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Comment by palmfacehn | Hacker News Reader

I have to disagree with the "Christian Nationalist" characterization.

https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taki...

>"Nigel Farage ‘on the side of predators’ with Online Safety Act criticism, says Labour"

Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?

The end goal here is digital ID and censorship. Compare this to the perennial efforts for encryption backdoors. If there is a characterization that accurately encompasses this, it is the illiberal, statist, authoritarian impulse. Sure, they used a sex-panic to advance their agenda. However, this is merely symptomatic of the larger illiberal trend towards authoritarianism and the expansion of the state.

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I believe the commenter said "in the US".

I guess I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that Americans who want age verification laws have some entirely different motivation than people in other countries who want age verification laws.

I'm more interested in the motives of those who would utilize the fear of pron or other taboos to advance this agenda. The coalitions reacting with fear are less interesting.

It doesn’t have to be the case that everyone who supports age verification has the same reasons.

In the US however, this campaign came from the same think tanks and strategists associated with Project 2025 (taking cues from folks like Enough Is Enough), who are pretty upfront with their Christian Nationalist views. In Project 2025 they include a bizarre connection of porn with transgenderism that tips their hand on the religious bent to all this, but elsewhere in the plan outright state their Christian Nationalist ideals.

Oh, no. Same impulses and motivations, Different dress.

The motivation is the same, power and control, but you need to run a slightly different playbook in different countries. In US, Republicans have been having Christianity as a front for decades.

They're all would-be fascists in sheep's clothing.

I'd really like to reconcile the different views expressed by this fascinating chain of comments.

First we hear that the people behind the push for online identity verification are Christian nationalists. Then, after being informed that the British Labour party is also pushing for the same measure, we hear that the common denominator between those factions is their crypto-fascism.

To call the Labour party fascist, you must be some sort of extreme Thatcherite. To call Christian nationalist fascists is somehow even less defensible, as fascism is strongly collectivist[1] and the American political Christian extremely individualistic.

This entire discussion points to a horrific crisis in civics education, which I believe can explain the increasingly authoritarian policies of modern western governments far better than some crypto-fascist plot.

[1] "Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State", The doctrine of Fascism by Mussolini

Christian Nationalists are extremists, nationalistic, and xenophobic. They have a strong desire to force other's to conform to their world view, including the use of force, mis/dis information, and bribery. They work by an in-group which their laws protect and any evil inside is excused, and an out-group which must be converted or destroyed and any evil those people commit is proof of such. They are individuals so long as they conform to the tenets of their religion, They vote as a single block.

So... national socialists and National Christians have a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram... to deny or miss those parallels seems disingenuous or ill informed.

I'm not informed of the British political landscape, so I can't speak to that.

And no, not every Christian is a NACHRIST, and it also isn't a coincidence that NAZI's co-oped and used Christianity opportunistically when it suited them.

None of the things you describe are remotely fascist. Winston Churchill was a fairly nationalistic and xenophobic person who was often in the extremes of the British political system. A strong desire to make others conform to your worldview and voting as a block is near universal among political movements.

And it's near universal because fascism is the major exception as it really doesn't desire any conformity from the designated inferior. That's what distinguishes the policies of NSDAP from prior cases of anti-Jewish oppression - the Nazi party wasn't interested in conversions at all.

As such, you really shouldn't call anyone ill informed on political topics.

American Christians are extremely individualistic... As long as your individual interests coincide with their rigid moral code and what they see as a "good Christian lifestyle". Seems right to me

It can be both. Some Americans can want it because of Christian/moral-panic reasons (there is a stated goal of making porn illegal here by some conservatives), and some can want it for authoritarian purposes.

I expect the make-porn-illegal crusade is more common in the US than elsewhere.

I mean, I think you probably have a range of motivations. In the UK, a lot of it will be control-freak-ery, always fairly popular across the political spectrum there. In the US, some part of it will be the lunatic-fringe Christians (a group who don't _really_ exist in meaningful force in most developed countries, but who are quite politically powerful in the US).

Why?

Interestingly while it'd be daft to call them Christian Nationalist the Labour Party does owe a lot of its early philosophy to various religious groups descended from the English Dissenters. This is also true for many groups that'd fall under the Christian Nationalist label in the US, even though their politics are very different.

Of course this just shows the English Dissenters ended up being quite influential on both the left and right over the course of Anglophone history.

Strictly speaking the law was passed under the conservatives, albeit in collaboration with Labour (it's bi-partisan). But I would agree that the drive is more authoritarian and it just uses moralistic arguments to shame people into siding with it.

The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subject. But instead they've gone the needlessly invasive route which is telling about the true motives.

