Online Safety Act

Doing nothing is not the answer to the problem.

This government has made a stand, it may be clunky, it may be imperfect but it is a start.

 

It was passed by the previous government. In fact every member of this government voted against it at the time.

And it’s not a start, it’s actively making the problem worse and opening UK citizens up to being the victims of identity theft at a massive scale.

I agree doing nothing isn’t the answer, but they set doing something that’s actively making the problem worse and also opening up a massive range of other problems.

It’s purely censorship.

And before anybody tried to play this card. I don’t give a **** about watching porn. I’m not annoyed that I wouldn’t be able to watch it without verifying my ID. I know enough to use a VPN safely if I really wanted to. Most people don’t though and it’s going to cause massive problems.

Not to mention the number of websites and services that are getting caught in the crossfire is completely unacceptable. Thousands of websites providing information that UK citizens are no longer able to access despite not even being adult content in any form. How anybody can justify this for any reason is insane to me, even if the act did have the benefits they claim it does. Which it doesn’t.

It’s a stupid law and rules created by people that know absolutely nothing about how the internet works and think they have the power to control it when it’s fundamentally impossible as a small country. We have no power over the content of websites hosted in other countries. The only option if they don’t comply is blocking the website entirely but even then it won’t really work.

Wikipedia is currently suing the UK because god forbid a child sees a medical picture of a set of boobs. Insane pearl clutching.

 

Until porn sites are required by every country in the world to provide age verification, I don't think the govt realise how trivially easy it is for the average teenager to download a VPN and bypass these requirements. Literally 2 minute job that any kid knows how to do. Pointless ineffective law - the proverbial ashtray on a motorbike.

 

Pouring petrol on a fire is better than doing nothing. At least you’re trying something.

 

There’s only one thing for it, let’s go back to hedge porn!

 

As I said, it’s a start and it needs work. Wikipedia is not the target and things like that will get sorted.

 

Looking forward for the inevitable data breach to come!

Whatever way you like to dress it, eroding people's freedom is never a good answer. People under 16 are now considered old enough to vote, yet won't have access to the full Internet.

But no, think of the children you porn addict!

 

It’s not a start. It actively makes the problem worse.

There are new porn sites coming online every minute. It’s impossible to block every one. The only sites that follow the new rules are going to be the ones that actively police the content on them and make sure there’s nothing illegal.

Shady porn sites will follow neither rule and will be just as easy to find for kids.

 

How about the censorship of information about the Palestine genocide?
Or of Corbyn’s political party posting information?

Are you confident that will “get sorted”? Because i’m not. The censorship will continue under the guise of “protecting kids”.

 

What?????

 

Is that all….

 

While I agree that the law is an ass it's important to remember that it isn't the online safety act which is choosing to censor that particular tweet, it's Elon musk. It isn't like there is a government minister scouring the internet and choosing which posts it wants to censor, it's twitter making that decision

 

You’re right but this pathetic law is the reason for it happening.

Just like the government aren’t going around shutting down forums that don’t have the resources to comply with it, they’re still the reason for it shutting down.

Companies aren’t going to take any risks and will just censor anything that could potentially be classed as adult content.

I’ll give you another example, reddit is a much worse experience in the UK now because so many subreddits don’t allow NSFW content at all and so use the nsfw tag to hide spoiler content from TV shows for example or many other purposes and it’s now just blanket blocked in the UK without verifying your age.

 

Completely agree with that about it making the internet far worse because it's such a poorly thought out act which wasn't ready for going live imo. I was just pointing out that the Twitter thing isn't really because of the act, the far right Elon is just using that as his excuse

 

Well my kids (along with all their school friends) use Opera GX - a gaming-themed browser. It has a built-in VPN.

My kids no longer use Opera GX but had already by today been told how to enable it in order to bypass the new law. And the parental blocks we've got set up through our ISP.

Opera GX is closed source free Chinese software so I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it anyway but thanks to the new law they could view more today than they could yesterday as at least the ISP blocks worked when they didn't know about the VPN.

Thankfully no Linux version so it'll not be an option when I migrate them in a few weeks (neither has a machine that will run Windows 11) but yeah, so far not impressed with the new law!

 

No mention there to tell you how when people post links from X they embed without having to change the URL back to Twitter