Amerika

Apparently voters in the UK thought people like me were just hysterical when we warned against the new Online Safety Act which is like a deranged version of the Texas law with a similar target. The UK law requires:

Under its Children’s Codes, platforms must prevent young people from encountering harmful content relating to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography from 25 July.

This will see some services, notably porn sites, start checking the age of UK users.

The point of acts like this is that to keep children away from porn, you have to check ID in any spaces where someone might upload porn, which means all of social media and any site that allows user interaction. After all, pornography can be words as well as images.

Voters see things in simple terms that are entirely disconnected from the actual mechanics of implementing them. When you say you want to ban children from pornographic websites, the dumbshit voter imagines that there will be a chaperone who calls up every user to make sure they are adult.

In reality, there will simply be a page where you upload your ID. This will be available to law enforcement because web firms will be passing over requests for user confirmation several times a day, so they will not notice if LEOs slip in a few user IDs for unrelated people.

This means that in one single law, the UK produced the perfect censorship machine. Nothing you post online in a form that many others can see will be anonymous, and you will go to jail for your posts against Islam, anti-terrorism, feminism, diversity, or their corporate partners.

How did the voters not notice? They were warned, yes, but by small political organizations posting to obscure corners of social media. The mainstream press took little heed. Nor did any of the talking head late night comedy informers. They were in on the plan.

Even more, the voters did not want to notice. Voters are customers who pay for good feelings with their votes. They feel good when they are “protecting children.” Even more, it means they can feel morally excused in not overseeing what their kids do on the internet. Government did it for them.

We need the Kings back. In the time of the Kings, your internet use and that of your family is your issue to negotiate. You would protect them, just like the family of Joanna Rogers wish they had protected her:

Rodriguez was also implicated in the 2004 murder of 16-year-old Joanna Rogers, whose body was also found in a suitcase in the landfill after Baldwin was discovered.

He was already connected to her disappearance before Baldwin’s murder based on internet chats and phone records. Rodriguez confessed to Rogers’ murder and told investigators he had also put her body in a dumpster in a suitcase.

Rogers was an innocent and lonely teenage girl living in a small home with her parents. She met Rodriguez online and he lured her out of the house before sexually assaulting her, murdering her, and throwing a Walmart suitcase containing her corpse into the nearest dumpster.

The world is not safe; nothing is without risk, and risk is often random. So you put up the castle walls and maybe, do not let your kids on the internet. Some things are best for adults, and yet in the name of “education,” every kid has access to the internet and its abundant horrors.

Tags: censorship, internet, pornography