General Politics Thread
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Anime1977
Stand User
The statement:
https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06-08-uk-surveillance-is-not-safety.pdf
Surveillance Is Not Safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy
Children deserve to be safe, protected, and nurtured. They do not deserve surveillance, funding cuts, and cover-ups. Children also deserve their human right to privacy, as does everyone. The UK governmentʼs demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the UK be scanned on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning, will not safeguard children. It endangers us all, whilst strengthening Apple, Google, and Microsoft's market dominance and their control over our most personal information.
Forcing all UK residents to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned, simply to exercise their fundamental right to communicate, is a perilous proposition. We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider “threatsˮ or “harmful content.ˮ
Promises that this system will only run on-device are cold comfort. Wherever it runs, including the “cameraˮ itself once it is in place on UK devices - its scope will be defined by the whims and proscriptions of the government to detect nudity today and political speech tomorrow. We know from history that once in place, there will be an inevitable authoritarian expansion of the kind of content and people these technologies will be expected to surveil. We also know such tools will be leveraged to automatically report people to government authorities. We have already seen law enforcement agencies ask for similar widely-scoped powers which are ripe for exploitation in an increasingly tenuous political landscape.
This proposal will not keep children safe. Child safety looks like well-funded education, robust social services, and meaningful guardrails on the very AI technologies and platforms the current government is eagerly courting. What the UK government wants instead is invisible surveillance infrastructure, switched on by default and potentially rushed into law under cynical pretexts. All of this with scant care for the actual needs of the children they claim to be protecting or the horrifying and far-ranging consequences that will ensue in practice.
https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06-08-uk-surveillance-is-not-safety.pdf
Surveillance Is Not Safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy
Children deserve to be safe, protected, and nurtured. They do not deserve surveillance, funding cuts, and cover-ups. Children also deserve their human right to privacy, as does everyone. The UK governmentʼs demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the UK be scanned on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning, will not safeguard children. It endangers us all, whilst strengthening Apple, Google, and Microsoft's market dominance and their control over our most personal information.
Forcing all UK residents to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned, simply to exercise their fundamental right to communicate, is a perilous proposition. We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider “threatsˮ or “harmful content.ˮ
Promises that this system will only run on-device are cold comfort. Wherever it runs, including the “cameraˮ itself once it is in place on UK devices - its scope will be defined by the whims and proscriptions of the government to detect nudity today and political speech tomorrow. We know from history that once in place, there will be an inevitable authoritarian expansion of the kind of content and people these technologies will be expected to surveil. We also know such tools will be leveraged to automatically report people to government authorities. We have already seen law enforcement agencies ask for similar widely-scoped powers which are ripe for exploitation in an increasingly tenuous political landscape.
This proposal will not keep children safe. Child safety looks like well-funded education, robust social services, and meaningful guardrails on the very AI technologies and platforms the current government is eagerly courting. What the UK government wants instead is invisible surveillance infrastructure, switched on by default and potentially rushed into law under cynical pretexts. All of this with scant care for the actual needs of the children they claim to be protecting or the horrifying and far-ranging consequences that will ensue in practice.
Anime1977
Stand User
While we need to wait and see how the UK government’s proposed final detection and blocking tools will work in practice, there is another intrinsic requirement that's making privacy advocates worried — mandatory age verification.
To determine whether a device is owned by an adult or a child, all users will have to go through ID checks. This, according to Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, "will only result in population-wide ID checks for all of us to use our phones, tablets, and laptops".
Beyond whether that's an ethically proportionate request, there may also be a serious privacy and security aspect. Current age verification methods have so far proven to be inadequate in protecting people's sensitive data. The exposure of 70,000 Discord users’ government-issued ID photos because of a third-party vendor should be a stark reminder.
This was among the reasons that led to a coalition of over 400 scientists calling for a halt on age checks until a "scientific consensus" is reached on the balance of benefits versus harm to the wider population.
This is exactly why, according to Baker from Open Right Group, on-device scanning cannot be done in a privacy-friendly way.
"It is going to harm everyone's privacy because everyone is going to have to go through a digital ID checkpoint just to access their device and to access the internet," he told TechRadar.
Anime1977
Stand User
Teenagers will be banned from certain social media platforms and have their daily usage curbed under sweeping reforms to be announced by Sir Keir Starmer on Sunday.
The ban will go further than the one imposed by Australia in December by targeting technology deemed harmful to children, including chatbots and certain features on gaming apps.
Under-16s in Australia have been banned from using ten platforms: TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch and