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.
Kids shouldn’t use the internet without a parent or teacher monitoring them. We can blame big tech for targeting our most vulnerable and pandering to them, kids are very easy to manipulate vis-à-vis a great target to advertisers, they will fill participation metrics, they will sit on one site for hours. And our solution is to keep the unsafe pseudo kids park online while handing power to faceless corps who we are to trust with our private and identifiable data? Roblox for example is an open pedo network targeting kids, this won’t be fixed. The sad truth is many children are encountering sexual content through these online play grounds made for kids.
Blaming is literally just relabeling the excuse to do what they accuse you of “not doing” while actually brainwashing anyone not paying attention.
Usually because they just left their third job and are driving to their first. Apparently they all forgot what to sleep was and never woke the fuck up. Pun intended.