[UrineSqueegee]

i opened the ofcom link and it has this really easy to follow guide with 17 illegal contents the users my encounter on your website like terrorism/pdf content etc like extremely bad stuff and all you have to do is asses how likely the user is to run into one of these on your site if its over 0% how do you plan on mitigating that.

thats literally all there is to it.

[fmajid]

Keep in mind UK terrorism legislation has been abused and is continuing to be, from prosecuting the failed Icesave bank to proscribing the non-violent Palestine Action activist group. If the Terrorism Act 2000 had been in effect in the 1980s, you could have risked 14 years in prison for advocating for the ANC against Apartheid (Thatcher's government's official policy was that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist who had been convicted in a fair trial).

The UK doesn't have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights other than the European Convention on Human Rights, that leading parties campaign of abolishing (if a bill of rights can be abolished by the legislature, it's not worth the paper it's printed on). Heck it doesn't even have a proper written constitution, it doesn't have separation of powers or an independent judiciary (the previous Parliament considered passing a law saying "Rwanda is a safe country to deport inconvenient asylum seekers to" in response to a court ruling (correctly) saying it manifestly isn't.

The UK and Australia are in a race to the bottom to see which one is going to be the worst enemy of the Internet. The only check against these authoritarian powers is popular juries, and they are trying to get rid of these as well.

[flumpcakes]

> the non-violent Palestine Action activist group

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2025-06-23/debates/250...

[hermitcrab]

In the link it says:

"with its members demonstrating a willingness to use violence"

As far as I am aware, have only damaged property. Have they actually committed any acts of violence or advocated violence?

It is embarassing for the UK military that they were able to get into a base and spray paint military planes.

[flumpcakes]

Damage to property is a form of violence. If someone broke into your home and destroyed medical equipment needed to care for your dying relative, I'm sure you would 100% call it an act of violence.

Also, the group has directly harmed people too:

> A police officer was taken to hospital after being hit with a sledgehammer while responding to reports of criminal damage.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mnnje4wlro

[Fluorescence]

> hit with a sledgehammer

It smells like a jumped up "assaulted a police officer" charge because you shield your face from their punches. Hitting someone with a sledge hammer is a suitably scary tabloid headline but physically unlikely and entirely out of character for the accused group.

Note that Avon Police have form as lying pieces of shit.

They attacked protestors and claimed 21 injured officers specifically: "officers got broken bones, had punctured lungs, were very seriously injured" in the national media.

Journalists contacted local hospitals and found no police were treated that night. They had to retract those claims and their list of the claimed injuries included staff who never attended the scene, a bee sting and a twisted ankle getting out of a car.

I expect similar will happen here but only after this claim has been used for years to demonise protestors.

[hermitcrab]

Also there is a huge gulf between being hit with the business end of a sledgehammer and poked with the shaft. I would expect a serious assault with a sledgehammer to result in serious injury or death.

[hermitcrab]

>Damage to property is a form of violence.

That seems a stretch.

>A police officer was taken to hospital after being hit with a sledgehammer

I wasn't aware of that incident.

[pseudo0]

Yeah just interpret 3000+ pages of policy documents and if you screw it up, OFCOM can fine you 18 million pounds and hold you criminally liable. Their "simple guide" is 70 pages long and has numerous links to additional policy documents that have more details on how to interpret the law. Any sane company is going to hire UK legal counsel to deal with this, which is easily going to cost five or six figures. And that doesn't include the cost of adding additional technical mitigations to justify a lower risk assessment, or the ongoing compliance cost for services that aren't low-risk. So the rational move for any company that has minimal UK revenue is to just IP ban the country, like Iran or North Korea.

[p3rls]

do people really blanket ban iranians? i run a large wiki platform for kpop and they're some of our best users-- i would much sooner ban ip addresses from the yookay.

[pseudo0]

Some tech companies block Iranian users to comply with US sanctions, eg. AWS.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2019/10/2/locked-out-why-i...

[landl0rd]

I have also blocked yookayers from my site because I would rather spend my time on GTM for my more valuable markets or have free time than waste it on the tiny chunk of my users who are yookay based.

Also I don't know what sort of weight "guidance" from a reg agency vs statute carries there, how much of a defense it is, etc.

[_dain_]

"extremely bad stuff"

people have literally been jailed for "hate speech" here because they clicked like on a tweet. labour is currently debating an official definition of "islamophobia" which would criminalize stating historical facts like "islam was spread by the sword" and "the grooming gangs are mostly pakistani". the govt put out a superinjunction forbidding anyone (including MPs) from mentioning they spent £7B bringing over afghans allegedly at risk from the taliban, and also criminalizing mention of the gag order itself, and so on recursively. nobody (other than judges and senior ministers) knows how many other such superinjunctions there are.

all this and more is covered by those 17 categories.

on top of this, britain claims global jurisdiction here. think a minute how absurd that is -- any website anywhere that any briton might access is in scope, according to ofcom. and they claim the power to prosecute foreigners for these "crimes" ...

[Nursie]

> put out a superinjunction forbidding anyone (including MPs) from mentioning they spent £7B bringing over afghans allegedly at risk from the taliban

This has to be the most uncharitable reading of that situation I've ever seen. Have you been watching GBNews?

The Ministry of Defence messed up under the last government, a junior operative leaked a list of names of Afghan people who had helped the UK armed forces during the years of British and American presence. Not only that, but the list also contained the names of UK special forces and a few secret agents. This is bad and at that point they had a duty to protect the people they'd exposed.

So yeah, they got a "super injunction" to prevent reporting of the list to do further damage, and that does prevent prevent reporting of the injunction. I personally think such things are dodgy as fuck and shouldn't be available in law, but compared to using them to block discussion of (for example) a rich footballer or a journalist being caught having an affair, it seems like this was comparatively reasonable.

To paint this as purely an exercise hiding the spending of money on bringing afghans into the UK 'allegedly at risk' seems... well, uncharitable.

> on top of this, britain claims global jurisdiction here...

As do the EU (and UK) for the GDPR, and lots of other countries for lots of other things. If you're offering services to people in the UK you have to abide by UK laws.

We can talk about the laws being bad (and it seems this one is) but it's hard to see that principle as wrong, unless you're still in love with the old wild-west, no-rules-followed internet. I think those days are behind us.

[hermitcrab]

>people have literally been jailed for "hate speech" here because they clicked like on a tweet

I am aware that someone was jailed for encouraging people via social media to burn down a hotel with refugees in ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3wkzgpjxvo ). But not because they clicked like on a Tweet. Reference please.

[bobsmooth]

Ignorance won't save you.

[hermitcrab]

No reference then?