That's what would be reasonably expected, but it's not backed up by the information.
> The total arrest figures are likely to be far higher because eight forces failed to respond to freedom of information requests or provided inadequate data, including Police Scotland, the second largest force in the UK. Some forces also included arrests for “threatening” messages, though these do not fall under the specified sections. [emphasis added]
Thanks. That wasn't clear from the Mail article above.
But the Times article also says:
> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.
So I think the categorisation is a mess, and probably not even consistent across forces
I have to say, it is a bit astonishing how much you are in a kind of bargaining stage of trying to rationalize how what is happening, is not actually happening, all while the trap doors are closing all around you even though very slowly.
Why do you think that is?
It is not just a British thing, because this ruling class tyranny is descending all across the western world, regardless of whether it is particularly egregious in the UK. Or should we maybe just start calling it Airstrip One at this point, the AO?
For me at least (different person), the term "speech offences" has been so captured by the far-right who think publicly advocating for the burning down of buildings populated with minorities is totally fine, but calling someone racist is beyond the pale. Whereas, at least from my own experience, progressives tend to use phrases related to expression, eg, protests.
And so when I hear "speech offences", my immediate thought is to question the premise: Are we talking about people publicly advocating for mass violence? Are we talking about bullying or harassment? Are we talking about a private conversation? Are we talking about a group chat? Are we talking about hate speech? Are we talking about defamation? Are we talking about "fighting words"? Etc. Context matters.
For all the talk I see online advocating for social media to be considered a public space, I've yet to see anyone really grasp the consequences of that: have any of them tried yelling out in a public space that they should burn down a populated building? That won't go down well, and rightly so. It has never been okay to do that.
People facing consequences for broadcasting their depraved bloodlust online doesn't concern me. What concerns me is the extent to which protests against genocide are being suppressed, with police looking for any minor infraction to pounce upon, but we have video of people saying to police "I support the genocide" to make a point, which the police don't bat an eye at. That scares me.
For you the issue is a left right issue and if the opinion matches yours it is acceptable and seen in a positive light but if it's the other side you have no tolerance.
You will never have free speech just controlled speech with alternating people in power. Which I think is a worse outcome because the people in power will never allow controlled speech against them.
> For you the issue is a left right issue and if the opinion matches yours it is acceptable and seen in a positive light but if it's the other side you have no tolerance.
When you remove all content and context from what is actually being said and done, then yes, this is fairly accurate, but it's also an entirely meaningless framing. But you have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right. But what you're doing here is (to use a hyperbolic comparison) accusing me of hypocrisy because I'm okay with interpretive dance but not murder, even though they're both just actions. It reminds me of 2016 Reddit where slurs were "just soundwaves, bro".
We don't have American-style freedom of speech, nor should we. We have freedom of expression instead because we have very personal experience within our very recent history what unfettered hatred does to a continent. Attempting to import American-style freedom of speech will genuinely destroy this country, we are already seeing it happen.
Many people share your viewpoint on the left and right. It's natural to support free speech for what you agree and censor what you don't. It's part of living in a left or right ghetto of thought.
Take a step back. The right is in power you are not allowed to speak your ideas. The left is in power you can say anything that supports their agenda.
What you can never do is speak against the government right or left
Why would you want that? Seems like the worst of all worlds.
Isn't the history you are trying to not repeat a history of controlled speech where the wrong party got elected or got in power? Why won't this happen again and again?
> It's natural to support free speech for what you agree and censor what you don't.
Y'all really don't make a convincing case for freedom of speech when you cannot even read. Let me repeat: "You have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right."
Someday we need to kill this myth, the wave of fascisms that appeared in Europe (Italy, Germany, Spain, Romania) are more of a cultural and economic reaction to the destruction of the Great War and not due to "unlimited free speech".
Free speech does not amplify or cultivate hate, it lets it fester in dark areas until it explodes when a crisis happens (which is what is happening currently).
Free speech and open discourse serves as a pressure valve release and self-correcting mechanism where by impopular or "untolerable" but common opinions have to be dealt with i.e the migration backlash in Europe
Again, you are stripping all context and content. You are pretending that protest organising and calling for the burning down of a building populated with asylum seekers are the same thing. I vehemently reject this facetious framing.
You're conflating legitimate criticism with incitement. The police record suggest the opposite.
Take the example *Bernadette Spofforth, 55*, she shared false information that the attacker was an asylum seeker, adding "If this is true, all hell will break loose." (not false btw) Deleted it, apologized. She still got arrested, held 36 hours, and then *released without charge because of insufficient evidence*.
