Sack The Act – The Fight Back Against The Appalling Online Safety Act

A new campaign aims to end the British government’s oppressive internet censorship laws before they cause more harm than they already have.

As we’ve pointed out several times, the British government’s Online Safety Act is a sledgehammer approach to a problem that has been wildly exaggerated, one that will do nothing to prevent children from accessing porn but which will severely restrict the rights of adults in terms of what they can see and what they can post online – which was probably the intention all along. British governments of all persuasions have a long and sordid history of using a whipped-up hysteria about protecting children as the cover for imposing controls over the rest of us, pushed through with smooth reassurances about how the laws will only affect the most extreme and indefensible of content to placate the public and the media, who will either fail to look into the detail of the law or else have their own ignoble motives for seeing the law passed.

The Online Safety Act puts control of the internet in the hands of OFCOM, a quango of career censors, civil servants and jobsworths that already control broadcasting and who – like the BBFC – have long been chomping at the bit to extend their remit and so maintain their relevance in an online world. It imposes age verification – something that already failed when a previous law attempted to impose it on porn websites a few years ago – across a wider variety of ‘adult’ content, which effectively means anything not aimed at or suitable for kids. It imposes the same clumsy rules that have governed many phone services, where bots miscategorise and block websites based on wording – but doesn’t allow you to opt out of the controls. Instead, websites will be forced to check if their content breaks OFCOM rules on child safety, with the rules likely to be vague enough to force sites to err on the side of caution. This means imposing age checks that, guess what, cost money and put off visitors. How will this affect a site like the one you are reading now? Who knows? Age verification is probably beyond our means even if we were inclined to impose it, so what do we do if OFCOM decides that we are ‘adult content’? Notably, news sites are exempt from the legislation – of course they are – but who defines what is and isn’t a news site remains unclear. Is The Reprobate a news site? Do we need to register as such and submit to the approval of some anonymous box ticker? So many questions and so few answers.

Perhaps more significantly, social media sites – often the only online presence for many people – will probably become even more cautious and censorial to stay on the right side of the law. We’ve already seen culls of sex workers and sex education providers on sites like Instagram, even when they follow the ‘no nudity’ rules. As with many British laws, the Online Safety Act is vague enough to keep everyone guessing and for many, if there is any doubt they will simply impose sweeping censorship – people will be deplatformed and silenced because of who they are, not what they do.

What’s more, the war on end-to-end encryption and online anonymity will put people at genuine risk. The government, backed by the police and other busy-body organisations, have long claimed that encryption allows criminal activity to go undetected. But if you are arrested, the police will seize your devices and demand your passwords – refusal is itself a criminal act. What they really want is to be able to intercept messages from anyone at any time – the mere idea of anonymous, private communication is anathema to control-freak governments like ours. We’ve already discussed why removing anonymity is a terrible idea that will see people’s lives destroyed – or force them off the internet entirely for their own safety. They are acceptable collateral damage in the war on privacy, it seems.

Is this the online safety that the law promises? The oppression of marginalised groups and individuals, entire subjects removed from the public discourse except in approved fashion, the entire internet subject to the approval of the British government and sanitised accordingly, all in the name of protecting children who will simply use VPNs to bypass any restrictions on what they see?

If all this concerns you – and it should – we suggest checking out the freshly launched Sack the Act, following up on OFCOM consultations and supporting those campaigning against the act. This is a badly thought-out law that was pushed through with emotive, hysterical claims, one that will not do anything to protect children or vulnerable adults. Better options are available, but those options do not give our leaders the same levels of thought-policing that this act does and so have been dismissed. Let’s do what we can to make common sense prevail and make everyone aware that this law will cripple the internet as we know it if left unchecked.

DAVID FLINT

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