UK Home Secretary considering removing right to anonymity on social media

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/priti-patel-david-amess-social-media-b1939775.html

by ArchieMaclean • 5 years ago

91 124 5 years ago

independent.co.uk

mensetmanusman2• 5 years ago

One of the interesting documented effects of removing anonymity is that is lowers the input of moderate voices.

People with extreme views don’t care if their voice is public.

floatingatoll• 5 years ago

I would not describe today’s internet as promoting the sharing and reasoned consideration of moderate viewpoints. It turns out that anonymous sock puppets prevent communities from moderating extremism. We’ve invested two decades or more by now into the theory that anonymity will prevent the suppression of moderate voices, and we’ve failed. Time to try something else.

im3w1l• 5 years ago

we’ve failed

Extremism seems lower than ever to me.

pjc506• 5 years ago

Much of the worst incitement is done by people in newspaper columns under their own names with blue ticks on twitter.

(Pop quiz: which newspaper columnist has been cited approvingly in more than one mass shooter manifesto?)

adventured• 5 years ago

Politicians are also popular inciters these days and pretty much universally shielded from responsibility for it (Trump's social media ban is one of the few cases where I'm aware of any of them being punished at all for acts of incitement).

Rather comically, the morons in control of the social media companies have done Trump an extraordinary favor. They've made him look better than he otherwise would by denying him access to the megaphone. They're considerably helping him in the lead up to 2024 by keeping him off the social media platforms where he'd otherwise be constantly putting his foot in his mouth and reminding center voters why they elected Biden. The best thing social media companies could do if they wanted to stop the inbound 2024 Trump campaign, would be to let him actively Tweet.

pacifika• 5 years ago

Does this require a Great British Firewall to enforce this?

selfhoster11• 5 years ago

Please, no. That's not an idea that we should be giving to them.

pmlnr2• 5 years ago

There's already the madness of https://www.iwf.org.uk/ which many ISP willingly follow, whereas https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders is mandatory.

iso1210• 5 years ago

Context - a UK MP has just been killed by a constituent at a regular 'meet the MP' incident.

This type of attack happened in 2016 when another MP was killed, in 2010 when it was an attempted murder (the MP survived), in 2000 (MP severely injured, his assistant was killed).

Before that there was the attack on the entire government at the party conference in 1984 by the IRA which killed 5 (including one MP), and assassination of the Northern Ireland secretary in 1979.

DizzyDoo• 5 years ago

There was also Ian Gow MP who was assassinated with a car bomb by the IRA in 1990.

pjc506• 5 years ago

Is there any evidence that the attack was in any way linked to internet anonymity, or is this just the usual suspects bringing out their authoritarian policy using this as a pretext?

(Details seem to be scarce because it's sub judice, but presumably US media might have something?)

Pyramus5• 5 years ago

And Ms Patel indicated she is considering going a step further by requiring sites such as Facebook or Twitter to retain details of the identities of people posting material which could be handed over to police investigating crimes.

I don't see how social media anonymity == internet anonymity?

truculent• 5 years ago

The UK government and press have been aggressively pushing for this for a while, so it seems safe to suggest that this is just pretext.

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

I've noticed that, since the term "troll" was popularized, in the UK media it's always been used to refer to people who angrily disagree with some authority figure or famous person on twitter; kind of the equivalent to the person who writes an angry letter to the editor. In the US, it's generally meant as someone who deliberately causes discord online to amuse themselves, not to make any sort of an earnest point. In the UK, people referred to as "trolls" are almost always people who clearly honestly disagree with the person that they're "trolling."

So with magical authoritarian thinking: 1) a troll is someone who rudely disagrees with a public person; 2) assassins and terrorists are people who very rudely disagree with public people; Conclusion: people who rudely disagree online are proto-terrorists.

gnufx• 5 years ago

Every time this sort of thing happens, it's the Home Secretary et al's opportunity to propose yet more measures attacking civil liberties, despite the absence (usually, always?) of evidence what they propose would even have helped.

jodrellblank2• 5 years ago

If only their response to 72 poor people dying in the Grenfell Tower fire was as swift and wide-reaching as their response to a millionaire Conservative MP being stabbed.

dash2• 5 years ago

There’s been a very serious public enquiry about that. (There’s also now been a policy response.)

