Something quite depressing is if we (HN crowd) find workarounds, most regular folks won't have the budget/expertise to do so, so citizen journalism will have been successfully muted by government / big media.
Those citizen journalists with their primary sources, disgusting.
Thats nothing but propaganda.
Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you.
You're right. But compared to what?
I guess 99% of mainstream "journalism" is irrelevant and/or inaccurate, hence citizen journalism is a 10x improvement in accuracy and relevancy! Not 10% better, 900% better! This makes a huge difference to our society as a whole and in our daily lives!
But this misses the most important point which is that the user should have the right to choose for themselves what they say and read. Making citizen journalism unduly burdensome deprives everyone of that choice.
In an age of mass media (where there's a video for anything) or now one step further synthetic media knowing who makes something is much more important than the content, given that what's being shown can be created on demand. Propaganda in the modern world is taking something that actually happened, and then framing it as an authentic piece of information found "on the street", twisting its context.
"what's in the video" is now largely pointless, and anyone who isn't gullible will obviously always focus on where the promoter of any material wants to direct the audiences attention to, or what they want to deflect from.
I grew up in a pretty deprived area of the UK, and we all knew "a guy" who could get you access to free cable, or shim your electric line to bypass the meter, or get you pirated CD's and VHS' and whatever.
There will always be "that guy down the pub" selling raspberry pi's with some deranged outdated firmware that runs a proxy for everything in the house or whatever. To be honest with you, I might end up being that guy for a bunch of people once I'm laid off from tech like the rest. :)
Well you'd be surprised to find out that this stupid policy (and many more) have been brought forward by Labour (Left).
You should be worried. Don't underestimate the capabilities of the government bureaucrats. That "guys down the pub" will quickly disappear once they start getting jail time for their activities.
They're being pushed by media conglomerates News Corp and Nine Entertainment [0] to crush competition (social media apps). With the soon-to-be-introduced 'internet licence' (euphemism: 'age verification'), and it's working. If they ban VPN's, it will make social media apps even more burdensome to access and use.
[0] News Corp and Nine Entertainment together own 90% of Australian print media, and are hugely influential in radio, digital and paid and free-to-air TV. They have a lot to gain by removing access to social media apps, where many (especially young) people get their information now days.
Somehow, things that could be unifying protests where the working class of every political stripe are able to overlook their differences and push back against government never seem to happen. It is always polarized so that it's only ever one side at a time, and the other side is against them. How does that work?
The goal right now is to make online anonymity impossible. Adult content is the wedge issue being used to make defending it unpalatable for any elected official, but nobody actually has it as a goal to prevent teenagers from looking at porn - if they did, they would be using more direct and efficient strategies. No, it's very clear that anonymous online commentary is hurting politicians and they are striking back against it.
They cannot enforce laws against such "petty" crimes, the reason society mostly functions in the UK is because most people don't try to break the law.
Pretty sure the local punters would kick the cops out if they came for one of their own, especially if he got them their porn back.
They can barely handle wolf-whistlers let alone pedophile rape gangs consisting of the lowest IQ dregs of our society.
I know it’s only painfully stupid people who think the law is stupid, but dodgy Dave down the way tends to fly under the radar. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many of them.
So as soon as Labour comes out for something, Cons are inclined to be against it and so on. The only way to have neutral protests is if no one visibly backs them and they don't become associated with a side, but then how do they get support and organization?
There is no need for special efforts to enforce the law. Put a few people in jail - and everyone else will quickly find safer and more legal ways to spend their time. No one will do something like that unless they are confident of their impunity.
Maybe The Guardian should open a branch in Sealand...
How about instead of being depressed you start being vocal and defiant?
Authoritarianism in the UK doesn't correlate with crime. The economy does.
The point of these things is not really to help citizens. "there's no money for that" like there's no money for healthcare or education (although there is for bombings in foreign countries). The point is protecting power from any threat that could mount against it.
It will only work if they admit that they supported this and all forms of totalitarianism during COVID. You can't fall for that and then be surprised when the world keeps going down that obvious path.
They would argue back on technical merits, I was talking political, a politics doesn't give a damn about the tech. We have slowly been going down this path for a while now.
“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” - PM Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.
Seeing companies like Palantir (and many lesser known ones) buddy up to everyone that wants it, its a clear statement on how they want to monitor and control the populace.
Long term I don't think it can be done, but the pain mid term can be vast.
The problem with covid is that we weren't totalitarian enough. Regulations you could drive a coach & horses through and no way to enforce is a sop.
The first lock down needed to be a proper 'papers, please' affair. When we get a properly lethal pandemic, we're fucked. Hopefully Laurence Fox and Piers Corbyn will catch it quickly and expire in a painful and televised way, it's the only hope of people complying with actual quarantine measures.
