It's a mix. I'm sure there are some people really trying to protect kids. There are other people that just want all porn off the Internet. And there are bad actors that want total surveillance. And they are all on the same side of this issue.
yes, I believe the term for them is "useful idiots"
They use assets to influence people and achieve certain goals. In this case here, terrorism or child pornography is used as cop-out rationale for censorship, surveillance and so forth. It's never about those topics really, perhaps 5% at best, the rest is just sugar-coated decoy to restrict people and keep them as slaves and pets.
> Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle
This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled by "this is because of terrorists". This is also why I am for 100% transparency at all times.
Is it just "more ID is bad"? Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance.
It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore. What have I missed?
I'll never look at that account again in my ficking life.
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
But this did, nonetheless, convince me that british legislators are interested in using this bill to regulate the internet.
If it was really like that, I would have no problem. Simple ID check, in-person only, that's never stored anywhere.
I've proposed this several times. Age-gated websites (social media, random forums, adult websites) should require a one-time use code or token that expires once a year. The token should only be available for purchase at liquor stores or tobacco stores - someplace they check your ID on pain of losing their license. It should be reasonably priced.
Sometimes someone might resell a token they purchased to a minor. Those people should be actively hunted with sting operations and prosecuted.
There's no good reason to make age verification on the Internet more stringent than age verification to buy alcohol or tobacco. Alcohol and tobacco kill far more people.
If they scan your ID for alcohol or tobacco purchases where you live it might be time to fix that with legislation too. Insurance companies would love that data.
From what I've seen, the current wave of ID-gating the internet is a wedge for opening the door to much broader censorship. Specifically, some jurisdictions (Wisconsin, Minnnesota, and the UK) are using recently-passed legislation to argue that we need to make VPNs illegal [0 1 2].
0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...
1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage...
2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714...
Speaking for my own beliefs, banning the use of VPNs is a huge problem, and it seems like basically anybody who understands the technology would be against it.
I have no problem with banning or age gating pornography at all. Personally it seems weird to me that that's the red line for people.
But this is a good point, which is that lawmakers who don't have a clue what they're regulating will see VPNs as undermining the laws they've made. Thanks for this
Oh, I'm familiar with the phrase, but I'm specifically disputing how applicable it really is to people that are self-aware about the situation they are facing. Useful idiots are ones that are tricked, especially ones that are evangelical about tricking others. People forced to choose between 2 extremes where both choices are very bad are called.. normal citizens participating in the democratic process.
> This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works
What? You can see through propaganda, but you can't just pencil in your own policy options. Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody. Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state probably got flipped by meta's memo about chatbots being "sensual" with children. They'd rather vote to force corporations to be good citizens, but they can't. So they'll vote for an age-gated internet as the best of the bad options. I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it. Meta wins either way, as planned. Either they get to build a more addictive platform, or they track more info about more people
Nah, that's just your "democratic" process.
People forced to choose between 2 extreme evils, one (debatably) lesser, are not called "normal", they are called unfree.
The process of making sure people are always in one such situation or another is not called "governance", it's called driving insane.
>I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it.
Forced into it under threat of violence, or under threat of denied sustenance and shelter, or "forced" by catering to their naivete, by confusing and duping them, by silently extorting them by enclosure of the commons?
Switching from "principle-based stance" to "convenience-based stance" is not called "being sensible", it's called... cowardice.
>Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody.
If voting changed anything they'd ban it.
>Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state
If you truly understood how the surveillance state feeds on human life, you would deny it sustenance by - yes: - refusing to breed in captivity.
That's one of the few meaningful political actions available to the individual. At least until advances in reproductive medicine get turned on us, same way it happened with the mind-bicycles. A society with the technical capacity to go Gattaca might rather go all-in on Plato's Republic.
Type of beat like yall can have the world to yourselves if yall want it that bad, but believe me, you will choke on it.
That's not how it works.
- anything that mentions "terrorists" (or the nouveau "narco-terrorists")
- "think of the children" / "we must protect the children"
- "we need to create jobs" / "job creators"
- "they're turning the frogs gay"
- "we need to protect America"
tbh if you're fooled by any of that (and there's no delicate way to say this) you're dumb. Even a cursory glance at history would reveal the obvious deception and it's on you that you haven't bothered.
This doesn't explain why they would support privacy-invasive ID requirements instead of the RTA header.
> People that were pro-guns for decades may watch several years of failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-control regulation, then eventually become anti-gun.
