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Comment by luke727 | Hacker News Reader

I am not nor will I ever be a Brit, let alone an average one. But I live here and I have seen and heard things from seemingly average Brits. Would they describe themselves using my exact words? Doubtful. But what other conclusion can one draw from their observed behavior? The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public.

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For what it's worth as a Brit I agree with you.

When I talk to people in Britain about sugar-taxes, smoking bans, porn bans, hate-speech laws, etc, most people will explain that without these things people will say/do harmful things therefore the government should stop them.

I remember when they started rolling out biometric facing scanning technology in stores and using it to ban people from all supermarkets within a designated area – basically forcing them to shop in smaller stores without these cameras or get their friends and family to buy their groceries. I thought this was utterly insane but to be horror Brits seem to almost universally support of this stuff because face scanning is a great way to identity people which private companies have flagged high-risk.

Our opinion of others is very low, and are comfort with authoritarianism is relatively high.

They think (like many Americans right now) that it will only be done against ‘those other people’. When they realize it’s been applied to them, it’s too late (they’ve been ‘othered’ now) and people will ignore them - or they’ll have to blame themselves or cover it up in order to fit in.

It’s classic.

Eventually, enough people will have been fucked by it that the numbers will shift back the other way - and then the opposite end of the pathology (not being able to recognize the main groups own needs enough to defend them or pull together as a coherent group) starts building.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

It's disturbing to me that so much of this type of legislation originates with the "Conservatives", and the only viable alternative in Labour thinks this type of legislation doesn't go far enough. I guess at least things will be interesting with Farage in Number 10.

>The Online Safety Act in particular enjoys extraordinarily high support among the general public

does not mean

>the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives

The average Brit doesn't want foreign entities pushing porn and self harm / pro suicide stuff to their kids. Can you perhaps see the difference there?

I notice most of the outrage in HN is from foreign entities wanting freedom to push whatever. The Brits are ok telling JD Vance et all chill.

It does mean exactly that. If parents want to control what their kids see online they can take control of the situation and limit screen time to where it can be supervised. It might even make sense to have legislation to ensure that that is possible (that schools can't require devices for young children, that device makers need to implement effective parental controls, etc.).

But that's not what the OSA is. Instead it's the government deciding how all kids should be parented. And of course it doesn't just affect the kids now because to be effective all adults need to prove they are not kids to view "harmful" materials, with all the chilling effects and collection of sensitive data that that entails.

> I notice most of the outrage in HN is from foreign entities wanting freedom to push whatever.

Hence the original acknowledgement:

> The thing you have to understand is that the average Brit wants and possibly needs the government to tell them how to live their lives.

The Brits can go bugger off and build their own China Firewall™.

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