Comment by airhangerf15
9 days ago
Yea, it's all about a permanent Digital ID and the end of any independent forums. It's the first essential steps before you get to great firewalls and social credit scores.
Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US, so even a nation with better speech and gun laws is still not immune from the slow descent into technocracy.
At least in the US the Supreme Court ruled that these sorts of laws are only kosher because they target porn, which is afforded a lower degree of legal protection (albeit not no protection at all). Trying to restrict access to protected political speech or the like the way the UK and Australia did would likely be a very different court case.
Given the rulings of the current SCOTUS, I'll go out on a limb and say that it's trivial to go after left-leaning political speech and impossible to go after right-leaning speech.
They are already suppressing left-leaning speech by defunding CPB, and ahve openly said their reasons for doing so for are politically motivated.
There's a 0% chance this move gets struct down by SCOTUS.
> They are already suppressing left-leaning speech by defunding CPB, and ahve openly said their reasons for doing so for are politically motivated
No longer subsidizing left leaning speech != suppressing left leaning speech
What political speech is the UK blocking?
If the 'political speech' is not adult in nature, which is true 99.9% of the time, then it can't/won't be blocked under this rule.
Unless of course this political speech is happening on a porn site, or a subreddit that has been deemed 18+. Which I can't see a legitimate reason for.
It seems like videos of violence are also getting blocked, and I expect eventually stuff about LGBT relationships etc will fall under it. Lots of things are adult that aren't porn.
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One possibly significant difference is that the cultural attitudes in the US tend to lean more rebellious and distrustful of the government, and "it's legal if you don't get caught" is a somewhat popular sentiment.
> Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US
Interesting, since when? I'm curious about how it's turned out in practise. For web services I mean. An for anyone hosting a message board or comment section.
The US states are just targeting the big porn sites like Pornhub to add ID checks AFAIK, I haven't heard of them going after random forums like in the UK. But obviously that sort of power always expands, just like how the UK went from arresting a couple people for offensive tweets back in 2010 to doing 12k arrests/yr in 2025
The UK law was designed to be all encompassing. Why block just the 'porn sites' when you can see porn on forums?
The UK law is actually a good implementation if you put child 'safety' as your number one priority, with any other considerations as, in practise, moot.
Unfortunately I think free civil discourse between adults, privacy, etc. are just as important as child safety which makes the current law a bit crap.
This is similar to the video game and MasterCard/VISA issue - you can buy games that promote sexual violence and incest. Nothing stops children downloading them for free, or using their under-18s debit card from purchasing the non-free versions. In this instance it was private companies leveraging their freedom of association rather than an all encompassing law from a sovereign state, but the intent is the same.
As a collective society we do really need to come to grips with what it is that we want. Allowing kids to freely access gang torture/execution videos and playing pro-rape entertainment should probably be tackled. I'm not sure I agree with the implementations though.
> Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US, so even a nation with better speech and gun laws is still not immune from the slow descent into technocracy.
I’m not sure what gun laws have to do with anything but guns are not unreasonably difficult to legally purchase in the UK or EU if you have a specific need for one. It’s a tool and treated as such