Coming out of the corner

That's because ministers will force platforms to bring in "highly effective age assurance" methods, meaning some adult users will have to verify their ages to prove they're not children.

But the government says many adults won't have to do age checks, if their account has been open for more than 16 years, has a credit card connected to it, or is liked to an email that's age verified in other ways.

Ministers say the ban is about keeping children safe, not about tracking everyone online.

I'm writing this in June 2026, so this means the social media accounts would have had to have been opened in or around June 2010.

Twitter opened in 2006, YouTube in 2005, TikTok in 2016, Facebook in 2004.

So just to be clear, most of these are only a little older than the 16 year deadline the government want to apply for people to escape the age verification. And TikTok didn't exist sixteen years ago. so quite who is going to have a sixteen year old account on that is beyond me.

And just how many people who use Twitter and Facebook are going to have credit cards on their account? Because that seems like something that these sites are not going to have attached to them.

So that leaves age verified email, which seems unlikely since most email accounts are just "sign here" - it's one of the benefits of email addresses.

I don't like being put in a position where I am agreeing with Elon Musk. It does not sit well with me. But given the shitty excuses the government are coming up with, and their pathetic attempts to say "No - you don't have to provide ID if you can invent a time machine and sign up before this site became public" then I am pretty sure they are full of shit.

Then there is the problem with using YouTube.

I routinely access it at work because there are videos on it about printers - about how to reset them, and how to calibrate them, and how to configure them.

I take the URLs and send them to customers, because it is easier than writing a long set of instructions out.

If I - and all of our customers - have to sign up to these sites to access these videos then it is going to make our life a great deal harder and screw up our business more than you can imagine.

How will it be enforced?

The government said "highly effective age assurance" measures would be used to check the age of those using social media.

This typically involves requiring companies to use tech that accurately estimates or verifies someone's age - such as face scans or asking for ID.

The regulator Ofcom has been asked to carry out a rapid study to identify the best ways to verify if someone is over 16.

What have social media firms said about the ban?

Facebook and Instagram-owner Meta said a ban would not achieve the goal of keeping teens safe online.

"As we've seen in Australia, bans risk isolating teens from online communities and information, and driving them to unregulated alternatives that lack built-in protections and parental controls," it said.

Restrictions should be "underpinned by an age verification system on devices", so that people aren't asked to "hand over ID to dozens of individual services", Meta said.

I am not going to hand over my ID to every site that demands it. Not for something that isn't age-restricted by default. It's ridiculous and kind of dictatorial.

And people who say "Oh won't someone think of the children"? That is the lowest form of argument and is just a base appeal to emotion.

Also the "age verification on devices doesn't take account of how this would work on computers. Because I use multiple computers and how would that work?

In overturning the decision on Palestine Action, and saying the government was right to proscribe it, Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr said - amongst other things - that The Suffragettes were "a non-violent protest group"

This "non-violent protest group" carried out over 300 bombings and arson attacks between 1912 and 1914.

Most people wouldn't consider that to be "Non-violent"

Most people would consider that to be a terrorist group.

Most people would consider that to be an incredibly active terrorist group.

And yet The Suffragettes are held up as one of our nation's greatest protest groups.

And yet Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr has said they were non-violent.

The entire political establishment just took away an entire section of the internet from the kids.

The idea that kids are going to be happier.......... no. I just don't see it.

This is over kill of the worst sorts. They are saying "We don't want you watching porn so we're not going to let you watch any films at all until you turn eighteen"

This is the nanny state gone mad. And I don't use that phrase lightly, because I hate it when people say "this is PC gone mad" or "this is blah blah blah gone mad" but honestly......... this is just insane.

They've repeatedly said "the tech companies have to get their house in order" and the tech companies have failed so instead they are spanking the kids because they have just given in.

But I want to make the point EVERY political party is in on this - Labour, The Tories, The Lib Dems, Fascist Farage's Playgroup - they are all a party to this abomination.

The first film was "Surrogates" with Bruce Willis. The ending basically shows a world where all the disabled people helped by remote/virtual bodies get fucked over because a guy decides to destroy all the remote/virtual bodies because he wants to see his wife again. No other reason - just that he misses his wife so he fucked over the entire country. It also skips over people in planes, people who are having surgery and so on getting killed because of his actions and just sells us a happily ever after world now that he has freed all the able bodied people of their "enslavement to modern technology"

And the second film (the one I didn't know what it was) was the remake of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and the ending - again - shows modern technology shutting down, and glosses over the planes in the sky, the people having surgery, all the people who - at the point modern technology shuts down and cuts out NEED that technology to stay alive and not die a brutal bloody death, and instead just shows us a bright, new shiny world that hasn't been destroyed.

I don't want to suggest that in the late 2000s Hollywood got INCREDIBLY full of themselves about "oh aren't we going to save the world" and stopped paying attention to the fact that technology is ACTUALLY PRETTY FUCKING USEFUL in some circumstances (and speaking as someone who has had THREE lots of surgery and kind of depends on technology to keep them alive during said surgery) but I think that quite honestly (and I cannot believe these words are coming out of my mouth) very occasionally they could do to stop being so fucking preachy and pay attention to the reality of some things.

I just got to the end of one film, and got slightly distracted answering a text on my phone, and when I looked up a whole other film had started.

So now I am watching a film. Except I have no idea what film it is, what it's about, whose in it, how long it is, or even what genre it is.

I literally have no buggering clue what this film is.

Which is making it quite entertaining.

So far there has been a guy in the arctic........ oh. I think I've figured it out. (Sorry - a giant robot just emerged from a spaceship, which is kind of a give away. Also the giant robot just said "KLATU" which is another give away).

Based on quite a LOT of posts on BlueSky, it would appear that KickStarter has been taken over by the religious right-wing and has been lost to the general public.

This is all "reported" stuff, so I can't entirely vouch for its accuracy, however I have very little reason to doubt that any of this is nonsense or invented bullshit

Bans on :-

Porn or sexually explicit content, on projects created for sexual gratification, on insertable sexual products, on sexually explicit comics, art or photography - whether that art features real people or not, products marketed specifically for sexual gratification, content that references illegal sexual acts (a), censored/black box images of any of the above.

This is just a summary of what is banned - it goes into far more detail, but in short it is a pretty comprehensive list and basically if you want to start a kickstarter for anything involving people's bikini areas you might as well forget it, because they don't want you there any more.

(a) - it doesn't reference what makes an act illegal, but if you live in a country where homosexuality is illegal, where polyamory is illegal, where the sexual act you want to depict, reference, draw, or write about is illegal, then there is the potential your kick starter will be rejected under this clause. Which literally makes it a morals clause for any religious nutjobs or right-wing bigots who might want to object to what you do.

In short - Kickstarter - that has the temerity to still have the following up on its site (see below) is apparently rejecting any adult content that it disapproves of for reasons that are not yet clear.

"Kickstarter has always been a home for bold, boundrry pushing creative work, including mature content projects like romance novels, nude art books and provocative comics. Creators working in this space are a valued part of our community, and that hasn't changed"

Apparently their definition of "boundary pushing" no longer includes explicit content or sex or anything that involves people's toilet parts.

If you write a letter with the words "RETURN THIS LETTER TO THE ABOVE ADDRESS" then you should REALLY INCLUDE AN ADDRESS

The Night of The Storm - the first of the new stories, and one that is potentially going to be a tad controversial. Inspired by the "Daria" story of the same name (although that seems lost) it is the first one I've written in a long while that might be the launching pad for a longer series.