Hello. I live in the UK (Yeah) and thus, I have to deal with the Online Safety Act in practice and on the ground. I kinda wanna write this account for three reasons.
All the YouTube Videos about it that are clogging my recommendations page are taking a bad situation and sensationalising it for clicks, views and engagement (as YouTube Channels do, alas), which gives a bit of an over the top breathless view on it.
I kinda wanna talk about it from the point of an average person.
I'm a thirty something, with a BA in History, I like to choose what I share about myself online (Oversharing can bite you in the arse), and I consider myself to be on the Left-Libertarian quadrant of the Political Compass. I'm transgender, queer af, Scottish Independence supporting and value Open Source tech, participationary democracy, and have Bookchinite views on things. OK? Ok.
So what about the Online Safety Act 2023?
The Online Safety Act 2023 (or as I call it, the OSA) was passed under the last Conservative Administration and despite winning the 2024 election, Labour is not merely enforcing it but enforcing it with some glee it seems with the Technology Minister insisting that if you are against it, you're with the Pedophiles.
But fun fact, The United Kingdom publishes all legistlation online for all to see and it's viewable here. The bill doesn't just cover sites about Porn, Violence or Eating disorders, it covers all sites with User Generated Content or where users interact with each other. It also covers search engines and sites with a search function (yikes). But the issue lies, like all bills, not with what it defines, but what it leaves vague. Section 60, Subsection 2 defines "Content that is harmful to children" as:
Primary priority content that is harmful to children (Porn, suicide, self harm, Eating Disorders).
Priority content that is harmful to children (abusive content or harm toward people and/or animals, be it real or fictional, yes you heard).
Content, not within 1 or 2, of a kind which presents a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of children in the United Kingdom.
That last one, Ladies, Gents, and all those inbetween and neither is what is worrying because that could mean literally anything. In fact no, that does mean anything. All you need to do is say "this harms children" and boom, age blocked. I could, hypothetically, point to the Prime Minister and Wes Streeting for harm to children, considering the amount of transphobia they spew could come under this law, because you know, there are an appreciable number of under 18s who are Trans, but we'll circle back to that.
So what does shit look like on the ground.
The Online Safety Act had an effect before it even came into force, with websites asking users to make an app and verify their ages before the 25th. But even outside of the usual suspects (porn) it was having an effect.
British Based Forums started shutting down, simply because they could not comply with what the Online Safety Act demanded or did not want to. These forums include football supporter forums, Renault EV owner forums, forums for single and divorcing dads, a forum for fix gear bicycle users in London (yes, you heard), and even a Mastodon Instance
They didn't shut down because they were pornographic or had pornographic content, they shut down because they were places where users interacted with each other and they were too small and did not have the resources to institue age checks. Sites from outside the UK started Geoblocking UK users (we'll get back to this later) because again, they didn't have the resources to institute agechecks. These included some porn sites, but also a lot of forums, blogs, and lemmy instances.
OK, so what about the age checks.
So pretty much every major social media and porn site (but not all) are instituting age checks. These take the form of an Age Estimation Face Scan (which have been broken by using video games like The Sims, Death Stranding and Garry's Mod, yes, you heard that right), or a Drivers Licence or Passport check, which you were told before this bullshit happened not to do. As a result, a lot of scammers are setting up face ID checkpoints and taking people's drivers licences and passports. For a while, you could go onto Google Images and get pictures of people's driver's licences.
And it gets worse because even the "legit" age checkers like Yoti say that they will delete the data, just not for a couple of weeks, just incase the cops want your ID (yikes). This of course, opens up a whole can of worms because this means that if Yoti gets hacked (which I'm sure every blackhat is doing as we speak), we will not merely have people's ID and faces leaked, but potentially what porn you have been viewing, which would be lovely for Blackmail.
The effect on Social Media
The social media sites that are doing verification include (but are not limited to)
Facebook (and it's subsiduaries).
