Lol what is going on over there. The UK is becoming more dystopian by the day.
It's not so easy to ban VPNs. They need to setup DPI everywhere. And then people will start using DPI circumvention software.
Just adopt a CCP style social credit system already. Why all of this pussyfooting around being a totalitarian, censorship focused, surveillance state? Just do it. Give the good people of UK a solid reason to be a little bit more French again.
There has been a widespread misconception that China operates a nationwide and unitary social credit "score" based on individuals' behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. Media reports in the West have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[4][5][6] In 2019, the central government voiced dissatisfaction with pilot cities experimenting with social credit scores. It issued guidelines clarifying that citizens could not be punished for having low scores and that punishments should only be limited to legally defined crimes and civil infractions. As a result, pilot cities either discontinued their point-based systems or restricted them to voluntary participation with no major consequences for having low scores.
What about all the people blocked from air travel due to low Social Credit? Are you saying that never happened?
People can be banned from airlines but they get banned for the same reasons they do in the US, like getting drunk on the plane and punching someone. Or like how the US bans people who owe child support from getting a passport, judges in China are allowed to ban people with unpaid child support or big enough unpaid fines from state owned airlines until they pay.
And there's the other shoe dropping with VPNs now. Didn't even take them an extra fucking year
Didn't even take a week.
(NOTE: Any links to politician tweets in this comment are from Nitter mirrors, not direct links to Elon Musk's nazi bar.)
The Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, pretty much called Nigel Farage a paedophile in a news network interview earlier today because he opposed the Online Safety Act, by saying he's on the side of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile.
He then went to Twitter and doubled-down on this stance:
If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.
This of course generated a lot of fury among the site's users.
For context, the Online Safety Act has been used to censor and age-gate anything and everything deemed "illegal content" under Ofcom guidelines. Any social media platforms must comply, else risk getting fined up to 10% of your annual global revenue. This is so broadly worded that it includes anything related to illegal immigration and people-smuggling (literally quoted in the GOV.UK page I linked.)
Twitter had genuinely been forced to censor all coverage around anti-asylum seeker protests behind age verification requirements, which has riled up a lot of right-wing politicians here. The reason for these protests is that the previous (Conservative) government had been paying exorbitant amounts of money to house asylum seekers in hotels, effectively lining the pockets of hotel chain executives - all while we deal with a massive housing and cost of living crisis.
This was meant to be a measure to give asylum seekers temporary accommodation which was put in place at the start of COVID, but has been government policy since 2020 with no end in sight.
Labour have also done jack-shit to resolve our skyrocketed (legal) immigration levels since they got into power, except for scrapping the Rwanda Deal which would have deported any illegal migrants to a third country for processing (which as the name obviously suggests, is the East African state of Rwanda.)
Zia Yusuf (head of Reform's DOGE division, yes they're ripping off Trump and Elon Musk) had this to say about the OSA on Twitter:
Britain is now a country which you can enter illegally without ID, but need photo ID to watch a protest against people entering without ID.
Let that sink in.
Labour have fucked up so catastrophically hard with how they've handled this legislation, that they've straight-up generated bipartisan sympathy for the leaders of a right-wing populist party - who are the only political force that have vowed to repeal the legislation because it is being used for mass surveillance and censorship.
Also, if you're thinking of voting Reform UK in 2029 (and it has honestly crossed my mind because age verification checks are a major sticking point for me), then you should take the pledges from Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf with a grain of salt. Richard Tice (the party's deputy leader) openly tweeted support for pushing through mandatory ID checks on social media four years ago.
If Labour don't get rid of Keir Starmer, do a full cabinet reshuffle and reverse course, we are going to see a Reform landslide in the next election...
Maybe if they see significant issues with the populace adhereing to this law they should identify the solution of revoking the unpopular law.
It's the populace that is wrong, not the lawmakers /s
I’d email my MP to ask why this Labour Government is using the BBC to promote Reform talking points and implementing brain dead Reform policies, but I don’t expect anything other than the blandest party line response.
apparently having a functioning brain isn't a requirement of being an mp
but of course we knew that when she did this in 2019:
On 16 July 2019, Champion stated: "If my party comes out as a remain party rather than trying to find a deal or >rather than trying to exit, I can't support that, it goes against democracy". She said she would rather support a "no-deal Brexit" than remain in the EU, as she believed Labour had to deliver the result of the 2016 referendum.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
