> The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”
Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
Or the sort of thing bigger companies lobby for to make the entry barriers higher for small competition. Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.
"Crony capitalism consists of but one principle: In-corporations who are protected by regulation, but not bound by it, alongside out-corporations who are bound by regulation, but not protected by it."
His sentiments are pressaged by others, including Adam Smith (1776):
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
> Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.
Exactly. This is the big boy version of "even your petty backyard patio needs a PE stamp" type crap.
Large companies will, and it becomes a moat to smaller entrants.
But it sounds much worse than that: infrastructure for textbook tyranny.
Suppress speech of dissidents against the regime, take away their soapboxes and printing presses, demand that the dissident be identified and turned over to the regime, and put fear of sanctions into all who might be perceived by the regime as aiding dissidents through action or inaction.
>Large companies will, and it becomes a moat to smaller entrants.
They won't care to implement it. They'll follow the letter of the law, which means they'll aggressively block anything that gets (falsely) reported, but they certainly won't follow its spirit.
the spirit is to tell the powers that be who the powerless person is who crossed them, the big companies definitely will follow that spirit. It is the very spirit which moves them.
Because Big Tech doesn't capitulate with tyrants, of course. It's not like there were billionaires right there next to the President while Elon Musk hit a Nazi salute on stage.
Also the kind of system that will absolutely be used by large companies where most of online discussion happens to squash whatever the government doesn't like.
> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
This is true. Which is of a piece with EFF's general bent these days. They stopped caring about big issues of internet freedom long ago and are now just a parade of Big Tech Bad headlines.
And in an era where (1) Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information and (2) we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.
The tech privacy apocalypse is upon us. And the %!@#! EFF is still whining about Meta and ByteDance for its click stream, because like everyone else on the internet that's what they really care about.
I don't understand this comment. The fine article is about a proposed law that would allegedly require the implementation of half-baked censorship systems along the same lines as the DMCA. Are you saying that's not a real issue because the EFF also whines about big tech?
I'm saying I'm fed up with the EFF for their silence in the face of genuine disaster, and am treating them like the click farm they've become. Is NO FAKES a bad law? Probably. Do I trust the EFF to tell me that? Not anymore.
They were a genuine beacon of rationality and justice in the early internet. They're junk-tier blog spam now. And I find that upsetting, irrespective of the status of AI legislation.
When you find yourself getting more angry at people saying “hey, this is a really bad law” than at the really bad law, I think you need to step back and take some deep breaths, maybe get off the internet for a while.
This philosophy is yours is bad for a number of reasons, but I’ll start with the fact that you have essentially constructed a loophole for arbitrarily bad laws to be passed. If you just rage yourself into not caring about bad laws because you’re mad at the people talking about them instead, then when will you ever oppose the bad laws, instead of “getting mad at randos online”? This quickly turns into cynicism and apathy in the face of unlimited cruelty and expansion of government power.
(Regardless of my agreement with either you or ajross. "Get off the Internet for a while" reads close to "touch grass", which dang's specifically addressed: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40851991>.)
I'd strongly recommend people read through mods' "no personal attacks" admonishments and the comments to which they're responding to. These often make the point that even a very mild (and unintentional) barb can read far more biting than it was written:
I'd argue quite strongly the opposite, that the EFF do care very deeply about internet freedom, but:
1. Have come to realise that Big Tech (including many substantial backers of the organisation, in the past if not presently) is itself a major threat and ...
2. That the problem is far more nuanced than early views (Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence> and Gilmore's "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It", see <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/> in particular) suggested. Absolute freedom turns out to not be freedom, for many, shades of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.
The EFF has been yelling that Big Tech is a major threat for like three decades now. The dystopia seems not to have arrived. Until now, when it seems to be rolling out as offical administration policy.
In point of fact, nonsense like "Big Tech Bad" became part of the general antiestablishment mania that got us into this mess! Google and Meta kept our stuff mostly private, it's the nuts we voted for who were the real threat, and we voted for them because the EFF and other thought leaders told us not to trust the people who turned out to have been the good guys.
And I've mostly had it. The EFF turns out to have been a click farm milking sincere but mostly irrelevant outrage into an engine for social destruction. No thanks.
> Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information
> we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.
The latter is the direct and consequential result of the former. Elon Musk is Big Tech, and he specifically engineered Trump's second electoral victory to get back at Gavin Newsom not letting him run the California Tesla factory at full tilt during COVID. He also turned Twitter into a 24/7 far-right slop machine.
Before that, under the latter half of the Jack Dorsey regime, Twitter was a 9-to-5 liberal slop machine. And before that it was so painfully "neutral" that it let all these far-right nutjobs get a foothold on the Internet to begin with. Remember Jack Dorsey rolling out the "world leaders" policy just to justify not enforcing the rules on Trump? Or Reddit vetoing moderators of far-right subs from shutting down their own hellholes? Big Tech's stewardship of public forums ranges from "asleep at the wheel" at best to "actively malicious and incompetent" at worst.
And this is downstream of the broader disintegration of the liberal coalition. The operation of a large enterprise involves many inherently illiberal acts, and thus the business half of that coalition no longer acts as liberals. In fact, I would argue they fell away decades ago. We didn't notice because the business class had distracted us with a culture war, specifically using their stewardship of social media to amplify opposition and division.
I have plenty of complaints about the EFF, but their lobbying against Big Tech is not part of them.
They got the left cheering to support censorship in the guise of fighting "fake news" when it had the uppper hand, lest someone hurt someone's feelings.
Now it will be used againt it, and against in right wing dissidents to the establisment fairy tales too.
There's a giant difference between supporting changes to the law that allows further censorship and yelling at companies to be consistent about the enforcement of their own terms of service.
One's a law that everyone has to follow, while the other one's a made-up piece of text that the company can change at any point in time if they wish to do so.
Doesn't all this assume that any such media is being "social media" shared? The language of this strikes me as moot within private communities. Could this be the unrealized "thing we want" and that is the killing of social media?
Thing is we understand at an academic level that this is a platform design issue not some abstract problem about free speech or personal responsibility.
The solution is to demand governments force social media companies to implement algorithmic friction coefficients.
It’s simply that the economic incentives involved mean there is no political will to make it happen.
The ruling class benefits from the chaos, division and confusion as perpetuated by social media in its current form. They like it just fine the way it is now.
Some Research:
Aral & Eckles (MIT, 2019): Introducing friction reduces misinformation spread without limiting freedom of expression.
• Mozilla & Stanford Studies (2020–2022): Friction (such as unsharing prompts) reduces fake news virality by up to 50%.
• Twitter’s 2021 experiments: Users changed or deleted tweets 25% of the time when shown fact-check prompts before posting.
So all the images need to go through replica filters but ai makes it trivially easy to make substantially different images from a single prompt so now we need an ai to infer the 'meaning' of an image. It all sounds like great news for chip makers and power generators.
I'm not sure I agree with the author at all on this - they make a bunch of bold claims (comparing it to the DMCA which is totally different) without much proof.
I would really like a simple english explanation of what this does without the lobbying/agitator catastrophizing.
Are they saying that this act allows companies to watermark their content to prevent other companies from generating secondary content on their content?
