In doubt we trust

Yes, it is the most uncanny of statements and there is al kinds of opposition to it. For me this started yesterday when I saw the BBC article (at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-63157632) titled ‘Molly Russell: Dad wants no further delay to online harm bill’ and I get it, he wants to do something and it all makes sense. But then we get “He also said online platforms must stop self-regulating their content” and there the trouble starts. In the first we have the UK, Canada, the US all having their version of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And it get to be worse. The UK (like a well trained group of pussies) decided to largely ignore the Leveson report. The media CANNOT regulate themselves and even after Leveson we have seen several examples where the media is unable to police and regulate themselves, as such why hold tech players and online media to those standards? The second setting is that these players can move from place to place. It is too large a sewer to see any clear management done on any level. And I feel for Ian Russell, I really do. Yet when we see “The current government has said that they want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online and yet we’re still here and we’re not regulating the platforms. I think it’s really important, firstly, that something that is illegal in the offline world must be illegal and we must be better protected when it’s found on the online world” we see the dream state, it is the best description. The man is not wrong, but with the cloud there is even less oversight. And it is a multi tiered prong we see. We go after regulating platforms but we do not go after the POSTERS. State per nations that any poster of social media is held responsible and make sure that the penalties are harsh. It will be a first hurdle and there are over a dozen to go. You see, when that hurdle is fixed, others will offer services on an international foundation and the problem starts again. His only real option is to make sure that EVERY poster of  certain materials are published with their real name and real address. That is when the game changes. Some will stop and hide under a rock, others will get more clever about matters and we are back at square one. For one Facebook adds “more than 300 million photos get uploaded per day. Every minute there are 510,000 comments posted and 293,000 statuses updated” Facebook tories are worse they are only there for 24 hours and can only be watched by a person twice. There is no policing or managing that. It is a life of its own and that is merely one source. Add Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube and half a dozen more and you see the scale of the matter. YouTube is the centre of 720,000 hours of material EVERY DAY. The scale cannot be managed and anyone who says different is lying to you. And that is only in places where some have oversight. With TikTok it becomes a much larger mess. So we might trust in doubt, but that doubt needs a formidable bat. Making the poster responsible and these media outlets reporting and having some  grasp of the posters is essential and that is a first. It will not make a huge dent, but it could give governments and people a handle of the poster of the harmful content and there is the first setting. These people want the limelight, but when their faces are on the news and they are being asked the hard questions, they will hide behind the freedom of speech and there is the real problem. The laws are centuries old and they never considered mass media and mass slander. These concepts did not even exist in those years. It is not bout regulation, it is about the laws being adjusted and there is also the problem, when that person places it on a server in Russia, India or China, can that person be prosecuted? 

It is a rather large mess and the law followed decades behind, so I reckon that a first solution will come to shine by 2035, which might make it no longer valid. 

It is merely my view and plenty will disagree, but look at what is now and how much could be regulated and do not rely on AI, it does not yet exist. In the mean time, I need to find a contact in Riyadh, the one in the Saudi Consulate seems to be non functioning (with the option of $500 million a month for their government), the levels of inaction are weird to say the least, but that is my problem, not yours.