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Wikipedia Criticises 'Harsh' New Online Safety Bill Plans (bbc.com) 66

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Wikipedia should be treated differently to the big social media firms in the Online Safety Bill, a leading member of its foundation says. From a report: The encyclopaedia is written and edited entirely by thousands of volunteers around the world. The Wikimedia Foundation's Rebecca MacKinnon also says a proposed change to the bill,would "limit freedom of expression".

The bill aims to protect people from harmful content online. The Wikimedia Foundation is the not-for-profit organisation which hosts the encyclopaedia. Ms MacKinnon says the foundation is concerned about the effect of the bill on volunteer-run sites. She told the BBC that the threat of "harsh" new criminal penalties for tech bosses "will affect not only big corporations, but also public interest websites such as Wikipedia".
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Wikipedia Criticises 'Harsh' New Online Safety Bill Plans More

Wikipedia Criticises 'Harsh' New Online Safety Bill Plans

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  • You can only run as fast as the slowest among you (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @01:14PM (#63217044)

    I feel for them - I really do. I believe that, for all of it's faults, Wikipedia is as close to a decent value as you can get in a site contributed to by volunteers from anywhere. That it works as well as it does is amazing to me. I think they should be treated differently.

    But the big boys fuck it up for everybody. And because deciding who is worthy of wider latitude is a horrible rat's nest of emotional arguments and righteous indignation, I fear Wikipedia will get caught in the crossfire.

    If I could wish away the big social media platforms, and the price was that Wikipedia went with it... boy, that's a hard problem. But I might pull the trigger on that.

    • Re:You can only run as fast as the slowest among y (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @01:27PM (#63217084)

      I don't know at this point, but it sure feels like the governments of the world, as they come up with ways to address social media issues, are using those issues as ways to wrest control of the entire web away from those that don't always align perfectly with their political goals, ideals, or fall in line with their current issue du jour. There's a big, BIG push to make the entire web sanitized for children, rather than make parents responsible for implementing monitoring or filtering on their children's devices. I get that when children are present in the real world, everyone around tends to modify their behavior to better suit them. But do we really have to assume that every piece of content we post online has to be sanitized for the youngest of our species? I certainly don't, and I don't know that this is the correct answer for anyone interested in the web as an information resources, good or bad.

      Is there a point where we are so busy trying to bury "danger" that we bury ourselves? I think we're fast approaching that point, if we haven't crossed it already.

      • I personally don't think everything needs to be child friendly - but there should be some firewalling. The current state of every toxic thing being one click away is untenable. We're beta-testing several generations, and we have no idea how it's going to turn out.

        • I know it's not popular, but being a parent today should come with some responsibility in the digital realm as well as the flesh and blood realm. Though there's some argument to be made there's not much in the flesh and blood realm either. But it's not like there's zero technology available to filter a child's access on their devices. In home and on-device firewalling with routes that cut-off known-bad sites. Granted, if I were a parent I'd probably start with a white-list and work my way up, allowing them

          • It's perhaps true, but not reasonable. It's not about will... it's about ability and knowledge. I have immediate relatives who can't do it. Even the bottom of your tree - the whitelist - is a foreign concept for a LOT of parents. Lots of them grew up pre-internet. Same for people in poorer nations/communities. You can't expect people who grew up with next to nothing to understand how to construct technical firewalls.

            • While I get that to a degree, sometimes parents have to learn new things to do their job as a parent. It sucks, I'm sure, but that's just how it is.

              I know I'm an old man at this point, and probably shouldn't be listened to, but I'm remarkably tired of the public screaming to be protected from the big bad at every turn. I don't think sanitizing the internet for seven year olds is the answer we're looking for, but my voice will likely be drowned out in the coming years. I think the end result will be a non-fu

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by DarkOx ( 621550 )

                People want to act like its 1996 and parents have *workable* tools to monitor and control access. Reality is the entire eco-system in modern tech is anti-parent. Nerds gripe about how they don't 'own' their device, that is EXACTLY how ever good parent feels too. However if they are not technies and/or old enough to remember an internet with open protocols and plain-text transmission where privacy isn't actually required they don't know how to articulate it.

