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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

In related news [1] "VPNs top download charts as age verification law kicks in [...] one app maker told the BBC it had seen an 1,800% spike in downloads."

It's going to be interesting to see how this plays with voters at the next election. Politicians think this censorship is a vote-winner, presumably because on the doorstep voters are unlikely to talk about their love of porn. Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular - especially with the high profile leaks of age validation services' user data; the government's legal battles with Wikipedia; Steam's demand for credit cards (debit cards are more common in the UK); and sites leaving the UK market all together.

I suppose we'll get to see whose polling is more accurate at the next election.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn72ydj70g5o

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It’s not that the UK government believes censoring porn is a vote winner so much as they really want to use “think of the kids” as a cudgel to widespread surveillance.

In other countries (not least the US) there’s an expectation of privacy which doesn’t really exist in the UK. It’s not seen as a right by any major party or particularly valued by the public at large (“nothing to hide nothing to fear” etc). The government still really wants E2E encryption banned here (as nonsensical as that is).

They don’t see any of this as a vote loser, as none of the alternative parties see it any differently.

Personally I’m kind of happy about this gating even if I disagree on principle, but they’ve already indicated that they have no line. They’ve been very open about seeing everything you say and do.

Despite all this talk about privacy, US would appear to be leading the free world in surveillance and illiberalism right now. It is very reminiscent to me of the radical free speech of Twitter and Republicans, which in practice means censorship.

I'm not saying UK is great, but surely ahead of what the US is doing by a wide margin.

I sort of agree.

If you look at the UK through the MAGA lens you see that there’s a grain of truth in some of the comments about free speech.

Likewise terminology in the US is sometimes a little turned on its head - in the US “liberalism” means something completely different from actual liberalism (which would be closer to libertarianism).

Also “woke” has been used for so many things that its meaning has been warped from “don’t trust the system” to whatever the right dislikes on a given day, even though they’re ostensibly all about smaller government that stays out of your business.

Politics has always been very subversive but it’s more entangled than ever now.

> how this plays with voters at the next election

Well. With the ageing population and the fact that older people are more conservative and they turn out to vote more often I would doubt that anything would change. At least not because of this.

Probably another push towards Reform, for better or worse.

>Reform UK's online policy reform proposal is to scrap the Online Safety Act

Labour seem to have forgotten that splitting the vote helps Reform get into power.

Everyone that defects to the Lib Dems, Greens or even the Tories stops helping Labour get past the post first.

These are all unforced errors they could have seen coming.

They're so focused on building a surveillance state for themselves that they've stopped worrying about what happens when Reform get control of it.

> Yet in online spaces, this policy seems wildly unpopular

That depends on which online spaces you frequent. Ones like HN, which have a higher proportion of male users, will be statistically more likely to have commenters who engage in habitual pornography consumption and are vocally opposed to the OSA on this basis.

Sorry to burst your bubble but porn use and addiction is a massive problem among women nowadays too.

FWIW the male spaces I'm in are supportive of porn bans.

These are exactly the types of rhetorical strategy we see from authoritarians.

You don't like our privacy violating laws? Well that's because you're a nasty disgusting pervert. You don't want to be a little pig man do you? Great, then support our law!

See also: you want children to be raped, you're a pedophile, you have something to hide, show me your hard drive...

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