I want to call this a bad example because the only people who call the rules that don't pass "basic and uncontroversial" are the people who were on the other side to begin with, but maybe it's a good example because the analogy lines up so well with exactly the same scenario:
People who are anti-X propose rules with low effectiveness against actual harms but that impose significant burdens on innocent people who are pro-X, persistently insist that their proposal is fine and supported by everyone even as it demonstrably lacks enough support to pass and then point to the period of nothing being done to try to garner enough support from independents to squeak over the line instead of considering less burdensome alternatives, because burdening the pro-X people is the point. And then the people who fall for it are the useful idiots.
Age-gating porn doesnt seem problematic to at all. In fact it's far less worrisome than any of the former, which are kind of important for commerce. What am I missing?
But personally, I'm much more concerned about it in regular commerce.
A huge swath of the population thinks that porn is inherently harmful. An even bigger swath thinks that it should be completely separated from both. I agree with both of these things.
I'm also strongly against censorship, so I'm trying to figure out how people are worried this is being used. I do not, at all, consider age-gating Playboy at the gas station to be censorship.
If you think your porn habits are not already being logged and tracked by intelligence agencies, I think you are fully delusional.
The whole "know it when you see it" doesn't work when there's a significant group out there who would love to see queer people at large go away from society. With this, you now have teenagers being blocked from actual educational material because Carol from the "burn everyone but me" church down the street believes anything regarding sexuality is "adult" material.
The thing with the porn habits being logged by intelligence agencies, is that data has a large risk-reward for actually being used. They wouldn't burn the secret of their capabilities for something small. Most of the metadata wouldn't be admissible in court assuming courts don't go full kangaroo. The usage of the metadata is general intelligence to point investigations, or parallel reconstruction to get warrants for someone they don't actually have anything on, but want to search.
Doing KYC American style for porn/adult content means mass data leaks are a matter of "when", because there's no consumer protection and this data will be retained indefinitely because ads make money. The leak means real people are put in real danger.
Flashing your ID at the store to buy a playboy doesn't go into a data set for years to come. Sure your credit card will, but you can opt to pay cash.
I really don’t care about what’s on the internet, until my kids get exposed to it. How grownups talk to other grownups in private isn’t my concern.
But when kids - and I mean my kids - enter the loop it becomes my business, and ideological concerns go out the window.
I’ve ranted and raved about how terrible filtering software is, and how school provided computers contain massive workarounds.
The real concern isn’t porn sites — the real concern is poorly moderated social media sites. Ones where kids post things other kids see. And guess what the kids post?
But a lot of the nasty content shared in these poorly moderated sites gets it start elsewhere.
I’m cynical about any law, but my bias toward legal action is only increasing as the online situation is only getting worse.
Why not install root certs on all your kids' devices and then force them through your home proxy so you can run content classification and proactively block and get reports of what you've blocked? A little privacy-invasive, but if your kids are young enough, it makes sense to get alerts when they've attempted to access boobs or gore so you can have a convo about it.
But this is not the way to go about it.
Given that kids need a device for school in a lot of areas (mine included) and the tools for stopping kids getting either access or bombarded by such stuff are either shit, require deep technical knowledge, or predatory, I can see why people are asking for it.
I presently hate the current system of handing over biometric data in exchange for tits. I don't want some shading startup having my biometrics so that when they go bust, pivot or get hacked, can be used to steal my stuff.
The middle ground is a system that _normal_ people can us to make sure kids who have access to devices can't easily access nefarious shit.
None of that is useful idiots.
When it get fun is the all or nothing crowd. The internet is going to be age gated, whether you like it or not. If you continue to go "INTERNET MUST BE FREEEEEEEE" without accepting that the tools that the populace _want_ don't exist means you get porn bans, or worse.
I'm in the UK and so far the only thing I've noticed age wise is Reddit asked me for a webcam selfie, which could easily have been faked by a kid with an accomplice but if the aim of this is to stop actual vulnerable kids that kind of thing is maybe enough. If they are with it enough to use VPNs and stuff they are probably old enough to see porn etc.
Like in the old days people used to avoid the kids looking at porn by putting the porno mags on a high shelf so they couldn't reach them. I don't think you need passport control level ID for this kind of thing.
I 100% whole heartedly agree.
For uk mobile ISPs there is already a system that stopped most of the nasty stuff from getting past. It was pretty difficult to circumvent, hence why I turned it off for me. If that could have been rolled out wider, with an account password for turning it off, that would have been more than enough.
"useful idiots" was a Stalinist term for people willing to cover up for the murder of millions on the grounds that communism was good and would never do the holodomor.
I don't think it's good to conflate them really.