[skippyboxedhero]

This isn't how the UK works. There is a vast ecosystem of pre-crime authorities and the police are able to investigate things which aren't crimes and add "non-crime" incidents to your criminal record. It may not surprise you to learn that almost all of the cases in which this is used are "social" crimes. In cases of actual crime, custodial sentences are sometimes not applied at all...again, usually for reasons of social order.

Ironically, I also can't read most of the screenshots because all sharing sites are blocked in the UK because of the threat image sharing represents to the social order.

[sirsinsalot]

But get your car stolen in the UK and the police won't do a thing. Even if you know where it is via a tracker. Nothing. Outright refuse to take any action.

[jodrellblank]

All sharing sites are not blocked, postimg and Reddit image hosting and Flickr and many more are not blocked.

The uk didn’t block sharing sites because of a threat to the social order, sharing sites blocked uk viewers because they don’t want to comply with uk laws like “don’t gather children’s personal data”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gzxv5gy3qo

[MrDOS]

No, they blocked the UK because it was either that or open themselves up to £18m in fine liability thanks to the Online Safety Act[0]. Social media sites which are unable or unwilling to operate strict, full-time content moderation have all blocked the UK because the alternative is being held punitively liable for abuse by bad actors. Pretty much a no brainer. (And that's without even getting into the quagmire of legitimate, consenting, age-gated adult content.)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023

[skippyboxedhero]

"don't gather children's personal data"...wut?

i love commenting on this stuff to get an insight into the mindset of people who support this...strident ignorance.

[trumpdong]

I'm pretty sure it was in protest of a law saying they'd have to check everyone's ID. The BBC, being incredibly biased, obviously won't report this correctly.

[kimixa]

Imgur were found to be in breach of the data collection laws before any "you must check IDs" laws were even discussed in parliament, let alone passed, where the guidance was pretty much "Don't get caught actively selling data you already know is from children". And even the punishment was pretty much writing a document of "we'll try not to do it quite so obviously next time", but they refused to do even that.

The "implied" link between their fines, them rejecting UK connections, and any new laws is very much a PR thing from imgur.

All the breathless online reporting seems to miss just how toothless the law was, and they still failed at following it.

Like I think the new verification laws are an unworkable mess at best, written by people with an idea similar to believing they could "ban one specific species of fish from UK territorial waters" by throwing the odd grenade in, but they're rather unrelated to what imgur actually did.

[somewhatgoated]

I haven’t followed this case at all but how do you know which data is from children if you don’t do some kind of verification?

[harvey9]

The outcome is the purpose.

[matthewmacleod]

This isn't true – why did you come here and choose to lie about this?