UK's Online Safety Act has made 'absolutely no difference,' kids say | Hacker News Reader

UK's Online Safety Act has made 'absolutely no difference,' kids say

theregister.com

29 pointsBender6 comments

> UK politicians had pushed for controls covering such features, either through the OSA or separate legislation, but none has materialized.

So it's not that online safety act didn't work, but rather that it was not enforced? I'm not familiar with the legislation, but I do hope that they implemented penalties for companies who do not follow the law, bit meaningless if they didn't.

The context for that is regulation on social media features (e.g. allowing opting out if an algorithmic feed), as opposed to the bans on certain age groups for certain kinds of websites that actually made it into the legislation.

Other parts are criticising the regulator, but to be frank the politicians wrote a law that the regulator has basically no ability to actually make effective (for all the reasons that have been discussed here before ad nauseum).

I can see porn on x.com without any issues (this is from top of my head regarding widely known websites that show adult content without any checks)

On the flipside, I cannot buy any adult orientated games on Steam, because I don't have a credit card

It was never going to work. Unsurprisingly tech illiterate people are not really going to understand that you can't shove the porn genie back in the bottle. It's available on so many sites that you won't be able to force them all to collaborate. The government also won't be able to find the owners to fine them (that's without debating are you really operating in a country just because you don't block content). This was clearly a hope on restricting freedoms more, just like the goal of banning Vpns and e2e messaging.

It was never intended to work. Fake reasoning, classic lies, rejecting any measured critique.

It's a heavy boot of the authoritarian regime in the door.

It's bloody well made a difference to those trying to provide a web-service, especially a user-to-user one.

The main difference is now that it's pretty stupid to go online with a new service without running everything through a lawyer, given the OSA has teeth - criminal penalties to people with say in the company.

If I were to print out my OSA docs, they'd come to 168 pages. That's just my take on the regs, my remedies, my policies, and a study of any weaknesses in the coverage of the harms defined by the OSA.

Then, because kids under 18 can access the site, there's the children-specific definitions of the same - except these cover more child-focussed areas like harassment, brigading, encitement to suicide etc. That's another 123 pages.

For a single-operator site like I intend to be, that's a damn lot of paperwork, before I've ever even launched the site. Understandably so, the solicitor is keen to charge quite a bit of money to make sure that volume of content is above-board and legal.

So things got expensive before they ever even get going.

And it's kind of annoying to see the kids say it doesn't matter anyway [sigh] - as if I thought it ever would.

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