No call for violence, "misinformation", which she retracted when corrected. Yet she still was arrested during the crackdown. The state used riot prosecutions to sweep up misinformation, political speech and "hatred" on one swoop not just incitement. Spofforth's arrest (and quiet release) shows they criminalized *any speech near the riots*, then kinda sorted legality later.
You're using the retarded Lucy Connolly to justify arresting people like Spofforth (which has opinion closer to the average). That's the poisoning-the-well: conflate extremists with moderates sharing concerns, arrest both, then claim all arrested speech was violent incitement.
You also seem to not take into account that *the UK has built the legal apparatus to enable this overreach:*
- *Public Order Act 1986*: Criminalizes speech where "hatred" is "likely" to be stirred up. You're criminal based on how others react.
- *Online Safety Act 2023*: Forces platforms to remove "harmful" content or face £18 million fines.
- *Non-Crime Hate Incidents*: Since
2014, police record speech "perceived" as hateful, even when no crime occurred. 133,000+ recorded. No evidence, no appeals, appears on background checks. Court ruled this unlawful for "chilling effect" in 2021 yet police continue anyway.
In total it ends up with 12,000+ annual arrests for speech (30/day), fourfold increase since 2016. 666,000 police hours on non-crimes. Broad laws + complaint-driven policing = arrest first, determine legality never.
Free speech protects conditional statements about policy during crises or when the people has something to say to its elites. The 36-hour detention without charges proves the suppression.
> You're conflating legitimate criticism with incitement.
You should tell the right wingers that. Here's some of the right-wing sources I found when searching Ground News for some articles about Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocating for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers:
You may notice a theme amongst these articles about how "it was just a tweet" and "she's a political prisoner" and "calculated move to suppress conservative viewpoints on immigration". This is what the right does. I'm not conflating legitimate criticism with incitement, they are, and they're using their massive media empires to spread this conflation.
This is just going to fix itself with more speech, right?
I actually do too, the issue is that in today’s wacko world the defense of Free Speech which in the early 2000s was a domain of the left/center-left, now has been abandonded due to the notion of “hate-speech” and opportunistically taken by the right (even tho many like MAGA will drop it the moment it stops being politically convenient i.e expulsion of students being critical of Israel actions).
A lot of those are propaganda peddlers who would drop the charade the moment someone on their political opposite side finds themselves in the same position (they keep crying about statements of Palestine and anti-semitism). I agree that they are stupid in their defense of Lucy Connely who literally and unrepentably pushed to “burn the asylum centers”, and that they are willfully conflating the issue to further their agenda.
The issue is both you and the retarded conservatives uses the situation to push their agendas, and as a counterpoint while they have media empires the left-wing political side also has media conglomerates pushing their ideas (BBC having a center-left slant).
No, the issue is going to fix itself with free speech, when no side is persecuted and better quality and rational discourse can arise and not be censored or overtaken by the extremes. Currently the only sane takes on many issues like immigration, economy or free speech exist only in the internet ghettos hidden from the larger public.
> which in the early 2000s was a domain of the left/center-left
Could you elaborate on that? I'm aware of the Lib Dems championing changes to the law to remove restrictions on "insulting" speech, but even so, they're not left/centre left. There's a joke that they're just yellow tories.
> now has been abandonded due to the notion of “hate-speech”
That's untrue. Stirring up or inciting racial hatred was made an offence by the Public Order Act 1986. And while it's true that stirring up religious hatred and homophobic hatred were added to that in 2006 and 2008 respectively, this did not invent the notion of hate speech. Lord Sumption, who was on our Supreme Court, said that the traditional line in English law was between words that merely outrage and words that would cause a breach of the peace amongst reasonable people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=END98dJwpCg&t=1306s). Stirring up racial, religious, or homophobic hatred would seem to conform to that.
> BBC having a center-left slant
That's also untrue. The BBC participated in the pillorying of Corbyn; the BBC gave JK Rowling a Russel Prize for her anti-trans manifesto (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55350905); the whole debacle with the "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" article (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4buJMMiwcg); the BBC downplaying Gaza (eg: killed vs died, not allowing the term "genocide", demanding anyone critical of Israel to ritualistically condemn Hamas, etc); the BBC preventing pro-Palestinian audience members for Question Time (https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/10/03/bb...). And speaking of Question Time, how many times has Farage (or other Reformer) been a panellist now? And this is just the stuff I've personally witnessed and noted down. The BBC is establishment media through and through: the BBC is not suddenly centre left because there's gay people in Eastenders.
> the BBC gave JK Rowling a Russel Prize for her anti-trans manifesto
It wasn't an "anti-trans manifesto", but a thoughtful explanation of her reasons for speaking out on the sex and gender issue, where she discusses her concerns for women's rights and safety, the well-being of vulnerable children, and how important it is to be allowed to speak freely on this topic. Plenty of people on the left (and centre-left) agree with her too.
