The Online Safety Act is not about protecting kids, it's about protecting war criminals

It has been a day since the Online Safety Act came into affect in the UK to “protect the children”, and political posts are being removed from social media left, right, and centre. I had one post removed by Meta for “nudity” that contained no nudity. It simply mentioned the Porn Hub situation and how adults are expected to show their passports or credit cards or have their faces scanned or even their email contacts scanned by porn and social media sites.

Artificial intelligence decided my political comment might contain nudity (it didn’t) and it was removed. Other users are being told that social media posts are being hidden in their region for users who have not verified their age.

On many sites, users are not given a way to verify their age and cannot access content they could access the day before. It’s preposterous. And very deliberate. This, of course, has nothing to do with protecting the children. Many of these censored posts are related to Gaza.

The Online Safety Act is just the latest in a line of measures to censor people for political speech in the UK and it might be the most draconian yet.

Just imagine putting security cameras on every street corner that are monitored by artificial intelligence. Imagine every time the AI flags “inappropriate behaviour”, the person must be arrested and will then be jailed unless they can prove their innocence. Imagine every building you try to access demands your ID. Anyone could see that for what it is: authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism is not an acceptable approach to child safety in the real world so why would we accept it in the digital world? People do not want these measures and they did not vote for them.

The UK has a Terrorism Act that jails grannies for protesting against genocide and an Online Safety Act that hides Gaza images until you sacrifice online privacy. Put simply: we are losing our freedoms day by day to protect genocidal Israel.

The Online Safety Act places ludicrous demands on social media companies such as taking harmful content down immediately. Ludicrously, companies are expected to remove content that is LEGAL. Yes, it is illegal to allow legal content on social media now. My head hurts too.

The term “harmful” is so nebulous that an AI must judge if there is any possibility of harm and remove that post, as has already happened to me. This means we are no longer free to speak on the internet without permission from an AI.

Websites are expected to share data on targeted ads and content moderation, meaning it’s a matter of time until the mother of all data leaks happens. They are even required to scan your personal encrypted messages, meaning there is a legal requirement for them to spy on you. Under-18s are not allowed to use DMs.

Perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of the Act is that the government rejected age verification at the device or browser level. While this would have still been intrusive, it would have been a one-time thing. Instead, they have decided you must verify your identity with every site that meets certain criteria: mostly the big sites.

One stupid thing about this legislation is that smaller sites are not affected by the rules to the same extent, meaning this does little to protect children from accessing content. Instead, it stops adults from accessing that content unless they sacrifice their privacy. Who the hell is having their face scanned for porn or handing over credit card details to Wikipedia?

All this means is that smaller sites will get a boost in popularity and bigger sites could face ruin. However, some of the smallest sites say they will also be forced to close. It looks like only the least controversial mid-sized companies are safe here!

I’m sure this is all part of the plan. It’s worth noting these measures are not just impacting the UK: some EU countries are trialling them along with some US states. Countries like Australia and Canada are introducing similar measures soon. Mark my words: this won’t stop at age verification. They will continue finding new measures for censorship and control. Next step will likely be digital IDs. The era of the free internet is over.

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