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Call For Tech Giants To Face Taxes Over Extremist Content (bbc.com)
Internet companies should face a tax punishment for failing to deal with the threat of terrorism in the UK, security minister Ben Wallace has said. From a report: Mr Wallace said firms such as Facebook, Google and YouTube were too slow to remove radical content online, forcing the government to act instead. While tech firms were "ruthless profiteers," governments were spending millions policing the web, he added. Facebook said Mr Wallace was wrong to say it put profits before safety. YouTube said violent extremism was a "complex problem" and addressing it was a "critical challenge for us all." In an interview with the Sunday Times, Mr Wallace said tech giants were failing to help prevent the radicalisation of people online. "Because content is not taken down as quickly as they could do," he claimed, "we're having to de-radicalise people who have been radicalised. That's costing millions."
Threatening content providers with SPECIAL tax treatment if they have the wrong content is censorship plain and simple.
Imagine if Wallace had called for a special tax on newspapers and television stations for failing to "deal with" the threat of terrorism in the UK. That said, the bizarre paid story approach that Facebook uses should be outlawed.
Instead of censuring internet companies for being too slow to remove radical content, how about censuring the UK government for inviting millions of immigrants who had no intention of assimilating British culture?
If those immigration officials didn't know in advance that this would result in terror attacks, they were in willful denial.
Because today it's terrorism, tomorrow it's someone who criticizes Islam or says that Brexit is a good thing.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... outside social media and address the root of most of the problems.
" ... violent extremism ... " isn't a social media problem -- it's a conversation about " ... violent extremism ... " in the real world.
Those real world problems are due to lack of diplomacy and governance and statesmanship.
Blocking evil content does not block evil.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
All those terrorists are nice local kids radicalized by Google and Facebook. Sure, sure...
There's no need to over complicate this. We already have a definitive set of rules for social conduct and interaction. It's called The Rust Code of Conduct. Thankfully, there's already an organization dedicated to upholding The Rust Code of Conduct. It's called The Rust Moderation Team. Together they will stamp out all injustice, intolerance, bigotry and hate. They will create a world with diversity and inclusion.
...by not being a party to killing civilians in so many foreign countries.
No censorship, no fear of being banned (unless you spammed). I know it's still accessible but seeing BurfordTJustice is posting in alt.home.repair the writings on the wall.
The only reason that the big tech companies says it is a "complex problem" is because they don't want to hire people to review the massive amounts of drivel that gets spewed out on their website. Of course, someone will say "it is impossible" to review it all because there is "so much content", but that is baloney. You might need to hire hundreds of thousands of people to do it, but they are making billions so they could do it.
Government clowns can't figure out how to tax corporations, period. How are they going to tax corporate "badness" when they can't even tax their profits?
How about giving people no reason to become extremists? How about giving people a reason to live instead of making them susceptible to promises of a great afterlife because they notice that they can't get anywhere in this life because everywhere they look they see a dead end?
No, that's unpossible, right? That would cut into the bottom line of the people paying you, you old ho!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only defense against this would be to give people the ability to think critically and detect bullshit if they're told some.
But what politician would want their subjects to be able to tell when they're being fed bullshit?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I mean after all one persons extremist content is another man's right to free speech, if this is something serious then there needs to be some safeguards to prevent legitimate free and protected speech from being targeted
Their content is created by society, so they reflect society. If you don't like what you see reflected, breaking the mirror is a natural impulsive response but it doesn't actually change society. It just lets you pretend what you saw isn't there anymore. But since it was just a mirror, it's still there, only hidden and still festering.
If you're concerned about people being seduced by extremist content they encounter (be it online, in newsletters/books, or just by talking with other people), your effort is better spent figuring out why that extremist content is so seductive to them. Then taking corrective action to make said content no longer so seductive. A true free society does not fear extremist content, because it's educated its people well enough that they'll see the flaws in said content and reject it on their own, no policing by the government required.
A few people who are outliers will still fall for it, whether due to low IQ or mental illness or they just happened to have the right confluence of events in their lives that the extremist message rings true to them. But seeing as your odds of being killed by an extremist in a terrorist attack are somewhere down around your odds of dying in a storm, by a dog bite, or to a lightning strike, it's simply not worth the massive effort being proposed to try to prevent those deaths. Direct that effort instead to mitigating more mundane but deadlier risks, like ladders and swimming pools and stairways (not to mention fires, motor vehicle accidents, and poisoning). Heck, a program which reduces the suicide rate by 5% would save more lives than 100% effective anti-terrorism measures in the UK. (In some countries a mere 1% reduction in suicide rate would suffice.)
It is the responsibility of government to prevent radicalization, by assuring kids a quality education so they will grow up able to know when someone is using bullshit to trick them into destructive behavior, and by assuring adults justice so the messages of extremist wackos wonâ(TM)t find fertile ground in the minds of people who think their society has gone to shit.
