The way I see it, the question isn’t why should you want to make the Online Safety Act even tougher, but why shouldn’t you?
“That’s a fair question. I’ll take a crack at it.
Say I’m working for a platform. Biggish one. Thousands of users but not “big tech”. Somebody drops the Act on my desk. Sounds reasonable at first—protect users, reduce harm, be responsible. Fine.
Then I start reading. There’s the Act. Then the guidance. Then the Codes of Practice. Then the consultation on the guidance. And definitions of what words mean in them all. Pages and pages explaining what the other pages might mean once somebody decides what “reasonably practicable” or “reliably effective” is supposed to mean.
So I hire a lawyer. Then another one. Not to build anything—just to guess, in advance, what interpretation won’t get us fined. And if we guess wrong, it’s our problem, not the people who wrote it. So we play it safe. Everybody plays it safe. And we buy an add-on content-moderation tool, a safety system to spot these high risk users.
And maybe one of those outsourced safety system moderators flags a post from a teenager who’s panicking at three in the morning on a forum about their GCSE exam and getting all wound up. Maybe it’s all stress, maybe it’s angry, maybe it trips the algorithm ’cause it uses the wrong words in the wrong order. So it gets their account blocked. No appeal. No human is looking at their apology. Just an automated disappearance.
And maybe that kid doesn’t post there again. Instead they go looking for sites on the dark web that don’t ask their age, or worse, feeling so lonely.
Now the ministers are on TV sayin’, “This is about protecting children,” like that sentence ends the conversation. They get to make up their stats on online harm, and no journo corrects them. They don’t see the edge cases. It’s not their teens who’ve got no friends to have fun with since their gaming forum shut down, with cuts to local authority funding meaning we shut down their youth club and sports centre and now not participating in the online world means nowhere to go at all. They don’t see the quiet kids who can’t complain or LGBTQ minors who some loud people online would quite like to see disappear anyway. They don’t see the stuff that never trends on socials or in the TV media, happy to see their competitors for ad revenue taking a beating.
The ministers don’t have to.
And if something breaks, it’s not their platform that gets fined. It’s not their engineers rewriting policies at three in the morning. It’s not their social life in a community shutting down because compliance costs more than the site’s worth. It’s some small forum run by volunteers who closed the whole thing up ’cause they can’t afford a lawyer. It’s some barely twenty-something moderator in Kenya cleaning up the worst things humanity’s got to offer online for £3 an hour with no one to care about their mental health or seek support from, while they’re busy making the lives of rich white kids in the North matter, and our consciences lighter that we did something to make the UK “the safest place to go online”.
Meanwhile the biggest companies? They’re great. They get to collect even more data from even more parents ‘cos the MPs raised the age in the data protection laws of when parents need to hand over their data in fake ‘consent’ to agree their teen can access social media. Those Big Tech are laughing ‘cos now they get even more data to build their products from, and target their ads with. Regulation’s just a protective moat to keep everyone else out. They can afford the ambiguity on ‘safety’. The rules squeeze out the little guys, and the internet gets flatter, quieter, safer in the way padded rooms are safe.
And sure, we call it “safety.” But what we really did was increase the power imbalance even further in those Big Companies’ favour, gave them even more building material for their product-training to build digital copies of our kids. We replaced personal judgment with fear and State imposed control—fear of getting it wrong, fear of penalties that are very strong and clear even when the rules aren’t. And the kids told to show their bodies for “consent” that they don’t want to give, but they have to be “age checked” by strangers, just like migrants at the border. “Me too” is all good again, go on everyone, perform for the camera, show us a bit more of your body — your eyes, your voice, your face, show us your teeth in that smile — and give up your biometric privacy just to get on some crappy platform. And the State model controls the outliers, the rebels, the government critics, a model now copied by authoritarians in countries around the world who take our lead on how to shut down dissent from the out-of-hours-past-UK-kids-bedtime-screen-time-limits in the newest UK shutdown law.
So now the public square’s quieter. Everyone’s wondering why nobody speaks up anymore, why kids have learned that everything in life needs to be turned into a permissive curated performance, why every platform sounds like it was written by the same corporate risk committee. Why kids don’t trust their own judgment and have no sense of responsibility. Why protest is dead.
So what do I think?
I think if protecting people means swapping out one set of technology risks by choice for some other risks for all, from an obligatory set of companies chosen by the state, who’ll pass around my ID details, compromise my privacy, and mean the end of anonymity online, forcing all of us to show our bodies to strangers like some Black Mirror episode where not saying no is taken as yes, then I’m not a fan.
I’m holding out for something better.
Because if the solution to keeping children safe online is growing up in a world where risk is never good, where real safety means they have to hide their faces and not go online at all to stay private, where companies’ algorithmic controls decide how the next generation can or cannot show up or speak up to take part in the digital world, we might as well just tell teens their views do not count and abandon any hope for their future interest in democratic participation, tell them all to become Wraith Babes, and while we’re at it, they’ll choose to have no children at all.
Heck, we can even elect a BigTech fanboy President.”
The original Good Will Hunting (1997) – Job Interview at the NSA Scene | Movieclips