From the Guardian, a couple of days ago:
From tomorrow social media companies must introduce child safety measures under the Online Safety Act. It is a key moment for a British government attempting, like so many others, to rein in tech firms and prevent children encountering harmful content on the internet.
Passed by parliament in 2023, the landmark legislation significantly empowers the regulator Ofcom… Social media companies operating in the UK now risk hefty fines if they fail to take strong action against content that is harmful to children such as pornography or material that encourages self-harm.
The Act has previously been criticised on the grounds that it might have unintended consequences, and/or will be ineffective. However, populists have come up with a new interpretation, which is that the purpose of the Act is instead to censor the news. Thus on Twitter/X, Annunziata Rees-Mogg:
The Online Safety Act, effective by July 2025, may be censoring violent protest footage in the UK, as noted in related posts, with Ofcom enforcing rules that could limit access to such content, raising questions about free speech versus public safety.
We live in a police state where the police have never been so mistrusted. 😡
And:
Hiding the truth increases fear.
Frightened people lash out.
This is dangerous.
“Frightened people lash out” would appear to be a pre-emptive apology for violence, similar to Nigel Farage‘s implication that the presence of counter-protestors at anti-migrant protests obliges protestors to smash up police vans and attack officers.
One supposedly suppressed clip in particular is cited by Rees-Mogg and others: it was uploaded by a user with the name Keira Diss, and shows police restraining and arresting a man at a protest in Leeds. Although fairly tame, some users are now seeing the message “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X esimates your age”. Both the clip and the text accompanying it are affected.
The restriction doesn’t affect me, as accounts created during or before 2012 are assumed to belong to adults. Nor does it affect anyone who has verified their identity on the plaform. If the purpose is government-directed news censorship, then it is rather poor effort. And the clip has not been “censored” by anyone in the UK: the decision to restrict the clip was made in America.
Four possibilities come to mind: (1) the clip has been flagged up either in error, or by someone gaming the reporting system for some reason; (2) Twitter/X decided to restrict access out of an abundance of caution; (3) Musk sees the development as useful in getting users to pay for verification; and/or (4) Musk wants to whip up resentment that will be directed at the UK government rather than at him.
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1) On Musk, he’s not doing too well at the moment with his other endeavours, so as he wants to fund his emigration to Mars (!!) I’m sure he will take advantage of legal changes to try to monetise his social media platform.
2) On the statement “We live in a police state where the police have never been so mistrusted” the problem is no working criminal accountabilities against a long-standing culture of constabulary evidential corruption in anti-person crimes. Any attempt to protect children from content that de-sensitises violence and sex crimes is welcome, as such content is a bad-teacher for life, but other players can mis-use prohibitions. There are clear potential dangers in misusing social media blocking for nefarious political reasons. ““Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X esimates your age”. Mis-use can cause suppression of what is in the public interest to know about.
3) And on suppression, (of protests) look at the U.N. condemnation of Cooper currently putting 80 year olds in police custody, their antibiotics medication denied, which is torture, for quietly standing on a street with a placard against genocide, on a street that is not the personal property of Cooper, etc. Is Cooper’s next step going to be to ban media, social or other, from reporting this outrage ? With 14 year prison sentences for any media journalist reporting the U.N. condemnation ? Cooper’s (Starmer etc.) conduct, in a number of ways, is not conducive to a happy relaxed productive society. Too many pledges broken, replaced with somewhat far right leanings. Not only trust in the police is broken, but trust in politicians is fragmented and broken . Can we really trust good intentions to dig into and restrict social media, ostensibly to only protect children which is obviously a good intention ? Or are there ulterior motives, to gradually increase restrictions on expression ? An interesting comment in the Guardian, yesterday, was, are we being aclimatised to accept flooded political mis-information ? Where it becomes difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy, a speciality of Far-Rage. But that is not a problem that can be solved by restricting media, which would also exclude counter arguments, just by ordinary people, not “specialists” like Watchdogs where, when attached to authorities, are no longer trusted, another point the Guardian commentator pointed out.
f the powers that be were really caring about children – real children, our children – they would do something about Islam and the rape gangs.