The UK is quickly becoming an authoritarian country. RIP freedom and democracy.
I wouldn't say it's always a bad thing, as many times this does work in the society's favour (e.g. consumer protection laws, various other regulations), and the loosening of the restriction works against it (e.g. the course of events that led to the Grenfell Tower fire).
Of course, you also get stuff like this, the various porn bills that surface every few years, and the Snooper's Charter. This is the real Nanny State stuff.
The UK simply has a different perspective on how government should work. Arguably because it's had a thousand years to figure it out.
It is really weird to watch these countries to mimic CCP controlled China without all the benefits that CCP managed to pull off.
Sad to hear that.
My guess is that they see trouble ahead and want to get a firmer grip on power, so they're trying to get the kid gloves off as stealthily as possible. If they could, they'd go full CCP before you can say "communo-fascism", but they can't, because then they'd have to deal with too much push back at once.
I can criticise my government which citizens in China are prevented from doing. This puts us a long way apart.
They have similar puppets they put on their hands to make the general population think a certain way, they may follow the same single act, but they're not similar.
They've winged and winged about anyone tweeting anything controversial about a perceived 'vulnerable minority' and this has always been the end game. They want people to be punished for causing offense.
I can't believe these morons go around joining groups like antifa, protesting against authoritarianism and yet spend half their energy campaigning for laws that would be an authoritarian governments wet dream.
It's kind of amazing because people in the West live in the most free and non-discriminatory society in all of recorded history. Yes, there are still problems and it's not perfect and these problems require adressing, but try being gay 50 years ago, or in most non-Western countries. We really do have it quite good.
There is kind of a curious parallel with Trump's "Make America Great Again!"-rhetoric where he presents the US as a kind of dystopian hellscape, which is not that dissimilar to how it's presented among some of these people. My take-away from this is that there actually are some deep-rooted problems in the way we organize our society, and that the dissatisfaction, frustration, and anger over this manifests itself in different ways. Brexit is another interesting example, because it always seemed to me not so much about the EU, but more a general dissatisfaction about the state of things.
On the contrary, they quickly side with pearl clutchers that have no problem with broad user surveillance and in some cases even champion laws that selectively punish one or two unsavory people in hope it might be seen as a precedent. Corporations primarily think of their advertisers that dislike any controversy.
I think ultimately we need different platforms for kids and adults. If you have a problem with comments that undeniably sometimes cross several lines, you might need to visit the former. That said, experience says that some people aren't content if there is disapproved content anywhere, but those need to be ignored.