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The Further Shitification Of The Internet

Intro

I’m writing (or more accurately, ranting) about this because of the recent amendment to the UK Online Safety Act which is detailed as follows:

As of 25 July 2025, platforms have a legal duty to protect children online. Platforms are now required to use highly effective age assurance to prevent children from accessing pornography, or content which encourages self-harm, suicide or eating disorder content.
Platforms must also prevent children from accessing other harmful and age-inappropriate content such as bullying, hateful content and content which encourages dangerous stunts or ingesting dangerous substances. Platforms must also provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise.

My issue with this amendment and why this doesn't work

  1. Offshoring citizen identifications is a terrible idea, and trusting companies to delete this data is irresponsible. I believe it won’t be long until we hear about the first data breach.

  2. The enforcement of locking 18+ content behind identification or AI facial review only encourages those looking for sources of porn in the UK to find hosts that don’t enforce ID, most likely higher risk and less moderated sites where actual illegal content may be present.

  3. I fear the ineptitude and poor planning of this ammendment can only lead us towards Digital Identification being required to access the internet in any capacity, infringing on personal freedoms and privacy. I hope everyone is ready for the government to announce it’s Digital Passport and content tracking for internet access in the UK, you can get a 5/5 rating if you don’t look at tits on the internet.

  4. The act in it’s current capacity will kill small businesses and websites that can’t afford the technology required to comply, the only winners here are Big Tech and those already hosting illegal content.

  5. Despite 400K+ signatures the current government has declared they have no intention to repeal this act, parliament considers all petitions with more than 100K+ signatures and it does not appear that this petition has been “considered”.

  6. The restrictions created by this act have already over-reached, we are unable to casually peruse memes if the forum/site/channel is tagged as 18+. Further to this, support channels such as /r/stopdrinking are innaccessible without going through this verification process, this can only be damaging - but somehow I doubt the nonces in this country are being affected by the restrictions.

In Summary

All this encourages is surveillance of the British citizens, if they’d named it the Online Surveillance Act it would have been more accurate with it’s purpose. I fear there’s worse to come.

I strongly believe in personal freedom and a level of privacy for each person, with the new restrictions I’ve ended up deleting social media accounts entirely just out of sheer irritation.

Maybe there’s a more honest reason for all these limitations though, it’s possible the government decided we all need to go touch grass more often - and that’s the real reason for the invasion (probs not lol).

Anyway. I’m around on Signal and Email

I don’t think I’ll be around in other online spaces soon, not with the way things are going.