Misusing The Children: The UK Online Safety Act, Privacy And Censorship

Scoop

2 days ago

The United Kingdom can always be relied upon to supply us with the eccentric, the admirably dotty, and the odd extreme bit of adventure in policy. Lately, those mad protectors and censors with their shields of false virtue and hollow intellect have decided to launch an assault on the users of the Internet. In this, they are joining the platoons of hysteria from such countries as Australia, where age verification restrictions on platforms are all the rage. It's all about the children, and when adults start meddling with children, all sorts of trouble arise.
Much in line with the foolish, and potentially dangerous efforts being made by the eCommissioner (not a misspelling) in Australia to impose 'industry codes' of child safety, the UK Online Safety Act (OSA) is being used to blanket social media, search engines and virtually any other site of service with age verification restrictions. The OSA lists three categories that are said to be harmful to children: primary priority content, priority content and non-designated content.
Primary priority content is a British favourite of the repressed classes: pornography, and content that supposedly encourages suicide, self-harm, or various behaviours and disorders with eating. (If only there was a form of pornography that might encourage good eating habits.) Priority harmful content covers abuse relevant to race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability or gender reassignment and any content that incites hatred against such people. To this, among others, can be added bullying, the promotion of 'serious violence, and depiction of serious violence' whether authentic or fictional.
To make things even more expansively ludicrous, the regulations cover content that is non-designated (NDC), which might as well be the entire body of knowledge and existence on this planet and beyond seen by the regulators of the day as dangerous. Examples are skimpy, and do not mention the enriching apple in the Garden of Eden offered to Eve by the opportunistic serpent. Something, however, is 'NDC if it presents a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of children in the UK'. What a triumph of insufferable vagueness.
The onus is placed on the online service providers to ascertain whether the hosted content is harmful to children. 'As the regulator, we won't be accessing individual pieces of content, or telling online services to remove legal material,' states the UK Office of Communications, Ofcom. They are, in effect, being enlisted by the government as moral, vigilant guardians, never the wisest thing when it comes to technology companies. If the providers in question determine the material to be harmful, they must implement various mitigation measures. Ofcom lists some of them: 'highly effective age assurance to protect children from [harmful content online]'; safer algorithms to limit access to such harmful content (goodbye much literature and culture); effective moderation; transparent reporting and complaints processes; supportive information for children and 'strong governance and accountability'. This constituted a true charter for docile imbecility.
The platforms are told to implement an age verification process that is 'technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair.' These include, among a range of options, facial age estimation, granting the age-check service access to bank information, digital identity services, which include digital identity wallets, credit card age checks, mobile network operator age checks and uploaded photo-IDs. Social media platforms such as Reddit, Bluesky, Discord, and have already imposed age checks to comply with the July 25 deadline. Ditto Pornhub, the most visited pornographic online provider in the UK, Tube 8, YouPorn and RedTube.
The well named Carl Dong, Obscura VPN founder, is not shy in calling the law a 'ticking time-bomb for the privacy of UK citizens.' The broader consequences of the OSA are snappily summed up by Paige Collings, senior speech and privacy activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: the OSA is nothing less than a 'threat to the privacy of users,' a restriction on free expression by arbitrating online speech, an imposition of 'algorithmic discrimination through face checks' and excludes 'millions of people without a personal device or form of ID […] from accessing the internet.'
The cleverer users will simply make a mockery of the whole show by using other means of regulatory subversion, including installing a VPN (Virtual Private Network) and browsing the web as if the user was from another country where age-verification rules do not apply. 'The logistics,' explains Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at Check Point Software, 'are near impossible. You could, in theory, ban the sale of VPN equipment, or instruct ISPs not to accept VPN traffic. But even then, people will find workarounds. All you'd achieve is pushing VPN underground, creating a black market for VPN contractors.'
A rush for the most appropriate VPNs has already been ushered in while a petition featuring over 481,000 signatures urging the repeal of the OSA has gathered steam. On July 28, the government responded in the customary tone deaf manner, admitting to having 'no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act'. Instead, it was 'working with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.'
Critics of these digital walls of restriction and exclusion face a body of manipulated public opinion. Gone are the days when everyone could post, mention and vent on any topic with merry impunity and noisy enthusiasm. Information superhighways have become potholes fought over by tribes and regulatory zealots inoculated against debate. Many members of the public seem to want censorship as a form of stand-in parenting, and a YouGov poll found a majority of Britons satisfied with the law (the latest figure as of July 31 comes in at 69%). Yet again, such an encroachment is being done in the name of the children, who are to be left permanently immature and unspoiled by the richer, more complicated life.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: [e-mail]