Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The UK's Censorship Catastrophe is Just The Beginning

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome back to Free Speech Friday, my series where I cover the fight for free expression, privacy, and civil rights online. The UK's new age verification law just went into effect, and it's already preventing anyone under the age of 18 from accessing information on Reddit about Israeli war crimes. This is yet another example of why these kids' online safety age verification laws are really only about one thing, censorship. The law mandates age verification across all platforms that carry adult content. But as I'm going to explain in this video, that means every single platform. Because while these laws are falsely framed as cracking down on corn, what they deem adult content is far more wide-reaching than you might think. This is why young people suddenly have to upload their government ID or face-scan themselves

Starting point is 00:00:49 to do things like listen to Spotify or watch YouTube. Every social media app, because it contains news content, is considered adult. This means that everyone, not just kids, but everyone, is now legally required in the UK to upload things like their government-issued ID, live selfies, biometric facial recognition, credit card info, and more, just to use major platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Blue Sky, and thousands of independent websites. I have an entirely separate video breaking down the problems with age verification more than broadly, which I'm linking here. But privacy issues aside, these age verification systems are going

Starting point is 00:01:29 to lead to devastating censorship of our news and information landscape, which will ultimately leave young people less informed. Like all of these terrible online censorship bills, the Online Safety Act claims that it's about protecting children from the evils of pornographic and adult content. But immediately after it went into effect, platforms began classifying nearly all breaking news footage, investigative journalism, political protest material, and reporting on the ongoing atrocities around the world as explicit, harmful, and adult content, blocking anyone under the age of 18 from accessing it. In the UK, under the Online Safety Act, access to subreddits dedicated to covering war crimes,

Starting point is 00:02:13 the genocide in Gaza, or providing crucial information on reproductive health or sex education, now require age verification. As the Verge reported, quote, effectively, web platforms must either set up an age verification system that poses potential privacy risks, or default to blocking huge swaths of potentially questionable content, or entirely pull out of the UK. Residents are finding themselves locked out of anything from period-related subreddits to hobbyist forums. Four out of the top five free apps on the UK Apple Store right now are VPN services, as people are desperately trying to circumvent these. filters and access crucial news information. But many systems have ways to detect VPNs, and the government will likely crack down on VPN use as well. Users on Reddit are reporting entire subreddits are now blocked in the UK. A post on one tech support subreddit shows the message,

Starting point is 00:03:08 quote, due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until we can estimate your age. Users on R-Slas UK politics encountered a message reading, quote, if you have a standard X account in the UK, presumably the vast majority of British users, you cannot see any protest footage that contains any violence tonight because of the Online Safety Act. Reddit has also blocked access to specific subredits that contain crucial public health-related information, like R-slash periods, R-slash stop smoking, R-slash stop drinking, and other subreddits that provide essential community support to users, including minors, like R-slash-Seconding. assault, for example. These are all blocked. In fact, young people cannot access any information

Starting point is 00:03:56 about sexual assault or potential abuse under these new child safety laws, meaning that they're actually less able to identify abuse and more likely to be exploited. The stuff that's being blocked under these child safety laws like war reporting, human rights documentation, protest footage, LGBTQ and reproductive justice content is essential content that all young people should have access to in order to remain informed about the world. This mass skating of information is preventing people under 18 in the UK from accessing things like independent reporting, witness testimony of crimes, community analysis of war atrocities. Instead, young people are being fed a sanitized, mainstream, government-approved version of the internet. It's crucial for young people to learn

Starting point is 00:04:43 and become educated about the world. And also to be able to gain access to information outside government propaganda and the mainstream media, which, let's be honest, mostly regurgitates government propaganda. These child safety laws limit young people's opportunities for critical thinking and civic understanding, and they isolate young people from global perspectives and from connecting with other young people in foreign countries like Palestine or China. And the way that enforcement of these child safety laws works, platforms are forced to err on the side of caution by overblocking vague categories of potentially disturbing content rather than having a more liberal approach. Young people are also being forced to provide highly sensitive personal data like their government

Starting point is 00:05:26 documents, selfies, and biometric scans. Organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Rights Group, have flagged serious concerns that these age verification policies are a privacy nightmare. And meanwhile, these free VPNs that everyone's downloading risk exposing young people to even less regulated corners of the web, which totally underbines the people in power's whole stated goal of child safety. Not to mention, the proliferation of free and shady VPN apps also raises privacy risks. And if you think that this is only happening in the UK, I need you to wake up because the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld age verification laws at every state level, with states like Nebraska and New York adopting similar frameworks

Starting point is 00:06:09 to the UK. Australia and Ireland are also introducing variants of age checks and digital ID systems. The Democrats and the Republicans are completely aligned in ramming age verification laws through Congress and removing all free speech and the right to anonymity on the web. Leftists have completely dropped the ball on this issue. There is no meaningful opposition to this stuff in the U.S. outside a few, like, fringe libertarian groups and some journalists. And a lot of people on the left have spent the past several years feeding into the exact moral panic nonsense that these laws are predicated on. Also, I just want to reiterate again that age verification does not protect the youth from anything but information that the government doesn't like. Young people still find a way to access corn. They're simply locked out of accessing crucial content about news, health, privacy, etc.

Starting point is 00:07:03 These laws also don't account for educational use or parental supervision on different platforms. They just create this binary system where all graphic or controversial or news content is treated the same, regardless of the context that it's presented in. We need to do everything we can right now to fight back against the moral panic about social media and fight these atrocious censorship bills that erode our civil liberties and destroy our right to free speech and free expression online.

Starting point is 00:07:32 All right, that's it for this week's Free Speech Friday. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.com. That's usermag.com, where I write about all of this stuff and more. If you like this show, give me a rating and review on Apple, podcast, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.

Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The UK's Censorship Catastrophe is Just The Beginning

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