Do you think the issues of Grenfell could have been solved by immediate action? I think an enquiry to figure out what went wrong was necessary.

You also seem to think there’s been a swift, wide reaching response to the MP’s murder. I’m not sure what that is, since this policy proposal has merely been mooted.

mongol• 5 years ago

That is indeed a lot of political murders / murder attempts. More than I would have guessed if someone asked me. Thanks for the history lesson.

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

Don't worry, no one in the UK government actually had any idea how to do an internet. This will be the same as the last 3 porn bans.

sysadm1n• 5 years ago

It's actually tricky enough to setup an anonymous account on Facebook or Twitter. They essentially extort and harass you asking for a phone number, and if you don't provide it: no account for you. And for those crying 'Burner phone!'. Where I live you have to register your legal name and have it attached to the SIM card. And then there's the cellphone masts that record your phone's interactions and proximity, so it's a hard problem. Anonymity is hard.

As for encryption, does this mean we can't do online banking if it's outlawed?

Shank• 5 years ago

Where I live you have to register your legal name and have it attached to the SIM card.

This isn’t true everywhere, and phone numbers work internationally. I’ve got a Weibo account with a +1 US phone number and it works (surprisingly). The problem with the phone number system is that quite honestly, it’s only not anonymous in cities/states/countries that make it closely linked to identity.

FourthProtocol• 5 years ago

And even then there are levels of gray - I registered on Facebook in 2007 with my real phone number. I changed providers soon after, and no longer have that number. But it's still the number Facebook have for me. I now (and many of my friends) have a pay-as-you-go SIM for anything (including parcel delivery) that want a number.

intricatedetail2• 5 years ago

if it's outlawed?

It will be licensed. Banks will have a license. Companies will be able to apply for VPN to carry on (and required to monitor employees traffic)

marcus_holmes• 5 years ago

Encryption used to be outlawed (banned for export and controlled by government). Then it got ridiculous and they finally realised they couldn't control maths.

onei2• 5 years ago

It still is controlled by the US government. I've spent the last 2 months integrating with a system that performs export checks on software to confirm we're allowed to send certain software from one country to another and we're not allowed to export to Iran, North Korea, etc.

nootropicat• 5 years ago

There are specialized sites where you can buy those codes sent to temporary phone numbers. Telegram is the hardest to get anonymously now because they require app installation on a smartphone. I suppose it could be hacked with an android emulator + normal sms code, but it's much harder in practice.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

Facebook and Twitter aren't the whole internet, though. There's Reddit, say. Or HN. (For HN, you need an email account. OK, can you get an anonymous email account? Sure. Easy.)

new_guy• 5 years ago

Well good luck with that. They can only target places like Facebook/Twitter, there's hundreds of smaller social sites that will just completely ignore this shit.

Not to mention the internet is global, so really they can't enforce anything.

Priti Patel considering removing right to anonymity on social media to stop ‘relentless’ abuse of MPs

If they weren't so corrupt and inept they wouldn't be subject to 'abuse', it comes with the job.

Edit: also to add, abusing people online is an easy form of 'slactivism', people let off steam, it keeps them lazy and complacent, stops them taking action in the real world.

If that venue is removed, i.e arresting people for name calling on Facebook (which is already happening) then actual actions in the real world will escalate and dealing with name calling will be the least of these peoples problems.

JumpCrisscross• 5 years ago

there's hundreds of smaller social sites that will just completely ignore this shit

Shifting potentially dangerous content from Twitter and Facebook to small, specialised sounds like a win win.

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

Yes, if there's anything people formulating dark plans hate, it's secrecy and privacy. It's important to force them into more robust and secure venues, their current opsec is terrible.

It'll be another guaranteed win, like FOSTA and SESTA in the US. Thank Congress that child prostitution has moved to places that law enforcement have no access to, and that sex workers require middlemen again in order to work.

inglor_cz• 5 years ago

"If they weren't so corrupt and inept they wouldn't be subject to 'abuse', it comes with the job."

