The UK’s Online Safety Act doesn’t just age-gate porn; it blocks material deemed “harmful” to minors. Days after the law went into effect, reports of non-explicit content on social media getting blocked in the region started to crop up. Subreddits from r/IsraelCrimes to r/stopsmoking are now walled in the UK. Video games, Spotify, and dating apps have instituted or will institute age checks.
Given the SCOTUS age verification decision [June '25], Stabile fears that people [in the US] will go “mask off” in the fall and spring, when state legislatures start getting back together. “People are going to attempt to restrict the internet even more aggressively,” Stabile said. “I think people are going to work to restrict all sorts of content, particularly LGBTQ content, but also content that is broadly defined as any sort of threat or propaganda to minors.” Other experts Mashable spoke to agree with him.
“I’m going to jump to the end step,” [Eric Goldman, law professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law] said. “The end step is that most online users are going to be required to age authenticate most of the time they visit websites. That’s going to become the norm.” In a paper he wrote, Goldman called these statutes “segregate-and-suppress” laws.
The stated reason behind these laws is to “protect children.” But as journalist Taylor Lorenz pointed out, in the UK, age verification is already preventing children from accessing vital information, such as about menstruation and sexual assault.
“When we see crackdowns on spaces on the internet, we’re essentially stripping away that potential for self-actualization,” Goldman said. We’ve reached the dystopian stage of the internet, he added.
Age verification isn’t really age verification: it’s identity verification. And once you have given your identity to one or two websites, data brokers will ensure that all your other activity on the internet will eventually be tied to it. Burner devices and anonymous VPNs could help, but only until those become illegal too.
This will have a chilling effect on not only every kind of discourse the fascists hate, but also political organization and people’s ability to resist. You won’t be able to organize a protest online without the police knowing in advance who is likely to come and finding a pretext to intimidate or pre-arrest them.
That’s the most insightful and chilling comment I’ve read in a while. I especially like the “it’s not age verification; it’s identity verification” part. (That messaging needs to be more commonplace.) The key(s) for organizing data about individuals online will shift from email addresses only to enough stable identifiers to impersonate someone or maybe even steal their identity. Data leaks and fraud will probably increase dramatically given the value-add of these data.
With the level of quashing dissent these days - eg UK police arresting hundreds of nonviolent people with placards denouncing genocide; military deployments in LA and DC - no wonder certain states/ governments support online identity verification laws.
“No Kings” protests are already a non-story in mainstream news today. Tomorrow, they can be prevented from happening in the first place! /s c/aboringdystopia
And one key thing. Fascists and fascist collaborators will claim, “everything you do online and already tracked to your real identity.” But the truth is, if that were already the case, then there wouldn’t be a push for these identity verification laws.
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And even if that’s somehow protected, I’m really uncomfortable with the government having that data.
You won’t be able to organize a protest online without the police knowing in advance who is likely to come and finding a pretext to intimidate or pre-arrest them.
That’s been true for a while. But it was “The FBI can put a pin in it” true before. And now it feels like “LinkedIn is going to have a second secret file on you” true.
Fun fact:
That was the plan all along.
The guy who founded LinkedIn… Paypal mafia
The guys who invested in Facebook. . PayPal mafia
The guys who founded YouTube… Paypal mafia
The guy who founded Square … Paypal mafia
The guy who ran doge and got all your us gov datasets, has literally half of all satellites in orbit sucking up your location and data… Paypal mafiaThe guy who decides who attends the bilderberg group, is ceo of the ai that is used by nearly every police force in the USA, and has contracts with military, who funded trump and Vance… Paypal Mafia
These guys have literally created the techno society we are now slaves to.
They are just getting started.
They are just getting started.
Idk, man. Seems like they’re wrapping up. Not a whole lot left to do when you’re this far up on the board.
My friend, you have no idea of the hell that awaits… There’s always a deeper layer…
Sure sure sure. Modern American politics is just the Shepherd Tone.
idk what that is. Also, I’m referring to the global state of things, not just North America; the identity-tracking mania, as far as I know, began with the EU, no?
Time to start making zines and locally organizing i guess
18+ to shop at Walmart. I don’t want my children exposed to harmful things like books, my boys shouldn’t be exposed to cleaning supplies or see women’s garments and my girls shouldn’t have to see that other girls are allowed to pick out their outfits or do manly things like play sports.
