Only in theory. If I remember correctly, the "penalty of perjury" is applied to only some small part of the claim, which makes it easy for all but the most blatantly malicious claims (and possibly even those) to get off scot free by claiming a honest mistake.
Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material. There is the root problem. In a world were we’re ruled by Epstein friends, this is probably not gonna happen though
Sure, but let's prioritize catching actual criminals, right? Somehow US started completely ignoring the actual criminals and demanding platforms to play police and not try to punish the actual sources of lawbreaking.
I think the point they might be trying to make is that there are religious and socially conservative groups that intentionally misclassify anything even remotely related to LBTQ topics as “pornography” so that anti-pornography laws can be used to silence anyone and anything that opposes their regressive views on sexuality, as one example. So it is a line that must be tread carefully.
Ah thanks that makes sense. And it indeed does not matter to the point Im making, which is some censorship, such as child porn, is good.
People can disagree on what that means, although I think there are some very obvious examples. Unless you think NOTHING called child porn should be censored because it might not actually be child porn, you can see how its a non factor.
It matters because if you can't determine if something is child porn, then you'll end up overblocking, so it doesn't matter if it "exists" and "should be censored"
But my point is some censorship is good. Such as child porn. We can disagree on what constitutes child porn in practice but you arent saying nothing should be censored right?
You do think there is such thing as child porn right? And that it should be censored?
Im not claiming more censorship is better. So I agree it could be overapplied. Im saying some censorship is clearly good.
Sure! Great slogan! Who can disagree! Now, let's define the terms?
What's censorship? Don't we all want some sort of censoring of content? If someone doxxxes me, posts revenge porn of me, threatens me and my family with credible threats of harm, shares my credit card numbers and bank/Bitcoin/Ethereum accounts, uploads all 400 of my password credentials and my mobile phone#, posts videos of them strangling my dog, wages a campaign to redefine my personal name into a perverted sexual practice...
Aren't those the sorts of things where we encourage the censorship of content? Do those fall outside of our definition of the term, so that "censorship" is bad, but "moderation" is good?
If someone gets a hold of "F/OSS" software and distributes it contrary to the licensing and violates that licensing, do we want their distribution censored or suppressed or, what's the term for good censorship? LLMs and generative AIs are moderated/constrained as a matter of course, and we've got the entire board here in an uproar over too much moderation, or too little? Because AI Slop Is Ruining Everything and please rein it in?
Our Founding Fathers espoused "Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion" but is that an unbounded, unchecked, lasseiz-faire freedom that they envisioned, or were there boundaries?
If you want to talk in the american context, its not like they wrote the constitution yesterday, there is hundreds of years of juriprudence on the issue.
To be sure its not an easy question, but we aren't starting from zero here.
It only took 13 minutes for an account to bulls-eye exactly the incident I was referring to.
Sure, "fair game", whatever, how can you "censor" a grassroots parody/mockery like this? Part of the game was, it wasn't actually stoppable in any meaningful fashion.
It seems rude, unethical, puerile even, to do this name-calling and dragging through the mud, if you will, and it was perpetrated/spearheaded, so to speak, by a journalist whose morals and platform encouraged that sort of tactic.
I don't think "censorship" was a solution to that incident, and since Mr. Santorum was a politician then "fair game" is a meaningless circumscription.
But perhaps the whole episode should reflect more on the character of the originator, rather than the target?
In the US there is lobbying. In Spain there is soccer. I have seen crazy things done just for soccer. The town I used to live in closed my street for a few weeks during one world cup. I wasn't able to use my garage during all that time.
Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.
> Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.
Bread and circuses. Whatever it takes to suppress the instinctual nationalistic ambitions of the people by redirecting their spirits and energy into /dev/null
Those are my thoughts too. I believe there was a world cup or euro cup during the 2008 crisis, which Spain suffered specially badly. All countries were getting out of the "hole" except Spain, but hey we won the euro cup so suddenly our country was the best and everyone forgot about it
... Out of curiosity, why did they close the street? Was it to turn it into public walking space? (I'm trying to imagine a reason and coming up short...)
It's a wide street and they installed a screen. I guess that's not something that you can set-up for every match so they decided to leave it up the whole time.
The problem I have with it is not that my street was closed. It's that soccer always gets all the preferential treatment. Why not set that up for badminton or tennis? We have spectacular players but soccer seems to be the only important sport
Having had this discussion many times, the conclusion we often come to is that part of the popular success of football is the scarcity and simplicity.
In most sports, you have a world championship every year, meanwhile, a World Cup happens only every four years.