It allows anyone to provide a complaint without any evidence, about any content hosted anywhere, and puts the legal onus on the person hosting that content to prove the negative (that it isn't a "fake"), with the legal requirement to remove the content as soon as is technically feasible (ie, instantly).
So, similarly abusable to the DMCA, but with even broader requirements and even more-impossible-to-prove legitimacy, since it creates a whole new ill-defined class of legal ownership over content.
TLDR: it's a great reason to move hosting outside of the US
Tennessee enacts several genAI laws July 1st; interestingly (perhaps due to state legislator misunderstanding of terminology?), these generic bans are sooo sweeping that they effectively ban owning any GPU.
>Oy': you got a license for that tensor core, mate?!
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But hey at least we're outlawing marijuana beyond what the Federal 2018 Farm Bill authorizes, nationally /s
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Our neighboring Friend down in Texas, the goodly-astute Gov-nuh, was wise to veto similar legislations in his own jurisdiction (due to perceived unconstitutionality / legal challenges).
Talking freely and Reddit don’t belong in the same sentence. Go say something that goes against the zeitgeist. It doesn’t have to be political go express support for the wrong celebrity or cause or opinion on shoes even. It’s a cesspool of brainwashing and propaganda.
No, they should just differentiate between curation done on behalf of and under direction by the user, and curation done to shove new content of the platform's choice in front of the user.
Platforms shouldn't be deciding for you what you see, outside of the obvious outright illegal things like CSAM
No it’s not. It would just remove protections of 230. That means HN can’t hide behind 230 if they don’t action on illegal content (and that doesn’t seem to be a problem)
There is no direct equivalent. The closest social analog is the coffeeshop/bar, but that doesn't quite fit technically. The closer technical fits don't align socially.
>no where else do they get magic exceptions to well established law.
Except for all kinds of established laws broken by the state itself (e.g. extrajudicial deportations), or "fast and loose" startups like Uber and AirBnB, or any big enough company really.
And when they can't fit through exceptions to the law, they magically pay politicians and buy their own laws.
But god forbid people can talk freely about it. What if they don't have the right ideas about things?
In particular, see the very first bullet point: Section 230 makes no mention whatsoever of a publisher/platform distinction. People like you appear to have invented this dichotomy out of whole cloth and attached relevance to it which does not actually exist.
“ No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
> The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”
You already need point a) to be in place to comply with EU laws and directives (DSA, anti-terrorism [1]) anyway, and I think the UK has anti-terrorism laws with similar wording, and the US with CSAM laws.
Point b) is required if you operate in Germany, there have been a number of court rulings that platforms have to take down repetitive uploads of banned content [2].
Point c) is something that makes sense, it's time to crack down hard on "nudifiers" and similar apps.
Point d) is the one I have the most issues with, although that's nothing new either, unmasking users via a barely fleshed out subpoena or dragnet orders has been a thing for many many years now.
This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies. They can afford to hire proper moderation staff to handle such complaints, they just don't want to because it impacts their bottom line - at the cost of everyone affected by AI slop.
The EU has a different approach to this kind of regulation than the USA [0]. EU regulations are more about principles and outcomes, while US regulation is more about strict rules and compliance with procedures. The EU tends to only impose fines if the regulations are deliberately being ignored, while the US imposes fines for any non-compliance with the regs.
So while you can compare the two, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. You need to squint a bit.
The DMCA has proven to be way too broad, but there's no appetite to change that because it's very useful for copyright holders, and only hurts small content producers/owners. This looks like it's heading the same way.
> This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies.
I don't see any exemptions for small businesses, so how do you conclude this?
Yeah one thing the EU as well as most local European courts care about is showing good faith, not just to the court but also to the other party. (Due to how US law works, this isn't quite the case in the US: respect for the court is enforced, respect for the other party isn't required.)
One of the big reasons why CJEU is handing out massive fines to the big tech companies is because of the blatant non-compliance to orders from local courts and DPAs by constantly demanding appeals to them and refusing to even attempt to do anything until CJEU affirms the local courts (and usually ramping up the fines a bit more at that). It's a deliberate perversion of the judicial process so that GAFAM can keep violating the law by delaying the proper final judgement. They'd not have gotten higher fines if they just complied with the local courts while the appeal was going on; that'd be a show of good faith, which European courts tend to value.
Ding ding ding. You are right on the money. Our entire legal system is based on first time offenders getting off with a slap on the wrist (if even that, you'll most likely get away with merely a warning if it's a new law or you were just incompetent or had bad luck) and only if you keep offending you'll get screwed eventually. Our aim is to have as much voluntary compliance as possible to the laws.
In contrast, American jurisdiction is "come down hard from the get-go if it's warranted, but the richer you are the better your chances are at just lawyering yourself out of trouble", and the cultural attitude is "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission". That fundamentally clashes with our attitude, and not just the general public but especially the courts don't like it when companies blatantly ignore our democratic decisions just to make short term money (e.g. Uber and AirBnB).
The fallacy is in expecting corporations to play the role of the government.
Suppose someone posts a YouTube video that you claim is defamatory. How is Google supposed to know if it is or not? It could be entirely factual information that you're claiming is false because you don't want to be embarrassed by the truth. Google is not a reasonable forum for third parties to adjudicate legal disputes because they have no capacity to ascertain who is lying.
What the government is supposed to be doing in these cases is investigating crimes and bringing charges against the perpetrators. Only then they have to incur the costs of investigating the things they want to pass laws against, and take the blame for charges brought against people who turn out to be innocent etc.
So instead the politicians want to pass the buck and pretend that it's an outrage when corporations with neither the obligation nor the capacity to be the police predictably fail in the role that was never theirs.
We don’t punish telecoms, ISPs or the mail company for “facilitating terrorism”. Where do you draw the line?
These rules have serious consequences for privacy, potential for abuse, and also raise the barriers immensely for new companies to start up.
The problem is quite obvious when you consider that Trump supporters label anything they dislike as fake news, even when the facts are known and available to everyone. These rules would allow any opposition to be easily silenced. Restricting the measures to terrorism, illegal pornography, and other serious crimes would be more acceptable.
Your question is like asking “why don’t we have metal detectors and body scanners on every school and public building”. Just because you can, and it would absolutely increase safety, does not mean it’s a good idea.
IMO legislation should focus on how individuals can be made responsible, and prosecuted when they break the law – not mandating tech companies to become arms of a nanny state.
> We don’t punish telecoms, ISPs or the mail company for “facilitating terrorism”. Where do you draw the line?
None of those attempt to curate, moderate, or pass judgment on the content they carry. They are essentially pipes that pass content through.
Social Media (and forums like HN) act more as publishers: they decide what is and is not allowed, and through that moderation, they are more responsible for what user content they choose to make available.
I’m not in favor of this law, but we should not pretend that Social Media is blameless when naughty people use it to publish their stuff.
And yet, why are we here? It would seem some bad actors have lead us to the now familiar, "That's why we can't have nice things." (It's as though permissiveness and anonymity have a slippery slope as well.)
You can hate the legislation, but it would be nice to hear some alternative ideas that go beyond, "We just have to accept all the horrific stuff that the bad actors out there want to throw onto the internet.
It seems like one approach is to oppose such a law, but that is playing defense and will eventually lose.