OK but here's where it gets worrying. There's two people who decide what's covered under this act:
The Social Media Companies themselves
This has lead to a couple of things happening:
A lot of overreach: Reddit, for example, are covering their arse by not merely Age Gating NSFW subreddits, but also SFW subreddits, namely help forums for people going through mental health issues, forums to stop smoking, and safe for work LGBT subreddits. Despite news content explicitly getting exceptions, Twitter/X are Age Gating posts by News Outlets. The example brought up frequently are Protests outside of Hotels housing Asylum Seekers, but this is currently also used on Protests against the Palestinian Genocide, Environmental Protests, and posts about anything related to those things. Basically the law is so vague on what counts as "harmful to children" that anything the Government doesn't like can be banned. If you're one of these people who are like "they're not going to target the other side" or "they're only targetting my side", let me remind you; Palestinian Action has been proscribed as a Terror Group for an act of Direct action and you can be arrested for even suggesting support for them.
A lot of twitchy fingers: Now bare in mind here, because of the vaguries in the law, we don't really know if something can or will be covered. For example, on my Fediverse account, I wrote about how Tuberculosis gave us Leather Daddies. That mentioned Erotic Artist Tom of Finland (who, despite making smut, has had an outsized effect on culture). Could that be age gated under this law? Since the law says "anything that could cause harm to an appreciable amount of children", that could mean anything. Technically, Tom and Jerry could be banned.
It doesn't just affect smut or politics.
Remember when I said Reddit is age gating LGBT subs? Well the current government is very much not Trans friendly. Keir Starmer made transphobic jibes in front of the father of Brianna Ghey, a murdered transgender teenager, in Parliament. Wes Streeting is a transphobe who's linked to various "gender critical" groups and is enforcing anti-trans policies. What happens when SFW help forums are age gated, or charities like LGBT Youth Scotland? A transgender teen, racked with dyphoria, may have nowhere reliable to go if the forum they require help from or the site that has the info they need is age gated. It is no accident that LGBT media is usually marked as being Adults Only when things turn south, even if the media in question is completely Safe For Work.
And what of other minorities? Will their spaces online be gated when opinions on them turn south?
And the whole thing Backfires.
The one thing about Teenagers and technology is that they are clever and when they find a work around, they use it and they share that work around with everyone. The governent, which is run by people who are a little older than Teenagers, don't seem to understand this and think that teens are as tech illiterate, or even more so, than they are.
Guess what all the teens did: They got VPNs. being teenagers with very little money (you can imagine the kind of stress they are under), are now using dodgy "free" VPNs who make their money by selling the data off to who the fuck knows, including things like your passwords and accounts, which puts teens into even more danger than they were before. Some of the cleverer ones are using Tor, which, while great, also runs the risk of running into straight up illegal material, putting kids into even more danger.
Now, I'm sure some poor sod at the Civil Service had to sit down with the tech minister or even the Prime Minister and explain how the bill was a bad fucking idea, and by the looks of things, the response from Number 10 was "I don't care". If you are reading this, nameless civil servant, you have my greatest sympathy because you must've needed the patience of a Saint or Bodhisatva to deal with the urge not to end up on the front pages the morning after.
What has been the government line to VPNs? Well they have said that "it's illegal to circumvent age checks with VPNs", but a law is only as good as it's enforcement. The other line is "Websites cannot tell people about VPNs in regards to age checks", but every fucking money making youtube channel for several years has been running ads for various VPNs for years now. Everyone knows what a VPN is, except number 10. And finally, it's been floated that VPNs themselves should be made illegal. All of this ignores the fact that companies, banks, and even the government require VPNs to do shit securely. My bank uses VPN tech for fuck sake! I don't think the government will care about practicality, they clearly haven't here. But then again, both the Last Labour GOvernment and the last Conservative governments, have floated the idea of banning or breaking encryption, only to (hopefully) be disuaded when told it would destroy the economy.
The Wikimedia Foundation (the people in charge of Wikipedia) are currently in court with OfCom trying to stop them putting Wikipedia under Category 1 regulations. Under which, all editors will have to reveal their identity, potentially putting them at risk of attack from unfriendly governments. Worse case Scenario: Wikipedia gets Geoblocked.
Wikipedia is one of those sites that I love and is a testament to the human capacity for knowledge and sharing. It is the modern Library of Alexandria, a real life Hitchiker's guide. To restrict or lose it would be the final straw for civil society and freedom of knowledge. If you are restricting Wikipedia, you are not a good person.
Shits bad. Fireballs and lighting aren't raining from the sky, but shit is bad. I'm so, so fucking tired.
