George Orwell’s 2025
The ‘Online Safety Act’
Earlier this year, the so-called ‘Online Safety Act’ went into effect here in the UK. This law requires any online platform that falls within it’s (pretty broad) criteria to implement age-verification. The requirements that this act asks of site-owners fail to take into account smaller, independent sites run by a single or small group of people. As a result many smaller sites have had to block all access to UK users or in many cases, shut down all-together, due to the requirements being completely unfeasible for anyone who isn’t a big corporation. In practice, most of these age-checks have so far taken the form of sketchy private companies such as ‘Persona’, which requires the user to share some form of legal ID or do a face-scan via webcam which will verify their age. So in order to access certain types of mature material you now have to give more identifying information to private companies. What could possibly go wrong? The stated aim of this legislation is one of the go-to’s for any authoritarian crackdown: Protecting the children.
To be clear, I am not denying that there is a problem with children
having access to pornography and being targets of dangerous online
predators.
However, call me old-fashioned but I think it’s the responsibility of
parent’s to address this issue. Rather that passing authoritarian
legislation that isn’t even fit for (stated) purpose, shouldn’t the
government be putting effort and resources into educating parents on how
to better protect their children? All the resources are available for
parents: parental controls, monitoring, restrictions on screen-time and
oh I don’t know, maybe not just shoving an iPad in their face from the
age of two. Maybe don’t let them rot in a corner while they cycle
through Youtube’s algorithm giving them an endless stream of creepy predatory Spiderman
and Elsa videos or the Google Play store
showing them weird, gross fetish-laden ads for slop games. These
measures are far more effective at preventing children from being
exposed to stuff they shouldn’t than turning the country into even more
of a nanny-state.
As soon as the act was put into effect there was a huge up-tick in the use of VPNs in the UK, I find it heartening that the people would rather pay for a VPN to bypass this nonsense than give up their information to these companies in an admittedly convenient and free (not-as-in-freedom) way. For children that want to bypass these age-checks and access explicit material, they are less likely to have access to a commercial VPN and are more likely to use free tools like Tor, which also gives access to Onion sites (colloquially known as the dark-web ), which can be home to highly-illegal and dangerous material. This places children in even more danger than they would be on the surface-web.
A petition, which at the time of writing has 541,419 signatures, calls for the repealing of the ‘Online Safety Act’. The government’s response to the petition was essentially to fob us all off and treat us like a bunch of dim-wits who just don’t understand why this legislation is so important. In response to criticism of this act from (our likely future prime-minister) Nigel Farage, Peter Kyle, the Technology minister said that those who want to repeal the online safety act are “on the side of predators and pedophiles”.
Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk was a far-right American political commentator, internet personality and founder of Turning Point USA. Kirk held a lot of pretty bigoted and non-progressive views, he was a homophobe, racist, transphobe and misogynist.
On the 10th September 2025, while at a Turning Point USA event in Utah, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed from afar in front of a huge crowd of students. Gory and graphic videos of the moment of his death (which I strongly discourage you from seeking out) in which he is shot in the neck, spread on social media shortly afterwards.
The American right immediately took to blaming his death on the left, speculating the shooter was trans and spreading lies about ‘leftist or pro-trans messages’ scrawled on the casings (which actually turned out to be video game references and internet meme brain-rot). “They killed Charlie Kirk”. They have used this outrage to crack down on freedom of speech in America, with the Trump administration arguing that left-wing views have enabled this violence, threatening to go after left-wing organisations. Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off air for pretty mild comments, mostly aimed at Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s death, far from making fun of Kirk himself or celebrating his death, by ABC after threats from the Trump administration and the FCC. Thankfully, after huge backlash from viewers, with so many cancelling their Disney+ subscriptions that it caused the cancellation page to crash, pressure from Disney talent as well as the media, Jimmy Kimmel has since been re-instated. The online right has been doxxing and harassing people online for not reacting to Kirk’s death in a way they deem appropriate, including a website called “Charlie’s Murderers” personally identifying people for their lack of sympathy, with some people being fired from their jobs.
To be honest I’m really not sure what to say about this one, I feel like it should be obvious why it’s troubling.
Britcard
Back to the UK now…
On 26th September 2025 (yesterday as of writing this) our prime-minister Keir Starmer officially announced plans for state-mandated ‘ID Cards’ for all UK adults. This ‘ID Card’ called ‘Britcard’ will take the form of a smartphone app (essentially state-mandating ownership of a modern Apple or Android smartphone by extension). This identification will be required to legally work, rent and possibly access NHS services in the UK.
A
petition which has reached over two million signatures at the time
of writing and is increasing rapidly, calls for this legislation to be
rejected.
Will the British people’s overwhelming rejection of this actually
prevent it from happening? Who knows.
To be continued…