Another approach would be to develop OSS that fulfilled the basic requirements in a non-tyrannical manner that supports people who create things. There was the example of Cliff Stoll on this site just yesterday. It is objectively wrong for someone to mistreat his creative work in that way.
What would httpd for content inspection look like? Plagiarism detection? Geo-encoded fair use?
Unfortunately this is the inevitable outcome of information and computation (and therefore control) becoming cheap. Liberal political systems can no longer survive in equilibrium. The 21st century will be a story either of ruling with an iron fist or being crushed beneath one :(
One's the kind that affirms existing worldviews, the other asks questions that makes TPTB uncomfortable, like Copernicus's questions about geocentrism.
The term 'disinformation' is also used by TPTB to discredit information that is grounded in observable evidence that goes against narratives that TPTB prefer to maintain.
Accordingly, every single declaration of "misinformation" must be critically evaluated according to available evidence, as the claim itself has been weaponized by bad-faith, self-serving interests of those in positions of power and authority.
The "experts" are frequently wrong, and are not inherently trustworthy. Not every word that slips past their tongue is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They are humans, and like the rest of humans, they lie, they mislead, they are wrong, and some of them and can and do attempt to abuse social consensus mechanisms, including ostracization, to bend public discourse in their favor.
All laws that you want to be strictly enforced, requires violence. This is why people should ALWAYS remember when making laws: "Is this worth killing for?"
I remember some years ago on HN people discussing about a guy that got killed because he bought a single fake cigarrete. IT goes like this:
You make a law where "x" is forbidden, penalty is a simple fine.
Person refuses to pay fine.
So you summon that person to court, make threats of bigger fine.
Person ends with bigger fine, refuses to pay anything.
So you summon that person again, say they will go to jail if they don't pay.
They again don't pay, AND flee the police that went to get them.
So the cops are in pursuit of the guy, he is a good distance away from the cops for example, then they have the following choice: Let him go, and he won, and broke the law successfully... Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.
This chain ALWAYS applies, because otherwise laws are useless. You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
I don't know if the guy you were discussing with is right or not, if digital era result in the need of "ruling with the iron fist", but make no mistake, there is no "strict law enforcement" that doesn't involve killing people in the end.
Thus you always need to think when making laws: "Is this law worth making someone die because of it?"
if a iron fist rule you shoot them, but sooner or later you will end up with situations where their brother will shoot you, or there is a uprising and they lynch the police chef etc. no one wins
in country with strict rules but no iron fist rule the police person who tries to shoot someone who doesn't pose danger for other just because they try to avoid arrest by running away will lose their job
> involve killing people in the end
this is such a misleading dumb fatalistic argument, yes people will get killed, but there is a huge difference between the context.
> You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.
Sure there are edge cases where you threaten shooting at someone, and sometimes police will have to shoot. But only if there is risk to live. And most crimes don't go that far.
>Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.
Well, it seems to be the same situation as everywhere: you either obey or be killed. As far as I know, in the EU there is no option to disobey and survive.
I do not believe that police are permitted to shoot a nonviolent criminal simply because they might escape (in most circumstances). They do have to actually physically apprehend them.
What is this insanity? Obviously the police have instructions that letting someone get away with a crime is better than having a shootout in the street. There's 3 big reasons for that. 2 good, one really bad:
1) other people can and will get hurt if you do that. Plus other damage.
2) no criminal only breaks the law once, so the police will get another chance. And, frankly, if by some miracle the criminal really does only breaks the law just once, that by definition means they're rehabilitated. Job well done.
3) If you use violence you WILL get hurt. Perhaps that's very Jesus of me but it's true. Jesus did not see fit to build in an exception for the police. And states do not take good care of police that get hurt in the line of duty. So for individuals ... SWAT pays well but on the other hand there's demands. Demands you will never meet again if you get even a severe kick in the knee, and that represents years/decades of lost income that the state will not replace. So ...
This is something people forget, but even animals behave like that. And it makes sense: a tiger may be powerful, but he cannot survive long term eating just you. Plus the calories the tiger gains from eating you justify maybe a few scratches, nothing more. In other words: an attack will only happen if the tiger is either desperate or VERY sure there's no risk. Not even a small risk of getting knifed.
Yes, we're still human, and if you really make it clear your a dangerous lunatic, say kill a cop, or kids, or ... yes some police will risk their own safety to arrest/kill you. So there's exceptions. But mostly, no.
In most places, shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.
Your whole post falls apart right there.
Person 'x' refuses to pay a fine - OK, well there are mechanisms where a fine can be automatically applied in some cases, or taken from their assets by court order, or docked from pay. In some places bailiffs/repo men can be called to take assets after fines have been delinquent for long enough.
Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine, even a 'strictly enforced' one.
> shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.
But we have seen that the police may not follow the same principle. There have been cases where police have killed harmless suspects and gotten away with it.
First, would this distinction matter when lives are at stake?
Second, if parts of system does not work as intended, then we should think of how to prevent such situations in the first place.
Where lives are at stake we cannot take a stand "it works on my machine" or "you are not holding it the right way". We need to find solutions to fix or prevent it.
It matters in terms of describing what the system is supposed to be.
If indeed violence is intended be used in context X, then that is something quite different from violence is intended never to be used in context X.
Sure, on the ground, "violence is not intended to be used here, but it is being used here" can be a life-or-death question. But if the answer is that the system is indeed intending to function that way, then the route to changing that is quite different than if some actors are not obeying the rules.
In countries where we don't have trigger-happy cops, the story continues this way:
* The person commits a crime or tort. Your courts fine the person.
* The person doesn't pay the fine. You extract the fine forcibly from their bank account (or force their employer to dock their wages, or forcibly obtain and auction their assets; let's go with the bank example)
* Why does the bank comply? Because you can revoke the bank's right to trade.
* Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.
* What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.
* What if the bank shoots back? Then you send in the army, and at worst case encircle the bank and lay siege to it.
* What if the bank has their own army which they use to break your siege? Send in your bigger army. Also have laws against private armies, and spend your time detecting private armies and breaking them up before they get bigger than the state's army.
Most people comply with the state at the earlier steps in this chain, and the state runs all the smoother for it. But you can see in failed states, one of the main reasons for the failure is some group (or groups) inside the state have managed to develop a bigger army than the state itself, or parts of the official army break away from the current government or attempt a coup. At that point, it's not the current government's country any more, it's up for grabs. The government (and the entire system of law it represents) has lost the monopoly on violence.
The point of the GP's post is that all laws are ultimately backed by violence. Most rational actors don't let law enforcement reach the explicitly violent part, but it's still there.
To bring it on topic, what this highlights is it is much better to fight against bad laws while they are just proposals, it is much harder to fight against bad laws once enacted.
> Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.
Or just cut off their power (or network access, or whatever)?
I know "monopoly on violence" is the term in the literature, but I think it's more like monopoly on coercion than monopoly on violence per se. The latter is one way to implement the former, but not the only way.
To give a hypothetical larger-scale example, if the population relies on a dam for water/power, then an implicit threat to destroy the dam could coerce them without any violence.
Is there a monopoly on coercion? An employer can for example coerce you into coming into the office with the threat of termination, or loss of access, but only the state can (legally) threaten you with violence to coerce you to do so.
