Slashdot Mirror
Cameron Says People Radicalized By Free Speech; UK ISPs Agree To Censor Button
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Techdirt: A few years ago, we mocked then Senator Joe Lieberman's request that internet companies put "report this content as terrorist content" buttons on various types of online content. The plan went nowhere, because it's a really bad idea, prone to massive abuse. Yet, over in the UK, some apparently think it's such a grand idea that they're actually moving forward with it. This isn't a huge surprise — the current UK government has been going on for quite some time about banning "extremist" content, and just recently ramped up such efforts. And now it appears that a bunch of big UK broadband access providers have agreed to play along: The UK's major Internet service providers – BT, Virgin, Sky and Talk Talk – have this week committed to host a public reporting button for terrorist material online, similar to the reporting button which allows the public to report child sexual exploitation. They have also agreed to ensure that terrorist and extremist material is captured by their filters to prevent children and young people coming across radicalising material.
Make this such an onerous burden that the ISPs are forced to either withdraw their support, or just censor everything that is flagged without checking it. To do this, report everything that is remotely political as "extremist" and "radicalizing". When the politicians themselves are the targets of their bad law, they just might take a hint.
There is this story online which claims that efforts to introduce wheel clamps were defeated by a mass movement of the French people who injected superglue into the lock of every single wheel clamp they came across. Eventually the whole wheel clamp introduction became more trouble than it was worth.