But that's not what laws like these are about. In the US at least these laws are driven by Christian Nationalists are setting up a situation where PII of porn users is able to be leaked. That's what they're counting on. They also want to have political control of platforms by continually holding a Sword of Damocles above any publisher's head.
https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taki...
>"Nigel Farage ‘on the side of predators’ with Online Safety Act criticism, says Labour"
Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?
The end goal here is digital ID and censorship. Compare this to the perennial efforts for encryption backdoors. If there is a characterization that accurately encompasses this, it is the illiberal, statist, authoritarian impulse. Sure, they used a sex-panic to advance their agenda. However, this is merely symptomatic of the larger illiberal trend towards authoritarianism and the expansion of the state.
First we hear that the people behind the push for online identity verification are Christian nationalists. Then, after being informed that the British Labour party is also pushing for the same measure, we hear that the common denominator between those factions is their crypto-fascism.
To call the Labour party fascist, you must be some sort of extreme Thatcherite. To call Christian nationalist fascists is somehow even less defensible, as fascism is strongly collectivist[1] and the American political Christian extremely individualistic.
This entire discussion points to a horrific crisis in civics education, which I believe can explain the increasingly authoritarian policies of modern western governments far better than some crypto-fascist plot.
[1] "Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State", The doctrine of Fascism by Mussolini