British Home secretaries have been proposing insane ideas for a decade. Patel alone proposed to:<p><pre><code> - 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)
</code></pre>
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).
Context - a UK MP has just been killed by a constituent at a regular 'meet the MP' incident.<p>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).<p>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.
What irks me personally about it is the reporting that it was done by a “British citizen <i>of Somali origin</i>”.<p>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.<p>No one reports that Wayne Rooney is British, of English origin.
Implementation of sanctions is the end game, and that end game is a national firewall.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>As for encryption, does this mean we can't do online banking if it's outlawed?
One of the interesting documented effects of removing anonymity is that is lowers the input of moderate voices.<p>People with extreme views don’t care if their voice is public.
Instead of attacking specific content or specific people/personal info, what if we go at the structure and system instead?<p>- Don't care about the content of the tweet (no fact checking boards)<p>- Don't care to register who sent it (no privacy leak to government)<p>"Attack" the structure:<p>- 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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!<p>/s, hopefully obviously.
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.<p>Or it is anonymous tweeters of course.<p>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.<p>But it is everyone else who is at fault....
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.<p>Not to mention the internet is global, so really they can't enforce anything.<p>> Priti Patel considering removing right to anonymity on social media to stop ‘relentless’ abuse of MPs<p>If they weren't so corrupt and inept they wouldn't be subject to 'abuse', it comes with the job.<p>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.<p>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.