u16

The UK government announced yesterday that it would follow Australia and enact a social media ban for under 16s by the end of the year. It's pretty infuriating for me that nobody is calling it what it actually is: Mandatory Age Verification. It won't be just 16 year olds that will be asked to verify their age - IT WILL BE ALL OF US. What then? What happens next? If Australia is anything to go by, all the tech-savvy kids will still be on TikTok and Instagram by using VPNs. What happens then? As we saw with the Online Safety Act, most age restricted websites can be bypassed with a VPN, so what happens to VPNs? The Labour government will go after VPNs, demanding they they are age restricted too. Internet freedoms are slowly being eroded until Sir Keir Starmer The Kid Starver can sit in his little den, checking what every single inhabitant of the UK is browsing/streaming/chatting about. Nobody will be allowed a pseudonym, all internet activity will be monitored and regulated with IRL…