As with all her work, it was very well written, which the article you linked rightly acknowledges.
Oh hello, welcome to this 18-comment deep thread. This is the second time now that I've mentioned JK Rowling's transphobia and had a randomer show up and comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37058027). You, like them, also only speak about JKR on your profile. How curious.
It's shows that JKR, a billionaire, has an army of sleeper accounts willing to jump at any mention of her nakedly virulent transphobia. Second-wave feminists would deplore her bio-essentialism. She is an anti-feminist.
Have you never encountered a generalisation in your entire life?
EDIT: Fun tidbits:
- Sheila Jeffreys thinks that "any woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations stronger".
- Janice Raymond thinks that "all transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves".
- Germaine Greer published a book of some 200 pictures of young boys "to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure".
Truly the height of second-wave feminism right here.
Figured I'd add that the BBC has had to apologise recently for Question Time posing a question to the panellists about a stat of 1 in 3 children in Glasgow having English as a second language, but the text prompt they showed on screen lied, saying that 1 in 3 children in Glasgow are not fluent in English. That's a pretty substantial change.
It's not very centre-left of the BBC to aid Farage in his racism, and of course there's a Reform politician there to have the first and last words about it. Keep in mind that this is a Scottish episode, with the leader of the Scottish National Party at Westminster, the leader of Scottish Labour, the leader of Scottish Conservatives, a Scottish journalist (there's usually one or two non-politicians on the panel) who did a lot of indyref coverage. And despite Reform not winning a single seat for Scotland in the 2024 General Election, or in the last Scottish Parliament election in 2021, they apparently always need to give Reform a voice on everything so they shoehorned him onto this panel.
Maybe I am reading these wrong, but it doesn’t appear to me these sources indicate that a significant number of people are being arrested for “speech offenses,” which I’m guessing you are using as shorthand for statements akin to those that would fall under “free speech” in the US. If I’m not seeing it or I am not correctly defining what you mean, feel free to correct me. I’m having to make some assumptions here
It can be hard to wrap your head around it from the US, but many of these are people that are in fact being arrested for writing posts on social media, e.g.,
> It can be hard to wrap your head around it from the US,
Come on. Was that necessary? I understand what we are talking about, I am saying none of those articles indicate that there is some huge thing going on where people in the UK are being arrested by the tens of thousands for irreverent memes or whatever. The issue is not my understanding, it’s the handwaving and vague generalizations that are causing issues. It’s coming across as fear mongering and I am looking for clarity.
I don’t think you understand. Either of those arrests are unconscionable by American standards. Most U.S. folks would be shocked to ever see such a thing, so it’s necessary to first show it to level-set that non-US jurisdictions don’t have any concept like the 1st Amendment. It wasn’t a slight in any way.
It was to say: even a single arrest on those grounds would be national news in the U.S. and quickly over turned by any circuit in the judiciary.
I feel like we are talking at cross purposes here and this all feels very broad, so I’m still not entirely sure what you are driving at other than “in the UK people are being silenced and arrested for what I consider to be acceptable speech” in some general sense. I don’t know what the line is, I don’t know what the numbers are, I really don’t have any sense of the scale or specifics of your claim.
I was responding to the initial comment at first: that upwards of 10,000 people are being arrested annually now in the UK for irreverent posts online and the like. The sources that were shared do not show that. Now you’re saying it’s really about any single incident being unacceptable and how an American can’t fathom it.
Do you see why I’m having trouble following this conversation?
Yes, I think we'll have continued difficulty reconciling this understanding.
It's almost impossible to get arrested for posting something that isn't CSAM or literal state secrets on Twitter in the US. Even so-called "hate speech" is broadly protected in the US by the First Amendment. In fact the American Civil Liberties Union (which is loathed by the American right) has gone to bat and litigated on behalf of the KKK of all organizations, for example, to protect those rights.
If you send "menacing" notes to someone, that can be a part of a larger crime like harassment, assault or stalking, but as noted in the chain, that's not what's being measured here.
So the fact that people are being arrested at all for tweets is not "what I consider to be acceptable speech" but in fact what the US generally considers to be protected speech. Any number above 0 that doesn't reference child porn is infinitely more than you'd expect to see in the US. That's the difficulty we're having.
[Edit: I understand US != UK. The American flag only flies in the embassy here. I just wanted to provide the context of those arrests and these numbers to US readers who will find them surprising.]
My wife in the USA had semi-anonymous texts send to her personal over a course of 2 years. They included her home address, her mother's home address with a picture of the home, and they stated that they would kill her and anyone she loved.
