The UK's race to the bottom

While I prefer to keep politics off my site, the Online Safety Act in the UK is now a serious and fundamental problem for the country.

Let's keep this short. Back in 2017, the UK government came up with this Act, which was sold as a world-leading piece of legislation. There were some valid points in what it was trying to do at the time. Skip forward to 2025, and they have finally rolled it out. As you can guess, in the eight years that passed in both technology and the world, much has changed. The Act is now nothing more than a massive overreach by the government to censor and surveil its people.

Of course, the first thing they will tell you is "it's for the children." That is the entirety of their moral shield. There is nothing else they can use to justify this other than that single, paper-thin argument.

Let's look at what the Act is actually doing right now and for the foreseeable future, that I know of.

ID for "Mature" Content: Any website hosting pornography or content deemed "harmful" to children now requires robust age verification. This is not a simple checkbox. It means providing your ID or using facial age estimation for access. This creates a clear path for anything tagged "mature," including art, health information, or controversial political speech, to be locked behind an ID wall.

Spying on Private Messages: The Act gives the regulator, Ofcom, the power to force encrypted services like WhatsApp and Signal to scan private messages for illegal content. Security experts are clear this is impossible without creating a "backdoor" that destroys the entire point of encryption, opening the door for criminals and state-level spying on everyone.

Criminalising Hurt Feelings: It creates a new "false communication" offence, making it a crime to send a message intended to cause "non-trivial psychological harm." It is basically a thoughtcrime law waiting to be abused, turning online arguments and bad jokes into potential police matters.

Killing Online Communities: Any platform with "user-to-user" content, from a news site's comments section to a small hobby forum, is now legally liable for what its users post. The risk is so high that many will simply shut these features down, erasing countless spaces for public discussion.

Gaming Requires ID: That's right, even hobbies like gaming are being hit. Microsoft is already rolling out age verification for Xbox in the UK, which will become mandatory in 2026 for full access to social features. You will need to prove your age to an American corporation to talk to friends in a game.

Attacking Wikipedia: Under this Act, Wikipedia is fighting a legal battle to avoid being classified as a high-risk service. This could force them to require ID checks for their volunteer contributors to edit articles. Read that again. The single most important hub for the world's knowledge is being actively threatened by UK government censorship. (Side note: please consider donating to them).

Now read that list again and ask yourself: how the fuck does any of this actually protect children? We live in a world with the social media cesspool of TikTok that has already conditioned an entire generation. And what was the immediate result of this genius plan? A reported 1,800% surge in UK users signing up for VPNs. People are already routing around the state's censorship, proving the law is not just intrusive, it's a practical failure.

The government acts as if it is not the parent's job to understand their own kid's needs and maturity level. They act as if we don't have incredibly robust and competent parental control apps in 2025. These tools allow parents to filter content, monitor for bullying, block apps, and set time limits far more effectively and without infringing on the rights of every other adult in the country.

Instead, what we have is a severe case of state-level control and mass surveillance, all hidden behind that one moral shield. Because a nude picture is apparently going to do more harm than the multiple stabbings reported in London this month, some involving children. More harm than the obesity crisis. More harm than the TikTok generation's mental health crisis.

This isn't just about our rights. It's about making the UK a toxic wasteland for technology. Why would any tech startup or small developer launch here? Why risk being bankrupted by a single moderation mistake when you can just go somewhere else? It's comically a self-inflicted wound on the entire UK tech economy, free speech is a bonus casualty.

They have nothing to justify this insane level of overreach. One of their senior ministers, Peter Kyle, literally said that anyone who opposes the Act is "on the side of predators."

That is not the statement of a logical, mature adult, much less a government official. He is shutting down any nuanced discussion. If you have a problem with the Act, you are branded as evil. This is the thinking of a child... oh, that makes sense. He needs the Act to protect his own ten-year-old brain. Frankly, it's a familiar script. The people most obsessed with policing everyone else's morality are always the ones with the most to hide. When your only move is to scream 'predator', it says a lot more about your own guilty conscience than it does about anyone else's.