It indeed comes with the job, but I think you are trying to shift the blame too much. Politicians cannot possibly do their job in a way that appeals to everyone and step on no one's toes. And some people out there are not entirely sane and the Internet has given them wings.

Every public figure, not just politicians, is a target of stupid hate. Actors, singers, journalists: if your face surfaces on people's screen too often, you will collect a team of disgusting haters.

mdp20215• 5 years ago

«team»?! «disgusting»?!

The job of politics is contextually assigning weights to the interests of different social components: that some temporarily lose something as their interest is valued as minor in a big picture is part of the game. The phenomenon of «corrupt and inept» is completely different.

Anything can be the target of the hate of morons: that is noise by definition. Move above the noise, and reasons arise why some collect targeted ire more than others. That is not frequency related exposure («too often»). It is, correctly, exposure as «corrupt and inept», and something very frequent in some big tribes (surely 'cultures' would be improper) must be added: bestiality. The ways of the worse populists (speaking not from the head to the heads, but from the nasty bits to the nasty bits) are common, in some areas, to many paupers-in-spirit attempting to be culturemakers owing to the drives of ignorance. Rare in the UK (apparently), extremely frequent elsewhere.

SAI_Peregrinus• 5 years ago

Disallowing anonymity clearly creates wonderful environments where no radicalization happens, and everyone is polite. It certainly helps to prevent social divisiveness. Just look at Facebook!

/s, hopefully obviously.

klyrs2• 5 years ago

It's currently possible to "verify" your facebook account with a fake ID. Don't be so flippant, ID cards in many jurisdictions already have barcodes, and if governments want social media to require legal ID, it will be easy to set up a system to do exactly that.

ben_w2• 5 years ago

Roughly 20 years ago, there was a documentary on British TV about fake ID. They found that the technique used in the 1971 book The Day of the Jackal (find someone dead, get a copy of their birth certificate, bootstrap other ID from that) still worked.

They then demonstrated how you didn’t even need the person you were doing this to to be dead, as they got a provisional driving license in the name of David Blunkett. Who was the Home Secretary at the time. And is blind.

Apparently the UK police still use the Jackal method as of last year, though obviously no system can possibly prevent actions by its own enforcement body: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/07/met-police-l...

c7DJTLrn• 5 years ago

UK is becoming more Orwellian by the day. Not sure if I really want to spend the rest of my life here when we're ran by nutjobs.

pmlnr2• 5 years ago

It's not just the UK, is the whole world:

"Privacy activists oppose EU plans for a GDPR-compliant Whois v2" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28892013

rektide3• 5 years ago

And the Orwellian aspects aren't just trying to change their fucked up little places, they're trying to redefine how the whole internet has to operate, demanding the world's information system caters to them.

Even with projects like GDPR, we're trying to build some pro-citizen rules. But we've still done nothing to defend or enable individuals, to grant them powers & rights to operate independently & freely online. There's no bill of hosting rights, that I'm aware of, anywhere on the planet. I want to see a nation step up & try to enhance & promote speech & data of it's citizen's in an supernational context. Our citizens have a right to have their words online! We are actively building & encouraging hosting solutions to enable that!

all2• 5 years ago

We'd be glad to have you in the US. I'll continue to offer that so long as the 2nd Amendment stands (I presume the possession of lethal protective measures are a bulwark against infringements of other rights... we'll know if I'm correct in the next 10 or so years).

rich_sasha10• 5 years ago

Plenty of places going totally bonkers.

I wonder if the world always seems like this in real time. When I first learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was described as a bit of a mild thriller with a happy end, much ado about nothing. But it must have seemed like apocalypse about to happen.

tweedledee2• 5 years ago

I presumed Orwell was inspired by the UK and not the other way around

dTal• 5 years ago

Orwell was inspired by - directly referencing, really - the Soviet Union. It's set in the UK for ironic contrast.

kzrdude3• 5 years ago

Instead of attacking specific content or specific people/personal info, what if we go at the structure and system instead?

