.
I’m not sure this ban is the right intervention but there’s no doubt something needs to happen.
The police are oh so keen to find reasons to arrest people for incitement or hate crimes whch might cause offence but are unwilling or incapable of dealing with real crimes even when the evidence is staring them in the face.
What is really funny is I can see the police arresting someone for supposedly inciting an attack whilst not bothering to do anything to prevent the actual attack itself. Such is the state of modern law enforcement.
Like that Begum case, it would presumably be open to a future government to limit its own discretion or stop the power in question being exercised, but new governments rarely seem keen on that - they presumably trust that they won't misuse the power like their opponents, so it's ok to retain.
The 'don't negotiate with terrorists' thing is just a line from TV shows and movies. Doesn't mean we casually do it all the time or anything, but even places at outright war exchange communications.
This has never been a good argument for new laws.
If there is an actual gap, would the new law actually address the issue? It's surprising that sometimes the answer will be that it won't really.
And if it will, the question will be is it a proportionate response, or are their secondary consequences arising from it which mean it is not a reasonable answer?
*Actually the real first question I suppose should be whether X is an actual problem at all, since different parties and groups will often have different views on that.
A lot of kids, regardless of their parents education, may just be happier being a gardener or a brickie than a banker or accountant.
Because of the free for all from the start you now take as unalterable a wild west - like the pre-copyright America which stole from Dickens and others.
Sites with editorial control are not "losing ground" unless their editors are worse than nothing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czx5ne278x8o
(PB has its moments, but doesn't (yet) push the drunken ramblings of particular contributors to six year olds because they also watch Bluey. And PB, at its worst, in comparison with the delights available on the internet, has the tone of an annual meeting of a branch of the Women's Institute.)
1/ Iran has reportedly assessed that Donald Trump is "mentally incompetent" and has incorporated psychologists into its negotiating team to adapt the wording of the proposed agreement "as if the recipient were a [mental] patient ... whose capacity is limited."
https://bsky.app/profile/chriso-wiki.bsky.social/post/3modvllfdle2k
However, if I think about general principles, I think it's the hardware that is the issue. I believe more in police arresting users for possession and dealers for dealing, and making drug use impossible, than 'smashing the networks' - because where there's demand, something will meet it. So is it really just smartphones that kids shouldn't have? No screens bigger than a smartwatch until you're 16. Potentially only phones that give you six hours' use until 18? Kids on screens are damaging their development. I'm on mine too much - if I'd had a smartphone all through school goodness knows what I'd be.