Wait I thought 4chan died
The hacker known as 4 Chan is BACK, baby!
Not dead. Just irrelevant.
4chan is a very stubborn website
I’m a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they’re not followed?
Like, they obviously can’t enforce these fines. This article says as much. The fines can’t be enforced, but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article). Which are fair measures imo.
Like, to the people saying UK can’t do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way? The US has these laws too, like COPPA iirc. It’s not really something the UK came up with, it’s a bit of a standard with laws like this as far as I know.
The UK government is basically testing the waters of what it can get away with and also normalising the notion that they could even bother/dare to ask for this to be done in the first place.
It is about shifting the Overton Window for the normies. Especially, over time. For example, the first people to be cancelled or removed from social media years ago, like almost 10 years ago, it was done with some bad fanfare, and the people who did it, Twitter, etc… I remember said that they did it even despite some internal strife over the notion of censorship. Now, people can get cancelled on a dime and no one really cares all that much.
If you told someone 20 years ago that you should pay ca$h out of your ien pocketas to get a corporate microphone that listens to you, your family, your children constantly so it can play songs for you and tell you the weather and gives some other conveniences, 99% people would say that you would have to fucking insane to do that. Being such a breach of fucking common sense and reasonable privacy. Look at people now. Shifting the Overton Window works for fun, control and profit.
Of course, if the US does not play along, then UK’s bill goes nowhere outside the UK, or maybe they will try with weaker geopolitical cointries. But governments do this type of thing all the time, under a, “We will push until someone else finally pushes back,” mentality.
If the UK really wanted to go after 4Chan, they could contact the FBI or whoever in the USA that could serve relevant via proper channels. This has always been available to them, but this is not about that, it is about censorship and control. Obviously.
I’m a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they’re not followed?
Some laws are bullshit and I commend everyone who decides to ignore them.
but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article)
This has already happened to a number of sites and services, with some voluntarily blocking access from the UK. 4chan’s approach is just a bit different in the way that they are waiting to get blocked instead of doing the blocking themselves. It sucks for citizens from the UK, but they are the ones that put the people in power who created those laws.
Like, to the people saying UK can’t do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way?
This has also been the case already. There are a number of American websites that will just straight up deny you access if you visit them from a EU country. Some even cite GDPR as the reason for being blocked. I don’t think it’s the best solution, but I accept it because I wouldn’t want to visit a site that cannot comply with it anyways.
Trump admin: “We literally want the same exact thing.”
The Biden Admin tried and failed in some fronts and got censorship working in others.
I’m pulled back and forth with this one. On the one hand, 4chan is a shithole that should be taken care of. On the other side, UK laws that try to govern the internet are so overly deranged shit.
Look at bigger picture. Ignore that it is 4Chan and imagine it is a site that you actually like or care about. That is the point.
The reason they go after 4Chan is because they want to normalise this general type of censorship and hope people are gullible or biased enough that they will or would let obvious authoritarian censorship slide because they know some people dislike the site. It is s manipulation and how you shot the Overton Window towards general censorship.
The point is that the UK should never do that and the law is bad. Whenever you see shit like this, switch the “thing” in question to something you like and be honest to yourself and think if you would be okay with it.
If they can do it easily to things you dislike, then they can as easily do it to things you like.
The fact that is Labour, or the equivalent of the USA Democrats trying to hinder public speech in other countries via this insane laws is something worth noting. Any side can do this.
Are EU privacy laws trying to govern the internet also deranged?
I don’t agree with the laws the UK have on this matter, but trying to govern the internet is absolutely nothing new, and most of the time the internet fucking loves it, and praises the EU for trying to do so.
“Taken care of”, so how does this kind of perspective differ from the protection law?
Properly dealing with hate crimes is different from controlling the internet more or less in general.
Let the internet be free, but also keep it free from hate.
Imagine, instead of “hate”, its "You cant talk about trans people without handing over your ID. Are you ok with that? Cos right now, youre OK with kicking 4chan out, even though that wouldnt get rid of whatever problem you dont like. But at some point, say, Trump. Could get a law going into effect similar or worse than the UK one, only instead of porn, its “Woke”. And he and his cronies get to decide what “woke” is and how to age verify you to be able to access services for gender care.
And the age shit isnt even the worst part. The UK government wants apple and facebook and everyone else with a messaging app, to create a window for the government to scan messages. They say for abuse. Luckily, it cant be done as it would break the current encryption methods used. But that doesnt mean they cant force it later on down the road. And got forbid your girlfriend or wife sends you a naughty text message with “Daddy” at the end. You knock on the door, and pedo label slapped on your citizenship score.
Whenever you want something new to be put into law. Always look to see the worst case that it can be abused, and then ask if you still want it. Scanning messages might protect a few kids, so its worth it right? But the cost is that for the rest of time, no one gets any privacy in their communications. And worse, the government can your private communications to profile you and then sell that data, above or below board. Does it still sound great?
“Let it be free, but control it to keep this part out.”