When you have screens and stuff setup by the city to follow a World Cup, the crowds are not made of die hard football fans, the majority of people there are normies that don't give a hoot about football during the 47 other months of a WC loop. Here we call them "footix".
If the WC was happening every year, they would be bored and less and less of them would come out to the public events.
Meanwhile, making it only every four years, they have time to forget that they didn't quite enjoyed it, they can believe things are very different from last time, and they agree to reserve part of their mental bandwidth to the event.
They wouldn't do this on a yearly basis because they fundamentally don't care about football.
They want to enjoy sharing a unique experience surrounded by friends, family and random peers.
You can't do this every year because it removes the special character of it.
To illustrate this further: here we have the Tour de France (cycling), that happens every year, so no scarcity.
Unless a stage passes near you. Which is something that happens even less often than a World Cup.
In that case, people with no interest in cycling will go to the side of the road and go crazy.
Sometimes places close streets for traffic control.
The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones.
A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.
> Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.
I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".
That’s crazy, in the Netherlands (though about 16x smaller than Texas) the 10 biggest stadiums in the country are Football (soccer) stadiums ranging from 10400 capacity at #10 to about 56000 capacity for the #1 stadium (build for 130 million euro). All at the highest paid level of professional football.
30 _high school_ stadiums at 10000+ I can’t even fathom!
To take the other side, my understanding is in the US there aren't any "second division" teams. You've got 350 million people and about 30 professional American football teams, or 10 million people per team
That would be the equivalent of having the top 6 teams in England's Premier League -- which based on last season would be Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth*
College and High School are more like the equivalent of national teams in England, although in America is seems that the taxpayer pays for these, where in the UK they are private businesses.
* There was a coup attempt a few years ago by a bunch of european teams to leave league football behind and make more money, because in the uk "only those 6 teams win". Chelsea and Tottenham fancied themselves, Tottenham narrowly avoided relegation and finished 17th, and Chelsea were topped by such internationally famous teams as Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth
It's ridiculous. Not being able to work (or having tools/certain websites fail randomly each time there's a high audience match) because "soccer" tells you a lot about the priorities of the country. Or at least of the elements that make these kinds of decisions and policies possible...
We even got an isitchristmas.com-like website to track this (https://hayahora.futbol/). I admit I find it a bit amusing.
I can assure you the situation in Italy is just as bad.
We do have an independent telecommunications authority, but it's been subservient to the Serie A (rather, the companies who own the broadcasting /streaming rights) diktat almost completely.
It's their fault to begin with, they should have not caved to blocking anyone, they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.
But hopefully this is the beginning of them growing a backbone.
>they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.
Here in the UK, that's basically what BT said back in the early days of rights holders trying to block this stuff.
The rights holders took them to court and managed to get the court to order them to use Cleanfeed (a system that was only used, at the time, to block Child Sexual Abuse Material) to block Newzbin.
Not only did it help kick all this off but, overnight, it meant there was a socially acceptable reason for people to share knowledge on how to circumvent Cleanfeed.
The rights-holders give zero shits about the collateral damage they create with stuff like this
the global trend is not good. in south korea the new law prevents anyone from posting memes of the president because they require public square operators to purchase AI hardware that is already expensive at inflated markup (with completely opaque RFP bidding process and no disclosure of beneficiaries) and every image and post be monitored for "fake news/disinformation" by a partisan government body created by the President. Bill C-22 in Canada, la Liga blocking cloudflare, UK requiring IDs....on an unrelated note Playstation store removing purchased games, zero day disclosures not being awarded so they end up in the black market leading to more data leaks....
this entire digital/internet industrial complex is beginning to show real issues. im hoping there is technology in the works that can give us back the old magic of the late 90s internet.
It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.
Really, it comes down to this: censorship is bad. Always.
If someone violates the law, get a court judgement. With the judgement in hand, take down that specific material.
Too much work? Tough...
> It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.
Isn't it under penalty of purjury?
Only in theory. If I remember correctly, the "penalty of perjury" is applied to only some small part of the claim, which makes it easy for all but the most blatantly malicious claims (and possibly even those) to get off scot free by claiming a honest mistake.
Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?
If not you can get around the absolute statement “censorship is always bad” by just making more things illegal.
I think censorship is so clearly good in some scenarios that we would never think to even debate it. Like child porn.
Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material. There is the root problem. In a world were we’re ruled by Epstein friends, this is probably not gonna happen though
>Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material.
Uhhh how about both? It is vital the material be taken down as well.
Sure, but let's prioritize catching actual criminals, right? Somehow US started completely ignoring the actual criminals and demanding platforms to play police and not try to punish the actual sources of lawbreaking.