The moment your dodgy Dave offends your local cadre, even for reasons entirely other than being dodgy, they'll throw the book at him. And because there is now unpredictability around who will be arrested and for what reason, it acts as a chilling effect for everyone who values some degree of stability in their lives. So the arc of dodgy Daves bends toward compliance.
What makes you think, if the Gov was to implement some sophisticated DPI firewall that blocks a million different things, they won't come after the people who circumvent it? They already enforce petty crimes. I could report you for causing me anxiety and you would have a copper show up at your door.
We have whistleblowers and leakers from the administration itself on a literal weekly basis, our own Department of State actively funds Signal and Tor, our media has been heavily criticizing Trump and his allies for years. A couple organizations got hit with lawsuits for publishing misinformation or skirting campaign law, but that’s about it.
They tried to make flag burning illegal - which is illegal in Mexico, most of South America, all of Asia, and most of Europe - and it was shot down almost immediately as even that comes under 1st amendment rights.
Please don’t lump us into the same bucket as the UK. We may have a sharply divided electorate but we don’t have a failing state!
No, they aren't interested in enforcing laws against petty crimes. The establishment literally don't give a toss if someone breaks into your house and nicks your telly.
They are very interested in enforcing the kinds of infringements we're talking about here.
Sorry for the snide comment, but considering the last 6 - 8 months in the US, at least from what is being reported in the outside world, the 1st amendment doesn't seem to be providing much in the way of protection, and unless I'm missing something the general public doesn't seem to have the level of interest that would be required for your 2nd amendment to play out in any meaningful way.
And COVID was not "totalitarian enough"? Yet people were forbidden from leaving their homes for a time.
It was really amazing what fear could do to a population, how it rallied mostly together.
As with any source, always question what you are being offered: is this video clip full, what preceded it, what followed it? Who else confirms this person said this or experienced that?
You're the kind of person that said that "measures didn't work because we didn't close hard enough, if we do 2 weeks of REAL lockdown...". It's ridiculous. You have absolutely no perspective of how the world work and how things break, people need health, food, working pipes.
You have an absolutely authoritarian mindset and an inability to asses risk. You also have deep contempt for your fellow human being who are "not deserving of democracy".
Lastly, it's funny to hear you admit this pandemic wasn't lethal because people don't actually comply the way you want, which means that the actions were theater and unneeded.
The ignorance of what's been happening the last few months is ridiculous. Trump and his people have successfully pressured, or denied access, or removed security clearances, or demonetized (public broadcasting), or directly fired, or just called out to cause a hate-storm from his supporters, companies, organizations, individuals.
Oh sure, it is different from the UK: Instead of technical blocks and surveillance this administration targets people and organizations directly.
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/paramount...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/11/us-journalist-dropp...
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/07/media/trump-cnn-press-con...
https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/11/the-media-fe...
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/g-s1-51489/voice-of-america-b...
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corporate-media-caves-t...
In my books, the UK is the father of Orwellian censorship and surveillance, they just didn't get down to do it completely (yet).
Individually, the people of the UK are generally kind, thoughtful and considerate. As a mob, they're an absolute nightmare especially when wankers like Fox and Corbyn get involved.
Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to tell people 'no'.
>Lastly, it's funny to hear you admit this pandemic wasn't lethal because people don't actually comply the way you want, which means that the actions were theater and unneeded
This pandemic was lethal, but it wasn't bubonic plague lethal. When we get something that cuts like a knife through hot butter, you'll soon be holed up inside screaming at strangers through the letterbox.
in the US the NYT is similar, they will sometimes allow stuff get published to manufacture credibility for when they actually need it. Like see the Iraq war for example.
Sometimes I think about that: vax aside, they actually managed to provision trusted certificates for a huge percentage of the population in a short period of time. Could have actually been useful for online ID, though we know of the dangers there; but look, here I am signing into my government's website using my bank as a 3rd party IDP. Shouldn't I sign into the bank using the gov't instead??
This is true everywhere, mobs devolve us to primate behaviour; if you've been in a crowd that ever got angry, you know this - it drives the hindbrain in amazing and terrifying ways. Happy crowds can give you elation you'll never feel anywhere else; angry crowds can make a man kill, even though normally he'd never dream of it.
Of course, most countries don't need to have Anti-Social Behavioural Orders or ban people from buying butter knives, so there's something else going on in the UK that is a bit harder to put a finger on.
I think this (incorrectly) assumes that nobody will ever capitalize on easy (and free/cheap) access to workarounds and advertise it far and wide.
If you suppress the avenues for peaceful political change, your courting violent revolution. History bears this out. Each, in its moment, seemed an unthinkable leap—overthrowing monarchs or empires—yet each remade its world.
The saying that history rhymes, not repeats, points to immutable human behavior.
Today, revolutionary pressures simmer. The U.S. saw a peaceful political shift in 2024, enabled by free speech's safety valve. Elsewhere, without such freedoms, violence fills the void. I pray other nations find paths to renewal without bloodshed, but history's lessons are not optimistic.