Online Safety Act

Only if you look at his nuts

 

Disgraceful law.

 

Has anyone fallen foul of this yet? Other than seeing this post about it, I haven’t seen a single thing to know that anything has changed. I don’t use a VPN.

 

Slightly off topic but I see humans fought back against AI today.

Over on X / Twitter Grok had it's account suspended over a post about Israel / USA

Rage against the machine

 

He has just turned 18 so some of the problem is now solved.

 

Yes. Half of reddit no longer shows up in the UK because things like discussions about TV shows use “NSFW” as a way to label spoilers.

Lots of posts about Palestine and other world events are now blocked on social media because they show graphic scenes which are classed as “adult content”

I suppose if you’re not using a VPN to see the content that’s missing you’ll never know it’s not there because for the most part it doesn’t show it as blocked it just doesn’t show it at all, but a lot of websites specifically social media now looks a lot different to UK people, for the worse in my opinion.

 

Why would they do that? All the subreddits I’m in just use Spoiler to label spoilers.

 

Wait, social media has got worse? How is that possible?

 

How dare they stop under 18s being exposed to adult material on social media! The good people on there would never corrupt or groom children!

Obviously i dont support this problem filled law but the concept that it filters social media for under 18s is one of the few absolute positives. Unfortunately it doesn't go anywhere near far enough in protecting people from genuinely harmful content being deliberately fed to them by unscrupulous individuals and crooked algorithms

 

TBF, I think I agree that the concept is right, but the implementation isn't - especially the part about "breakable for the good guys only encryption". If the age restrictions had been in place for 30 years, nobody would be complaining about it.

 

In years gone by the spoiler tag didn’t exist, so any content older than a few years old will use the NSFW tag and many people still use it for that reason.

 

They’re not stopping under 18s being exposed to adult material. That’s literally impossible. As someone in this thread has pointed out there are browsers with VPNs built in that every kid knows about. Not to mention the fact that a kid can easily search “porn” and go to page 100 on the google results and have their pick of sites that are completely unregulated and full of illegal content. Much better than being on regulated sites where the content has to follow the law…

All they’re doing is censoring the internet under the guise of child safety. Remember labour opposed this law when they were in opposition, but now they’re the ones in control of the censorship they’re all for it.

 

Under the guise of child safety is absolute nonsense. The aim of the bill was always to provide protections to minors. Primarily against harmful content promoting self harm, suicide and dangerous acts on social media. The fact that there are mechanisms to avoid these measures doesn't change that intent one bit.

What you are talking about regarding wider censorship was tacked on alongside it during the endless reviews, although I do believe the initial aim was to restrict access to extremist content such as terrorist propaganda and content from the far right & left.

I absolutely agree that this aspect of the law has been misappropriated and misused by this government (and would have been by the previous government who created it, and will be even worse if Farage ever gets his grubby hands on it - don't believe for one second he'll repeal it, to him its an ultimate weapon)

But I cant deny that my five year old can no longer accidentally stumble (or be lead) into harmful or inappropriate content anywhere near as easily and that is a damned good thing. Her access to the internet is strictly limited, as it should be, but as they grow up they gain more access online and you have less and less visibility.

The kids you are referring to using VPNs are much older. More needs to be done to protect them, but this aspect of the law and the reforms it pushes on to social media companies is a positive in the general sea of s**t.

 

For the less techy....what does that all mean please?

 

Basically lots of places on reddit would ban adult content and remove it if it showed up so had no need for the adult content tag so would use that to mark things like spoilers from TV shows so people could avoid them, as the adult content tag blurs out images and hides text until you say you want to see it.

Reddit later added a specific spoiler tag which served the same purpose but all the old content on there still uses the adult content tag and lots of people still use it for new posts because that’s what they’re used to using.

Any post marked this way is now not shown to UK users.

For an example, i’ve just refreshed my reddit homepage (while on VPN) and 10-20% of it is marked as adult content - be it for spoiler reasons, because it’s a joke with swear words in it, because it’s a photo of a starving child that could be considered “graphic” etc. - none of it is porn or nudity in any way.

 

Obviously if you verify your age to reddit you don't need a VPN. Are you fully against the idea of age verification to protect children from being exposed to adult content? Because it sounds like you're grumbling about a minor inconvenience that you have multiple ways around

 

Thanks for that.

 

That's so easy to solve though that that's not even a 0.000001% of a reason to put kids at risk. In fact, it already has been solved by mods just telling people to use the correct tag that exists for that specific purpose. Even if people continued to not, people have the choice of verifying or just not seeing film spoilers. The stuff that is actually NSFW not being able to be seen by kids is a good thing. There was/is plenty on stuff on Reddit that is absolutely not for kids' eyes.

 

Forcing people to send their ID to foreign companies doesn’t sound like a great idea to me.

Yes, i’m completely against the idea of censorship. The solution to this problem is education specifically educating parents and making it easy for them to block adult content.

 

I agree, which is why i think parents should block reddit from their young kids devices.

What i’m against fundamentally is making people in the UK second class citizens on the internet and restricting the information we’re allowed to see. Having to provide your ID to foreign companies with questionable privacy records is not a valid solution.

If you’re worried about kids accidentally seeing something i’d be ok with requiring an “are you 18?” question on any site that contains adult content. That way they can’t stumble onto it. It’s not going to stop a kid that wants to see it, but neither does this law.