Misusing the Children: The UK Online Safety Act, Privacy and CensorshipThe 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.
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