Both the state or a private entity seem like they could do the dam example.
Depends what you consider coercion I guess. Perhaps if you view it that way there isn't a monopoly, I'm not sure. The way I'd look at it is that you could always quit your job, and you agreed to its terms beforehand anyway, so threatening to fire you is not exactly coercion... it's more like the contract stopping to be in effect. But I'm happy to see it as not-a-monopoly if that feels more sensible. The point I was disputing wasn't the existence of a monopoly on violence by the state, but the connection between that and "all laws are ultimately backed by violence" - I just don't believe every chain ultimately leads to violence, because states can (and do) coerce people in other ways.
This is why the monopoly on violence is often formulated as "the monopoly on legitimate violence" or "legal use of force"
If you you don't pay your drug dealer, he can't take you to court, because his entire business is illegal. So instead he beats you up to get you to comply with his payment demands. If a policeman catches him doing that, the policeman can legally arrest him for the crime of assault, and can legally use force to stop him beating you up.
I was saying that the government can and does coerce people to do a lot of things without violence. For many laws, just cutting off access to essential goods or services forces compliance without ant violence whatsoever - even if you never comply with anything. Heck, even mere arrest and jail time isn't violent - they can occur pretty darn peacefully.
Of course if you become violent at any stage then that's what you get in response, and the government has a monopoly on doing that legally, but that's not a response to your noncompliance - it's a response to your own violence, which is separate and has nothing to do with the initial law you were actually breaking.
> cutting off access to essential goods or services forces compliance
That's still underpinned by violence. Why would the providers of essential goods or services willingly comply with a state's demands to cut off your access? Perhaps they think you're a good guy and the state has the wrong idea. Let's say they refuse the state's demand.
The answer is the state in turn threatens these providers with whatever it needs to to force their compliance. And it threatens any fourth, fifth, sixth etc. parties it needs to. It threatens them with loss of legal status, loss of revenue, loss of property, loss of freedom. And it ultimately has to use violence to uphold these threats, should everyone it asks to carry out these actions refuse.
It all traces back to state violence, it's just convenient for both the state and subject if the state doesn't have to escalate that far. But it always can. If it cannot - if the subject can successfully defend themselves against a state-backed enforcement of its laws - that's a sign of a failed state.
> Why would the providers of essential goods or services willingly comply with a state's demands to cut off your access?
Because their licenses might be revoked and that would affect how others treat them, both domestically and internationally? Because they have respect for the rule of law and want to live in a country where laws are respected? Because they realize they're playing infinite games rather than one-shot games, and that it might actually be better business to comply? I could cite a million reasons, but seriously: not every single compliance is due to indirect threat of violence. We actually have laws with penalties that simply do not escalate that far, and the vast majority of people still comply with them simply because they're the law, and a lot of people have respect for that. Hell, even violence is not enough to prevent the entire population from turning against you, even in the world's most powerful countries. The idea that every single law is ultimately backed by violence or that that's somehow necessary is just silly. Humans are more complex than that.
And how you make sure bailiffs/repo men succeed? For example I know a case in Brazil, that happened in the 70s, where repo men tried to take a Capoeira Master car, and he just grabbed his huge "Peixeira" knife and chased the repo men away. Justice then decided to just let him break the law, because the other choice was send heavily armed cops and hope they would survive the confrontation with the guy and his students.
Nevermind cases where people don't even have a bank account or anything you can take. Or they protect it well enough.
If a criminal uses violence to escape the law, then yes, violence is usually permitted against them (and they have now committed a violent crime).
Physical force is permitted against nonviolent criminals so they can be apprehended, but lethal force is usually not permitted unless the criminal has used or is about to use violence.
Yes, there are of course instances where nonviolent criminals have been killed, with that act of killing being legal under that framework. For example, if a criminal is escaping in a vehicle recklessly and putting the lives of others in danger. Or cases where enforcers are given overly broad latitude in determining what constitutes a threat of violence. Or tyrannical regimes that authorize lethal force for minor infractions.
But it is not the case that most legal systems say “a criminal can be killed if they refuse to submit to punishment, regardless of the severity of their crime”. That is a misconception. People don’t get killed for not paying fines, they get killed for trying to shoot the person that comes to take them to jail for not paying the fine.
Jacob Blake was shot in the back by an officer and it was justified by saying he was walking to his truck and there may have been a pocketknife in said truck.
Charles Kinsey was shot in the chest for no reason other than being on-scene while another mentally disabled person blocked traffic. He stayed to advise officers that the person blocking traffic was holding a toy firetruck, not a weapon. Kinsey asked the officer why he was shot, and the officer replied, "I don't know."
>Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine
It is, though. All of the things you listed as alternatives to force are actually escalations of force, and at the end of the day you either pay the fine or go to jail and when they come to take you to jail you either come along quietly or get beaten and maybe killed. The backstop of all law and order is a state-sanctioned monopoly on violence.
> The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”
Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
Or the sort of thing bigger companies lobby for to make the entry barriers higher for small competition. Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.
To adapt the words of composer Frank Wilhoit:
"Crony capitalism consists of but one principle: In-corporations who are protected by regulation, but not bound by it, alongside out-corporations who are bound by regulation, but not protected by it."
I love Wilhoit's original, and want to note that he's been active lately on HN as well (<https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FrankWilhoit>).
His sentiments are pressaged by others, including Adam Smith (1776):
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/>
Or some guy named Matthew, somewhat earlier:
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
<https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-12.htm>
> For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
Matthew was a tax collector, this is literally expert advice, not just one of those religious metaphors.
> Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.
Exactly. This is the big boy version of "even your petty backyard patio needs a PE stamp" type crap.
Large companies will, and it becomes a moat to smaller entrants.
But it sounds much worse than that: infrastructure for textbook tyranny.
Suppress speech of dissidents against the regime, take away their soapboxes and printing presses, demand that the dissident be identified and turned over to the regime, and put fear of sanctions into all who might be perceived by the regime as aiding dissidents through action or inaction.
>Large companies will, and it becomes a moat to smaller entrants.
They won't care to implement it. They'll follow the letter of the law, which means they'll aggressively block anything that gets (falsely) reported, but they certainly won't follow its spirit.
the spirit is to tell the powers that be who the powerless person is who crossed them, the big companies definitely will follow that spirit. It is the very spirit which moves them.
Because Big Tech doesn't capitulate with tyrants, of course. It's not like there were billionaires right there next to the President while Elon Musk hit a Nazi salute on stage.
Also the kind of system that will absolutely be used by large companies where most of online discussion happens to squash whatever the government doesn't like.
Or a system intended to prevent and identify dissidence by labeling anything as "fake".
> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
This is true. Which is of a piece with EFF's general bent these days. They stopped caring about big issues of internet freedom long ago and are now just a parade of Big Tech Bad headlines.
And in an era where (1) Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information and (2) we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.
The tech privacy apocalypse is upon us. And the %!@#! EFF is still whining about Meta and ByteDance for its click stream, because like everyone else on the internet that's what they really care about.
I don't understand this comment. The fine article is about a proposed law that would allegedly require the implementation of half-baked censorship systems along the same lines as the DMCA. Are you saying that's not a real issue because the EFF also whines about big tech?