She never saw justice for it. The police said there was nothing they could do, despite having the phone number it came from, because it was across state lines.
The texts stop, and we suspect that it coincided with a specific person who went to jail for a year or so for unrelated offences around the time that the texts stopped.
And in many other countries those would get you prosecuted for hate speech or incitement to violence.
The lie here is you've picked too examples of atrocious behavior, but you're trying to pretend that actually all the rest are just people posting dank memes and so "it could happen to you!!".
Those examples are completely inoccuous to my sensibilities. Of course, there are plenty of countries that lack the broad speech protections Americans enjoy, but one doesn't expect such curtailments of personal liberty in a fellow English-speaking western "liberal" democracy.
The first example was "man arrested for wearing the exact same outfit as a man who intentionally blew himself up, killing 22 people". It's not "he was wearing the same chequered shirt!" either. As a UK citizen... I don't see how that fits under "free speech", lol
Even with "freedom of speech", you do not have "freedom from fascism" built into that, case in point, Wikipedia has multiple pages documenting both the current US administration's attitude towards trans people (that, in Charlie Kirk's words, we are "abominations unto god" that should be "taken care of" "as in the 50s/60s", which can only be taken to mean lynching), as well as the attitude of the US presidency towards democracy
I think the issue here isn't "freedom of speech", its that people who claim to want "freedom for speech" are either using it as a shield to say vile things to other people, or they feel that "freedom of speech" is the only thing one needs to guard against fascism.
The resulting difficulty is that the former is demonstrably true, and the former is demonstrably false.
Okay, so I see we've arrived at fantasyland now. Just because someone probably posted an idiotic idea like that on Twitter one time does not mean it has any path to becoming law. Do you know how difficult it is to get a constitutional amendment passed?
I agree that it's not currently reality and the person you replied to could have made their point by using actual examples of appalling ICE actions rather than a scenario that's currently just fantasy.
That said, it's not just "someone posted an idiotic idea on Twitter". The idea of stripping people of their citizenship has literally been suggested by the current president to a press gaggle, and that's not a one off random statement it follows years of things like prominent political voices suggesting that certain Muslim members of congress should be deported despite their having been born in the US...
As to the technical difficulties of passing a constitutional amendment, I agree it's hard to imagine that happening. Depressingly though it's less hard to imagine the president signing an executive order telling ICE to go against that part of the constitution, followed by one or both of ICE actions outpacing judicial ability to enforce the constitution, and/or judges ruling in favour of ICE being allowed to ignore the constitution.
These are possibilities that, if suggested 30 years ago would sound like crazy conspiracy theory territory, but in 2025 they're actual plausible scenarios looking at the coming months, yet alone years. I wish this was just scare mongering, but the truth is if you don't think this is possible then you haven't been following US politics closely enough - from the words of Trump and his team, such as Stephen Miller, to the actions of agencies such as ICE and the FBI, to rulings of the Supreme Court such as the one giving Trump unqualified immunity that anything he does as a work act rather than a personal one can't be treated as illegal, even if it goes against the constitution.
See, I don't think they'd really bother with an amendment. FWIG there's also something in there about the right to a trial (is it the sixth?) that they've just kinda ignored. Is it that it's the first one that makes it more important? We've also gotten over our (apparently) ludicrous assumption that posse comitatus means anything.
Indeed. The success of even one such prosecution means that the second someone in government wants someone out of the way, they can efficiently be imprisoned for anything rising to the level of... "offensive."
"offensive" actually has a relatively solid definition based on how judges have ruled on it in the past. This includes hate-mongering against protected characteristics, which I see a lot of from the USA right now.
Huge numbers are for political speech. It's not just prosecutions. Child protection is abused to force far left wing beliefs on the population.
A former Marine was charged with inciting racial hatred after describing some migrants as “scumbags” and “psychopaths” in a 12-minute video posted on Facebook following the murders of three children in Southport, which sparked riots around the country. He was then banned from coaching his own daughter's football club. A jury cleared him in 17 minutes, but Wales is run by the left so they kept the coaching ban in place because they believe right wing people are a threat to children.
In another case a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that "Britain is still a Christian state"
There are lots of cases like this. Especially if you expand to Europe. The German Chancellor has personally prosecuted thousands of speech cases against people who insulted him. Merkel established a general rule against insulting politicians so now people get police visits and their devices confiscated for saying things like such and such a politician is a dumbass.
> He was then banned from coaching his own daughter's football club. A jury cleared him in 17 minutes, but Wales is run by the left so they kept the coaching ban in place because they believe right wing people are a threat to children.
