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.
All of our platforms are inundated by an overwhelming amount of well crafted, targeted (specific per person) campaigns of disinformation by foreign actors.
China, Russia, Iran, and others cannot even remotely hope to stand against the West. Yet if you cannot stand against your adversary, you must weaken them.
You promote infighting. You take minor issues which can be cooperatively resolved with compromise, and seek to turn them into issues of great division. You spread falsehoods, creating useful idiots in great numbers.
You find the most radicalized, most loony of citizens that you can, and then secretly fund them.
Understand, any concept of "we do that to ourselves" is like a gnat in comparison. This is a real threat, it's been getting worse, and the common person is not capable of even understanding the concept. The common person, even when told repeatedly, thinks there is no downside to having their Pii stolen, or hacked. They simply read click bait titles, youtube or tiktok videos and 100% believe every word without any skepticism.
You may disagree with any or all of the above.
However! The above is what is actually behind the move for KYC to this extent. It's not about age verification, it's about identity. And it's not even about one westerner talking to another, it's about a foreign adversary seeking to pretend to be a domestic.
Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.
And I say this as someone that has fought for an open internet. It's already dead. It's dead because foreign interests use it as a tool to destroy our societies. It's dead because soon AI will replace most generated information.
Age verification laws are really identity laws, and any work to provide anonymous verification will fail, sadly, unfortunately, because the perceived threat is so large.
(I do not even necessarily agree with this, but if we don't understand the logic and the why of this, of why it is happening, then we're complaining about the wrong thing...)
I worked on the latter problem space precisely for the US State Department. Its challenging, esp at scale, and esp if the folks trying to fight back are not given a free enough of a hand to do whats needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXqTMwN4MtY
At the time she was the Neocon Presidential candidate.
I've always found it difficult to believe that voters are capable of critically consuming information and voting for wars, regulations or confiscatory taxes, and simultaneously are incapable of thinking critically about propaganda. Under this model, the fact that some deceptive sources may be foreign is largely a red herring. The entire premise of Democracy rests upon the presumption that voters are capable of making informed decisions in an adversarial information landscape.
I don't see the desire to control Internet speech as a novel phenomenon. The rationalizations have evolved over the years. The proliferation of AI, Russian sponsored podcasters and Wumaos are iterations of an appeal to special circumstances.
If the West truly believes that authoritarians like the CCP are immoral and should be opposed, it stands to reason that they shouldn't be seeking to emulate the CCP's methods. That's the surface level, ideologically consistent view.
Beneath that, there is a rabbit hole of fringe theory. Like the above poster, I provide this information to better explain possible motives, without endorsement. In the conspiracy sphere, the PRC is regarded as a trial lab for social engineering schemes. The allegation is that concepts are ironed out there first. Examples would include: social credit scores, digital ID, Internet censorship and the confluence of all three. Whether these theories are true or false, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be wary of these outcomes.
All of which is the fault of the establishment parties and not of foreign actors.
Even Trump now continues or, in the Middle East, exceeds the existing long term neocon policies. So the foreign online propaganda, which does exist, is completely overrated.
The issue is no one in government would buy into this. You'd prevent them from catching bozo criminals who can't use a VPN.
*For example, you get up to N anon tokens a day you can use for anoning online. Only a count is stored daily to limit generations.
In the US however, this campaign came from the same think tanks and strategists associated with Project 2025 (taking cues from folks like Enough Is Enough), who are pretty upfront with their Christian Nationalist views. In Project 2025 they include a bizarre connection of porn with transgenderism that tips their hand on the religious bent to all this, but elsewhere in the plan outright state their Christian Nationalist ideals.
The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subject. But instead they've gone the needlessly invasive route which is telling about the true motives.
Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radical idea, I know.
The law was passed in 2023 by the tories, and Ofcom has concluded what the tories asked them to do -- write the statutory instruments that implement the law.
The Labour government would have to repeal the law (really unlikely; governments don't usually rip down their predecessors' laws because if they did no progress would occur) or set the statutory instruments aside.
I think the "true motives" are what the law says. I don't think they will ban VPNs (which would support an alternative reading of motive).
I also, again, encourage US readers to understand that your own supreme court has rubber-stamped a law that requires US porn firms to do all this and more for the benefit of Texas, and there are 24 more state laws that have similar impacts.
Pretending this is just something crazy we Brits are doing out there on our own is disingenuous at best and often hypocritical and whiny at worst.
Labor during the Corbyn years made Bernie Sanders look like a fascist and the current labor is back to being milquetoast and embracing its social authoritarian roots.
Similarly, Americans cannot understand that the Canadians have an "NDP" and "Liberal" and they don't understand their differences - though these days I don't think the NDP knows their differences either!!!
I don't need China to tell me via Tiktok that my life is getting demonstrably worse. I know that. The fact that China gets to tell me and be completely honest whilst doing so isn't something they've "engineered," they're just pointing at reality.