I think they should catch the criminals as well, like I already clearly stated. They just aren’t mutually exclusive.
How do you know if something is child porn?
I dont think it matters for the point im making. Child porn exists and should be censored.
What are you suggesting?
I think the point they might be trying to make is that there are religious and socially conservative groups that intentionally misclassify anything even remotely related to LBTQ topics as “pornography” so that anti-pornography laws can be used to silence anyone and anything that opposes their regressive views on sexuality, as one example. So it is a line that must be tread carefully.
Ah thanks that makes sense. And it indeed does not matter to the point Im making, which is some censorship, such as child porn, is good.
People can disagree on what that means, although I think there are some very obvious examples. Unless you think NOTHING called child porn should be censored because it might not actually be child porn, you can see how its a non factor.
It matters because if you can't determine if something is child porn, then you'll end up overblocking, so it doesn't matter if it "exists" and "should be censored"
But my point is some censorship is good. Such as child porn. We can disagree on what constitutes child porn in practice but you arent saying nothing should be censored right?
You do think there is such thing as child porn right? And that it should be censored?
Im not claiming more censorship is better. So I agree it could be overapplied. Im saying some censorship is clearly good.
soon with the age verification laws, the mass surveillance laws coming
we'll have a great wall of Europe ... my guess is that they're following the Russian / Chinese model.
banning of VPN is a matter of time.
then the days of free or anonymous internet is behind us.
> censorship is bad. Always.
Sure! Great slogan! Who can disagree! Now, let's define the terms?
What's censorship? Don't we all want some sort of censoring of content? If someone doxxxes me, posts revenge porn of me, threatens me and my family with credible threats of harm, shares my credit card numbers and bank/Bitcoin/Ethereum accounts, uploads all 400 of my password credentials and my mobile phone#, posts videos of them strangling my dog, wages a campaign to redefine my personal name into a perverted sexual practice...
Aren't those the sorts of things where we encourage the censorship of content? Do those fall outside of our definition of the term, so that "censorship" is bad, but "moderation" is good?
If someone gets a hold of "F/OSS" software and distributes it contrary to the licensing and violates that licensing, do we want their distribution censored or suppressed or, what's the term for good censorship? LLMs and generative AIs are moderated/constrained as a matter of course, and we've got the entire board here in an uproar over too much moderation, or too little? Because AI Slop Is Ruining Everything and please rein it in?
Our Founding Fathers espoused "Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion" but is that an unbounded, unchecked, lasseiz-faire freedom that they envisioned, or were there boundaries?
If you want to talk in the american context, its not like they wrote the constitution yesterday, there is hundreds of years of juriprudence on the issue.
To be sure its not an easy question, but we aren't starting from zero here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Rick Santorum was a public figure, his name is fair game.
It only took 13 minutes for an account to bulls-eye exactly the incident I was referring to.
Sure, "fair game", whatever, how can you "censor" a grassroots parody/mockery like this? Part of the game was, it wasn't actually stoppable in any meaningful fashion.
It seems rude, unethical, puerile even, to do this name-calling and dragging through the mud, if you will, and it was perpetrated/spearheaded, so to speak, by a journalist whose morals and platform encouraged that sort of tactic.
I don't think "censorship" was a solution to that incident, and since Mr. Santorum was a politician then "fair game" is a meaningless circumscription.
But perhaps the whole episode should reflect more on the character of the originator, rather than the target?
Such an obvious thing, should have been there from day 1.
The situation in Spain is particularly crazy. How can la liga have this much power over the Internet?
In the US there is lobbying. In Spain there is soccer. I have seen crazy things done just for soccer. The town I used to live in closed my street for a few weeks during one world cup. I wasn't able to use my garage during all that time.
Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.
I hated that
> Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.
Bread and circuses. Whatever it takes to suppress the instinctual nationalistic ambitions of the people by redirecting their spirits and energy into /dev/null
Those are my thoughts too. I believe there was a world cup or euro cup during the 2008 crisis, which Spain suffered specially badly. All countries were getting out of the "hole" except Spain, but hey we won the euro cup so suddenly our country was the best and everyone forgot about it
... Out of curiosity, why did they close the street? Was it to turn it into public walking space? (I'm trying to imagine a reason and coming up short...)
It's a wide street and they installed a screen. I guess that's not something that you can set-up for every match so they decided to leave it up the whole time.
The problem I have with it is not that my street was closed. It's that soccer always gets all the preferential treatment. Why not set that up for badminton or tennis? We have spectacular players but soccer seems to be the only important sport
Having had this discussion many times, the conclusion we often come to is that part of the popular success of football is the scarcity and simplicity.
