Online Safety Act and Child Protection Debate

to force people to verify their age in order to access social media.

They needed to protect children.

Privately, though, they offered a different explanation.

In their submission to the High Court of England published last year,

the British government said that the principal part of the Online Safety Act had

nothing to do with protecting children.

Instead, they said, and I quote,

the main part of the Online Safety Act was aimed at capturing large

platforms with significant influence over public discourse.

Now, let's think about it.

They used protection of children as a pretext, where,

in fact, they wanted more control over political speech online.

And this is very sad,

because protecting children is exactly the same justification that

has been used in countless

other cases by authoritarian regimes

over the course of the last century.

Why? Because once somebody says child protection, all of a sudden it triggers

very ancient, very deep parts of our brain.

Who would be against protecting children?

Everybody is scared for the future of their offspring.

Once somebody says we need to protect the children, they're in danger,

it completely bypasses logic,

it bypasses debate,

it bypasses rationality.

All of a sudden,

people are ready to give up everything,

and authoritarian regimes were able to smuggle all kinds of repressive legislation

under the guise of protecting children.

Now, the same justification is being used by the European Commission

to push for a set of surveillance laws,

the so called chat control,

the chat control initiative.

For five years, the European Commission has been

trying to force

a new set of laws that would require every messaging

app to implement a backdoor to their encryption,

so that everything that we share online, every private message,

every private photo that we send using apps like Telegram or WhatsApp or

any other would be automatically monitored.