4chan refuses to pay UK Online Safety Act fines, asks Trump admin to intervene
4chan refuses to pay UK Online Safety Act fines, asks Trump admin to intervene
I absolutely don't care what happens to 4chan, but UK starting to fine the internet for being available there and not complying with their bullshit is worrying.
I don't want the 4chan users to flock someplace else.
Believe me, they've already been everywhere you've been. It's not like once you post on 4chan you're forbidden from making accounts on every other website.
They've already "flocked". The site and userbase is a shell of its former self and it's hey day is long passed. The users aged out or just went to places like kiwi farms, random discord channels, etc.
I mean you're on Lemmy, a good chunk of old 4chan users are here, so you're amongst them.
Yeah. Say what you like about 4chan, but it does a good job of keeping the /b/ types in one place.
Go 4chan!
Not often I get to say that, but this is one case.
you definitely don't have to praise the website for paedophiles.
So has Twitter, Youtube, Insta, Facebook and Lemmy.
He’s praising the site’s action, not the site itself.
“4chan asks Donald Trump for help”
What a weird world.
Indeed, feeling the need to check, I can tell you that we're not in the onion anymore...
I guess it makes sense that they're natural allies.
Calling 4chan the most hateful site on the Internet ignores the fact that xitter is a thing.
The kind of hateful rhetoric and grooming are not unique to 4chan, they happen on Facebook, discord, and roblox. 4chan has just been a minimally filtered representation of underground online cultures for decades now meaning it's still just as much a font of creativity as it is a cesspool of internet refuse.
4chan has been mostly dead as a place of creativity for years. /b/ is mostly creepshots, AI generated porn, and a guy who has been spamming a picture inviting you to eat Andy Sixx’s shit for like 5 years now. /pol/ is basically Stormfront lite.
/lit/ and /mu/ were some of the best parts of 4chan but are shells of their former selves, some of the sfw boards sometimes have things of value but it’s time to move on.
I think people who used to use 4chan.get nostalgic for the rare gems and forget the absolute depraved shit or how much there was, perhaps along with not being able to spot things as well when they used it.
4chan's creativity died when the first Soyjak was posted.
Just because you're comfortable with racial and homophobic slurs in most posts, doesn't mean it's not hateful.
I detest Elon and xitter as much as anyone, but there is zero comparison. If anything, it just shows how far you've gone.
I'm a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they're not followed?
Like, they obviously can't enforce these fines. This article says as much. The fines can't be enforced, but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article). Which are fair measures imo.
Like, to the people saying UK can't do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way? The US has these laws too, like COPPA iirc. It's not really something the UK came up with, it's a bit of a standard with laws like this as far as I know.
I’m a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they’re not followed?
Some laws are bullshit and I commend everyone who decides to ignore them.
but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article)
This has already happened to a number of sites and services, with some voluntarily blocking access from the UK. 4chan's approach is just a bit different in the way that they are waiting to get blocked instead of doing the blocking themselves. It sucks for citizens from the UK, but they are the ones that put the people in power who created those laws.
Like, to the people saying UK can’t do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way?
This has also been the case already. There are a number of American websites that will just straight up deny you access if you visit them from a EU country. Some even cite GDPR as the reason for being blocked. I don't think it's the best solution, but I accept it because I wouldn't want to visit a site that cannot comply with it anyways.
The UK government is basically testing the waters of what it can get away with and also normalising the notion that they could even bother/dare to ask for this to be done in the first place.
It is about shifting the Overton Window for the normies. Especially, over time. For example, the first people to be cancelled or removed from social media years ago, like almost 10 years ago, it was done with some bad fanfare, and the people who did it, Twitter, etc... I remember said that they did it even despite some internal strife over the notion of censorship. Now, people can get cancelled on a dime and no one really cares all that much.
If you told someone 20 years ago that you should pay ca$h out of your own pocket as to get a corporate microphone that listens to you, your family, your children, constantly so it can play songs for you and tell you the weather and gives some other conveniences, 99% people would say that you would have to be fucking insane to do that. Being such a breach of damn common sense and reasonable privacy. Look at people now. Shifting the Overton Window over timr works for fun, control and profit.