That’s literally what you’re experiencing. You get to witness the flaw in the part where you don’t get to pick the entity that decides which content doesn’t belong.
Keep it free from hate without controlling it? Who gets the ultimate say, then? The internet or the government? If your answer is “the government” how in the world does that work without controlling the internet? What government has successfully done this before?
Can we just block the UK from the Internet. So they can have their own Internet, like China. That will solve a lot of problems.
If you are not in the UK, this shit UK law doesn’t affect you in any way. 4chan will just be blocked by UK ISP’s, and people will put up proxy sites that will get regularly blocked blah blah blah like thepiratebay.
Unless the shithead Trump, whose voted-for-twice America actually could do with being isolated from international life (this is not inflammatory, America voted for international non-cooperation), intervenes and our pathetically weak government yet again fails to stand up for itself.
Let’s face it, Starmer’s tongue is shoved so far up Trump’s fettid arsehole, he can taste his mouthwash. Trump only has to tweet about it and that spineless twat will capitulate and make it the government’s most important mission to ensure “international cooperation”, or some BS.
If Europe and others don’t pull away from the US as quickly as is possible, surely we are going to be sucked further into the abyss of authoritarianism.
But it does effect everyone. Don’t you think the lack complete backlash to the online safety act is emboldening similar ideas in the rest of the world, especially the EU? Yes, we’ve stopped chat control like 2 or 3 times already, but it’s being brought up again now.
Every Western country is moving towards authoritarianism/data-totalitarianism. Characterising this as a British only thing is nonsense.
But ideas are cheap, of course every government has thought and dragged ideas about this before. But implementing them is costly, so letting another government go first, working out the kinks, getting case studies for what kind of messaging works, what tech is required, and seeing what the backlash looks like, makes the second go a lot easier and cheaper.
Dominoes
I hope this encourages more companies/sites to fight back against stupid laws. If most keep complying, it’ll only get worse for them in the future when they make even worse laws.
Pull out all UK servers and ignore uk fines (assuming thats legal wherever u reside… idk how that works) or just pull out of uk.
I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.
The EU wants to go after encryption. By introducing means to be able to see messages in services before they are encrypted and sent. Law is currently being discussed.
Basically:
“Trust us bro, we will have the means to read your stuff but we promise to never read them or abuse it. Trust us.”
I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.
Not going to happen with Switzerland and EU laws. Being completely surrounded by the EU, we’re really bad with leverage and are already struggling to not have worse and worse deals forced on us. Plus, we have our own Chat Control type law coming up (which is why Proton is leaving). There’s no way we’ll take a stance against EU law.
Wow thats a shock. I suppose the second best option would be any country outside of europe, even though the connection speed wouldn’t be that fast, it would still be useable.
Why would an American website pay fines because of the laws of a random country?
If you offer a service in a country you are subject to their laws.
The internet is open. It is not up to a site to block a country just because. Which is what happened here, and this why their law is dumb and over reaching.
The argument is more like:
“UK citizens, via the open internet could see your site, and we have now decided that we do not like it. We are not going to complain via diplomacy or via your country’s existing Laws or policing agencies, as such, you must pay us £20,000 in fines, per day, for exisitng because we say so. Despite you having no interests, employees or infrastructure, at all, in our country.”
My website is my website. You visit my website, my website does not visit you. My website is public, you choose to enter it. You visit my website through your infrastructure to get to my infrastructure. My infrastructure is publicly available to you, should you be able to access it.
The governing body of your (second person, not you specifically) infrastructure (the UK government) chooses to impose rules on my actions. Their threat is “we’ll stop letting people in our infrastructure from being able to reach your infrastructure.”
That is extortion, not working in the public’s favor. The UK government is saying they’ll block all roads from your house that lead to my website outside of the UK. My website is overseas, brother. The UK is blocking all the ports so you can’t sail here. I don’t “offer services” to you in the UK, I just don’t prevent people from the UK from trying to reach my island. Nothing about my services requires the UK infrastructure. My services keep operating whether the UK government exists or not. How do they have any right over my infrastructure in this scenario?
If this is about ads, the UK has all the right to remove my ads from their country. That is within their right. Anything about blocking people from the UK is within their right, sure, but that’s not my problem lol. Sorry you have a shit government lol
I’m not sure I like the idea that you’re “offering a service” in a country simply by being a data service that can accessed from it.
Someone from Australia can call me and we can chat. It doesn’t mean I or my phone carrier are offering a service in Australia.
You’re right, but that also means your service can get blocked in said country. And that’s what they don’t want, so they’re trying to fight it from home.
Whoever is providing the communications infrastructure to the Australian caller would be offering a service in Australia (5g masts, fibre, customer service etc.)
Only if the call is going via satellite owned by non-Australians could you avoid this.
What does that mean? Arent most sites available everywhere by default?
I absolutely don’t care what happens to 4chan, but UK starting to fine the internet for being available there and not complying with their bullshit is worrying.
I don’t want the 4chan users to flock someplace else.
They’ve already “flocked”. The site and userbase is a shell of its former self and it’s hey day is long passed. The users aged out or just went to places like kiwi farms, random discord channels, etc.
