I just wish I knew what an online harm actually was
Funny to see the online harms bill positioned as a blow against big tech when it will give them the power to make sweeping decisions on enforcement while simultaneously making it much harder for smaller competitors
Rule of politics: displays of strength are often signs of weakness. Online harms delegates many aspects of justice to tech companies. It's effectively an admission that the state can't do the work itself
This might be only practical way to proceed, given the scale of the challenge. But as the tech companies are going to be writing their own rules, then enforcing them, it embeds the existing way of doing things to an astonishing degree
The duty of care idea comes from health and safety, but I think the best analogy is financial market regulation pre-2008. It's trying to answer the question: how do we protect people* without interrupting the existing way of working?
*Defined as: keeping stories out of the news
A tech industry source gets in touch:
"I was involved in the consultation and it was pretty crazy
The two big messages were: 1. Could you first define and then solve this problem for us please? 2. Don’t worry, we won’t do anything to inconvenience you"
Perhaps I'm being overly negative. This is not an easy area to legislate. Govt needed more tools to deal with some parts of the internet
I just can't help see this as the product of a process where everyone ran around saying "something must be done!", but never worked out *what*
Good example of what I'm talking about: use of AI for moderation. Fraught with difficulty, but tech companies love it. Oliver Dowden was just asked about it in the Commons
He advised the MP "to go along to some of these tech companies and see the advances that they're making"
I am sympathetic to the government's dilemma here. It's not easy. But the potential for unintended consequences is v.high
In his speech Dowden said tech companies should try to "engineer the harm out of their platforms from the very outset"
I have no idea what that means either
A piece from last year on online harms, focusing mainly on cyberbullying
I like to be constructive, so I suggested a concrete proposal for action. If the government had taken my advice back then, it'd be a lot better off right now news.sky.com/story/sky-view…
Good question from @DamianCollins in the debate: will Ofcom be able to audit the transparency reports from tech companies? Oliver Dowden say they will
But will Ofcom be auditing a quarterly pdf or an API with data it defines itself?
Another good question, this time from @darrenpjones. Didn't get answered, but there you go
What's happening with the data about the vaccine? Well, let's put it this way: there's a lot to sort out
A THREAD on my reporting today
This is Dr Elliot Singer, a GP in Waltham Forest. If anyone can be called a community doctor, it’s him. He wasn’t just born locally, he was delivered by the GP who used to have his practice
He’s delighted to be delivering the vaccine, but the tech is causing “huge frustration“
There are numerous software systems involved with vaccination, but two are central. 1. Recording who's had the vaccine (and which vaccine, what batch etc). 2. Inviting and booking patients for appointments - what's known as "call and recall"
Cold take: mutations happen all the time. I would like more information on this new variant, especially before it's linked to the rise of cases in the south east
The expert view on the variant is considerably more cautious than Matt Hancock's
As so often, @alanmcn1 puts it best. Catching this variant is a tremendous achievement, but study is ongoing, so *it is important to keep a calm and rational perspective* sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reactio…
Based on this and conversations with experts it seems as if the idea that the strain is faster-spreading is mainly conjecture
It's been found in the SE, where cases are rising, but *any* variant will be found in the the place with most cases. Correlation ≠ causation
Yesterday SAGE released a one-page document called "potential trajectories for covid-19 in the next six months"
It's not going to brighten your day, but it's one of the best summaries of where we are and where we're heading
Some notes 🧵
1. The “first” and “second” waves are very different
The second is growing much slower because of the impact of social distancing. Before this lockdown, contact rates were about half of pre-lockdown levels
But that's still not low enough.
2. Social distancing needs to be very extensive
SAGE: “With a basic reproduction number of 3, controls need to reduce infectious contacts by two thirds”
For a rough sense of what they means in practice, here's a chart of movement in London. It's been above 33% since June
Incredible story in The Times, which I'm told is definitely true. For most of its existence, the contact tracing app for England and Wales has been using the wrong risk threshold, so it's hardly been sending out any alerts telling people to self-isolate thetimes.co.uk/article/softwa…
One of the biggest complaints about the app has been ghost messages saying "you've been near someone with covid-19". If the risk threshold hadn't been artificially high, many of those alerts would have been instructions to isolate
As it was, people were told to ignore them
The Times has described this as a software bungle. I understand the issue was incredibly human. There was meant to be a change to the risk threshold on the app, but no-one went in and made the update