                The fact is as far as the internet goes thanks to C

                • To add on to what you said... filtering isn't even an answer anymore.

                  There are plenty of sites with both perfectly normal and even useful educational content that also have complete shit on them.

                  I'll use a single well known example: YouTube.

                  You can easily find a lifetime's worth of really solid and free content on YouTube covering an insanely broad range of human knowledge. I'd say way more than Wikipedia. Yet, YouTube is also chock full of garbage, wrongness, conspiracy shit, and time wasting garbage sim

                  • You can easily find a lifetime's worth of really solid and free content on YouTube covering an insanely broad range of human knowledge. I'd say way more than Wikipedia.

                    YouTube is absolutely amazing if, for instance, you want a video to show you how to fix something that is broken on your car, or to install a new appliance in your house. Wikipedia is far more useful if you want to know the history of your particular make or model of car, or how various types of home heating systems work. I don't see them as competing at all, in fact they are very complimentary.

                    That said I would suggest there is far more shit you would not want your kids to see on Youtube than on Wikip

                • We may be talking past each other as my mention of "please protect me" was a society wide one, and not internet specific. Since 9/11, if not a bit before, it's been the battle-cry for EVERYTHING from space exploration to common traffic.

                  However, the simple solution to making websites responsible for everything published on them is no more public commentary at all. Period. Comments on slashdot? Gone. Twitter? Gone. Facebook. Gone. While I can see the argument in some cases, as I have yet to see any net positi

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by DarkOx ( 621550 )

                    The thing is the public's ask was "please protect me", but that isn't what they got. Kinda like how the CDA worked out actually at least after the courts got thru with it.

                    We got wars of reprisal, which supporters understood to be punitive in nature, but were also promised that after 'regime change' we'd do some nation building and create societies "over there" who were not our enemies. When that did not work though we kept up the reprisal part even though the nation building part was NOT working and double

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

                sometimes parents have to learn new things to do their job as a parent. It sucks, I'm sure, but that's just how it is.

                I think the difference is that parents now have to bring in digital crack into their homes in the form of youtube, tablets etc. This digital crack is powered by a multi-billion dollar industry to be as addictive as it possibly can. The only thing remotely similar in addictiveness and manipulation is cigarettes. Tobacco addiction wasn't solved by "parents being parents", and tablets+youtube won't be solved that way either -- they both require society-wide pushes. (One difference is that cigarettes weren't ne

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sjames ( 1099 )

              I'm pretty sure parents understand the concept of a white list. For example telling a child the places they are allowed to go when they go outside. Also blacklists, stay away from the river. Don't play around the well...

              They may not understand how to technically enforce it, but they know what it is.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Oh, I agree it ought to be the parents' job.

            Parenting is a busy job and they can't be expected to know everything, so I don't mind if they outsource some of it. Like there's an ISP [solcon.nl] (run it through google translate) here that sells "safe, filtered internet" (really, filtered WWW) mainly to the religious who don't trust themselves not to sin by searching for porn. (I do get that some people have serious problems with this temptation, but it doesn't do to assume everyone must therefore have that very same pro

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

            But it's not like there's zero technology available to filter a child's access on their devices. In home and on-device firewalling with routes that cut-off known-bad sites. Granted, if I were a parent I'd probably start with a white-list and work my way up, allowing them free access when I'm there to help steer and explain things as they got older.

            I'm a highly tech-savvy parent. You'd think that what you describe would be sensible, and provided on devices, but it's not...

            * MacOS - the whitelist is IP only. Thus for instance if your email server "mail.exchange.com" is backed by a load-balanced pool of 500 IP addresses, you need to approve each one as it comes to it.

            * iPad - it turns out that every blasted educational app needs a constantly changing backend list of servers to connect to. I guess some are downloading JS, some are doing oauth, some are d

          • Just think of the average parent's intelligence level. Now realize that half of all parents are dumber then that. Of course our species is doomed if we let anyone and everyone have children.