Of course, if the US does not play along, then UK's bill goes nowhere outside the UK, or maybe they will try it with weaker geopolitical countries. But governments do this type of thing all the time, under a, "We will push until someone else finally pushes back," mentality.
If the UK really wanted to go after 4Chan, they could contact the FBI or whoever in the USA that could serve relevant via proper channels. This has always been available to them, but this is not about that, it is about censorship and control. Obviously.
Can we just block the UK from the Internet. So they can have their own Internet, like China. That will solve a lot of problems.
But it does effect everyone. Don't you think the lack complete backlash to the online safety act is emboldening similar ideas in the rest of the world, especially the EU? Yes, we've stopped chat control like 2 or 3 times already, but it's being brought up again now.
Let's face it, Starmer's tongue is shoved so far up Trump's fettid arsehole, he can taste his mouthwash. Trump only has to tweet about it and that spineless twat will capitulate and make it the government's most important mission to ensure "international cooperation", or some BS.
Dominoes
I hope this encourages more companies/sites to fight back against stupid laws. If most keep complying, it'll only get worse for them in the future when they make even worse laws.
Pull out all UK servers and ignore uk fines (assuming thats legal wherever u reside... idk how that works) or just pull out of uk.
I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.
I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.
Not going to happen with Switzerland and EU laws. Being completely surrounded by the EU, we're really bad with leverage and are already struggling to not have worse and worse deals forced on us. Plus, we have our own Chat Control type law coming up (which is why Proton is leaving). There's no way we'll take a stance against EU law.
Wow thats a shock. I suppose the second best option would be any country outside of europe, even though the connection speed wouldn't be that fast, it would still be useable.
The EU wants to go after encryption. By introducing means to be able to see messages in services before they are encrypted and sent. Law is currently being discussed.
Basically:
"Trust us bro, we will have the means to read your stuff but we promise to never read them or abuse it. Trust us."
I'm pulled back and forth with this one. On the one hand, 4chan is a shithole that should be taken care of. On the other side, UK laws that try to govern the internet are so overly deranged shit.
Look at bigger picture. Ignore that it is 4Chan and imagine it is a site that you actually like or care about. That is the point.
The reason they go after 4Chan is because they want to normalise this general type of censorship and hope people are gullible or biased enough that they will or would let obvious authoritarian censorship slide because they know some people dislike the site. It is manipulation and how you push the Overton Window towards general censorship.
The point is that the UK should never do that and the law is bad. Whenever you see shit like this, switch the "thing" in question to something you like and be honest to yourself and think if you would be okay with that.
If they can do it easily to things you dislike, then they can as easily do it to things you like.
The fact that is Labour, or the equivalent of the USA Democrats trying to hinder public speech in other countries via this insane laws is something worth noting. Any side can do this.
Are EU privacy laws trying to govern the internet also deranged?
I don't agree with the laws the UK have on this matter, but trying to govern the internet is absolutely nothing new, and most of the time the internet fucking loves it, and praises the EU for trying to do so.
Why would an American website pay fines because of the laws of a random country?
If you offer a service in a country you are subject to their laws.
I'm not sure I like the idea that you're "offering a service" in a country simply by being a data service that can accessed from it.
Someone from Australia can call me and we can chat. It doesn't mean I or my phone carrier are offering a service in Australia.
My website is my website. You visit my website, my website does not visit you. My website is public, you choose to enter it. You visit my website through your infrastructure to get to my infrastructure. My infrastructure is publicly available to you, should you be able to access it.
The governing body of your (second person, not you specifically) infrastructure (the UK government) chooses to impose rules on my actions. Their threat is "we'll stop letting people in our infrastructure from being able to reach your infrastructure."
That is extortion, not working in the public's favor. The UK government is saying they'll block all roads from your house that lead to my website outside of the UK. My website is overseas, brother. The UK is blocking all the ports so you can't sail here. I don't "offer services" to you in the UK, I just don't prevent people from the UK from trying to reach my island. Nothing about my services requires the UK infrastructure. My services keep operating whether the UK government exists or not. How do they have any right over my infrastructure in this scenario?