I'm saying I'm fed up with the EFF for their silence in the face of genuine disaster, and am treating them like the click farm they've become. Is NO FAKES a bad law? Probably. Do I trust the EFF to tell me that? Not anymore.
They were a genuine beacon of rationality and justice in the early internet. They're junk-tier blog spam now. And I find that upsetting, irrespective of the status of AI legislation.
When you find yourself getting more angry at people saying “hey, this is a really bad law” than at the really bad law, I think you need to step back and take some deep breaths, maybe get off the internet for a while.
This philosophy is yours is bad for a number of reasons, but I’ll start with the fact that you have essentially constructed a loophole for arbitrarily bad laws to be passed. If you just rage yourself into not caring about bad laws because you’re mad at the people talking about them instead, then when will you ever oppose the bad laws, instead of “getting mad at randos online”? This quickly turns into cynicism and apathy in the face of unlimited cruelty and expansion of government power.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9944753>
(Regardless of my agreement with either you or ajross. "Get off the Internet for a while" reads close to "touch grass", which dang's specifically addressed: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40851991>.)
Your latter source was “you sound like a basket case… touch grass” which has a completely different tone and somewhat different content.
I'd strongly recommend people read through mods' "no personal attacks" admonishments and the comments to which they're responding to. These often make the point that even a very mild (and unintentional) barb can read far more biting than it was written:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982286>
This case is borderline, but I suspect mods would find it on the far side of that border. The original comment reads better without the swipe.
I'd argue quite strongly the opposite, that the EFF do care very deeply about internet freedom, but:
1. Have come to realise that Big Tech (including many substantial backers of the organisation, in the past if not presently) is itself a major threat and ...
2. That the problem is far more nuanced than early views (Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence> and Gilmore's "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It", see <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/> in particular) suggested. Absolute freedom turns out to not be freedom, for many, shades of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.
The EFF has been yelling that Big Tech is a major threat for like three decades now. The dystopia seems not to have arrived. Until now, when it seems to be rolling out as offical administration policy.
In point of fact, nonsense like "Big Tech Bad" became part of the general antiestablishment mania that got us into this mess! Google and Meta kept our stuff mostly private, it's the nuts we voted for who were the real threat, and we voted for them because the EFF and other thought leaders told us not to trust the people who turned out to have been the good guys.
And I've mostly had it. The EFF turns out to have been a click farm milking sincere but mostly irrelevant outrage into an engine for social destruction. No thanks.
> Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information
> we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me.
The latter is the direct and consequential result of the former. Elon Musk is Big Tech, and he specifically engineered Trump's second electoral victory to get back at Gavin Newsom not letting him run the California Tesla factory at full tilt during COVID. He also turned Twitter into a 24/7 far-right slop machine.
Before that, under the latter half of the Jack Dorsey regime, Twitter was a 9-to-5 liberal slop machine. And before that it was so painfully "neutral" that it let all these far-right nutjobs get a foothold on the Internet to begin with. Remember Jack Dorsey rolling out the "world leaders" policy just to justify not enforcing the rules on Trump? Or Reddit vetoing moderators of far-right subs from shutting down their own hellholes? Big Tech's stewardship of public forums ranges from "asleep at the wheel" at best to "actively malicious and incompetent" at worst.
And this is downstream of the broader disintegration of the liberal coalition. The operation of a large enterprise involves many inherently illiberal acts, and thus the business half of that coalition no longer acts as liberals. In fact, I would argue they fell away decades ago. We didn't notice because the business class had distracted us with a culture war, specifically using their stewardship of social media to amplify opposition and division.
I have plenty of complaints about the EFF, but their lobbying against Big Tech is not part of them.
15 years ago that would've been outrageous. But at this point they're just kicking a dead horse.
Maybe 25 years ago. But that ship sailed with PATRIOT act and friends post-2001.
Surprised/not surprised. When surveillance capitalism is the MO for generations, it just becomes the norm.
Personally, I find the world becoming more and more about fighting for survival while simultaneously fuck you I got mine...
They got the left cheering to support censorship in the guise of fighting "fake news" when it had the uppper hand, lest someone hurt someone's feelings.
Now it will be used againt it, and against in right wing dissidents to the establisment fairy tales too.
There's a giant difference between supporting changes to the law that allows further censorship and yelling at companies to be consistent about the enforcement of their own terms of service.
One's a law that everyone has to follow, while the other one's a made-up piece of text that the company can change at any point in time if they wish to do so.
Doesn't all this assume that any such media is being "social media" shared? The language of this strikes me as moot within private communities. Could this be the unrealized "thing we want" and that is the killing of social media?
Thing is we understand at an academic level that this is a platform design issue not some abstract problem about free speech or personal responsibility.
The solution is to demand governments force social media companies to implement algorithmic friction coefficients.
It’s simply that the economic incentives involved mean there is no political will to make it happen.
The ruling class benefits from the chaos, division and confusion as perpetuated by social media in its current form. They like it just fine the way it is now.
Some Research:
Aral & Eckles (MIT, 2019): Introducing friction reduces misinformation spread without limiting freedom of expression. • Mozilla & Stanford Studies (2020–2022): Friction (such as unsharing prompts) reduces fake news virality by up to 50%. • Twitter’s 2021 experiments: Users changed or deleted tweets 25% of the time when shown fact-check prompts before posting.
Good luck defining social media in legislation.
That's my point, this legislation does not define social media at all, but it sure as hell makes being a social media site harder.
Why not ban lying and set up ministry of truth?
Attempts to regulate lying are just cover for push certain narratives to favor political opinions.
So all the images need to go through replica filters but ai makes it trivially easy to make substantially different images from a single prompt so now we need an ai to infer the 'meaning' of an image. It all sounds like great news for chip makers and power generators.
I'm not sure I agree with the author at all on this - they make a bunch of bold claims (comparing it to the DMCA which is totally different) without much proof.
Counterpoint:
https://www.recordingacademy.com/advocacy/news/no-fakes-act-...
Such companies have the resources to sell a used snake skin to an elephant.
I can be easily fooled by such blog entries.
I would really like a simple english explanation of what this does without the lobbying/agitator catastrophizing.
Are they saying that this act allows companies to watermark their content to prevent other companies from generating secondary content on their content?
How exactly does this act work?
This has nothing to do with watermarking.
It allows anyone to provide a complaint without any evidence, about any content hosted anywhere, and puts the legal onus on the person hosting that content to prove the negative (that it isn't a "fake"), with the legal requirement to remove the content as soon as is technically feasible (ie, instantly).
So, similarly abusable to the DMCA, but with even broader requirements and even more-impossible-to-prove legitimacy, since it creates a whole new ill-defined class of legal ownership over content.
TLDR: it's a great reason to move hosting outside of the US
I skimmed the text.
I think it is DMCA for images, tools and derivative works, along as all logging needed to track the creator, the tool and the publisher.
As I said though, I just skimmed the text.
Tennessee enacts several genAI laws July 1st; interestingly (perhaps due to state legislator misunderstanding of terminology?), these generic bans are sooo sweeping that they effectively ban owning any GPU.
>Oy': you got a license for that tensor core, mate?!
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But hey at least we're outlawing marijuana beyond what the Federal 2018 Farm Bill authorizes, nationally /s
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Our neighboring Friend down in Texas, the goodly-astute Gov-nuh, was wise to veto similar legislations in his own jurisdiction (due to perceived unconstitutionality / legal challenges).
