[Ray20]

Regardless of how you feel about content moderation, we are talking about a situation where the government is DEMANDING corporations to implement automated, totalitarian surveillance tools. This is the key factor here.

The next step would be for the government to demand direct access to these tools. Then the government would be able to carry out holocausts against any ethnic group, only 10 times more effectively and inevitably than Hitler did.

[happymellon]

> the government is DEMANDING corporations to implement automated, totalitarian surveillance tools

You've got this the wrong way around. These are social media sites.

People are publicly publishing revenge porn, and the government has told sites that if they are requested to take down revenge porn then they have to.

They don't have to monitor, because they are being told of it's existence.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Are you conflating this specific principle with the much wider Online Safety Act? Because, while the latter has certain privacy-undermining elements to it, I'm not sure how asking social media companies to take down content has anything to do with 'surveillance'.

[Ray20]

No, I'm not conflating. The point here is that for taking content down in the way they want it, the implementation of totalitarian surveillance tools is necessary.

[Manuel_D]

As bad as I think this law is, this isn't demanding any degree of surveillance in the sense that real human beings have their information or activity tracked. This is mandating taking down content, not surveiling anyone.

[Ray20]

> This is mandating taking down content, not surveiling anyone.

As far as I understand, it precisely mandating to monitor EVERYONE.

They are not talking about removing a specific image from the platform based on its hash or something. They are talking about actions that involve automated analysis of all content on the platform for patterns arbitrarily specified by the government.

The technologies discussed differ from totalitarian surveillance by simply toggling a single flag on the platform, and are indistinguishable from such surveillance for the user.

[roryirvine]

Every social media site is already reading, analysing, and filtering the content posted on their platforms.

[Manuel_D]

Imagine dang wrote a script to delete every HN comment that contains the string "velociraptor". Under your logic, this involves surveiling every HN commenter. This is true in the pedantic sense that every comment posted to the site would be checked for "velociraptor".

But most people understand the word "surveillance" to mean more involved information collection than just deleting content that matches certain criteria.

[pjc50]

Every social media site already has a system for removing porn.

[Ray20]

These systems does not imply the tools of totalitarian surveillance.

In contrast to the proposed one, which should be able to classify all content on the platform at any arbitrary moment in time according to a post-factum specified arbitrary filter. Literally a mechanism of totalitarian surveillance.