It has broad public support.

The law was passed in 2023 by the tories, and Ofcom has concluded what the tories asked them to do -- write the statutory instruments that implement the law.

The Labour government would have to repeal the law (really unlikely; governments don't usually rip down their predecessors' laws because if they did no progress would occur) or set the statutory instruments aside.

I think the "true motives" are what the law says. I don't think they will ban VPNs (which would support an alternative reading of motive).

I also, again, encourage US readers to understand that your own supreme court has rubber-stamped a law that requires US porn firms to do all this and more for the benefit of Texas, and there are 24 more state laws that have similar impacts.

Pretending this is just something crazy we Brits are doing out there on our own is disingenuous at best and often hypocritical and whiny at worst.

The problem to me is this thing is full of holes. It basically just sets up ID checks but it can only do that on accountable websites who self select to do so. It can't stop people sharing extreme content on WhatsApp groups for example which are one of the modes of communication increasing in popularity the fastest.

As it happens I am from the UK and have no particular love for the way the US handles things either. In fact one of my biggest problems is that it encourages us to send extra PII to some of the most odiously associated US companies out there.

But in general I don't think doggedly pursuing this route where children get access to the full internet sans some self-selecting sites with ID checks is the way to go. There's too much out there which is outside the realms of accountability. If everyone installs VPNs (which appears to be what's going on, especially given that far more than just pornography is being blocked this way) then guess what happens when the child borrows the shared family device?

People want a magical solution which exonerates caregivers from having to worry about this and shifts the burden elsewhere but unfortunately one doesn't exist and the online safety act certainly isn't it. Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.

> Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.

Strongly agree. It kills me that nobody is seriously discussing robust, industry-standard childproofing.

Even if you require a driver's license, how hard is it really to swipe your mom's ID from her purse and write down the serial number? There is no solution to this problem that doesn't require parents to actually parent their children a bit and lock down their devices.

I don’t support this legislation, but I think your argument is weak because everything relating to age checks is full of holes in all kinds of contexts. People under 18 can obtain alcohol and cigarettes without extraordinary difficulty, for example. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the laws requiring age checks for these items should be repealed.

I think this sounds similar on the surface but the nature of the distribution of physical goods and digital media are so different that the premise doesn't actually hold up. Age verification has a meaningful impact in the physical world because supply of goods is limited by physical process and marginal costs of supply/production. Reproduction and sharing of digital media, especially illicit digital media, is essentially free and limitless, and can be done by anyone and even be done anonymously or pseudonymously. You can't just link hundreds of people to a single unregulated bottle of beer you found out about but you can do that to a site hosting some adult content. The dynamics are totally different.

To an extent, but people can’t have this both ways. If the checks really are trivial to get around then why complain about them? In reality we know that most people are lazy and have poor technical skills, so it’s rather likely that this will substantially reduce the amount of porn that under 18s are accessing.

I think this is wishful thinking. Using a VPN is very much so within the capability of normal mobile users today and many people are aware of them (wide advertising on social media, news articles, discussions, etc.). It's not harder than installing e.g. WhatsApp or TikTok. Couple that with the Streisand effect and just normal teenage rebellion behaviour and honestly it could lead to an increase.

It’s not “wishful thinking” because I don’t have any reason to care particularly whether less porn gets watched or not. I don’t wish for it. I just think you’d be surprised at how much small inconveniences will affect the behavior of average people.

Another factor is that a lot of sites won’t work well with a VPN these days. So you really need to keep switching back and forth, which is a pain (especially on mobile).

> I think the "true motives" are what the law says.

Oh yeah? How's that anti-terrorist legislation working out?

It has broad public support.

Preventing children from accessing porn has broad public support (as we might hope). That is very different to saying the OSA has broad public support though.

The YouGov survey results that have been much discussed in the past week came from three questions - one about age restrictions for porn, one about whether the new measures would be effective, and one about whether the person had heard of the new measures before the survey. The answers were essentially that the majority hadn't heard of the measures, almost everyone supported preventing kids from accessing porn, but the majority didn't think these measures would be effective in achieving that. Probably none of those results is very surprising for HN readers.

What is notably missing from the debate so far is any evidence about whether the public support the (probably) unintended consequences of the actual implementation of the OSA - which are what almost all of the criticism I am seeing is about. As with any political survey the answers probably depend very much on how you ask the questions and it's easy to get people to say they support "good" measures if you gloss over all the "bad" parts that necessarily go along with them.

Requiring device side child safe modes would be far further reaching and likely mean your cannot run your own software anymore. Requiring providers of adult content to check id is much more limited in scope.

