The collective West decided to censor the entire internet instead of not doing genocide

Since the Online Safety Act came into effect, we've seen an awful lot of political censorship and nothing in the way of saving children. Children's lives have not been improved by this bill, but all of us have seen loss of privacy and loss of information we should be allowed to access in a free society.

There is a petition on the Parliament UK website to repeal the Online Safety Act that I have attempted to sign three times. I still have not received the verification email, meaning my signature has not been counted. I suspect this is deliberate and that many more than the official 427,000 people have attempted to sign.

The government has already responded to the petition by dismissing everyone's concerns and refusing to debate this in parliament. The whole point of parliamentary petitions is to trigger parliamentary debates, but the government is no longer pretending to listen to what we want.

The level of overreach in the Online Safety Act is off the chart. Section 179 bans people from saying something false that could cause "non-trivial psychological harm", potentially banning humour and satire. It could also ban any speech that counters a government narrative and is therefore deemed false.

If your government decides there is no genocide and you say there is, there is nothing stopping them deeming this misinformation and banning you. While you might not think things would go this far, you should remember that at the start of the Ukraine war, social media users were banned for challenging the narrative, including popular YouTubers like Lee Camp, Glenn Diesen and Rachel Blevins. Their message was peace and many of the things they were banned for are now accepted as true, such as arguing the war was unwinnable and could lead to World War III.

The Ministry of Truth now gets to decide which online content is factual or harmful and that will always be a political decision. There is no impartial way of doing this, and aside from anything else, people in a free society are allowed to say what they want. No one needs to be protected from speech.

It is incredibly easy to label any challenge to the official narrative as harmful. Those who opposed the Iraq war were being harmful because they were "Saddam sympathisers". Those who opposed the Afghanistan war were "terrorist sympathisers". Those who oppose Israel's genocide are "antisemites". Those who oppose the Online Safety Act are "paedos". You see how easy it is to label opposing views as harmful?

Your right to speak is at the discretion of bureaucrats, artificial intelligence, and social media bosses, all of who can silence anyone under the guise of protecting the public. So much for the marketplace of ideas.

Predictably, the backlash against the Online Safety Act has been enormous, so it's going to be interesting to see Labour's standing in future polls. In all likelihood, it will not even be one of the top three parties, and for a party of government, that is insane.

The government is now so desperate that it is resorting to calling people paedophiles for opposing the Online Safety Act. Given most people oppose the implementation of the Act, they are accusing a majority of the population of paedophilia. It's hard to see how their messaging could be worse.

Peter Kyle is a guy who reportedly once called the police on a constituent who wrote to him about Gaza, resulting in a 4am raid on his home. It seems Peter is greatly concerned about the safety of children, unless those children are in Gaza...

A government that has contempt for its public and acts with sheer disregard for their wants and needs cannot reasonably be described as democratic. A government that is giving itself increasing powers, instead of responding to public opinion is, by definition, authoritarian.

And this authoritarianism is hardly confined to the UK...

Have you considered it strange that countries across the world suddenly decided online safety measures were needed simultaneously? Almost like this was coordinated... Even the US is trying to get around its pesky first amendment with multiple bills aiming to censor online speech, such as the Kids Online Safety Act.

If the US can't introduce such laws, it will depend on so many of its allies introducing censorship rules that they become the new global standard. It will reach a point where it's easier for big tech to censor the entire planet than have different sets of rules for different countries. This means we will be subjected to the most draconian interpretation of the most draconian rules from around the globe.

The US has already banned foreigners from criticising Israel which is ironic considering Marco Rubio goes around the world lecturing other countries on free speech. Now it is trying to ban its own citizens from criticising Israel through the Stop Hate Act - a bill backed by the Anti-Defamation League that would fine social media companies $5 million a day for not removing posts critical of Israel.

It's not just the ADL that is demanding censorship, there are all kinds of shady groups that have been engineering this for years, such as the Global Coalition for Digital Safety. One member of the GCDS, Melanie Dawes, just happens to be the head of OFCOM.

While they're pretending this is all about "safety", these censorship measures are putting you at risk. Your personal data is being processed by companies that are registered abroad and therefore do not come under our jurisdiction. There is nothing stopping those companies handing your data over to hostile governments or selling it on the black market, and even if they don't, your data is now an easy target for hackers.

The UK government has not made the slightest attempt to protect your data or your right to free speech. It has instead ignored every recommendation that could have kept you safer and focused on measures that have nothing to do with child safety. As the Adam Smith Institute points out, “80% of the legislation [is] more concerned with censorship, the powers of Ofcom, and non-safeguarding matters.”

Age verification has already gone so much further than pornography sites and social media companies. Even Spotify is demanding age verification, for god's sake. If you fail to verify your age, or the facial recognition AI thinks you are under 18, your account gets deactivated!

YouTube is now using AI to monitor your every key stroke without your consent. Are you comfortable with this? Is it making you feel safer? What about if your government demands access to this information?

YouTube's surveillance still isn't enough for Australia which is about to ban under-16s from using the platform, a platform that already does not allow adult content and demands age verification for anything remotely sensitive.

If you're still unclear why that might be, just consider that TikTok has hired a former IDF instructor to decide what its users can and can't say about Israel's genocide.

All these measures are primarily about monitoring and censoring critics of Israel and western imperialism. Peter Kyle let the cat out of the bag when he pleaded with the public to not use VPNs. He insisted that verifying your identity keeps children safe, but it literally doesn't.

It makes no difference to a child whether adults access restricted content by age verification or a VPN. The only relevant factor is that if you use a VPN, the government can't spy on you. Kyle is mad that you are circumventing government surveillance. That's it.

VPNs are seeing a huge surge in users because people do not want to be spied on or put their personal information at risk. The government does not give a crap about what they want and is trying to force them to do something without their consent.

A ban on VPNs would not help children in any way because your nine-year-old isn't signing up to a VPN. A ban on VPNs would simply enable your government to spy on you.

Some internet service providers are already blocking access to VPNs, even though there is no legal requirement to do so. They implicitly understand what is expected of them so they're doing it anyway.

As if all this isn't enough, the government is looking at introducing a digital ID called BritCard, a move that could give them real-time data on every website you visit, every person you interact with online, every company you do business with, every real place you go.

Imagine having to inform the government every time someone visited your house, every time you went to a shop, every time you made a telephone call. You would call that totalitarianism. What we are seeing here is the emergence of digital totalitarianism.

What has come so far from the Online Safety Act is only the tip of the iceberg. Next year, websites will be required to let the government access their source code and algorithms and even your DMs. It's a matter of time until they are enforcing the algorithmic suppression of content they dislike and arresting people for private conversations.

If you still believe the Online Safety Act is about protecting children, there truly is no hope for you. This bill is not making a safer world for children, it's making a world in which they cannot see unauthorised opinions and are not entitled to privacy.

This explains why the bill has attracted criticism from across the political spectrum, from the likes of @owenjonesjourno to Alex Armstrong. Only the most pro-establishment weirdos, who would be happy for the government to put cameras in their bathrooms, could think the Online Safety Act is okay.

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