- Don't care about the content of the tweet (no fact checking boards)

- Don't care to register who sent it (no privacy leak to government)

"Attack" the structure:

- Heavily tune down features that can enable posts on social media to go viral. Basically ban virality. Boosting high-emotion posts above all else is the largest systemic issue.

Yes, it's heavy-handed, but it's not censorship. It's not registering who has which political opinions. It's just changing the rules equally for all, to create a better forum.

pjc506• 5 years ago

I mean .. maybe, but how do you phrase this as a law, and how do you make the billionaires dependent on virality obey it?

intricatedetail2• 5 years ago

Ban feeds that are other than chronological of people you follow.

PoignardAzur• 5 years ago

Basically ban virality.

That seems roughly as feasible as banning maths.

kzrdude3• 5 years ago

Maybe but I think it's a stone worth turning.. to see if is there any solution in this direction?

thr0wawayf003• 5 years ago

I would love to see something like this happen, basically force Facebook and Twitter to become boring message boards that require some higher quality forms of engagement to reach a broader audience (if reaching a broader audience should even be possible).

The problem is that Yyu'd essentially be killing one of the primary revenue generators for these companies, which are already built on top of fundamentally unsustainable business models in terms of actually managing content. The thing is that you'd have to define what exactly "high-emotion" posts are and how content will be assessed, which is effectively a form of censorship.

kzrdude3• 5 years ago

In what I'm trying to explain, there is no classification of content. Only suppressing vitality itself by removing mechanisms for it, in general (!)

mmarq3• 5 years ago

British Home secretaries have been proposing insane ideas for a decade. Patel alone proposed to:

  - build a wave machine to stop (drown?) immigrants coming from France
  - build a floating wall in the Channel to stop immigrants from France
  - send asylum seekers to concentration camps in some remote islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
  - send asylum seekers to concentration camps on abandoned oil rigs in the North Sea
  - reintroduce capital punishment (but she wasn't Home Secretary at the time)

Before then somebody wanted to force people to buy a special ID card to watch porn (I'm not sure if the innovator in question was May, Rudd or Javid).

rich_sasha10• 5 years ago

Different league, but in the early days of Nuclear Red Button, UK Home Office was tasked with developing failsafe communication with Westminster when the PM is around the country. This was just after the US developed some kind of terrestrial radio system.

The UK equivalent was entrusting all drivers with a box of coins so they can use the phone boxes. Should have hear run out, the PM could call the operator and request reverse charge connection (with UK strategic command or sth presumably). This was also deemed failsafe, as there are many phone boxes around the country.

It was once described in length on QI...

andyjohnson0• 5 years ago

The UK equivalent was entrusting all drivers with a box of coins

This was in the 1950s and is described in Peter Hennessey's excellent book The Human Button.

It's been a while since I read the book, but from memory the cabinet office also purchased an AA membership so that the prime minister's driver would have a key giving them access to the private AA phone boxes that were fairly common back then. They had an arrangement with the AA call handlers to allow the PM to be connected to the appropriate part of government in an emergency.

Meanwhile the US and Russian government probably had satellite...

ceejayoz4• 5 years ago

Should have hear run out, the PM could call the operator and request reverse charge connection (with UK strategic command or sth presumably).

"Will you accept this collect call from: LAUNCH-THE-MISSILES-DO-IT-NOW?"

6510• 5 years ago

for a decade

The beard tax was cool, I also liked the sober pubs as described in the Licensing Act 1872 section 12: “Every person found drunk in any highway or other public place, whether a building or not, or on any licensed premises, shall be liable to a penalty”

rich_sasha10• 5 years ago

In present-day Oxford the city centre by-laws ban “remaining in the public toilets without a valid excuse”.

Some of my favourite legalese euphemisms.

jjgreen• 5 years ago

The current law in France states: Il est interdit de se trouver en état d’ivresse manifeste dans les lieux publics, it is forbidden to find oneself in state of manifest drunkenness in public places (CODE DE LA SANTÉ PUBLIQUE : ART. R. 3353-1).

