10 Examples of Absurd Fallout From the U.K.'s Online Safety Act
The measure is putting up roadblocks for people who want to read about world news, listen to music on Spotify, chat on Discord, play video games, find information about quitting smoking, or join antimasturbation groups.
A law in effect for less than two weeks is already wreaking havoc all over the internet.
The United Kingdom law—called the Online Safety Act—is purportedly about protecting children. The best I can say about its rollout is that maybe it will serve as a cautionary tale for lawmakers here.
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It's certainly not stopping motivated individuals—and who is more motivated than a teen told they can't do something?—from accessing verboten content. "Let's start with the most obvious sign that this law is working exactly as poorly as critics warned: VPN usage in the UK has absolutely exploded," notes Mike Masnick at Techdirt. "Proton VPN reported an 1,800% spike in UK sign-ups. Five of the top ten free apps on Apple's App Store in the UK are VPNs. When your 'child safety' law's primary achievement is teaching kids how to use VPNs to circumvent it, maybe you've missed the mark just a tad."
But the Online Safety Act is putting up roadblocks for people who want to read about world news, view classic art, listen to music on Spotify, chat with friends on Discord, play video games, find information about quitting smoking, or join antimasturbation groups.
To be clear, the U.K. government isn't explicitly ordering restrictions or blocks on all this content. But blocks like these are an inevitable result of the system they are ordering.
The portion of the law that took effect on July 25 requires websites with content that authorities have deemed "harmful to children" to verify user ages and restrict content for anyone under age 18, or anyone who declines to submit to an ID check, facial scan, or other privacy-invading measures. Sites must entirely block minors and anonymous accounts from accessing sexual imagery and content related to self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders. They must also make efforts to restrict their access to an even wider range of "priority content,"—including anything that is hateful or "abusive" about race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, or gender reassignment—as well as bullying content, content depicting violence, content encouraging risky challenges, content encouraging substance use, and more.
What could go wrong?
Notably, the rules don't just apply to U.K. companies but any tech platform with a significant number of users in the U.K. or the U.K. as a target market. And the rules for noncompliance can be steep, ranging from fines for companies to penalties for senior managers to the government taking "business disruption measures" that might include ordering third parties, like payment processors, to terminate service to a targeted company.
"Already 5m extra online age checks a day (yes, every day) are being carried out in the UK since the introduction of age-gating for pornography sites alone, according to new data from the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA)," according toThe Guardian.
As of last Friday, 26 percent of people in the U.K. said they encountered new restrictions on internet content. And while the percentage of Britons supporting the law is still high, it has shrunk dramatically in the first week of implementation: from 80 percent to 69 percent, per YouGov polling.
For U.K. residents, the options are either to accept that their internet experience will be sanitized as if they're children, to circumvent the law by surfing the web exclusively using a VPN, or to submit to all sorts of different age-verification services (including ID checks and facial scans) that could leave their identities and information vulnerable.
"Even when these systems 'work,' they're creating massive honeypots of personal data," points out Masnick. "As we've seen repeatedly, companies collecting biometric data and ID verification inevitably get breached, and suddenly intimate details about people's online activity become public. Just ask the users of Tea, a women's dating safety app that recently exposed thousands of users' verification selfies after requiring facial recognition for 'safety.'"
U.K. residents are already reporting a host of troubles with accessing all sorts of content. Let's dive into these mishaps, shall we?
(Note: I have not independently verified that all of the following allegedly restricted content is actually restricted,so take all of this with a grain of salt. But reports of such restrictions are coming from far and wide.)
No ID? No NoFap.
Per the Free Speech Coalition's Mike Stabile,"Reddit has now blocked r/NoFap in the UK over the Online Safety Act. The anti-masturbation forum can now not be accessed unless you submit biometrics or identifying information." On the NoFap subreddit, multiple users havecomplained about being required to give information in order to view the NoFap forum's content.
War News and Debates About Sexual Predators Blocked
"Social media companies are blocking wide-ranging content - including posts about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza - in an attempt to comply with the UK's new Online Safety Act," reports the BBC:
BBC Verify found a range of public interest content, including parliamentary debates on grooming gangs, has been restricted on X and Reddit for those who have not completed age verification checks….
Among the restricted content identified by BBC Verify was a video post on X which showed a man in Gaza looking for the dead bodies of his family buried among the rubble of destroyed buildings. The post was restricted despite not showing any graphic imagery or bodies at any point in the clip. X subsequently removed the warning after being approached by BBC Verify.
When users who had not verified their age attempted to access the post they were met with a message reading: "Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age."
The same warning was experienced by users who attempted to view a video of a Shahed drone destroyed mid-flight in Ukraine. The Iranian-made drones, which are widely used by Russia in the full-scale invasion, are unmanned and nobody was injured or killed in the clip.
Francisco de GoyaHistoric Art Off Limits
A post on X that featured an image of Saturn Devouring His Son, a famed 19th century painting by Francisco de Goya, was restricted for U.K. users until their ages could be verified, according to the BBC.