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>It would mean the end of Reddit which would be simply glorious
Yeah, god forbid there's a place people talk somewhat freely. They might have ...bad opinions.
Talking freely and Reddit don’t belong in the same sentence. Go say something that goes against the zeitgeist. It doesn’t have to be political go express support for the wrong celebrity or cause or opinion on shoes even. It’s a cesspool of brainwashing and propaganda.
No, they should just differentiate between curation done on behalf of and under direction by the user, and curation done to shove new content of the platform's choice in front of the user.
Platforms shouldn't be deciding for you what you see, outside of the obvious outright illegal things like CSAM
It would also mean the end of HN.
No it’s not. It would just remove protections of 230. That means HN can’t hide behind 230 if they don’t action on illegal content (and that doesn’t seem to be a problem)
Anything else is just a slippery slope fallacy
thats also good. online services need to be held responsible for what they host. no where else do they get magic exceptions to well established law.
what other thing is there that is equivalent to online services publishing user-generated content?
There is no direct equivalent. The closest social analog is the coffeeshop/bar, but that doesn't quite fit technically. The closer technical fits don't align socially.
Literally anywhere with a flyer stuck on the wall. Or graffiti. Is the railroad liable for graffiti spray painted on trains? (Actually asking)
In all these cases, the person who adds "content" does so without permission from the owner of the thing to which it is added.
Your local telephone pole
The people who installed that pole do not actually want you to post things on it.
A library, record store, or craft markets are the only physical analogues I can think of.
the editorial section of the newspaper?
All curated by the newspaper itself. The whole point of Sec 230 is that the host does not need to curate.
The online publishing of unedited user-generated content to the open internet may not be a business model that works.
Not everything has to be a business model
>no where else do they get magic exceptions to well established law.
Except for all kinds of established laws broken by the state itself (e.g. extrajudicial deportations), or "fast and loose" startups like Uber and AirBnB, or any big enough company really.
And when they can't fit through exceptions to the law, they magically pay politicians and buy their own laws.
But god forbid people can talk freely about it. What if they don't have the right ideas about things?
Time to once again post the “You are Wrong About Section 230” article: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
In particular, see the very first bullet point: Section 230 makes no mention whatsoever of a publisher/platform distinction. People like you appear to have invented this dichotomy out of whole cloth and attached relevance to it which does not actually exist.
“ No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
Seems pretty clear to me man
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> The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”
You already need point a) to be in place to comply with EU laws and directives (DSA, anti-terrorism [1]) anyway, and I think the UK has anti-terrorism laws with similar wording, and the US with CSAM laws.
Point b) is required if you operate in Germany, there have been a number of court rulings that platforms have to take down repetitive uploads of banned content [2].
Point c) is something that makes sense, it's time to crack down hard on "nudifiers" and similar apps.
Point d) is the one I have the most issues with, although that's nothing new either, unmasking users via a barely fleshed out subpoena or dragnet orders has been a thing for many many years now.
This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies. They can afford to hire proper moderation staff to handle such complaints, they just don't want to because it impacts their bottom line - at the cost of everyone affected by AI slop.
[1] https://eucrim.eu/news/rules-on-removing-terrorist-content-o...
[2] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/vizr6424-bgh-renate-k...
This is one of those cases where the need to "do something" is strong, but that doesn't excuse terrible implementations.
Especially at a time when the US is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
The EU has a different approach to this kind of regulation than the USA [0]. EU regulations are more about principles and outcomes, while US regulation is more about strict rules and compliance with procedures. The EU tends to only impose fines if the regulations are deliberately being ignored, while the US imposes fines for any non-compliance with the regs.
So while you can compare the two, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. You need to squint a bit.
The DMCA has proven to be way too broad, but there's no appetite to change that because it's very useful for copyright holders, and only hurts small content producers/owners. This looks like it's heading the same way.
> This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies.
I don't see any exemptions for small businesses, so how do you conclude this?
[0] https://www.grcworldforums.com/risk/bridging-global-business... mentions this but I couldn't find a better article specifically addressing the differences in approach.
Yeah one thing the EU as well as most local European courts care about is showing good faith, not just to the court but also to the other party. (Due to how US law works, this isn't quite the case in the US: respect for the court is enforced, respect for the other party isn't required.)
One of the big reasons why CJEU is handing out massive fines to the big tech companies is because of the blatant non-compliance to orders from local courts and DPAs by constantly demanding appeals to them and refusing to even attempt to do anything until CJEU affirms the local courts (and usually ramping up the fines a bit more at that). It's a deliberate perversion of the judicial process so that GAFAM can keep violating the law by delaying the proper final judgement. They'd not have gotten higher fines if they just complied with the local courts while the appeal was going on; that'd be a show of good faith, which European courts tend to value.
Ding ding ding. You are right on the money. Our entire legal system is based on first time offenders getting off with a slap on the wrist (if even that, you'll most likely get away with merely a warning if it's a new law or you were just incompetent or had bad luck) and only if you keep offending you'll get screwed eventually. Our aim is to have as much voluntary compliance as possible to the laws.
In contrast, American jurisdiction is "come down hard from the get-go if it's warranted, but the richer you are the better your chances are at just lawyering yourself out of trouble", and the cultural attitude is "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission". That fundamentally clashes with our attitude, and not just the general public but especially the courts don't like it when companies blatantly ignore our democratic decisions just to make short term money (e.g. Uber and AirBnB).
None of which is acceptable
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The fallacy is in expecting corporations to play the role of the government.
Suppose someone posts a YouTube video that you claim is defamatory. How is Google supposed to know if it is or not? It could be entirely factual information that you're claiming is false because you don't want to be embarrassed by the truth. Google is not a reasonable forum for third parties to adjudicate legal disputes because they have no capacity to ascertain who is lying.
What the government is supposed to be doing in these cases is investigating crimes and bringing charges against the perpetrators. Only then they have to incur the costs of investigating the things they want to pass laws against, and take the blame for charges brought against people who turn out to be innocent etc.
So instead the politicians want to pass the buck and pretend that it's an outrage when corporations with neither the obligation nor the capacity to be the police predictably fail in the role that was never theirs.
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You need to expound on why as your replies are not only unacceptable but remarkably useless.
Try dialogue.
Is it? Why should the big tech giants be exempted from the laws and regulations that apply for everyone else?
We don’t punish telecoms, ISPs or the mail company for “facilitating terrorism”. Where do you draw the line?
These rules have serious consequences for privacy, potential for abuse, and also raise the barriers immensely for new companies to start up.
The problem is quite obvious when you consider that Trump supporters label anything they dislike as fake news, even when the facts are known and available to everyone. These rules would allow any opposition to be easily silenced. Restricting the measures to terrorism, illegal pornography, and other serious crimes would be more acceptable.
Your question is like asking “why don’t we have metal detectors and body scanners on every school and public building”. Just because you can, and it would absolutely increase safety, does not mean it’s a good idea.
IMO legislation should focus on how individuals can be made responsible, and prosecuted when they break the law – not mandating tech companies to become arms of a nanny state.