Not if it is enabled by the buyer, which I took to be the point.

Mobile phone subscriptions in the UK go the other way: By default they filter some content. If you tell the phone company to turn it off, they do. It's less invasive than this law because you don't need to tell them why you want it turned off, but still more draconian than if we could turn on a child safe mode that e.g. then required a pin or something to disable.

The requirement that such functionality be available is likely to preclude FOSS. e.g. in the US, California has a bill[0] that would require anyone distributing software to ensure it hooks into an age verification API in the operating system, and requires device manufacturers to provide such an API, which appears to me to say computer manufacturers can't let you install Linux and developers of any software including FOSS must do these checks.

I can't imagine that it would pass as-is since on its face it seems to apply to all computers and all software including things like nginx or nftables that the entire modern economy relies on, but who knows?

[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

It's possibly some badly written requirements would, but there's zero reason why it'd need to preclude FOSS if such restrictions are written to be under the buyers control presuming they demonstrate age, as all they require is a way to restrict reinstalls and replacements of whatever software produces sufficient controls without an unlock code.

It doesn't need e.g. code signing or anything else of the sort.

To be clear, I think all of this is a massive overreach - my point is only that you can achieve the claimed aim with far less invasive means.

That, if anything, makes the chosen idiocy even more troubling to me, as either they're incompetent, don't care at all about the implications, or there are unstated aims.

This is 1000000% where we are going between Google moving away from AOSP and Samsung removing the ability to unlock bootloaders altogether.

There is a conspiracy and it's being rolled out. There was already some country that declared anyone running non-standard OSes on their phones are highly suspect.

Americans don't understand that the liberal democrats are the "anti-authoritarian" party of the UK and would be who most American mainstream democrats would vote for in practice.

Labor during the Corbyn years made Bernie Sanders look like a fascist and the current labor is back to being milquetoast and embracing its social authoritarian roots.

Similarly, Americans cannot understand that the Canadians have an "NDP" and "Liberal" and they don't understand their differences - though these days I don't think the NDP knows their differences either!!!

> Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?

Honestly? Yeah, pretty much. It's a little hard to think of them that way since they're the leftmost establishment party in the UK, the same as the Democrats in the US, but historically speaking they're pretty right-wing. And theocracy has pretty deep roots in Anglosphere politics, so it's not necessarily that visible from the inside.

The elephant in the room, is 'foreign actor'.

All of our platforms are inundated by an overwhelming amount of well crafted, targeted (specific per person) campaigns of disinformation by foreign actors.

China, Russia, Iran, and others cannot even remotely hope to stand against the West. Yet if you cannot stand against your adversary, you must weaken them.

You promote infighting. You take minor issues which can be cooperatively resolved with compromise, and seek to turn them into issues of great division. You spread falsehoods, creating useful idiots in great numbers.

You find the most radicalized, most loony of citizens that you can, and then secretly fund them.

Understand, any concept of "we do that to ourselves" is like a gnat in comparison. This is a real threat, it's been getting worse, and the common person is not capable of even understanding the concept. The common person, even when told repeatedly, thinks there is no downside to having their Pii stolen, or hacked. They simply read click bait titles, youtube or tiktok videos and 100% believe every word without any skepticism.

You may disagree with any or all of the above.

However! The above is what is actually behind the move for KYC to this extent. It's not about age verification, it's about identity. And it's not even about one westerner talking to another, it's about a foreign adversary seeking to pretend to be a domestic.

Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.

And I say this as someone that has fought for an open internet. It's already dead. It's dead because foreign interests use it as a tool to destroy our societies. It's dead because soon AI will replace most generated information.

Age verification laws are really identity laws, and any work to provide anonymous verification will fail, sadly, unfortunately, because the perceived threat is so large.

(I do not even necessarily agree with this, but if we don't understand the logic and the why of this, of why it is happening, then we're complaining about the wrong thing...)

Well the politicians could make that argument but haven't.

"We need our social media companies to verify everybody, says fmr. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXqTMwN4MtY

At the time she was the Neocon Presidential candidate.

I've always found it difficult to believe that voters are capable of critically consuming information and voting for wars, regulations or confiscatory taxes, and simultaneously are incapable of thinking critically about propaganda. Under this model, the fact that some deceptive sources may be foreign is largely a red herring. The entire premise of Democracy rests upon the presumption that voters are capable of making informed decisions in an adversarial information landscape.

I don't see the desire to control Internet speech as a novel phenomenon. The rationalizations have evolved over the years. The proliferation of AI, Russian sponsored podcasters and Wumaos are iterations of an appeal to special circumstances.

