Telegraph – Child safety is the smokescreen as the nanny state goes digital

If anyone thinks that such broad censorship powers will be limited in practice by British common sense, think again. In the UK, police arrest 30 people a day for online posts. Over the past decade, police have recorded almost 150,000 “non-crime” hate incidents – that is, lawful speech. Already, the online safety act has resulted in the censorship of Reddit threads discussing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, posts about Fantasy Football teams, and images of a Goya painting. The idea of sweeping internet controls being put at the tip of a ministerial pen under the banner of preventing “harm” isn’t child protection – it’s a censor’s charter.

The elephant in the room is that, whether MPs choose the social media ban or the censorship blank cheque, both routes are imposed via age checks – and that means digital ID checks for the British population. The death of anonymity online means there will be less freedom – less whistleblowing, less comedy, less debate, less honesty. A compromise in all adults’ freedom and privacy might be, for some, a price worth paying to protect children – but as a YouGov poll showed this week, the majority of us know the age checks won’t actually keep children off social media anyway. Despite the recent social media ban in Australia, new research shows the majority of 12 to 15-year-olds still have access to social media accounts. The internet is fundamentally an anti-censorship machine – children will find a way around the obstacles.

Britain’s so-called “internet safety” measures are getting more extreme. A few weeks ago, Apple restricted the internet freedom of all its UK users – over half the population – unless they complied with age and ID checks. Owners of iPhones and iPads that failed to prove they are over 18 now have child-locked devices. The company has not publicly discussed why, but it is widely understood to be a pre-emptive response to the UK’s direction of travel towards online checkpoints. The only other countries in which Apple has introduced similar device restrictions are South Korea and Singapore – countries without a free internet.

In the moral panic about internet harms, the population is being infantilised as a whole and losing our freedom on the way. Internet use should be restricted for children – but by their parents, over half of whom don’t even use the extensive parental controls Apple and others offer on their devices. Displacing these parental responsibilities onto the Government gives way to checkpoints and controls not just for children but for the British public as a whole – and we may find we’ve lost our liberty for a promise that was never going to be kept.

– Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch Director