In most sports, you have a world championship every year, meanwhile, a World Cup happens only every four years.
When you have screens and stuff setup by the city to follow a World Cup, the crowds are not made of die hard football fans, the majority of people there are normies that don't give a hoot about football during the 47 other months of a WC loop. Here we call them "footix". If the WC was happening every year, they would be bored and less and less of them would come out to the public events. Meanwhile, making it only every four years, they have time to forget that they didn't quite enjoyed it, they can believe things are very different from last time, and they agree to reserve part of their mental bandwidth to the event. They wouldn't do this on a yearly basis because they fundamentally don't care about football. They want to enjoy sharing a unique experience surrounded by friends, family and random peers. You can't do this every year because it removes the special character of it.
To illustrate this further: here we have the Tour de France (cycling), that happens every year, so no scarcity. Unless a stage passes near you. Which is something that happens even less often than a World Cup. In that case, people with no interest in cycling will go to the side of the road and go crazy.
Bit of a catch 22 isn't it?
Soccer is the only important sport so it gets all of the attention
Soccer gets all of the attention so it stays the only important sport
Sometimes places close streets for traffic control.
The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones.
A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.
> Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.
I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".
That’s crazy, in the Netherlands (though about 16x smaller than Texas) the 10 biggest stadiums in the country are Football (soccer) stadiums ranging from 10400 capacity at #10 to about 56000 capacity for the #1 stadium (build for 130 million euro). All at the highest paid level of professional football.
30 _high school_ stadiums at 10000+ I can’t even fathom!
To take the other side, my understanding is in the US there aren't any "second division" teams. You've got 350 million people and about 30 professional American football teams, or 10 million people per team
That would be the equivalent of having the top 6 teams in England's Premier League -- which based on last season would be Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth*
College and High School are more like the equivalent of national teams in England, although in America is seems that the taxpayer pays for these, where in the UK they are private businesses.
* There was a coup attempt a few years ago by a bunch of european teams to leave league football behind and make more money, because in the uk "only those 6 teams win". Chelsea and Tottenham fancied themselves, Tottenham narrowly avoided relegation and finished 17th, and Chelsea were topped by such internationally famous teams as Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth
It's ridiculous. Not being able to work (or having tools/certain websites fail randomly each time there's a high audience match) because "soccer" tells you a lot about the priorities of the country. Or at least of the elements that make these kinds of decisions and policies possible...
We even got an isitchristmas.com-like website to track this (https://hayahora.futbol/). I admit I find it a bit amusing.
I can assure you the situation in Italy is just as bad.
We do have an independent telecommunications authority, but it's been subservient to the Serie A (rather, the companies who own the broadcasting /streaming rights) diktat almost completely.
It's their fault to begin with, they should have not caved to blocking anyone, they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.
But hopefully this is the beginning of them growing a backbone.
>they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.
Here in the UK, that's basically what BT said back in the early days of rights holders trying to block this stuff.
The rights holders took them to court and managed to get the court to order them to use Cleanfeed (a system that was only used, at the time, to block Child Sexual Abuse Material) to block Newzbin.
Not only did it help kick all this off but, overnight, it meant there was a socially acceptable reason for people to share knowledge on how to circumvent Cleanfeed.
The rights-holders give zero shits about the collateral damage they create with stuff like this
Agreed
Enforcement should be a cost/benefit analysis.
RN, there is very little cost imposed on the alleged rightsholders, so they spam freely.
The real damage from over blocking isn't a few customer service calls to the ISP or a couple of lost customers...
The real damage is the millions of hours of wasted time of the citizens of the nation.
Absolutely.
No such power without consequences if abused.
Put some skin in the game
I hope so, in Spain you can't access anything that uses Cloudflare, even docker images, thanks to LaLiga's president bullshit
the global trend is not good. in south korea the new law prevents anyone from posting memes of the president because they require public square operators to purchase AI hardware that is already expensive at inflated markup (with completely opaque RFP bidding process and no disclosure of beneficiaries) and every image and post be monitored for "fake news/disinformation" by a partisan government body created by the President. Bill C-22 in Canada, la Liga blocking cloudflare, UK requiring IDs....on an unrelated note Playstation store removing purchased games, zero day disclosures not being awarded so they end up in the black market leading to more data leaks....
this entire digital/internet industrial complex is beginning to show real issues. im hoping there is technology in the works that can give us back the old magic of the late 90s internet.
Small networks maybe? Make a virtual network for you and some friends and don't let the public access it.