💥scrapping jury trials
💥cutting welfare and disability benefits
💥halving foreign aid
💥restricting protests for ‘cumulative disruption’
💥proscribing Palestine Action & arresting thousands of people for holding signs
💥AI boosterism
💥cosying up to Palantir & embedding them in the NHS
💥surveillance flights over Gaza & arms sales to Israel
💥allowing UK bases to be used for war in Iran
💥the most punitive asylum and immigration reforms in generations
💥halving the UK's contributions to the Green Climate Fund
💥banning social media for under 16s despite widespread opposition from child protection charities
💥taxing workers not wealth
💥refusing to nationalise water & energy or punish executives and companies pumping excrement into rivers
💥‘reforms’ to planning rules to remove environmental protections
💥freebies and cronyism scandals
💥a watered-down Employment Rights Bill
💥introducing policing via Live Facial Recognition using Israeli software used to “track, trace and abduct” thousands of Palestinians passing through checkpoints
💥 Peter Bloody Mandelson…
All brought to you by the most disliked Prime Minister since the introduction of modern polling, delivered to power with an unlawful slush fund filled with cash from millionaire and pro-Israeli donors.
Did anyone who voted Labour in 2024 expect this?
I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.
The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.
There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.
What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.
Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.
This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.
That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.
What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.
Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?
No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.
Starmer: We want to digitally ID everyone who uses social media
Brits: Absolutely Not!
Starmer: OK then, we want to ban under 16s from social media (by digitally ID-ing everyone)
Brits: OMG that’s a great idea. Idk what idiot would be against that 🥴
This is the tragedy for the young generation, we all see the writing on the wall for the country we love, we all know what needs to be done
But boomers hold the controls and are being radicalised to drive us off a cliff and we will spend the rest of our lives fixing their mess