The UK's censorship catastrophe is just the beginning
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I did an hour long beginner’s breakdown on why age verification is so dangerous, bad, and leading to mass censorship, with tech policy expert Eric Goldman.
Watch the full video on my YouTube or just let it play and listen. This issue is only going to become more relevant as the U.S. seeks to replicate UK law!
The UK's Online Safety Act finally went into effect this week and it has been a massive clusterfuck. Entire forums, websites, communities and essential journalism is being censored. People are being forced to scan their faces to use Spotify and YouTube is guessing ages and asking users for government IDs.
Like all of these terrible censorship bills, the Online Safety Act claims it's about protecting children from the evils of pornographic and “adult” content. But immediately after it went into effect, platforms began classifying nearly all breaking news footage, war coverage, investigative journalism, political protest material and information about reproductive and public health as “explicit” or “harmful" content, thus blocking anyone from under 18 from accessing it.
Subreddits dedicated to covering war crimes in Ukraine and Gaza or crucial information on sex ed now requires age verification. As The Verge reported, "Effectively, web platforms must either set up an age verification system that poses potential privacy risks, default to blocking huge swaths of potentially questionable content, or entirely pull out of the UK. Residents are finding themselves locked out of anything from period-related subreddits to hobbyist forums"
Users on Reddit are reporting entire subreddits are blocked across the UK. A post on one tech support subreddit shows the message: “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age.” A post on r/ukpolitics reads: "If you have a standard X account in the UK - presumably the vast majority of British users - you cannot see any protest footage that contains any violence tonight. Because of the Online Safety Act."
Reddit has also blocked access to a slew of subreddits featuring crucial public health related information like r/periods, r/stopsmoking, r/stopdrinking. Other subreddits that provide essential community support to users including minors like r/sexualassault, for example, are also blocked. Young people cannot access any information about sexual assault or potential abuse under these new child safety laws, meaning that they are less able to identify abuse and more likely to be exploited.
This mass gating of information prevents people under 18 in the UK from accessing independent reporting and community analysis of breaking news. Instead young people are fed sanitized, mainstream or government‑approved narratives. It's crucial for young people to learn and become educated about the world, and also to be able to gain access to information outside government propaganda and the mainstream media.
These laws limit young people's opportunities for critical thinking and civic understanding and they isolate young people from global perspectives. They also prevent them from connecting with other young people in foreign countries. And the way enforcement of these child safety laws works, platforms are forced to err on the side of caution by over‑blocking vague categories of potentially disturbing content.
Young people are also being forced to provide highly sensitive personal data like their government documents, selfies, and biometric scans. Organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Rights Group have flagged serious concerns that these age verification policies are a privacy nightmare. Meanwhile, VPN use is surging, potentially exposing young people to even less regulated corners of the web, which totally undermines these people's stated "child safety goals." Not to mention, the proliferation of free or shady VPN apps also raises privacy risks.
Also I just want to note that age verification does not "protect youth" from anything but information the government doesn't like. Young people still find a way to access porn, they're simply locked out of accessing crucial content about news, health, privacy, etc. These laws also don't account for educational use or parental supervision on platforms. They just create a binary system where all graphic or controversial content is treated the same, regardless of context.
Everything that is happening in the U.K. right now could happen in the U.S. if people don't start fighting back.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld age verification laws at the state level, with states like Nebraska and New York seeking to adopt similar frameworks. Australia and Ireland are also introducing variants of age‑checks or digital ID systems.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans are completely aligned on ramming age verification through congress and removing all free speech and the right to anonymity on the web. Leftists have completely dropped the ball and there is no meaningful political opposition to these efforts in the U.S. from either party. Meanwhile, a lot of people in the media have spent the past several years feeding into the exact moral panic nonsense that these laws are predicated on.
We cannot allow our government to normalize censorship in response to a moral panic about technology and social media. As anyone with any experience in this realm can tell you, these laws start with children but they expand rapidly. The laws are already leading to adults being unable to receive crucial news and journalistic content across myriad platforms.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans want to destroy our free and open internet and create a world where the only information we're able to access online is sanitized, government approved speech. We need to fight back against the moral panic about social media and these atrocious censorship bills that erode our civil liberties and destroy our right to free expression on the internet.
What I’m reading
Inside The Mass Call Campaign To Stop Video Game Censorship
Following censorship of adult games on Steam and Itch, people are calling Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe 'round the clock. - Aftermath