I mean you’re on Lemmy, a good chunk of old 4chan users are here, so you’re amongst them.
I love rage-baiting on /g/ and /tg/, it’s a very good outlet
been temp-banned on /tg/ for trolling on an OSR thread, good time
Believe me, they’ve already been everywhere you’ve been. It’s not like once you post on 4chan you’re forbidden from making accounts on every other website.
It’s like league of Legends. Sure, they play other games. But it keeps a lot of their time busy elsewhere.
A game would keep people entertained or engaged in some way, some kind of focused shared activity. But to 4chan, coordinating with other anons about what YouTube comments to spam, what subreddit to brigade, that was the game. Organizing a personal army of trolls (yes that personal army) was the whole point of being there.
In your analogy, a game of LoL takes place where all 10 players don’t play the game, they use global chat to decide on raiding Battlefield, DotA, or Overwatch. They then make a bunch of accounts, join some games, and rile people up with hate speech. Then they go back to LoL to share how angry they made other people.
Oh I know, but some place has to host their collective depravity. It might as well remain the 4chan site. I don’t think they can be gotten rid of or dispersed.
Calling 4chan the most hateful site on the Internet ignores the fact that xitter is a thing.
The kind of hateful rhetoric and grooming are not unique to 4chan, they happen on Facebook, discord, and roblox. 4chan has just been a minimally filtered representation of underground online cultures for decades now meaning it’s still just as much a font of creativity as it is a cesspool of internet refuse.
4chan has been mostly dead as a place of creativity for years. /b/ is mostly creepshots, AI generated porn, and a guy who has been spamming a picture inviting you to eat Andy Sixx’s shit for like 5 years now. /pol/ is basically Stormfront lite.
/lit/ and /mu/ were some of the best parts of 4chan but are shells of their former selves, some of the sfw boards sometimes have things of value but it’s time to move on.
4chan’s creativity died when the first Soyjak was posted.
Just because you’re comfortable with racial and homophobic slurs in most posts, doesn’t mean it’s not hateful.
I detest Elon and xitter as much as anyone, but there is zero comparison. If anything, it just shows how far you’ve gone.
I checked one of those site traffic estimators and got 2 to 2.5 mil monthly views for 4chan vs 120 mil for twitter. So if every single 4chan user was a nazi, it would only take about 2% of twitter being nazis to equal that. Seems like there might be more nazis on twitter these days tbh.
Maybe more, but every other post on xitter doesn’t use the n word. You cannot compare just numbers. Actions are key. 4chan is a cesspool.
Are you trying to argue that twitter isn’t a shithole?
No. I’m making it clear equating the 2 ain’t right. It looks like you’re trying to defend and normalise 4chan.
To try and say, “yeah, there is racial slurs, but it’s great for culture” is trying to justify unacceptable views.
To be fully explicit, xitter sucks and you shouldn’t use that either.
I really hope he says no, just because 4chan deserves the leopards.
Why, because they are opposing the safety act just like we are. It just seems a bit naive.
I don’t really understand how this works. If I’m a company whose entire infrastructure is in the US (for example, I don’t know if 4chan is like that) how can I get in trouble with the UK? I don’t have a legal entity there, I’m not doing any business on their soil whatsoever, how can they enforce their laws against me?
They’re “doing business” there by serving ads to their citizens, that’s the legal basis for suing them. Whether that goes anywhere depends on the laws governing the business and any leverage UK has (say, going after advertising who do business with the company and in the UK).
I think it only works if the country you are in allows it to happen, as in they have an understanding with the UK (in this case) to follow through with legal stuff. If they were in russia (for example), the UK probably couldn’t enforce anything.
Think it is down to the government of your country.
If there’s someone prepared to argue in court about why the UK’s Act is a terrible idea, holy crap is it NOT 4chan
I wonder how discovery would go.
“Your honor here is 30 terabytes of beastiality porn, we think what you want is somewhere in there, have fun going through it”
I am surprised they are asking for any legal action at all instead of just laughing at it and ignoring all messaging from Ofcom. Maybe responding with a few shitposts
Probably because the US has agreements with the UK about prosecution of folks for stuff like this, and the resulting handling of court ordered punishments like fines. We only ignore things like that if you’re a spouse of a cia agent or something.
“4chan asks Donald Trump for help”
What a weird world.
Indeed, feeling the need to check, I can tell you that we’re not in the onion anymore…
Go 4chan!
Not often I get to say that, but this is one case.
you definitely don’t have to praise the website for paedophiles.
He’s praising the site’s action, not the site itself.
So has Twitter, Youtube, Insta, Facebook and Lemmy.
OK so Trump is going to have to choose whether or not to side with fucking 4chan, you know, the site with regular pedophilia threads.
And how would Trump siding with nonces be a surprise?
It’s been a long time since I’ve browsed that cesspool, but I remember all the pedos getting banned and going over to the other image boards like 8chan. Been more than a decade though and that was when moot still ran things
They do pedo AI threads.
Gross