If this is about ads, the UK has all the right to remove my ads from their country. That is within their right. Anything about blocking people from the UK is within their right, sure, but that's not my problem lol. Sorry you have a shit government lol
What does that mean? Arent most sites available everywhere by default?
The internet is open. It is not up to a site to block a country just because. Which is what happened here, and this why their law is dumb and over reaching.
The argument is more like:
"UK citizens, via the open internet could see your site, and we have now decided that we do not like it. We are not going to complain via diplomacy or via your country's existing Laws or policing agencies, as such, you must pay us £20,000 in fines, per day, for existing because we say so. Despite you having no interests, employees or infrastructure, at all, in our country."
I guess this is what it comes down to...
Personally, I'm a firm believer that IP addresses aren't people and that an IP address range doesn't mean the end user is from that country, so I lean towards point 2.
...buuuuuut I also really don't like the idea that countries control access to things like that. I'm sort of in a "wish I could have it both ways" thing. Because the more sites that are adamant about taking view number 2 the more countries will be encouraged to censor. And let's be honest, this is all about control, there are sensible ways to protect children like creating standardized self labels for parental controls to reject and find on those instead, so... It's hard.
I hate this.
I don’t really understand how this works. If I’m a company whose entire infrastructure is in the US (for example, I don’t know if 4chan is like that) how can I get in trouble with the UK? I don’t have a legal entity there, I’m not doing any business on their soil whatsoever, how can they enforce their laws against me?
I think it only works if the country you are in allows it to happen, as in they have an understanding with the UK (in this case) to follow through with legal stuff. If they were in russia (for example), the UK probably couldn't enforce anything.
Think it is down to the government of your country.
They're "doing business" there by serving ads to their citizens, that's the legal basis for suing them. Whether that goes anywhere depends on the laws governing the business and any leverage UK has (say, going after advertising who do business with the company and in the UK).
Trump admin: "We literally want the same exact thing."
The Biden Admin tried and failed in some fronts and got censorship working in others.
OK so Trump is going to have to choose whether or not to side with fucking 4chan, you know, the site with regular pedophilia threads.
And how would Trump siding with nonces be a surprise?
Wait I thought 4chan died
4chan is a very stubborn website
The hacker known as 4 Chan is BACK, baby!
Not dead. Just irrelevant.
So nothing's changed then.
Not so, more's the pity.
Man, either they strike a blow for online censorship or the UK laws do one decent thing and take out 4chan. Hilarious they're trying to invoke trump tho like, when has that ever worked, he doesnt care about his bootlicking supporters....
It wouldn't be the first time that he's done something because Barron says all of his supporters want him to.
Coming back to this thread later, I’m surprised that it’s mostly being negative regarding 4chan.
I’m use to people defending it when it comes up. Even defending it to my face in synchronous spaces online. The dissonance always weirded me out.
It’s good to see.
Airstrip 1
I mean, they're already creating the Ministry of Truth...
This is the best thing for everyone.
If Trump intervenes: Trump is forced to either acknowledge 4chan and potentially even be positive of it
If Trump intervenes: UK is forced to weaken the OSA
If Trump backs down: He looks weak, UK gets EU a win against American corpos
UK gets EU nothing, UK has left EU.
And the way their politics have gone to shit with mass surveillance and powerful lobbying from anti-LGBT groups, I prefer them not being represented in EU anymore.
It's a win by western governments against American tech oligarchy's desire to be above the law. Which makes it a win for the EU who wants to regulate them and a loss for American oligarchs.
Yes UK politics are fucked. Rest of Europe catching up as well. But I don't envision a scenario where this clash between various bastards is anything but a win for anyone who isn't a bastard.
Everyone watch orange goo protect kids.
I really hope he says no, just because 4chan deserves the leopards.
Why, because they are opposing the safety act just like we are. It just seems a bit naive.
Lots of people here happy to cut off their nose to spite their face. 4chan losing this battle means everyone loses it
If there's someone prepared to argue in court about why the UK's Act is a terrible idea, holy crap is it NOT 4chan
I wonder how discovery would go.
"Your honor here is 30 terabytes of beastiality porn, we think what you want is somewhere in there, have fun going through it"