Who is the "they" in this? The football club? If the situation is essentially that he called certain groups scumbags, but the footbal club has members of that group, its not surprising he would be banned.
Being rude gets you banned from things. I don't see a problem with that. He wasn't thrown in jail, he said something that offended some people and as a result they decided they didn't like him anymore. Freedom of association is also freedom to chose not to associate with people you don't like.
> In another case a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that "Britain is still a Christian state"
I mean, that sounds like a dick thing to say to a child or to anyone. And not particularly true (yes there are some vestiges with the church of england, but you are allowed to be any religion in england)
Was that person prosecuted or just fired?
> The German Chancellor has personally prosecuted thousands of speech cases against people who insulted him.
And Microsoft own the client, so they are the one company who don't need to do this!
If you really want to check every time someone clicks on a link then you can do this in the client and keep the visible link the same for the end user.
But instead there are different teams working on this in Outlook, Teams, Exchange, Defender and god knows where else.
(I'm one of the people in corporate IT trying to turn this off and often struggling)
One use case might be if you have limited bandwidth, perhaps only a voice call, and want to join a video conference. I could imagine dialling in to a conference with a virtual face as an improvement over no video at all.
The article conflates two issues that have different security implications.
The "1-click login" links are a concern and just having access to the SMS would be enough to take over things like WhatsApp.
But 2FA codes seem notably less worrying.
They are the second factor and require an attacker to have the password too.
For these cases I'm much more relaxed about the use of SMS and the risks of interception.
I didn't think of 2FA as being protection against password reuse. People should still avoid reusing passwords and change them if they know of a breach.
Are there really attackers who are picking up breach databases and then sim-swapping to get the 2FA as well?
I think 999 of those databases are the same data set. I lost a password ten years ago from a blog breach and I get almost a monthly notification about it showing up again and again.
This debate seems to conflate two or three different issues.
1. Use of phones in classrooms
2. Having phones present in schools, but unused
3. The impact of social media on schoolchildren
(1) is undeniably bad and should be banned everywhere.
(2) raises some issues. I don't want (1) but I would like my child to have a phone for the journey to and from school. And a smartphone is much better at this than a dumb phone (group chats are really good!)
(3) is a concern but it seems almost totally unrelated to the other issues.
The children who are banned from having a phone at school will use the same social media when they're at home and schools will still have to deal with bullying.
Our school current bans (1) and is consulting on more bans. But from parent discussions it feels like both the school and parents are mixing up these issues and just coming back with "phones are bad".
The fact that many people now develop anxiety if unable to use a phone for even a very short time is a part of the problem.
The phone has become a pseudo-appendage for most people now. Even those who spent most of their lives blissfully phone-free quickly internalized the need for connectivity.
Raising children from a young age to expect and demand access to phone connectivity at all times is making this problem much worse.
No, you do not need to have a phone at all times "for emergencies" that almost never happen. The negative effects of perpetual connectivity are far, far worse.
Almost all humans (including those alive today) managed just fine to live life without a perpetual phone link. Teach children to do the same. The phone is a nice-to-have, not a necessity to merely venture out of the house on a routine trip to school and back.
Indeed it is. "Phone addiction" is the "smoking" of our time.
In the 1950s, people around the world smoked furiously whenever awake. And why not; it made them feel good! It let them bond with others over shared cigarettes!
Even at that time, there was strong initial evidence of smoking's harmful effects. It was largely ignored in favor of short term feelgood outcomes.
Perhaps in 2080 or so, we will look back upon today's era of always-on connectivity the way people now look at chainsmokers in 1955: "Wow, how could they ever do that? Didn't they know this was so obviously bad for you?"
There are many "smoking"s of our time. Food addiction is probably an even bigger one (cause of obesity and type 2 diabetes).
I'm actually starting to question whether smoking really was some huge public health success story. Or did it just go out of fashion? It's odd that we'd be able to tackle one thing like that then just completely drop the ball on it (see vapes) and not even begin to address other things like food/sugar and phones.
That's pretty close to "almost never happens" That works out the 33 a year, but there's something like 129,000 schools in the US. And when people talk about school shootings, they're typically talking about mass shootings, and there are even fewer of those (apparently 0.5 per year according to https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/4/e20230...).
And then there's the question of how a cell phone is actually supposed to help in such an emergency. If anything, I think it would be a liability.
As a parent that experienced such an event, my son having his phone let him message me that he and his class were literally running away into the woods and escaping the situation.
Obviously, knowing his class was ok was a huge relief, but also being able to talk to dad helped him calm down a bit.
