The Online Safety Act - To Petition Against Or Not?

Should I sign the petition to repeal the Online Safety Act? After all, the thing was more or less written to order for the Carnegie Foundation, who have investments in facial recognition technology.

Everyone in the business knew the date, had their PR and stunts lined up, and let everything fly on Friday 1st August. It has given us the leading candidate for PR Puppet of the Year, Peter Kyle, who has had to utter the line "Register your age now, and protect a child". The man is either shameless, or has been crying in the shower every evening.

But I digress.

Age-related laws are nothing new. There's one that forbids the sale of alcohol to under-18's. It relies on the judgement of shop staff and keeps no records. It works as well as anything will. The shop staff look at me and decide if I'm old enough as much as they look at the kid in front of me and decide he isn't. But the process is friction-free, fast, and leaves no records. Facial age-estimation software is no different from shop staff giving us the once-over. Except the software is slower and keeps records.

I am all for preventing children from seeing pornography, beheading videos, extreme content from the Left, Right, Misandrist, Misogynist, Manosphere, and Womansphere, also jihadi videos, bomb-making instructions, pro-ana, self-harm, pro-bulimea material, and anything else of that ilk. Add in the brain-dead but insidious "trends" on TikTok / Instagram and other social media I haven't heard of. It's too damn easy for kids to find, by intention or accident, this stuff, and they don't have the filters to handle it. (They don't even know that much of what they see on social media sites is made in collaboration with the social media company's marketing people: heck, there are adults who still don't know that. MySpace did it first, and every social media site has done it since.)

The operators of the major hosting sites have proved over the past years that they cannot vet every single upload consistently and in a timely manner. Also that they do not want to be "publishers" responsible for selecting material. And nobody wants to use blacklists or whitelists - for many reasons. So age verification it is.

If the introduction of this Act was supposed to gather public support, it failed. It would have been the worst product launch since New Coke. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/new-coke-the-most-memorable-marketing-blunder-ever

But the purpose of the product launch was not to get support. It was to make it look as if the Government was Doing Something Tough about the disastrous effects of allowing people under 18 to access the cesspits of the Internet. Hence the delusional grandiosity of claiming that its regulations applied to any website in the world - which is nonsense. UK law applies in the UK and one or two dependent territories, and contrary to the advice given to Ofsted by the Foreign Office, the USA is not one of those dependents. Hence the diplomatic faux pas of sending e-mails directly to American site operators threatening penalties, which should be done through official channels. Hence the preposterous suggestion of using NI numbers or bank details as age-verification. And hence also, stooping to equating opposition to the Act as tantamount to supporting child abuse. This is what governments do when they want to be Seen To Be Doing Something.

(Solid explanation by US lawyer. Worth listening to.)

All the "the Government is out to restrict free speech / monitor your every breath and click" articles and videos that poured onto You Tube? The commentators may as well have been paid by Ofcom's PR department, since all they did was spread F(ear), U(ncertainty) and D(espair).

Is age verification a mechanism of censorship? No. The OSA requires age-verification for certain content, it does not impose not a restriction on hosting that content. Is age verification intended to reduce casual browsing for pornography? Of course it is. Will it have a chilling effect on what site hosts will accept if they want to avoid age-verification? Of course. Does Mumsnet need age verification? Ofcom would not dare. Will Ofcom pick on harmless sites with twenty-four subscribers and weekly views in the high 90's? Naturally. Is this going to turn into another farce? Of course.

The civic dangers are not in age verification.

One is that Left-wing governments and their apparatchiks take to surveillance, censorship and super-injunctions like ducks take to water, and Comrade Starmer's Supreme Soviet is just one such. Mission creep will afflict the OSA for sure.

Today's Left-Wing / Liberal / Internationalist governments have a habit of criminalising behaviour they find inconvenient. Rather than try to solve the social or economic problem causing that behaviour, they criminalise any criticism of the consequences of their failure to solve it. Anything they do not like, instead of asking why people do it, they criminalise, like a bunch of old codgers muttering "there ought to be a law against it". Except the government are the old codgers, but with less life-experience. This problem can only be solved at the next General Election, and you know what you have to do. So do it.

What does a poor boy do? The OSA lists a number of ways of age-verifying, of which only one is acceptable: facial age estimation. The face estimation service makes a judgement and passes it back to the site that made the request. The site (should) make a record that the person attached to the username / e-mail is over 18. It does not get a copy of your face, and the age-estimator has to delete the image within seven days.

Look carefully and there is nothing to stop you using anonymous user names and e-mail aliases. The phrase "your e-mail address" does not have an official meaning - you may have several e-mail addresses for different purposes. Age verification is another one of those. So if anyone hacks that, they get nothing else, and if they hack your regular gmail (say) they won't see the age verification activity.

Inconvenient but not intrusive.

This is yet another type of data to be hacked, sold, and distributed all over the place. Almost surely it will be. How else do you think the age-verifiers are making money? If you're not the paying customer, you're the product being sold. I get there are people who don't like the idea that other people know anything about them. Many people are private, and many are surrounded by a**holes who don't know when to stay schtum. This can be a deeply-held feeling and I'm not going to Scully anyone who has it.

So I'm not signing. Age verification always was coming. The long game is that Google and Meta take most of it on, streamline the process, and make even more money from it. The current situation is just an interim solution.

(Yep - I back-posted this. It took a while to get my thoughts straight.)