I mean arguably, Labour could have repealed it or could have decided to disown it and discourage implementation, but the terrible design of the legislation is pretty much entirely the responsibility of the last government.
As it happens I am from the UK and have no particular love for the way the US handles things either. In fact one of my biggest problems is that it encourages us to send extra PII to some of the most odiously associated US companies out there.
But in general I don't think doggedly pursuing this route where children get access to the full internet sans some self-selecting sites with ID checks is the way to go. There's too much out there which is outside the realms of accountability. If everyone installs VPNs (which appears to be what's going on, especially given that far more than just pornography is being blocked this way) then guess what happens when the child borrows the shared family device?
People want a magical solution which exonerates caregivers from having to worry about this and shifts the burden elsewhere but unfortunately one doesn't exist and the online safety act certainly isn't it. Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.
Mobile phone subscriptions in the UK go the other way: By default they filter some content. If you tell the phone company to turn it off, they do. It's less invasive than this law because you don't need to tell them why you want it turned off, but still more draconian than if we could turn on a child safe mode that e.g. then required a pin or something to disable.
Of course this just shows the English Dissenters ended up being quite influential on both the left and right over the course of Anglophone history.
Oh yeah? How's that anti-terrorist legislation working out?
I can't imagine that it would pass as-is since on its face it seems to apply to all computers and all software including things like nginx or nftables that the entire modern economy relies on, but who knows?
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
I expect the make-porn-illegal crusade is more common in the US than elsewhere.
There is a conspiracy and it's being rolled out. There was already some country that declared anyone running non-standard OSes on their phones are highly suspect.
That's not working so well in the US at least. That gave us Trump.
Honestly? Yeah, pretty much. It's a little hard to think of them that way since they're the leftmost establishment party in the UK, the same as the Democrats in the US, but historically speaking they're pretty right-wing. And theocracy has pretty deep roots in Anglosphere politics, so it's not necessarily that visible from the inside.
Strongly agree. It kills me that nobody is seriously discussing robust, industry-standard childproofing.
Even if you require a driver's license, how hard is it really to swipe your mom's ID from her purse and write down the serial number? There is no solution to this problem that doesn't require parents to actually parent their children a bit and lock down their devices.
Mass alienation didn’t begin in a troll farm in St. Petersburg, it began in think tanks, boardrooms, and editorial meetings that decided ordinary people were an obstacle to be nudged, not a public to be served.
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
The propaganda in Britain isn’t loud or foreign (largely). It’s quiet, domestic, and politely credentialed. It's Otto English, it's James O Brien, it's the BBC. It doesn’t scream at you, it nudges, omits, and reframes until systemic rot looks like unfortunate happenstance.
The message from the BBC and the like is overwhelmingly don't think too hard about why things are the way they are, don't ever question the root causes, and if someone from the credentialed classes says something, they're probably right about it.
It's why the article is never "Wait why have your living standards fallen through the floor?" or "Is lockdown actually working?" but "Here's how to make a meal for £1" or "How to make a really good sourdough loaf".
By setting up a world where people can only access "pre approved" bits of information, you're not lessening access to propaganda, you're just picking winners.
So... national socialists and National Christians have a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram... to deny or miss those parallels seems disingenuous or ill informed.
I'm not informed of the British political landscape, so I can't speak to that.
And no, not every Christian is a NACHRIST, and it also isn't a coincidence that NAZI's co-oped and used Christianity opportunistically when it suited them.
Preventing children from accessing porn has broad public support (as we might hope). That is very different to saying the OSA has broad public support though.
The YouGov survey results that have been much discussed in the past week came from three questions - one about age restrictions for porn, one about whether the new measures would be effective, and one about whether the person had heard of the new measures before the survey. The answers were essentially that the majority hadn't heard of the measures, almost everyone supported preventing kids from accessing porn, but the majority didn't think these measures would be effective in achieving that. Probably none of those results is very surprising for HN readers.
What is notably missing from the debate so far is any evidence about whether the public support the (probably) unintended consequences of the actual implementation of the OSA - which are what almost all of the criticism I am seeing is about. As with any political survey the answers probably depend very much on how you ask the questions and it's easy to get people to say they support "good" measures if you gloss over all the "bad" parts that necessarily go along with them.
And it's near universal because fascism is the major exception as it really doesn't desire any conformity from the designated inferior. That's what distinguishes the policies of NSDAP from prior cases of anti-Jewish oppression - the Nazi party wasn't interested in conversions at all.
As such, you really shouldn't call anyone ill informed on political topics.
It doesn't need e.g. code signing or anything else of the sort.
To be clear, I think all of this is a massive overreach - my point is only that you can achieve the claimed aim with far less invasive means.
That, if anything, makes the chosen idiocy even more troubling to me, as either they're incompetent, don't care at all about the implications, or there are unstated aims.
Another factor is that a lot of sites won’t work well with a VPN these days. So you really need to keep switching back and forth, which is a pain (especially on mobile).