Your link shows ~600 people injured or killed in school shootings, across every possible education level (from kindergarten to college) in the course of 24 years. (Both injured and killed, the number actually killed is more like a quarter to a third of that).
That's an average of 25 people killed or injured per year.
ANY school shooting, whether people are shot or injured or killed, or whether the shooter simply misses and nobody is struck, is extremely rare in the United States.
That is to say, it almost never happens.
The few incidents that do happen garner outsized media attention because they are unquestionably tragic. That repeated messaging makes them feel more common than they actually are.
For comparison, fatal car crashes on the way to or from school are FAR more common than school shootings (while still rare.)
It is very useful device, but sure- it doesn't block bullets. In a shooting it's mostly useful for contacting family and 911.
>"having access to a cellphone" did not alter the outcome at all in those tragic incidents
How could you possibly conclude that? Look at any timeline of a school shooting and there's often a lot of information going from 911 calls to inform the police on the number of shooters, the shooter's location, and where students are still alive/hiding. ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timelin...
As a parent that experienced this two years ago, I can confirm. Hearing about a threat at school, followed by shota.fired, and receiving a call from my fleeing child are those "life in slow motion" moments burned into my memory. It didn't alter the outcome, but it was very beneficial to everyone's mental state.
I don't understand (2); I (and probably you, too) never had a phone going to school, or playing outside, or doing most other things, and this was fine. If you really need to get in touch for the rare emergency that will probably never happen you can just ring the school. I sometimes see parents talk about not being in contact 24/7 is like [1].
On a practical level, "no phones at all" is just so much easier to enforce.
Yes, you were fine. But you were also fine meeting up with friends, giving up when people are late, making plans, etc. Society has moved on -- plans are dynamic and people keep each other updated. If you're running late you let them know and they go to the museum without you and you know you can catch up. If you're in the area, you send a quick message to see if they're around.
With kids it's the same -- you want to change pickup or remind them of a dentist appointment, you have that ability now, and why not use it? This is just the way the world is now. When kids make plans with each other they don't have to make a ton of arrangements, they can just fly by the seat of their pants; they can meet up with friends, or ditch them because they're feeling tired without it being a big deal or requiring a game-of-telephone approach to communication.
The fact that many people have decided to do something which causes objectively harmful externalities does not somehow make it OK to jump on the bandwagon and do that same thing, too, just because "everyone's doing it."
Perpetual phone connectivity is the "smoking" of our time. The best outcome here will be that in 50 years or so, we all look back on the current brief period of "keep each other updated" at all times the same way that we now look back on "chain smoking" in the 1950s -- a brief social fad, which nobody realized was harmful at the time, because they were exclusively focused on the positive portions and ignored the negatives.
There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that pervasive phone connectivity has led to large increases in psychiatric issues among all demographics, and particularly among younger people who have now grown up immersed in a phone culture.
More informally, smartphone usage by children promotes a short attention span, a lack of any sense of presence where actually situated in the physical world, as well as less and lower quality interaction with others, leading to poor social skills, anxiety, social isolation, and a focus on superficial social signaling over meaningful human interactions, ultimately producing the mental illnesses referenced above.
I appreciate that there is a body of research discussing possible implications of large-scale phone connectivity, but this does not meet the bar of "objectively harmful externalities".
I'm not even talking about methodologies or replication or evidence or p-hacking (all of which are huge challenges to this sort of research).
On a much more fundamental level, the statement "unauthorized smartphone use in a classroom setting is objectively harmful" is a defensible statement. I don't need a study to tell me that, nor should anyone. The extraordinary claim in this case would be the opposite, for which I would have to see tremendous evidence, and which even then I would likely not believe.
> With kids it's the same -- you want to change pickup or remind them of a dentist appointment, you have that ability now, and why not use it? This is just the way the world is now.
Because it's fucking up your kid's education. That's why. That's what this thread is about.
I'm so tired of this "it's just the way the world is" technofetishist apologetics. It's a complete non-argument that says nothing, and this type "it's just the way it is" resignation can be applied to every injustice or shortcoming in society every.
Phones in the classroom are clearly a distraction and should be disallowed. Phones in school seem mostly harmless and provide clear benefits.
I'm not saying "do nothing", I'm just not seeing a case anywhere of why phones in schools but not during class are "fucking up" anything.
You can make a serious case for banning phones in school as the easiest way to enforce banning phones in classrooms, and accepting the tradeoffs that this implies. But you can't just dismiss the fact that many people (myself included) see there being serious benefits of having access to phones outside the classroom setting without first addressing those arguments.
Formally, saying "that's just the way it is," or "that's what society is now," is an example of a logical fallacy called "begging the question," where the original criticism is simply repeated as if it were a response to itself:
Replying to "society has this problem X" by saying, "Well, X is just the way society is now."
is not responsive to the proposition. It is merely repeating it in different wording.
