8 More Years of British Censorship

Exactly 8 years ago, I wrote a blog post covering internet censorship within the UK. The context to that blog post was the UK government pushing though laws to censor file sharing websites for “copyright infringement”.

There was also “voluntary” blocking of websites considered harmful by ISPs that were turned on by default. Something, as mentioned in the blog post, led to some political websites being blocked “accidentally”.

Since then, the government and media (including the BBC who are legally meant to be non-biased…) have been unfairly blaming the internet for all of society’s problems.

Claiming that the internet is full of people who want to throw around racist language towards black footballers when such words are not uncommon at working class pubs which Rich footballers, London-centric Media and politicians.

The other two key problems politicians and media blame on the internet are misinformation and “child safety”.

Since the election of Donald Trump as US president (January 2017 to January 2021), the media has been blaming the internet for the spread of “Russian misinformation”. When the media has been more than happy to lie to sell more newspapers, including causing the US to go to war with Spain.

The other trope is to blame the internet for causing harm to children. While true, the internet is not a place younger children should visit without content supervision. The real world is more dangerous for children. It is a world where injury from poorly maintained play equipment should be a massive concern or what about the real life risk of children being raped by a grooming gang. An issue that was ignored for over a decade by authorities wanting to not be seen as racist.

Or what about real-life bullying that happens in every school across the country that is ignored by teachers and school admin staff (often leading to suicide)? Or what about body issues caused by unrealistic bodies featured in magazines and on mainstream television?

The media and Parliament blames the internet for all these things, assigning no blame to the authorities who enable these “harms” in real life.

There is a reason for that. That is of using the unfair blame of the internet to pass mass censorship and surveillance because “Think of the children”. Under the Online safety Bill, anything the government dislikes will be unavailable to you unless you give platforms your real identity, enabling the government to spy on everything you do online.

As proven with the grooming gangs, neither of the two parties give a shit about protecting children. It’s just the propaganda to accuse anyone against the censorship bill of wanting to “harm” the children.

• You better be accepting that Digital ID for every platform if you don’t want to “harm” the children.

• You better accept censorship of anything the government decides, same as in places like China, if you don’t want to “harm” the children.

• You better give up your rights to a private conversation (E2EE), if you don’t want to “harm” the children.

That is the “think of the children” propaganda in action. I originally talked about copyright holders being able to censor the internet. However, this country has slipped down a “slippery slope” towards becoming more like China over those past 8 years.

Published: 15th March 2023