If the West truly believes that authoritarians like the CCP are immoral and should be opposed, it stands to reason that they shouldn't be seeking to emulate the CCP's methods. That's the surface level, ideologically consistent view.

Beneath that, there is a rabbit hole of fringe theory. Like the above poster, I provide this information to better explain possible motives, without endorsement. In the conspiracy sphere, the PRC is regarded as a trial lab for social engineering schemes. The allegation is that concepts are ironed out there first. Examples would include: social credit scores, digital ID, Internet censorship and the confluence of all three. Whether these theories are true or false, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be wary of these outcomes.

Even in that context, I believe you could provide semi-anonymous verification. You just need a weaker encryption of sorts. One you can crack in a month instead of never ever. Then have that shit rotate, and the government can invest money to find that one identity posting BS all day with multiple bots until it rotates/regenerates, but they can't keep track of everyone.

It's far simpler. All you need is KYC to generate anon tokens, and then make it illegal to store any linking information and illegal to use any such information in court.*

The issue is no one in government would buy into this. You'd prevent them from catching bozo criminals who can't use a VPN.

*For example, you get up to N anon tokens a day you can use for anoning online. Only a count is stored daily to limit generations.

I agree with much (if not necessarily all) of what you said, esp about foreign actors and adversarial propaganda and disinfo (APD.)

I worked on the latter problem space precisely for the US State Department. Its challenging, esp at scale, and esp if the folks trying to fight back are not given a free enough of a hand to do whats needed.

The opposition in the West does not come from foreign propaganda but from sky-high house prices, sky-high education and health insurance costs and dropping living standards.

All of which is the fault of the establishment parties and not of foreign actors.

Even Trump now continues or, in the Middle East, exceeds the existing long term neocon policies. So the foreign online propaganda, which does exist, is completely overrated.

I mean, yes and. I'm sure that social media of all stripes is rife with funded propaganda. It's been proven several times. It helps them tremendously that to tear the United States and other western powers to shreds, all you have to do is point at the facts on the ground. Our governments are completely in the pocket of corporations and barely if at all represent any actual people's will, the only people's will they express interest in being directly traceable to various hate campaigns they themselves concoct (fucking with transpeople, fucking with sex workers, etc.) while the rest of the country has the copper pried out of the walls by these low-rent grifters.

I don't need China to tell me via Tiktok that my life is getting demonstrably worse. I know that. The fact that China gets to tell me and be completely honest whilst doing so isn't something they've "engineered," they're just pointing at reality.

> Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.

Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radical idea, I know.

We tried that, and it turns out you can't trust people to exercise their critical faculties. Haven't you been paying attention?

Ah right, yeah, because the Guardian-reading, PPE-educated, civil service "concerns have been raised" class that we trust to govern in our enlightened best interests have been doing such a fantastic job of things. My mistake.

Mass alienation didn’t begin in a troll farm in St. Petersburg, it began in think tanks, boardrooms, and editorial meetings that decided ordinary people were an obstacle to be nudged, not a public to be served.

This is a tangential argument. I want neither foreign nor domestic propaganda infesting our information streams. We seem to agree that people as a group are quite prone to systemic influence, and the fact that US corporations do it does not mean that we should allow everyone else to do it too!

Largely, you've got it already - but a lot of the propaganda (and by far the most influential form of it in Britain) is aimed at propping up the mores and power structures of the prevailing establishment.

The propaganda in Britain isn’t loud or foreign (largely). It’s quiet, domestic, and politely credentialed. It's Otto English, it's James O Brien, it's the BBC. It doesn’t scream at you, it nudges, omits, and reframes until systemic rot looks like unfortunate happenstance.

The message from the BBC and the like is overwhelmingly don't think too hard about why things are the way they are, don't ever question the root causes, and if someone from the credentialed classes says something, they're probably right about it.

It's why the article is never "Wait why have your living standards fallen through the floor?" or "Is lockdown actually working?" but "Here's how to make a meal for £1" or "How to make a really good sourdough loaf".

By setting up a world where people can only access "pre approved" bits of information, you're not lessening access to propaganda, you're just picking winners.

> Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties

That's not working so well in the US at least. That gave us Trump.

The failure of coastal Liberals to talk to anyone apart from themselves in successive elections gave you Trump.

So if you don't give your ID to multiple corporations in league with foreign governments, then foreign governments win?

Worth noting that this bill was introduced in 2021 and passed in 2023 under the previous Conservative governments, all of which were fairly libertarian/anti-state at least in their rhetorical positioning.

I mean arguably, Labour could have repealed it or could have decided to disown it and discourage implementation, but the terrible design of the legislation is pretty much entirely the responsibility of the last government.

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