In the UK some supermarkets charge extra for children to buy products. You need to register an account for them to harvest even more data and if you don’t then some products can cost a lot more. Children can’t register as they can’t collect that kind of data on children.
I shop at Aldi instead because they don’t do this shit
Those store loyalty cards suck. When I’m forced to use one, I just enter my parents’ number or something because I don’t want yet another company to spam me with calls and texts.
And they dont even have any valid excuses, because its totally possible to implement anonymous age verification that cannot be fooled. These systems already exists and work perfectly, but it was never the plan to do it this way. It was always intended as a political tool of censorship.
What systems are you referring to?
The EUs eID system. https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-digital-identity_en
Depending on the use case, varying amounts of information can be transferred like only age or nationality or everything.
Ive used it for signing EU petitions but also local bureucratic things like residency stuff.
The eID system is kind of overkill if all that matters is age verification. You could build a suuper lightweight system just for that which would make checking the source code much easier.
Does the system know what service is requesting the age verification?
It’s not about protecting the children and never has been with the Party of Pedos. It’s about control.
Outlaw porn. Then start calling LGBTQ folks pornographic. Now it’s illegal to be gay. You KNOW they are going in that direction.
Stephen Fry’s character in V For Vendetta is a perfect depiction of this
Comrade, it seems you have just committed a thought crime. The thought police are already coming for you. Please do not resist. :)
Nuclear weapons are harmful to children.
Global warming is harmful to children.
Microplastics and forever chemicals are harmful to children.
But, no, let’s just block the porn.
The world is on fire
But don’t say “cunt”
Angelspit - Don’t Say
Pornographic content is literally & figuratively the canary in the coal mine of the internet.
Remember, according to the UK government you’re legally able to have sex, give birth, choose your future, and (soon?) vote at 16. Heaven forfend if you see a pair of titties though, you’re not mature enough for that…
You can have sex, but you better not look!
I’m not against a bit of spice, but blindfolds at 16 just seem a little advanced. Especially when sex at that age is akin to a oblong peg in a tesseract shaped hole of unknown location.
No no you’re missing the point. It’s not that you can’t look, you just have to tap the gubmint on the shoulder so they can watch you look
oblong peg in a tesseract shaped hole of unknown location
Thanks for that. I just spat out my coffee and laughed a little too hard.
“I’m fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there’d only be one website left, and it’d be called Bring back the porn!”
- Dr. Percival Ulysses Cox
Percival.
Edited. Thank you
Happy to be of service!
I always thought it was spelled “Percy Valuli sees cocks”
The very instant a website wants me to verify my age by providing PII, I’ll just blacklist that website from my network. There isn’t a single website that I can’t go without.
What if it ends up being all discussion boards?
Until they ban Tor there will always be porn available.
This isn’t about protecting children.
It never was. But that is hard to discuss. I remember when I still was young and went to house parties decades ago when my country discussed yet again some measures “to protect the children”, don’t recall exactly what, you found lots young people who of course couldn’t be against protecting the children. How could you be against that? It’s such a shitty way to get these things through.
This isn’t about protecting children.
This is about narrative control on the internet.
You dare argue with the Ministry of Truth?
Bingo
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Here’s the thing. When prohibition took effect in the US, anyone with half an idea on how fermentation and distillation worked made their own alcohol (I made my own ‘prison hooch’ at home using EC-1118 yeast, sugar, and fruit juice. It is fucking EASY to do). The problem with stuff like this is that some people often produced toxic stuff, since they had no idea how to separate ethanol from methanol and other toxic byproducts during distillation, and this shit got people killed. Not only that, the complete lack of regulation (since it was 100% illegal after all) meant that people adulterated the booze with all manner of bullshit. It was a common trope in prohibition era and post-prohibition films to showcase it.
With porn? Look, the porn industry is rife with abuse for everyone involved. But having a legal industry and legal sites like pornhub and many others means one thing: The shit isn’t going to be illegal. There were actual porn videos featuring underaged girls on pornhub, and those were removed almost immediately upon discovery. Dark web stuff is… holy shit! One main reason why I don’t do much dark web stuff is very specifically that I fear I will click on a link that’ll take me to some child porn site… and the stories I heard on true crime videos show just how horrific many of those pornographers are. They are far more than just naked kids posing, some of them involve almost killing children.
And banning porn will only make it that there are no protections whatsoever against anyone, be they adult or otherwise. If there is one good thing about modern porn is that a lot of it (and I would even say the best) is amateur made. With the people involved all willingly making the stuff to post online.