I get where you're coming from, but times have drastically changed. I feel we'd see better results in teaching kids from a young age how to responsibly use smartphones, use them for research, fact-checking, how to protect themselves, and building a healthier relationship with them.
If I know kids, banning something just makes them want it more.
> If I know kids, banning something just makes them want it more.
Then you don't know kids, because this is not how (most) kids work, certainly not at a young (pre-teen) age. And even in teenage years/puberty this kind of reductionist simplistic reasoning doesn't really apply (and is also one of those non-arguments that can be applied to everything).
And no one is argueing against all smartphone usage by kids. Or at least, I wasn't. Just saying people don't need to in touch on the way to and from school.
I'm the oldest of 5 siblings and have helped multiple family members, friends, and neighbors with their kids. I feel comfortable enough to say that I do know kids. In total, I'd say I've helped raise 15-20 kids in my life.
I wasn't allowed a phone or internet access by my parents until I was 18 and off to college, by then the iPhone 5 was out. Even when I did go to college, they refused to get me a phone at all, stating that the front desk of my dorm will walk up 5 flights of stairs to my dorm to tell me I had a call. My aunt had to buy me a flip phone.
You know what I (and my siblings) did when we lived with them? We would buy a schoolmates old iPod touch, PSP, or Blackberry Storm and hide it in our pillow cases. We'd ask for a specific e-ink Kindle because it had a button hidden in the settings to access an "experimental" internet browser.
Kids are creative, and if they want something, they will get it.
I agree that it would be fine to not have phones - we'd all cope.
But when my daughter hasn't got home on time if I can check her GPS and see that she's in the park then I can relax a little.
If she needs to say she's staying out late, using a group chat to let the whole family know is easier than trying to phone mum, then dad, then grandma.
Or she can include a photo showing how much fun she's having.
My life is richer because of communication on things like family group chats.
It would be a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater and lose that
Why would three family members need to know that she's staying out late? I genuinely can't understand your comment because it seems like it has the obvious hallmarks of helicopter parenting. I don't actually know you and you're probably a much more reasonable parent than this comment portrays, and I don't know how old your daughter is, but it seems like you're not comfortable at all with not knowing much she's up to.
When I was a kid, my parent would know that I was staying out late... from the fact that I was not home yet. Sometimes he wasn't home yet, either, so no problem at all. If it was really late, as in it turned into a sleepover, the friend's parent would call my parent to let them know to expect me back in the morning. We somehow survived without 24/7 surveillance and GPS tracking.
"Surveillance parenting" -- which is "helicopter parenting" magnified through technological tools the Stasi could only dream of -- seems likely to foster long-term dependence and anxiety that far outweigh the positive effects.
Yes, it's OK to not know exactly where a responsible older child is down to centimeter-resolution lat/lon coordinates at all times. Most humans, including most alive today, lived like that for all of history.
Some of that is rather different than "I would like my child to have a phone for the journey to and from school" from your previous comment mentioned though. I'm just saying it's fine to send your kid to school without a phone. I didn't say anything about group chats in general or (3) from your post or anything else.
>> 1. Use of phones in classrooms ... is undeniably bad and should be banned everywhere.
I disagree. For a few years I taught a university class and very much appreciated the kids having their phones in class. In discussions I would often task someone with looking up or confirming some pertinent fact or law. They would usually use their laptops but I didn't much care whether the used their phones. Students having ready access to information can be useful in a classroom.
This isn't really about university classes but elementary school and high school, and no one denied that phones can't be useful on occasion – just that the downsides outweigh the upsides.
And many highschoolers are just one summer vacation away from a university classroom. Imho a great many highschool seniors are better behaved and take classroom time much more seriously than the average first-year uni student. We should not ball all kids together, as would happen under any total ban on a particular tech.
Well said! This is the same problem I have [1] with the messaging around this sort of thing and I don't know why people can't back up and figure out a more consistent approach to these separate issues.
One thing I hear a lot from parents of middle school and high school children (mine are just entering this domain) is that there's a deeper problem of teachers losing control of students -- even when they have these policies, the teachers and administrators are unable or unwilling to enforce them. I don't know what the solution to this is, though.
> But from parent discussions it feels like both the school and parents are mixing up these issues and just coming back with "phones are bad".
Always seems to boil down this way. There is no place for nuanced discussion in US school policy. "Zero tolerance" was just a crystallization of existing all-or-nothing trends.
The problem with the phones and social media is bad discussion is that ... school's can't fix that. It's just too far outside their ability to control.