I love the idea of "finding oneself in a state of manifest drunkenness", how on Earth could that have happened?

oliv__• 5 years ago

It's scary to think that these people are even remotely close to any position of power over ordinary citizens.

mercy_dude3• 5 years ago

concentration camps

What is your source? I hardly believe she said that and still a home minister of a free and democratic society.

ceejayoz4• 5 years ago

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/30/revealed-no-...

Downing Street has asked officials to consider the option of sending asylum seekers to Moldova, Morocco or Papua New Guinea and is the driving force behind proposals to hold refugees in offshore detention centres, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
The documents suggest officials in the Foreign Office have been pushing back against No 10’s proposals to process asylum applications in detention facilities overseas, which have also included the suggestion the centres could be constructed on the south Atlantic islands of Ascension and St Helena.

I'm iffy on terming this "concentration camps". It fits the technical definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_... as examples), but the line between "concentration" and "extermination" camps like Auschwitz has been entirely blurred for decades.

bserge• 5 years ago

All of those sound stupid af, so how is she still in that position?

Also, didn't they actually spend millions on the porn filter just to call it quits later? Surely schools could've used that money instead.

pjc506• 5 years ago

All of those sound stupid af, so how is she still in that position?

You will not understand British politics until you realise that she is in power because of, not despite, these stupid suggestions. They're what you have to say to get there. That's why Johnson performs the idiot act.

irrational2• 5 years ago

American here - the older we get, the more we realize that we are just like our parents.

gorgoiler• 5 years ago

Implementation of sanctions is the end game, and that end game is a national firewall.

The UK should propose the outlaw of all bunny killing videos. Relatively benign you’d think, but as a sideshow it would require some kind of way of blocking the bad guy bunny killers and the way to do that is with a Great Wall of China^WTunbridge Wells^W^W^W^W^Wnational firewall.

Actually, it’s even more meta. The UK establishment has no intention of doing anything as base as constitutionally accountable lawmaking. Far better to allow these US corporations to dodge tax on their UK income, then threaten to crack down on the tax dodging unless FB/GOOG/ELLO bend to the government’s privately (and extra-parliamentary) will.

noarchy• 5 years ago

To those who want social media regulated, this is the kind of thing you'll actually get. So be careful what you wish for.

KaiserPro• 5 years ago

I mean yeah she is, but it'll be forgotten when another avoidable crisis comes to a head (possibly involving immigrants in one form or another)

rich_sasha10• 5 years ago

What irks me personally about it is the reporting that it was done by a “British citizen of Somali origin”.

He was probably born in the UK, went through schools there, maybe his parents did too. But let’s just make it clear, he’s not British in the same way that someone white is. Or, you know, Pakistani, but from an upper-middle-class family of doctors.

No one reports that Wayne Rooney is British, of English origin.

threatofrain• 5 years ago

As people have observed of popular media, it's a 2-way street. Writers write this way because they think readers want to know, and yet this kind of information nugget is in public consciousness in part because people write this way.

If people stop rewarding this kind of writing, their wellbeing is not threatened in any way. If companies fail to observe the competitive edge which their competitors are utilizing...

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

Well they could word it in a more sympathetic way.

axiosgunnar• 5 years ago

Your quote is quite likely the most important part of the whole story, as it helps with fact-based policy decisions on immigration.

Disagreeing with this is akin to putting your head in the sand and wishing for a reality that simply is not there.

rich_sasha10• 5 years ago

But he wasn’t foreign, is my whole point. He was born in Britain. Or if not, passed the whole naturalisation process. Apparently he’s indistinguishable from other British people. Oh except for the “Somali heritage”.

I feel like the focus on “Somali” is meant to deflect any responsibility on domestic matters. This guy apparently was born, bred, schooled in the UK. Maybe he was radicalised by hardcore Somali-heritage islamists (if that’s a thing), but then it’s a failure of UK domestic policy for creating an environment, or cause, for them to organise, and UK domestic security for preventing this.

I’m not saying this is easy, rather that this is where the onus lies. But when we say “ah he’s Somali”, suddenly it’s someone else’s fault.

