this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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I live in the UK, and this is something I was saying about the Online Safety Act. It puts all the onus on the websites and not only do some websites not have the money or resources to comply, but with something like Mastodon, it doesn't really work. Like this bill was written and passed by people who don't know shit about fuck about tech. Several Lemmy and Mastodon instances have shut down/Geoblocked the UK because of this, and other jurisdictions don't seem to understand that either.
So they knew what they were doing. Age verification is about removing all sources that can't be controlled.
and yet they're doing a fucking terrible job at it (source, I'm using a VPN, something people in the Lords didn't even know was a thing until it was too late). It would be funny if it wasn't my reality.
You know you can just switch to some small instance that's not blocked and you're gonna be good? Even in China the small Lemmy instances work while the big ones are obviously blocked
Yeah sure, until they find a way to block that too.
I doubt UK could surpass China and Russia in terms of internet censorship any time soon
You'd think that, but we're in a political culture right now that puts kneejerk reactionism before reason, logic, and evidence. "It's Just Common Sense™" is used to shut down anyone who might have any good points to make from history or reason. There used to be a point where a politician in the ruling government would spitball something in public, and then a civil servant who knew what they were talking about would sit them down and explain to them why their idea was bollocks. The OSA has shown to us that said thing is bollocks, and efforts from groups like Collective Shout have shown otherwise.
We have major politicians here saying shit like We should Pay Taxpayers money to the Taliban to take people they wanna kill anyway. We have a whole section of the population banned from using gendered toilets and government policy written by far right activist groups. We have books being banned from libraries in certain council areas for being "woke" and we have the ever looming shadow of fascism over us from Russia and America.
Payment processors are telling us what we can and cannot buy because a reactionary group pressured them into it and the most widely used OSes on our phones and computers are ready made to basically fuck all of us if it's profitable.
Russia can flip a switch tomorrow and cut off all access to the outside world under their "Sovereign internet" plan. Shit'll get worse before it gets better.