> We don’t punish telecoms, ISPs or the mail company for “facilitating terrorism”. Where do you draw the line?
None of those attempt to curate, moderate, or pass judgment on the content they carry. They are essentially pipes that pass content through.
Social Media (and forums like HN) act more as publishers: they decide what is and is not allowed, and through that moderation, they are more responsible for what user content they choose to make available.
I’m not in favor of this law, but we should not pretend that Social Media is blameless when naughty people use it to publish their stuff.
As I understood, it propose for broad filter so more content which should fall under "fair use" will now be take down faster.
> not your small mom-and-pop startup
not sure why you said this, it's the artists / content makers that suffer.
Slippery slope. See how far we've fallen.
And yet, why are we here? It would seem some bad actors have lead us to the now familiar, "That's why we can't have nice things." (It's as though permissiveness and anonymity have a slippery slope as well.)
You can hate the legislation, but it would be nice to hear some alternative ideas that go beyond, "We just have to accept all the horrific stuff that the bad actors out there want to throw onto the internet.
It seems like one approach is to oppose such a law, but that is playing defense and will eventually lose.
Another approach would be to develop OSS that fulfilled the basic requirements in a non-tyrannical manner that supports people who create things. There was the example of Cliff Stoll on this site just yesterday. It is objectively wrong for someone to mistreat his creative work in that way.
What would httpd for content inspection look like? Plagiarism detection? Geo-encoded fair use?
Unfortunately this is the inevitable outcome of information and computation (and therefore control) becoming cheap. Liberal political systems can no longer survive in equilibrium. The 21st century will be a story either of ruling with an iron fist or being crushed beneath one :(
Information is as expensive as always it is just copying it that is cheap.
is it? it was always easier and faster to spew bullshit than to refute it, and now we can automate it.
Information, disinformation, what's the difference?
One's the kind that affirms existing worldviews, the other asks questions that makes TPTB uncomfortable, like Copernicus's questions about geocentrism.
Disinformation is not grounded in any observable evidence, and often has no basis in reality or is just wild speculation.
For example, anonym29, when did you stop beating up your partner?
The term 'disinformation' is also used by TPTB to discredit information that is grounded in observable evidence that goes against narratives that TPTB prefer to maintain.
Accordingly, every single declaration of "misinformation" must be critically evaluated according to available evidence, as the claim itself has been weaponized by bad-faith, self-serving interests of those in positions of power and authority.
The "experts" are frequently wrong, and are not inherently trustworthy. Not every word that slips past their tongue is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They are humans, and like the rest of humans, they lie, they mislead, they are wrong, and some of them and can and do attempt to abuse social consensus mechanisms, including ostracization, to bend public discourse in their favor.
there is a huge difference between having strict laws and enforcing them and "ruling with the iron fist"
the later inherently implies using violence to suppress people
That is always same thing.
All laws that you want to be strictly enforced, requires violence. This is why people should ALWAYS remember when making laws: "Is this worth killing for?"
I remember some years ago on HN people discussing about a guy that got killed because he bought a single fake cigarrete. IT goes like this:
You make a law where "x" is forbidden, penalty is a simple fine. Person refuses to pay fine. So you summon that person to court, make threats of bigger fine. Person ends with bigger fine, refuses to pay anything. So you summon that person again, say they will go to jail if they don't pay. They again don't pay, AND flee the police that went to get them. So the cops are in pursuit of the guy, he is a good distance away from the cops for example, then they have the following choice: Let him go, and he won, and broke the law successfully... Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.
This chain ALWAYS applies, because otherwise laws are useless. You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
I don't know if the guy you were discussing with is right or not, if digital era result in the need of "ruling with the iron fist", but make no mistake, there is no "strict law enforcement" that doesn't involve killing people in the end.
Thus you always need to think when making laws: "Is this law worth making someone die because of it?"
> Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.
if a iron fist rule you shoot them, but sooner or later you will end up with situations where their brother will shoot you, or there is a uprising and they lynch the police chef etc. no one wins
in country with strict rules but no iron fist rule the police person who tries to shoot someone who doesn't pose danger for other just because they try to avoid arrest by running away will lose their job
> involve killing people in the end
this is such a misleading dumb fatalistic argument, yes people will get killed, but there is a huge difference between the context.
> You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.
Sure there are edge cases where you threaten shooting at someone, and sometimes police will have to shoot. But only if there is risk to live. And most crimes don't go that far.
>Except pretty much all of the EU operates _exactly_ that way with minor differences. And it works.
Well, it seems to be the same situation as everywhere: you either obey or be killed. As far as I know, in the EU there is no option to disobey and survive.
I do not believe that police are permitted to shoot a nonviolent criminal simply because they might escape (in most circumstances). They do have to actually physically apprehend them.
What is this insanity? Obviously the police have instructions that letting someone get away with a crime is better than having a shootout in the street. There's 3 big reasons for that. 2 good, one really bad:
1) other people can and will get hurt if you do that. Plus other damage.
2) no criminal only breaks the law once, so the police will get another chance. And, frankly, if by some miracle the criminal really does only breaks the law just once, that by definition means they're rehabilitated. Job well done.
3) If you use violence you WILL get hurt. Perhaps that's very Jesus of me but it's true. Jesus did not see fit to build in an exception for the police. And states do not take good care of police that get hurt in the line of duty. So for individuals ... SWAT pays well but on the other hand there's demands. Demands you will never meet again if you get even a severe kick in the knee, and that represents years/decades of lost income that the state will not replace. So ...
This is something people forget, but even animals behave like that. And it makes sense: a tiger may be powerful, but he cannot survive long term eating just you. Plus the calories the tiger gains from eating you justify maybe a few scratches, nothing more. In other words: an attack will only happen if the tiger is either desperate or VERY sure there's no risk. Not even a small risk of getting knifed.
Yes, we're still human, and if you really make it clear your a dangerous lunatic, say kill a cop, or kids, or ... yes some police will risk their own safety to arrest/kill you. So there's exceptions. But mostly, no.
Murder by cop only applies to the individual.
Never in the history of our country, was a company that openly flaunted the law, and was murdered by cop or judge.
What's the saying? "I'll believe in the death penalty when they kill a corporation in Texas"
In most places, shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.
Your whole post falls apart right there.
Person 'x' refuses to pay a fine - OK, well there are mechanisms where a fine can be automatically applied in some cases, or taken from their assets by court order, or docked from pay. In some places bailiffs/repo men can be called to take assets after fines have been delinquent for long enough.
Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine, even a 'strictly enforced' one.
> shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.
But we have seen that the police may not follow the same principle. There have been cases where police have killed harmless suspects and gotten away with it.
But is that a part of the design of the system, or parts of the system not behaving as intended?
First, would this distinction matter when lives are at stake?
Second, if parts of system does not work as intended, then we should think of how to prevent such situations in the first place.
Where lives are at stake we cannot take a stand "it works on my machine" or "you are not holding it the right way". We need to find solutions to fix or prevent it.
It matters in terms of describing what the system is supposed to be.
If indeed violence is intended be used in context X, then that is something quite different from violence is intended never to be used in context X.
Sure, on the ground, "violence is not intended to be used here, but it is being used here" can be a life-or-death question. But if the answer is that the system is indeed intending to function that way, then the route to changing that is quite different than if some actors are not obeying the rules.