The first time this PII is leaked about some politician’s online search history, it will all get repealed.
Wanna stop this? Get some whale to buy up the data and find people pushing this shit and any mass adoption for these things will die. Politicians like to eat up religious lobbyist’s shit until it’s used to expose their less savory activities to the greater population.
We need to consider building on and spreading the word about other protocols like Tor, Yggdrassil etc etc. Show people that the Commons cannot be stolen again.
I think the problem is that most of the people who have casually heard of Tor already associate it with CSAM
good thing there are alternatives, like the aforementioned yggdrasil and i2p, though ygg doesn’t guarantee anonymity
“Poorly Implemented Attempt to Censor Porn will Ruin Corporate Internet”
There, FTFY
Poorly implemented? There is no good implementation of censorship or any other restriction on freedom of expression. All attempts to do so are dangerous, existential threats.
Yeah, but it’s like it’s total slop on top of the censorship part. It’s literally adding insult to injury.
The stated reason behind these laws is to “protect children.”
It was porn watching that initially pushed the internet technology to be better. Everything comes full circle.
I’m ready for the internet to end. This experiment has shown it is extremely harmful to society. Fucking end it already.
The internet isn’t the problem. Corporations mining it for money is.
No… I really do think the internet is the problem. People aren’t meant to know 1000s of people all at once. We evolved our social abilities in tribes with maybe a couple hundred individuals. The sheer number of people who are all effectively anonymous who are constantly trying to one up each other and troll people is too much for anyone to bear. And that’s before we get into the innumerable echo chambers of whatever flavor you want that allow people to reinforce their nutjob beliefs in a way that wouldve been shut-the-fuck-down if brought up in a smaller group.
And that’s not even getting into the fact that Amazon is utterly destroying every retailer on the planet which has had cascading effects that are too broad and disastrous to bring up in a brief “the internet sucks” conversation.
No. The internet is the problem. It should be reserved for sharing academic papers like back in the darpa days.
You’re free to leave anytime. You could live a simple life out in the boonies working on a small farm and 99% of internet shit would go away.
Me leaving wouldnt solve the problem of the brain rot it causes 90% of people.
probably depends on how digitally advanced your country is, but: accessing government services and even things like making a doctor’s appointment will continue to be pushed online
for now there are measures to keep up service for the analog eldery - but for how long?
i expect there will be basically no opt-out-of-online in ~15 years
the “early” internet was great. hell you don’t even need to go back that far.
online games taught us that people all over the world are just like you. they are not some elusive foreign potential threat but chill people. everywhere
we found more common ground than differences, it was beautiful while it lasted . only in the recent times the big us-vs-them rift appeared everywhere
Sure but the common ground isn’t necessarily a good thing. It lets you retreat from in person community because you found someone to hang with that you have never met in person. It does encourage some healthy behaviors like work on interesting hobbies - but the homogenizing affects are worse. It has practically halted the evolution of small cultures and arts across the globe because they thrived in isolation. The world is too small; too mundane now. There is no wonder about what’s abroad. Everything is at your fingertips and it’s at everyone else’s too.
My in-person community was toxic and abusive, and I didn’t even realize it until I found a warm, accepting, and much healthier online community to compare with. “Retreating” was a survival need. I’m glad your offline community isn’t harmful to you but don’t assume that is the case for everyone.
I’m also part of one of those small artistic cultures you mentioned and it evolved and thrived way more with the arrival of the internet than it ever did in the days of small in-person gatherings and physical-only publishing. Art is furthered by cultural contact and mutual exchange of ideas, not isolation.
Now, you do have a point that there is a problem with homogeneity and stagnation these days, but the real cause of it is late-stage capitalism. The harder it is for the average person to make a living, the more they are forced to focus all of their energy on making money. For an artist, that means not having any time for masterpieces or experimental projects because Fast and Marketable is the only way to make rent. Arts and culture are starving because a small number of billionaires are sucking up all the financial nutrients (and then passing censorship laws to cut down anything that still manages to grow, until the only things left are as boring and mundane as they are.)
kind of an insane take to say common ground is not a good thing.
the alternative was historically constantly warring tribes.
best example for it is the european union. former enemies peacefully deciding on common ground. the result: most peaceful time in european history.
You’re comparing treaties to upvotes. They’re different things.
