The UK's Online Safety Act doesn't just age-gate porn; it blocks material deemed "harmful" to minors. Days after the law went into effect, reports of non-explicit content on social media getting blocked in the region started to crop up. Subreddits from r/IsraelCrimes to r/stopsmoking are now walled in the UK. Video games, Spotify, and dating apps have instituted or will institute age checks.
Given the SCOTUS age verification decision [June '25], Stabile fears that people [in the US] will go "mask off" in the fall and spring, when state legislatures start getting back together. "People are going to attempt to restrict the internet even more aggressively," Stabile said. "I think people are going to work to restrict all sorts of content, particularly LGBTQ content, but also content that is broadly defined as any sort of threat or propaganda to minors." Other experts Mashable spoke to agree with him.
"I'm going to jump to the end step," [Eric Goldman, law professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law] said. "The end step is that most online users are going to be required to age authenticate most of the time they visit websites. That's going to become the norm." In a paper he wrote, Goldman called these statutes "segregate-and-suppress" laws.
The stated reason behind these laws is to "protect children." But as journalist Taylor Lorenz pointed out, in the UK, age verification is already preventing children from accessing vital information, such as about menstruation and sexual assault.
"When we see crackdowns on spaces on the internet, we're essentially stripping away that potential for self-actualization," Goldman said. We've reached the dystopian stage of the internet, he added.
Sure but the common ground isn't necessarily a good thing. It lets you retreat from in person community because you found someone to hang with that you have never met in person. It does encourage some healthy behaviors like work on interesting hobbies - but the homogenizing affects are worse. It has practically halted the evolution of small cultures and arts across the globe because they thrived in isolation. The world is too small; too mundane now. There is no wonder about what's abroad. Everything is at your fingertips and it's at everyone else's too.
My in-person community was toxic and abusive, and I didn't even realize it until I found a warm, accepting, and much healthier online community to compare with. "Retreating" was a survival need. I'm glad your offline community isn't harmful to you but don't assume that is the case for everyone.
I'm also part of one of those small artistic cultures you mentioned and it evolved and thrived way more with the arrival of the internet than it ever did in the days of small in-person gatherings and physical-only publishing. Art is furthered by cultural contact and mutual exchange of ideas, not isolation.
Now, you do have a point that there is a problem with homogeneity and stagnation these days, but the real cause of it is late-stage capitalism. The harder it is for the average person to make a living, the more they are forced to focus all of their energy on making money. For an artist, that means not having any time for masterpieces or experimental projects because Fast and Marketable is the only way to make rent. Arts and culture are starving because a small number of billionaires are sucking up all the financial nutrients (and then passing censorship laws to cut down anything that still manages to grow, until the only things left are as boring and mundane as they are.)
kind of an insane take to say common ground is not a good thing.
the alternative was historically constantly warring tribes.
best example for it is the european union. former enemies peacefully deciding on common ground. the result: most peaceful time in european history.
You're comparing treaties to upvotes. They're different things.