            And here we are.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

        There's a big, BIG push to make the entire web sanitized for children, rather than make parents responsible for implementing monitoring or filtering on their children's devices.

        Just to note, I think software doesn't exist for software-based filtering. Therefore, the monitoring+filtering all has to be done in the real world. It's like buying a family heroin needle, leaving it on the counter, and then rely on discipline and rules to make sure no one uses it when they're not supposed to. (i.e. discipline and rules might work for many people, once their brains are mature, but integrating them into your child's formation is way premature).

        * iOS -- there are "screen time" controls whic

        • Not going to happen until strong AI happens. A choice needs to be made each time for each kind of content and parental preferences vary really widely. One parent doesn't care, another wants to shield his child from violent content, another wants to permit soft core porn starting at the age of 14. And making a new filter/security apparatus you're still pitting your skills against the combined sex drive of all teenagers. Good luck.

      • I don't know at this point, but it sure feels like the governments of the world, as they come up with ways to address social media issues, are using those issues as ways to wrest control of the entire web away from those that don't always align perfectly with their political goals, ideals, or fall in line with their current issue du jour.

        Let's take an example: how to make a bomb. Should this information be suppressed on the net?

        Some years ago the FAA banned liquids on airplanes, because there are specific A/B liquids that can be combined mid-air to make a bomb.

        As an adult with an opinion and a vote, should I take the FAA's word for this, or should I be able to look up the components and their admixture, read papers on the reaction, and otherwise make up my own mind?

        It turns out that the A/B components are reactive, unstable, and don't "expl

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Point of order, I thought the liquid thing was because of gel explosives. I'm no expert but Wikipedia claims that they have mostly replaced dynamite for demolition in the US, so they must be capable of doing some significant damage.

          In any case, it's a good thing that I was able to look that up. Now excuse me, someone is banging on the front door...

      • We would of never been allowed online if the government really understood what the Internet was and could become.

        I'm quite sure it will be turned into another cable tv network in the not so far future. User-generated content will go away and only those who can setup a website will be able to post. Furthermore, hosting companies will be given more regulations to follow and likely dictating what websites can even be made.

        Free and open Internet? Yeah right, no government wants that. They just want the Internet

        • Remember when business first started taking notice of the internet? How many articles did we read about this new thing that's "just like a TV but with a buy button!?" They're working on it, and I'm sure they'll get us there eventually.

    • Wikipedia is as close to a decent value as you can get in a site contributed to by volunteers from anywhere.

      That used to be true but has not been for some time.

      Instead Wikimedia is engaged in just as much censorship along the exact same ideological lines as all other large social media platforms.

      Indeed Wikipedia is probably more odious in this regard as social media is all treated as opinion, while many treat Wikipedia as fact. So they should probably be held to a higher standard and punished even more se

      • I would disagree with your characterization of how people view all sources. There are plenty of people that view things crossing their chosen media platform as fact - particularly those sources that traffic in echo chambers.

        The idea that you crack down on the companies that get too close to being mostly correct seems counter-intuitive to me. Being objectively reasonable earns you greater scrutiny and heavier punishment? What's the end game there?

      • If a site seems fair and balanced to left-leaning people, then you can be assured it is biased in favor of the left. And if a site seems fair and balanced to right-leaning people, you can be assured it is biased in favor of the right.

        If a site seems fair and balanced to both left-leaning and right-leaning people, you can be assured it doesn't exist.

      • Instead Wikimedia is engaged in just as much censorship along the exact same ideological lines as all other large social media platforms.

        Could you link an example article or two to illustrate the nature of the censorship? Links to reliable sources for the censored information would be helpful as well.

    • Back when I was about three years old, we lived in this flat in Amsterdam and there was some kind of a metal staircase outside my window so all I had to do was open said window, climb down said staircase and go walking around the red light district. Honestly I don't know what these people were thinking.

    • "The bill aims to protect people from harmful content online."