But in general I believe this is true. I don't think it's as vague as you think it is. I'm not sure I would agree with "dangerous", but definitely "unhealthy".
The last thing Apple is going to do is put a bad taste in the mouths of it's most obedient golden geese. Apple stock would probably halve if kids stopped socially shaming each other into buying iPhones.
There is a potential clash here between control and privacy.
A few years ago Apple blocked[1] some parental control apps because "they put users’ privacy and security at risk"
This actually came up with our school. They tried to use an app to control student phones but it was fundamentally limited by these Apple restrictions.
First thing I would do is to wonder how I could enforce that ... for fun and games on others.
And really if we're talking about having to enroll a device into some sort of managed device system, schools don't have the time or manpower to manage tracking every kid's phone that is in the school.
And if we're talking about something you don't actively choose to enroll, we're back to my fun and games.
Moreover, when a kid is perpetually glued to a screen absorbed in a group chat, they are much less likely to interact with others who are physically around them and ever develop any actual mates.
It's wild that this sort of bug got through testing.
As a diabetic it feels like our insulin pump software is very conservative and lacking in features especially compared to what some of the "closed loop" things would like to do.
That seems reasonable if the manufacturers are having to do lots of safety testing.
But if bugs like this are getting through then the testing obviously isn't anywhere near as robust as we'd like.
The user-blaming stands out in their official communication. Bad sign for company culture.
> Once the bolus dose is confirmed and you tap START, the value that is shown on the screen will be delivered by the system...
> As stated in our User Guide, it is important to review the bolus amount before you confirm and start the bolus. Omnipod 5 will always deliver the amount you confirm and that is shown on the Confirm Bolus screen (Figure 2).
Is this saying there's no way to stop it, even if it hasn't performed the injection and killed you yet?
"Hello, Insulet customer support? My Omnipod is going to kill me. Quick, what do I do?!?"
"Didn't you read our Guide?? Omnipod will always deliver the amount you confirmed! RTFM!! click"
--
Seriously though, what's the intended recovery procedure for this? Can the device be removed quickly? Batteries taken out? Emergency Stop?
Or are users expected to carry a firearm at all times to "rapidly disassemble" a murder-happy medical device? :-\
You can pop the pump off on a moment's notice (there is a needle sticking out of the pod at the back, some other manufacturers use an umbillical that can be disconnected).
Totally agreed on the communications failure here, they all but blame the user for not noticing their error. That's not how a responsible medical device manufacturer should deal with this.
These wearable pumps, especially in combination with closed loop are a very interesting and important medical development that can improve quality of life for a huge number of people, but these sort of fuck-ups are really concerning. Inexcusable, especially because they have failed on multiple layers (code review, automated testing, acceptance testing, firmware development). Shocking, really and it makes me wonder wtf is going on at that company software development wise.
On the flip side, what behavior would you prefer? The pump to not always deliver the amount you confirm?
I mean, this is clearly a bug, but under normal operation it would be much much worse if the system silently overrode a user dose. People's insulin sensitivity varies a lot. A 350lb person may regularly dose 10 units for a single meal, whereas that dose would kill a small child. If you are 350lbs, and your BG is 400, in DKA, and you're dosing 15 or 20u as a correction, you do not want an automatic early termination of the dose.
You can always cancel a bolus in progress. The override/cancel bolus is likely the highest priority task in the entire system. In the worst case, you can physically disconnect.
The part that makes this even more dangerous than this description might indicate is that it appears to be somewhat random. So most of the time entering a value as e.g. ".5" would work, but sometimes it would not. This is probably more dangerous than if it would always fail to do that, as the first few times you use it you likely pay much more attention to the confirmation dialog than later when you're used to it.
That linked description is very interesting. They list 3 steps that need to happen to get an incorrect dose. The 3rd step is that YOU confirm the dose. The next section emphasizes the importance of confirming it. That's all great, and yeah, the user basically hit OK but that does not change the fact that they have a software bug.
Also, since it happens intermittently with that kind of input I have to seriously question how the software is put together. If the input box shows the decimal there's no way it should slip past the parser. Something smells very wrong with how their app is put together, and that would make me concerned about other issues we just don't know about yet.
> that would make me concerned about other issues we just don't know about yet
That's exactly my concern. This is not the kind of bug that you fix and move on, this is the kind of bug that makes you go back, fix your process, ensure your QA would catch this next time and then you audit all of your code to make sure that your broken process hasn't missed anything else.
for these critical applications which require reliable oprations as lives are at stack. formal verfication will help by reducing bugs more than traditional testing. they are not bullet proof but still better. z notation is one of many.
Not all of them are online posts, in fact probably a minority
reply