Welcome, friends, to my grubby little corner of the internet. A corner so strewn with obscenity that the UK government has decided you must prove you’re a grown-up before you can access certain parts of it. The UK’s new Online Safety Act has come into force, so UK people might have noticed a bunch of websites suddenly demanding you take a selfie, share your credit card details, or jump through another hoop to prove that you’re over 18. Quite a few of my friends have been discussing this in the pub, because for understandable reasons people who aren’t embedded in the world of online pornography or internet law are suddenly curious about why the internet is now so very broken. They’re also often convinced that the government will change its mind and therefore no one really needs to worry. I’ve had this conversation so many times now that I reckon I’ve got the basis for a fairly solid layperson’s guide to age verification: what it is, how it affects you, and why we absolutely, genuinely do need to worry.
Girl on the Net basically published the definitive guide on why age verification online, as currently implemented in the United Kingdom, and explored by the United States and the European Union, is such a terrible idea. It’s a privacy disaster, a clear onramp for Christian extremists to go after LGBTQ+ content, it doesn’t “protect the children”, it’s easily circumvented, breaks accessibility, casts such a wide net that it even hits sites like Wikipedia, and so, so much more.
Whenever anyone online tries to sell you on age verification as a means to “think of the children”, you can just point them to the linked article. If, after reading it, they still believe this is the way to protect children from seeing naked people (while leaving the door to the most brutal forms of violent content wide open, of course, as is tradition), they will have either ulterior motives, or are some form of extremist you can’t argue with anyway.
The demonization of sexual content and the sex workers that produce it as a means to introduce strict authoritarian control over the internet is something that will never go away. “Think of the children” is an incredibly powerful rallying cry for authoritarians to scare sheltered boomers into accepting pretty much any draconian measure, regardless of efficacy, and I doubt we will ever definitely win this fight.
But we won’t have to sit down and accept it.
The social media commentary surrounding the impact on liberty, sexuality and pornography is a smokescreen propagated by opponents to the law.
The bulk of the regions starting this process are acting because the monolithic social media mega corporations have failed the keep children away and safe from harm like cyber-bullying and predatory behaviours. If a small / minor segment of adult society is disadvantaged by this then it’s bad luck, but really we don’t care about disadvantaging a minority to make all children safer, we want to reduce the incidence of teenagers committing suicide or self-harm.
If Meta, X, Tik Tok and others had acted none of this would be necessary, but they put profit before children.
It’s the death of the internet outside of platforms. My understanding is that it also affects forums. That’s it, game over, community/volunteer forums are dead. Welcome to the new AOL cable.
In any case, a bunch of forums and online games have already stated they’re shutting down, explicitly because of this.
You’ll get pissed too when wikipedia starts asking for your age because you want to read about the kamasutra or the Sky King (2018 Bombardier Q400 suicide crash).
> If Meta, X, Tik Tok and others had acted none of this would be necessary, but they put profit before children.
Certainly so.
The problem is that, at least in the case of the uk, these laws put huge advantages on those same corporations. There is a serious problem when a law that purports to “protect children” forces a one-man show like gamingonlinux to shut down his forums.
Easy on the hate speech Thom. We don’t want people discriminated on their religious beliefs.
Hate speech? You can’t be serious.
Why not? It can’t be hate speech only when it applies to the extreme left.
I’ll take a wild guess and say that Thom was born in a mostly Christian cultural environment. He can’t possibly utter hate speech against himself.
> Ch*****an extremists to go
This situation has nothing to do with both far right and far left extremism. Censorship of Internet in the excuse of “protecting the children” is the exact thing RMS already warned us 20 years ago.
Bullshit. All of these laws are being promoted by the left, at least in Europe.
Don’t lie. The Online Safety Act was introduced by Conservatives in the UK. The recent payment issues with Valve and Itch.io were caused by an extremist Christian organisation from Australia. Those are just two recent examples.
Well, yes. A previous Conservative government minister Propsed it. But Labour that pushed it through and into law in the lords and the Conservatives opposed it.
Conservatives (voting wise) 162 voted against and 5 for.
Labout voted 114 for and 0 against.
(Liberal Democrats and xb making up the majority)
What in the name of all that is holy are you talking about? The Act became law in 2023. The Conservatives were in power in 2023, not Labour.
