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UK Online Safety Bill will censor some “legal but harmful” content (reclaimthenet.org)
46 points by verisimi on March 17, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments


>Before the bill was presented to Parliament, the UK’s main opposition party, the Labour Party, suggested that it would offer little obstruction to the Online Safety Bill and complained that it hadn’t been introduced fast enough.

Anyone in UK thought about keeping children safe from inheriting a totalitarian dystopia?


Quote from the article:

UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, said her aim with the bill was to "make the internet, in the UK, the safest place in the world for children and vulnerable young people to go online."

People don't realise, but the UK govt think pretty much only about the children and vulnerable young. Legislation begins and end with this question: "how can they make sure everyone is nice and safe?"

Its not that they are using this group as a pretext to shove draconian legislations down our throats, no. /s


The easiest way round this UK authoritarian nonsense would be if Mindgeek et al immediately replaced all media requests to their CDN from UK IPs with a list and photos of the politicians behind the continuous erosion of digital freedoms. The entire country would switch to VPNs so fast, the GCHQ would flip out.


Mindgeek was the proposed enforcer of digital age verification in a previous incarnation of this bill.

If anything, Mindgeek et al have a lot to gain from this.


That is true, they will try whatever is needed to keep the UK market as UK eyeballs are worth more than other places.

It’s more like a required gate, like if the UK pushed it, I doubt we would see gates in other jurisdictions. It’s all very chilling effective. I don’t think it’s so much as a gain (why would you even gate it unless regulators were threatening IP and hostname blocks).


I've been using a VPN for everything, on all my devices, for over 5 years.

UK ISPs have been doing extensive logging and applying nanny filters for 10 years at least.


So how likely is this bill to become law? I know that in the US, most bills don't end up being law, but is this the same in the UK?


Caution: blocking E-Mail-Address popup prompt first.


Really? a pop up? I just get a banner at the top of the page.


You've been to the domain before then. - it sets a value in localStorage to make it a banner at the top instead. First time visitors and Incognito browsers see this on page load: https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru/i/q6P9wN2OBQSDI0n2.png

If "popup_71227_times" is 0 you get the fullscreen popup asking for email with a "Let me read first >" link underneath.


Ah! Thanks. I didn't recollect the first time.


Truly awful. Slippery slope begins.


Well, YouTube saw this coming and accelerated the bans on their platform. So perhaps the same will happen everywhere else.

On top of that they will bring ID verification just like how YouTube has already done so they were prepared.

Oh dear.


At least YouTube accepts fake IDs. I just used a Google Images example ID and it got approved.


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