So of all the fucking things to restrict, why this? Facebook is a hundred times more dangerous than any porn. Ban that shit instead.

Don't give your children unrestricted acces to a smartphone until they've proven they can use it wisely.
No smartphone before age twelve. Limited use until age 15.
And ffs. Ban smartphones at school.

Teach your kids about the internet. It's part of sexual education.

And don't leave it up to private companies to identify me and collect sensitive data on me. Fuck that. If you really want age verification. Deliver the framework.

Drugs still won.

And people of color lost.

I don't understand how this is a controversial opinion, but maybe parents should actually parent their children instead of expecting the Internet or the government to decide what their kids should see for them? Maybe talk to your kid about safe and ethical sex, the dangers of porn addiction, and not to take anything away from pornographic content instead? Maybe we shouldn't be giving children smartphones and tablets with unfettered internet access in the first place instead of spending time with them? Wild concepts I know.

Don't get me wrong, but why are matters of governmental surveillance and control inherently "right-wing" rather than a totalitarian policy not otherwise directly connected to wing politics? Extremists on both sides have a history of creating totalitarian, Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards).

I don't understand how this is a controversial opinion, but maybe parents should actually parent their children instead of expecting the Internet or the government to decide what their kids should see for them? Maybe talk to your kid about safe and ethical sex, the dangers of porn addiction, and not to take anything away from pornographic content instead? Maybe we shouldn't be giving children smartphones and tablets with unfettered internet access in the first place instead of spending time with them? Wild concepts I know.

Fuck off with your device based verification system. That's just the same service, but as a more invasive app installed on your phone.

not necessarily. you give a phone to your children. you partly lock it down by setting it up as a child account, with its age. you make sure to install a web browser that supports limiting access to age appropriate content according to the age set in the system, maybe taking a parent allowed whitelist. the website is legally obliged to set an appropriate age limit value in a standard HTTP header.

that way, the website does not know your age. the decision is on the web browser.
the web browser checks the configuration in the system, that only the parent can change. it does not send it anywhere, only does a yes/no decision. if the site is not ok, it'll show a thing like when the connection is not secure or it was put on the safebrowsing list, except that you can't skip it, only option is to request parent permission.
and finally the age is set in the operating system, without verifying its truthiness, but once again requesting lock screen authentication.
oh and app installs need parent approval for kid accounts, like it should almost always be.

this way it's as private as it can get. the only way a website can find out information about you from this, is to log if your browser loaded the html but not any other resources, because that means you were caught in the age filter. but that's it.

there's multiple pieces in this that is not yet implemented, but they should be possible with not too much work.
this is all possible with open source code, if you make sure the kid can't install anything without parent approval. stores like fdroid could have some badge or something if a browser supports this kind of limitation.

I'm just waiting for the response to be something along the lines of...
"According to existing law (see Online Safety Act), websites are required to do age verification... blah blah blah, no changes will be made, thank you for your inquiry"

I assume "Republican" on this diagram is not used in the contemporary American sense. Otherwise it would be somewhere up in that little grey cloud.

In any case, official US politics takes place entirely within the top right quadrant, and UK politics seems to have retreated there too. Canada is in danger of getting up there as well. And we don't have any mechanism to vote our way out of that box, so change will have to come from action outside of electoral politics.

And giving them sweeping ability to track everybody via their identity papers, to see what websites and services they're using, what all their online identities are, etc.

They claim the info isn't being saved or passed on to the government to form a big surveillance database to one day use against people - sure, it's legal to, say, be gay or a socialist or of a particular religion today, but societies and regimes change, and the info they collect on you today may become ammunition against you in 10, 20, 40 years time.

But I don't for a moment believe their obvious lies.

This is nothing but authoritarian police state monitoring and control. It's extremely obvious. Yet, who are we to vote for in the next election? Not Labour, thanks to this (and a few other big reasons perhaps), not the Tories because, well, you've seen what they're like.

It's not impossible for a third party to be elected of course, not as impossible as places like the USA that have a very worryingly solidified two party system, it's just very unlikely.

Knowing the British people and their seeming apathy and poor judgement at scale these days I wouldn't be surprised if they elect the racist bigots at Reform - who ironically would be even more authoritarian and evil than what we have now.

As usual, there's no hope for the future and no possibility of good outcomes.

Humanity is doomed to repeat it's failures for all of history again and again, and we're just along for the miserable ride.

When is DeviantArt going to demand my ID, I wonder, it is chock full of all manner of fetish material.

I'm on the fence, because do kids need to be seeing glimmer choke down on a futa She-Ra? No. But does the UK Guv need to de-anonymize the internet to stop it? Fuck. No.

Age verification is a security nightmare, you shouldn't support it. Unlike you, I hope Deviantart never asks for users' IDs.

Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards)

When the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK had even more civil society surveillance than the US.

As a consequence of those revelations, in the US some of the surveillance was walked back, whilst in the UK the Government just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK system of Press Censorship) to shut up the Press, got the Editor of the newspaper that brought it out in the UK (The Guardian) kicked out, and the Press there never talked about it again.

Also, let's not forget the UK has the biggest number of surveillance cameras per-capita in the World.

Oh, and they have a special and separate Surveillance Tribunal (the Investigatory Powers Tribunal) were the lawyers for the side other than the State are not allowed to be present in certain sessions, see certain evidence or even get informed of the final judgement unless their side wins.

They easily have the most extreme regime of Civil Society Surveillance in Europe, and in the World are probably second only to the likes of North Korea and China.

Britain is well beyond merely "headed towards" Big Brother and has been for at least a decade.

The full spectrum is really more like “authoritarian vs libertarian”. Political policy should really be split into two different spectrums. On one spectrum, you have financial policy. On the other, you have social policy. The two normally get lumped together because politicians campaign on both simultaneously. But in reality, they’re two separate policies. So the political spectrum should look less like a single left/right line, and more like an X/Y graph with individual points for each person’s ideology. Something more like this:

On this graph, as you go farther left, the government has more ownership and provides more, (and individuals own less because the government provides more for their needs). As you go farther up the chart, social policy gets more authoritarian. So for example, something on the far right bottom corner would be the Cyberpunk 2077/The Outer Worlds end-stage capitalist where megacorps inevitably own everything and have their own private laws.

Once you separate the two policies into a graph (instead of just a left/right line) it becomes clear why “small government” doesn’t necessarily correspond to “fewer laws” when dealing with politicians.

Imagine if people could choose what country they're browsing from.