All countries exist as distinct entities because they can maintain what Max Weber called the monopoly on violence within their geographic bounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_continuum
In countries where we don't have trigger-happy cops, the story continues this way:
* The person commits a crime or tort. Your courts fine the person.
* The person doesn't pay the fine. You extract the fine forcibly from their bank account (or force their employer to dock their wages, or forcibly obtain and auction their assets; let's go with the bank example)
* Why does the bank comply? Because you can revoke the bank's right to trade.
* Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.
* What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.
* What if the bank shoots back? Then you send in the army, and at worst case encircle the bank and lay siege to it.
* What if the bank has their own army which they use to break your siege? Send in your bigger army. Also have laws against private armies, and spend your time detecting private armies and breaking them up before they get bigger than the state's army.
Most people comply with the state at the earlier steps in this chain, and the state runs all the smoother for it. But you can see in failed states, one of the main reasons for the failure is some group (or groups) inside the state have managed to develop a bigger army than the state itself, or parts of the official army break away from the current government or attempt a coup. At that point, it's not the current government's country any more, it's up for grabs. The government (and the entire system of law it represents) has lost the monopoly on violence.
The point of the GP's post is that all laws are ultimately backed by violence. Most rational actors don't let law enforcement reach the explicitly violent part, but it's still there.
To bring it on topic, what this highlights is it is much better to fight against bad laws while they are just proposals, it is much harder to fight against bad laws once enacted.
> Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.
Or just cut off their power (or network access, or whatever)?
I know "monopoly on violence" is the term in the literature, but I think it's more like monopoly on coercion than monopoly on violence per se. The latter is one way to implement the former, but not the only way.
To give a hypothetical larger-scale example, if the population relies on a dam for water/power, then an implicit threat to destroy the dam could coerce them without any violence.
There is no functional difference between behavior coerced by violence and behavior coerced by the threat of violence.
And neither is what I wrote. Threatening to destroy a dam or threatening to cut off a building's power is not threatening violence.
Is there a monopoly on coercion? An employer can for example coerce you into coming into the office with the threat of termination, or loss of access, but only the state can (legally) threaten you with violence to coerce you to do so.
Both the state or a private entity seem like they could do the dam example.
Depends what you consider coercion I guess. Perhaps if you view it that way there isn't a monopoly, I'm not sure. The way I'd look at it is that you could always quit your job, and you agreed to its terms beforehand anyway, so threatening to fire you is not exactly coercion... it's more like the contract stopping to be in effect. But I'm happy to see it as not-a-monopoly if that feels more sensible. The point I was disputing wasn't the existence of a monopoly on violence by the state, but the connection between that and "all laws are ultimately backed by violence" - I just don't believe every chain ultimately leads to violence, because states can (and do) coerce people in other ways.
This is why the monopoly on violence is often formulated as "the monopoly on legitimate violence" or "legal use of force"
If you you don't pay your drug dealer, he can't take you to court, because his entire business is illegal. So instead he beats you up to get you to comply with his payment demands. If a policeman catches him doing that, the policeman can legally arrest him for the crime of assault, and can legally use force to stop him beating you up.
That... has nothing to do with what I said?
I was saying that the government can and does coerce people to do a lot of things without violence. For many laws, just cutting off access to essential goods or services forces compliance without ant violence whatsoever - even if you never comply with anything. Heck, even mere arrest and jail time isn't violent - they can occur pretty darn peacefully.
Of course if you become violent at any stage then that's what you get in response, and the government has a monopoly on doing that legally, but that's not a response to your noncompliance - it's a response to your own violence, which is separate and has nothing to do with the initial law you were actually breaking.
> cutting off access to essential goods or services forces compliance
That's still underpinned by violence. Why would the providers of essential goods or services willingly comply with a state's demands to cut off your access? Perhaps they think you're a good guy and the state has the wrong idea. Let's say they refuse the state's demand.
The answer is the state in turn threatens these providers with whatever it needs to to force their compliance. And it threatens any fourth, fifth, sixth etc. parties it needs to. It threatens them with loss of legal status, loss of revenue, loss of property, loss of freedom. And it ultimately has to use violence to uphold these threats, should everyone it asks to carry out these actions refuse.
It all traces back to state violence, it's just convenient for both the state and subject if the state doesn't have to escalate that far. But it always can. If it cannot - if the subject can successfully defend themselves against a state-backed enforcement of its laws - that's a sign of a failed state.
> Why would the providers of essential goods or services willingly comply with a state's demands to cut off your access?
Because their licenses might be revoked and that would affect how others treat them, both domestically and internationally? Because they have respect for the rule of law and want to live in a country where laws are respected? Because they realize they're playing infinite games rather than one-shot games, and that it might actually be better business to comply? I could cite a million reasons, but seriously: not every single compliance is due to indirect threat of violence. We actually have laws with penalties that simply do not escalate that far, and the vast majority of people still comply with them simply because they're the law, and a lot of people have respect for that. Hell, even violence is not enough to prevent the entire population from turning against you, even in the world's most powerful countries. The idea that every single law is ultimately backed by violence or that that's somehow necessary is just silly. Humans are more complex than that.
And how you make sure bailiffs/repo men succeed? For example I know a case in Brazil, that happened in the 70s, where repo men tried to take a Capoeira Master car, and he just grabbed his huge "Peixeira" knife and chased the repo men away. Justice then decided to just let him break the law, because the other choice was send heavily armed cops and hope they would survive the confrontation with the guy and his students.
Nevermind cases where people don't even have a bank account or anything you can take. Or they protect it well enough.
If a criminal uses violence to escape the law, then yes, violence is usually permitted against them (and they have now committed a violent crime).
Physical force is permitted against nonviolent criminals so they can be apprehended, but lethal force is usually not permitted unless the criminal has used or is about to use violence.
Yes, there are of course instances where nonviolent criminals have been killed, with that act of killing being legal under that framework. For example, if a criminal is escaping in a vehicle recklessly and putting the lives of others in danger. Or cases where enforcers are given overly broad latitude in determining what constitutes a threat of violence. Or tyrannical regimes that authorize lethal force for minor infractions.
But it is not the case that most legal systems say “a criminal can be killed if they refuse to submit to punishment, regardless of the severity of their crime”. That is a misconception. People don’t get killed for not paying fines, they get killed for trying to shoot the person that comes to take them to jail for not paying the fine.
>a clear and present threat to life
Jacob Blake was shot in the back by an officer and it was justified by saying he was walking to his truck and there may have been a pocketknife in said truck.
Charles Kinsey was shot in the chest for no reason other than being on-scene while another mentally disabled person blocked traffic. He stayed to advise officers that the person blocking traffic was holding a toy firetruck, not a weapon. Kinsey asked the officer why he was shot, and the officer replied, "I don't know."
>Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine
It is, though. All of the things you listed as alternatives to force are actually escalations of force, and at the end of the day you either pay the fine or go to jail and when they come to take you to jail you either come along quietly or get beaten and maybe killed. The backstop of all law and order is a state-sanctioned monopoly on violence.
how do you have strict laws and enforce them without violence?
And what does “enforcement” mean in your mind? The western censorship regime isn’t being implemented by asking nicely…