And America is next
The Online Safety Act was sold to the British public as a way to protect children from adult content, but fighting porn proved to be a trojan horse over fighting what the regime cared about.
Any Britons trying to read the Act probably never made it to Chapter 7 at which point the wooden horse legislation listed a ‘Committee on Disinformation and Misinformation’ and began handing out matching orders on how internet services are supposed to deal with the bogeys of unfettered speech. What does disinformation have to do with keeping kids from accessing porn?
Recent court hearings revealed that officials had stated that the real purpose was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”. There’s only one kind of censorship the British government is really into.
Rather than blocking pornography, the Online Safety Act was used to block videos of parliamentary debates about the Muslim sex grooming gang crisis in the UK. Not only wasn’t the Online Safety Act protecting children from being exposed to sexual content, it was being used to censor revelations about the complicity of the authorities in the sexual abuse of children.
The OSA is one of a series of pieces of legislation that seem designed to replicate Orwell’s nightmarish 1984 dystopia under the guise of reforming and protecting people from things.
Orwell’s inspiration for 1984 came from his time working for the BBC under the Ministry of Information which he sarcastically rebranded in the book as the Ministry of Truth. Today’s Ministry of Truth is OFCOM, the UK’s monstrous speech regulator, which, in a fitting tribute to 1984, is forcing Big Brother onto ‘Smart’ TVs. In an echo of 1984’s TVs playing government propaganda that can’t be turned off, the Media Act forces BBC and other government content to have a “privileged” role on internet connected TV’s. Whether or not anyone wants them to.
While “1984 was not an instruction manual” is a longstanding meme, it is very much an instructional manual for government officials who brag that the purpose of the Media Act is to “make sure public service broadcast content is always carried.”
Furthermore, since viewers insist on not watching government propaganda and instead watching cat videos, the next OFCOM proposal is to also force YouTube and popular video streaming sites to promote government propaganda into your algorithm whether you want it or not. If viewers still choose not to click, 1984 includes a helpful guide for having a gent with a mustache stare at them through their screen to make sure that they are watching the BBC. --->READ MORE HERE
US policymakers should take heed, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Implementation of the UK's Online Safety Act is giving internet users around the globe – including those in US states moving to enact their own age verification laws – real-time proof that such laws impinge on everyone's rights to speak, read, and view freely.
The new OSA rules require all online services accessible in the UK – social media, search engines, music sites, and adult content providers — to enforce age checks to keep children from seeing "harmful content". Online services also must change their algorithms and moderation systems to keep such content from young people.
Social media platforms Reddit, Bluesky, Discord, and X all introduced age checks to block children from seeing harmful content; adult websites implemented age assurance checks on their sites asking users to either upload government-issued ID, provide an email address for comparison against use on other sites, or submit personal information to a third-party vendor for age verification. Sites like Spotify are requiring users to submit face scans to third-party digital identity company Yoti to access content labelled 18+.
The scope of so-called "harmful content" is subjective and arbitrary, and often sweeps up content that governments and CEOs of online services might not want online — regardless of whether this is legal content or not. Add to this the law threatening large fines or even jail time for non-compliance, and platforms pre-emptively over-censor content to ensure they won't be held liable.
And reports from the UK are already showing how age checks are being used to censor content that falls outside the OSA across the internet. This includes footage of police attacking pro-Palestinian protestors being blocked on X, multiple subreddits blocked, including r/IsraelExposed, r/safesexPH and r/stopsmoking, and some smaller websites closing down entirely.
No one — no matter their age, no matter what country they live in — should have to hand over their passport or driver's license just to access legal information and speak freely. And users in the UK know this: Days after age checks went into effect, VPN apps —"virtual private networks" that protect your internet connection and privacy online — became among the most downloaded apps in Apple's App Store in the UK. --->READ MORE HERE
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