Here’s the voting record on the final Programme Motion in the Commons. This was the final division in the Commons, apart from amendments. As you’ll see, not a single Conservative voted against the Bill.
https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1416
Yes, the Conservatives objected to the regulations implementing the Act once they were in opposition, but those deal with relatively trivial matters. The substance of the Act is wholly and entirely their doing.
Read my comment again. Then read the link below.
Labour and the other parties made many of the amendments you see in the law today, especiallyin terms of its scope.
https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Lords/Division/2990
Spain, Denmark and France’s governments are leftists.
In reality, the PSOE are centre-right, but I guess to Vox far-right Christian extremists, they must seem like communists!
Sumar and Podemos are certainly left-leaning, which I guess would make the Spanish government more centred.
Similarly, Starmer’s Labour is centre-right and moving further right every day. As for Macron’s party, the idea that they are leftists is hilarious. Seriously, though, it’s the far-right Christian extremists in all these countries and the EU Parliament & Commission who are driving these policies. I expect the EU will mandate age verification soon, and then the censorship (‘protecting society’) will soon follow.
Save grandma, save the children, save the planet.
It’s ridiculously easy to manipulate the masses, who will until the end of the time fight over who is the lesser evil: the red puppet or the blue puppet.
This is a coordinated attack on free speech and the online realm. It’s happening in Canada/Australia/UK/Europe, Europe is now talking about making encrypted chats illegal, It’s all about political/economic control of the populations of these countries. It has nothing to do with child protection and people need to wake up and see the political oppression for what it is before a tracking system which Stalin/Hitler/Mao could only have dreamed of comes into existence. Australia is talking about forcing users to login to use Maps and Search Engines. There are already VPN Bans being discussed and blocking technology being trialed. This is a massive fascist takeover by government and large corporations and it needs to be opposed immediately. Australia has also looked to implement a misinformation/disinformation bill which would criminalise talking about the economy if it leads to a loss in confidence (even though we have a massive amount of household debt, the highest house prices in the world which now overtook Hong Kong in Sydney and the AUD has dumped 30% of its value in about 6 years). The people pushing for this want AI to takeover, they want a Universal Basic Income. They don’t want or like private ownership for poor/middle class people. They want everyone paying them rent.
DarkImage,
Honestly I was with you until you started to conflate socialism with fascism. I despise the elimination of our rights and the rise in fascism is terrifying. However part of the reason fascists are succeeding is because their scapegoats are so darn effective. Look at Teflon Don’s loyal following who readily ignore all of his lies and BS because he unites them with scapegoats and blaming others for everything. “Nothing is your fault, blame Joe Biden/Obama/democrats, blame the immigrants for crime, blame China, blame the FBI for the capital attack, blame the economic experts for bad numbers, blame election fraud for bad poll, blame FEMA, blame scientists, blame everyone but me for everything”. This pattern has been so consistent and predictable, the buck never stops with trump who has a 100% failure rate at providing proof. The only thing shocking is how many people this works on..
I appreciate that you do not like socialism and you may not like fascism either, but I’ll tell you this: a big part fascist strategy is convincing people that someone else is the enemy.
Edit: Sorry if my examples are overly US-centric, hopefully my points will still make sense to others.
I find it fascinating that many in the comments think whether left or right leaning matters. Politicians will screw you over their personal interests. All it takes for them to abandon their principles is the wheeling and dealing that goes on in the background, behind closed doors. Voters should not vote along party lines, but according to the individuals that they choose. If you are going to vote, don’t look for people that have done little in your favor, look for someone else. If it is going to be an independent, then so be it.
adkilla,
I do agree with this point, however I think it’s important not to mistake the fascist playbook for ordinary politics. Most of us have never lived under dictatorship, and are privileged as such. On top of this many lack an education about abusive regimes, both past and present. Unfortunately this leaves much of the public rather ignorant. The failure of voters to notice the difference between normal partisan fighting and an authoritarian takeover could mean we’ll all wake up one day and democracy will be over. The biggest threat to our democracy is not an external actor, but a demagogue destroying the pillars of democracy from within the government.
Erm… EU is trying to make it “Zero Knowledge” so the take on privacy is “so so”… just because the UK is doing things the shitty way doesn’t mean that’s the only way and we should keep on without any age verification besides “pinky swear I’m over 18yo”
https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/architecture-and-technical-specifications/
https://ageverification.dev/Technical Specification/annexes/annex-B/annex-B-zkp