Scan Your Face To Stream Music
"Spotify is testing age assurance technologies in select markets, utilizing our own internal age estimation technology and partnering with Yoti, a trusted digital identity company," the company said. "This means that you may have to confirm your age by going through an age assurance process. For example, if you attempt to watch a music video that has been labelled 18+ by the rightsholder for that video, Spotify may serve a prompt to confirm your age." The Yoti age assurance process will involve facial scanning and, if that fails, an ID check. If your estimated age is incorrect, you can use the ID verification to confirm your accurate age, per Spotify. "If the age check shows that you're under the minimum age for Spotify in your country, your account will be deactivated and then deleted."
Man With Face Tattoos Locked Out
A man with myriad face tattoos said he's being shut out of verifying his age on certain sites, since their systems don't recognize his face as a face. "Some of the websites are asking for picture verification, like selfies, and it's not recognising my face," he told Metro. "It's saying 'remove your mask' because the technology is made so you can't hold up a picture to the camera or wear a mask."
A 'Teen Appropriate Experience' for Everyone on Discord
"All UK users will experience new default settings designed to create a teen-appropriate experience," Discord posted on July 21. "These defaults include automatic content filtering (which is already on for teens everywhere) as well as privacy settings that can help limit exposure to potentially harmful materials and interactions. UK users who wish to access content flagged by our filters or customize certain settings can do so by completing a one-time age verification process to confirm they are 18 or older."
Subreddit Sabotage
"We're already seeing reports of content being age gated when it really shouldn't be," posted the Open Rights Group. "These include: sexual health subreddits including r/STD, r/safesexPH and r/stopsmoking [and] news subreddits including r/Aljazeera and r/israelexposed."
Public health information—including subreddits about periods and quitting drinking—has also been restricted, according to tech writer Taylor Lorenz. And "other subreddits that provide essential community support to users including minors like r/sexualassault, for example, are also blocked."
In one Reddit thread, users claiming to be in the U.K. have been keeping tabs on the myriad subreddits they supposedly have to show proof of age in order to view.
More Shadowbanning of Sex Workers?
"X is shadowbanning adult creators in the UK for any visitor who has not verified their identity under the Online Safety Act," according to Stabile. Searching for certain adult stars returns "only fake scam accounts, even if you follow" the real creators themselves. Stabile said that some porn-creator posts are being marked as adult-only content even when they are unrelated to porn.
Gamers Getting Carded
Microsoft is starting to roll out age verification for Xbox. "As part of our compliance program for the UK Online Safety Act…players who indicate their account age as 18 and over, based in the UK, and signing into an Xbox experience with a Microsoft account will begin seeing notifications encouraging them to verify their age," the company posted on July 28. "Starting early next year, age verification will be required for these players in the UK to retain full access to social features on Xbox, such as voice or text communication and game invites."
Nexus Mods is also rolling out age verification, according to Pink News:
Community content website Nexus Mods announced earlier this week that it plans to add age-verification requirements for users hoping to download 'Not Safe For Work' (NSFW) or adult mods.
Video game mods are optional, user-generated additions or changes to a video game to enhance the experience. They can range anywhere from gameplay modifications, to changes to the game's content or story.
Nexus Mods, one of the top modding websites in the world, which features over half-a-million mod files for over 3,800 games and counting, wrote in a Tuesday (1 July) statement that it is making changes to comply with new UK and EU laws that aim to protect under-age internet users from inappropriate content.
U.S. companies—and lawmakers—have been objecting to the new requirements. Wikipedia is suing. X is sounding a warning. Last week, "Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) accused the United Kingdom's Office of Communications (Ofcom) of threatening American companies 'with censorship,'" as Reason intern Tosin Akintola reported last week.
I wish we could expect this debacle to dampen enthusiasm for similar schemes in the United States. But I expect that states will keep right on pushing for age verification for porn and social media, and U.S. lawmakers will keep right on pushing laws like the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require that tech platforms try and stop minors from accessing a huge array of content, much in the manner of the U.K.'s law. Somehow, it's "censorship" when they do it but "protection" when we do.
• "The Ninth Circuit swiss-cheesed Section 230 with two new exceptions," writes law professor Eric Goldman. More here.
• Florida is suing the parent companies of porn platforms, including xVideos, XNXX, Bang Bros, and Girls Gone Wild, alleging that they're violating Florida's age-verification law. "Attorney General [James] Uthmeier today filed legal suit against Webgroup Czech Republic, NKL Associates, Sonesta Technologies, Inc., GGW Group, and Traffic F for breaking state law and endangering minors," Uthmeier's office said in a press release:
On behalf of all minor residents in Florida, Attorney General Uthmeier's lawsuit seeks to compel the companies to comply with their obligations under HB 3 as well as the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, which prohibits the unfair and deceptive business practices that the companies have used to build a vast and lucrative Florida user base that includes vulnerable children and teens.
• U.K. lawmakers are mulling a ban on "barely legal" pornography. "The proposed action by the independent pornography taskforce, launched last month by the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin, comes in response to the broadcast of the Channel 4 documentary 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story," The Guardian reports. The task force is also looking into restricting access to the documentary about Blue.