For example: in America, an extremist wacko conspiracy theorist NUT convinced huge swaths of the country that America was no longer âoegreatâ and to vote against their own political and economic interests, ironically exacerbating the very problems those people were concerned about.
Schools should have taught these people better as kids. They should have been immune to this and responded âoehow does keeping immigrants out of a country OF IMMIGRANTS that was made great in the first place BY immigrants somehow make it great rather than less great?â Or perhaps âoeAmerica is already great, and if we were to make the idiotic mistake of voting for your incompetent ass, it could only make whatever is bad, worse.â
Then again, when one is dying, one is far more easily persuaded to try anything, and under useless, corrupt, garbage government by the owners of the âoetwoâ (hahaha) âoepartiesâ, Americans were willing to vote for literally ANYONE promising to upend the applecart.
Too bad one half of the oligarchy kept someone who wanted to really actually upend the applecart OUT and FAILED to stop the other, and so the applecart ends up upended... right into HIS applecart.
Insisting the media, (or internet companies who are replacing them,) should wipe government asses for them rather than insisting they CLEAN UP THEIR OWN SHIT is another symptom of failing government. In the UK, this is exemplified in the election of Theresa May and the Brexit vote. There, like here, massive failures of âoeher majestys governmentâ to educate children and provide justice for adults, (and society in general) made them susceptible to the kind of âoethinkingâ that made âoebrexitâ possible.
And I dont know what slashdots deal is with apostrophes so Ive simply stopped using them here.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Well, at least there has been some education if you only realised *today* what Ben Wallace is. Others have known this for some time.
I note the BBC slyly put their own opinion about this on the article, "effectively a fine", as that is exactly what it is. Tax is paid according to income, not action that is deemed criminal. I don't pay more tax if I do over a Post Office. I may well pay a fine, but the amount is in no way dependent upon how much I earn.
To even attempt to call this a tax is so fucked up and contrary to what everybody knows tax is, is symptomatic of the pure idiocy these cretins display, let alone how it could be "collected".
Best to just classify this along with the other "blue sky" thinking, i.e. not worth considering further.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
It's a money grab, power creep, and blamestorming, all in one. "See, it's not our fault, we told the tech companies to stop terrorism! They couldn't so we took their money!"
Better to simply give them a set goal and tell them it is the law, with fines on them if they fail to meat the goal.
Something simple like "down within x minutes", with penalties for taking the wrong stuff down.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If you outlaw hate speech, just define anything you dislike as hate speech and you legally shut down the opposition. Take, for example, groups like antifa. They call anyone to the right of Stalin a nazi. They define speech they disagree with as hate speech. Then they use violence to prevent speech because stopping "nazis" and "hate speech" is a good thing.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Those bad guys are forcing honest governments to impose censorship, which they HATE! Ha ha ha!
I don't care for the KKK OR the Black Panthers but I respect their right to say the stupid things that they say .... perhaps rather than policing speech we
embrace free expression
Farmers should be fined for producing food that goes to extremists. They know that these extreme groups can't exist without food, yet the just keep producing it. It's just ruthless profiteering and it's time we put a stop to it.
than doing what is right.
If government expects private companies to assume the functions and responsibilities of government (extraordinarily dangerous idea) they should be getting a cut of existing tax dollars as compensation for that work.
Twitter explicitly makes an exception for military or government entities in their latest set of rules. On the other hand it allows for a very broad interpretation of affililiation with violence so its potential for censorship is large.
> "Because of encryption and because of radicalisation, the cost of that is heaped on law enforcement agencies," Mr Wallace told the newspaper.
Becoming moderator of the entire internet will heap far more on law enforcement.
Censorship is also likely to result in more extremism. On the one hand companies will play it better safe than sorry eliminating any content that might fall foul of the law. On the other hand this kind of authoritarianism will turn more people against the government and law enforcement.
You'll have the same paradox you have in cyber-security where you can end up making users your enemy as well as hackers.
What's also paradoxical about things such as "extremism" is that the more expression you have and the less censorship the easier it is to detect, measure and manage.
You can implement secure end to end encryption on top of existing insecure systems or even create your own secure messaging application. You have to ask how far the government wants to go with this. Make encryption illegal, jailbreak illegal, root access illegal, open source illegal, programming without a license illegal? They become that IT Dept that includes all kinds of restrictions making it impossible to work.
> "They will ruthlessly sell our details to loans and soft-porn companies but not give it to our democratically elected government."
The government is meant to be stopping that from happening, not saying we want a piece of the pie.
Whoever is in the opposition is an extremist.
Venezuela is our shining example for removing extremist content.
Also the IRS auditing organizations specifically because they aligned themselves with the TEA party is another shining example.