When a white British guy, with a name like Gary or Shaun stabs a teacher, say, you get stories from people who went to school with Gary or Shaun. He was an alright guy but a bit extreme when angry, maybe. Or no one would see it coming, he was a quiet guy. Why did no one see it coming? Ah well you can’t prevent everything.

But this guy is Somali, it’s their fault. I mean, ok he’s British but you know what I mean. Different British.

matthewmorgan• 5 years ago

That's what 'irks' you? Not the murder of an MP?

moffkalast2• 5 years ago

It's not the first and likely not the last, regardless of what draconian measures they implement.

It's a high profile job and the danger comes with it. If you're the one writing laws for everyone to follow, it's highly likely that many people will want you dead.

It's a "fun" fact that US presidents have a nearly 20% death rate for example.

rich_sasha10• 5 years ago

It’s an unspeakable tragedy. But this is HN and I thought we were meant to skip the obvious and focus on insightful debate.

With any terror event, tragic as it might be, the aftermath tends to be way more impactful than the actual event. The death of 5,000 people in WTC started at least one UN-sanctioned war and cost the lives of many times more than the airplane strikes.

So yes, I’m choosing to focus on the aftermath. But Sir David, rest in peace.

jahewson2• 5 years ago

His father is Somali and works for the Somali government, so you can drop the accusatory speculation. It’s likely he’s British-born though and the usual word in the UK would be “heritage” not “origin”, which as you say implies that someone was born elsewhere.

When talking about a hate crime the ethnicity of the perpetrator is hardly irrelevant. And for any terrorism-related incident the first question is going to be whether or not the perpetrators were domestic or foreign (especially if they just murdered a member of the government) - as this shapes the response massively. If this person was raised abroad and brought radicalism with them that’s totally different from someone raised in the UK who has been radicalised online (or possibly even in the community).

onei2• 5 years ago

To me, Somali origin but British citizen implies they were born in Somalia and then immigrated to the UK and later gained citizenship. Regardless, the term is designed to point out that the person is foreign and that's something that the public should inexplicably be concerned about.

ajsnigrutin2• 5 years ago

Considering most of the terorism attacks are done by a few groups of people, people want to know who did it and why. A better question is, how can someone, immersed in calm and relaxed british enviroment and culture (if we ignore their footbal hooligans of course) get so radicalized by looking at stuff online, to go and actually murder someone.

Political correctness aside, it's mostly either local nationalists (which are native, noone "let them in", and there's nowhere to deport them), or first or second generation immigrant islamists (which someone actually let inside the country relatively recently). If it's an immigrant, people of course want to know where they came from... and very few of them come from eg. japan. I know this fuels steretypes, but ignoring statistics is also bad.

rich_sasha10• 5 years ago

I’m all up for statistics, but this is isn’t statistics, this is anecdata at best.

Also, make your pick. What was this guy? British? Radical Islamist? Somali? I think these are reasonable labels. But “British but you know, kinda foreign” is unfair. It’s saying, well it’s kind of our fault, we can’t blame any foreigners, but oh look he’s really Somali, so it’s fine. Stiff upper lip prevails, unblemished.

jimnotgym• 5 years ago

Perhaps Conservative MPs could review their own post histories and be 100% sure they have not sowed division and hate, especially around Brexit. Or maybe just review Boris Johnson's own newspaper column where he has said some things that many find offensive. Boris runs a Trumpist government that gained power by sowing discontent and division.

Or it is anonymous tweeters of course.

I noticed one Conservative MP followed by thousands of bots presumably there to make him seem like an influencer to the algo. Then these weird networks of retweeters pile in to amplify what he said.

But it is everyone else who is at fault....

rektide3• 5 years ago

i'm not going to treat anything from idiot Patel with even the faintest hint that there's anything actionable or real, that this is anything other than trying to chuck the overton window towards some extremist end.

but again, i just want to look at this less from the UK perspective, and to note once again this is some part of the world imagining it's going to create a strong guidelines for how the rest of the world has to operate.

guilhas• 5 years ago

To defeat China we must become China

UK Home Secretary considering removing right to anonymity on social media

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