      Go ahead. Define "harmful" in that sentence. Then find the society that will agree with you.

      They realized defining the "hate" in hate speech was utterly fucking pointless, so in a grand demonstration of 21st Century intelligence and logic, they reworded the same bullshit to convince you it was a different argument.

      It's not, and this will ultimately go nowhere. It'll sure distract the masses for a while though.

  • "freedom to indoctrinate".

    For example, Etienne Terrus [1], a lesser known French painter but nonetheless great artist friend of Matisse and recognized during his lifetime (thing that Van Gogh didn't achieve), has his name translated to "Esteve" and he's no longer French but "Catalan of the North".

    And the indoctrination comes when you try to put that he was French and Wikipedia Policeman blocks you and remove your editing rights.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    [2] https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • So if I were to look deeper into the chain of events, that's exactly what happened? I won't find anything else that might have contributed to a ban? Such as, say, excessive confrontational language or unreasonable aggression? The banned person simply said, "Hey, that guy was french", and the hammer came down?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dasunt ( 249686 )

        So if I were to look deeper into the chain of events, that's exactly what happened? I won't find anything else that might have contributed to a ban? Such as, say, excessive confrontational language or unreasonable aggression? The banned person simply said, "Hey, that guy was french", and the hammer came down?

        Looks like (using google translate), there was an edit war, with someone saying he was French because he was born in France, someone else reverting it, and saying leave a message in their discussion if

        • Sounds about right. My only point was that getting banned from editing probably takes more than a momentary disagreement.

        • I was the one in that fight saying that because he was born in France, he was French.

          And, alas, French are NOT Catalan, even less "Catalan of the North", which is an independentist terminology used for indoctrination of a false "Catalan is a nation and our territories were stolen".

          So, because of that Wikipedia is now a tool of indoctrination.

    • It took me a number of minutes to understand that your bad experience took place on the Catalan Wikipedia.
      Everybody knows English Wikipedia. The small langauges are a lot less visible.
      I don't read Catalan, but I do read Spanish, and a cursory examination suggests that you were probably in the right, but that you probably went about your disagreement the wrong way.
      As a minority ethnicity without their own country, the Catalans tend to be zealous in claiming those they see as their own. Obviously, that viewpo

  • Move all Wikipedia servers to the U.S. It would increase latency a bit for the rest of the world, but would prevent government censorship from the EU and even more authoritarian governments like Pakistan.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vbdasc ( 146051 )

      Move all Wikipedia servers to the U.S. It would increase latency a bit for the rest of the world, but would prevent government censorship from the EU

      Which EU you're talking about? The one that the UK is a part of? Note that according to the article the Wikimedia representative actually said that the EU law was reasonable and she wished the UK's proposal was like it.

  • Nope. Do it across the boardf (Score:4, Informative)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @04:26PM (#63217698) Journal
    Wiki is a joke. They purposely withhold all sorts of information. For example, one was China threatening to nuke their neighbors if they help taiwan stop China's invasion. There are videos of top government and the government rags saying out and out that they will nuke them. And this was in the last couple of years
    Then in the page about nuke first use, it claims that China has promised that they will not use it unless they are attacked by a nuclear bomb.

    It is one thing to have a chinese troll pull it, but it is another to have the 'moderators' allow it to be pulled.

    There are many many other lies sitting in wiki that need to be stopped.

  • ... "limit freedom of expression".

    This is where 'save the children' becomes a problem: No-one is allowed to publish the truth because a child will see it. When does reporting the facts become "exposing children to harmful content"?

    The internet is already censored because a how-to manual may incite a crime. It's why the details in movies are wrong: Because the truth is visually boring, or because the truth might enable criminal behaviour.

  • Wikipedia is about as reliable as CNN or MSNBC
    • Yes! Just have a look at any liberal new media broadcaster. They never use the word "liberal" or "biased". However, any journalist who even slightly leans right is labeled "conservative" in the first paragraph of their bio. This can be proven time and time again. Also note that these articles are always "locked" so that revisions cannot be suggested.

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