In an ideal world inhabited by politicians and children's campaigners, social media companies would work though all postings and treat each on its merits as to whether it requires age gating or not.
In the real world where commercial reality make
this approach too expensive, coupled with a safety first approach mandated by ludicrously massive fines for transgression, the social media play safe and implement age gating around entire forums or even whole websites. For smaller companies it is often
make sense just to self block the whole website to UK users.
Of course this reality leads to many more posts being blocked or age gated than maybe simple minded politicians envisaged. Now there seems to be a widespread disquiet about how the
Online Safety Act is panning out.
Apart from just the 498,000 people that have signed the petition to repeal the Online Saety Act, LibDems MP Victoria Collins and peer Lord Clement-Jones wrote a letter to the censorship minister Peter Kyle
saying:
There remain significant concerns about how the legislation is currently being implemented, including concerns that:
age-assurance measures may prove ineffective, as children and young people may use VPNs to sidestep the systems,
political content is being age-gated on social media
educational sites like Wikipedia will be designated as Category 1 services, requiring them to age verify moderators
important forums dealing with LGBTQ+ rights, sexual health or other potentially sensitive topics have been age gated, and that
age assurance systems may pose a data protection or privacy threat to
users.
The implementation of the Act must be flexible, and respond to those emerging concerns. The intention behind this legislation was never to limit access to political or educational content, or to important support relied on by young
people.
It was intended to keep children safe, and we must ensure that it is implemented in a way that does that as effectively as possible.
They then go on to talk about how parliament needs the chance to review
it and make legislative changes where necessary.
Ofcom on over blocking
Online security expert Alec Muffet has tweeted that he has spotted a few hints that Ofcom has recognised that over blocking will be an inevitable
characteristic of Soi cla media's attempts to live whith the censorship rules:
Of course MPs use VPNs themselves, its basic internet security
See
article from reclaimthenet.org
Meanwhile it is interesting to see that when Peter Kyle has called for people not to use
VPNs for the sake of the children, then it is intereting to see that MPs themselves are using VPNs as a matter of course. After all it would be stupid not to, for people in public life.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Peter Kyle warned:
For everybody out there whos thinking about using VPNs, let me say this to you directly: verifying your age keeps a child safe. Keeps children safe in our country, so lets just not try to find a way around.
Politico reported that official spending records show parliamentarians across party lines have been billing the public for commercial VPN services. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds charged taxpayers for a two-year NordVPN subscription in April 2024. Labour MP Sarah Champion, who in 2022 pressed the government to investigate whether teenage VPN use could undermine online safety rules, also has a subscription on record.
The government says it has no intention of outlawing VPNs but admits it is monitoring how young people use them. This comes after a sharp increase in downloads following the rollout of mandatory digital ID checks under the new censorship law, the
Online Safety Act. So I wonder how many porn using MPs prefer to dangerously hand over their ID data for age verification, and how many play it safe and use a VPN.
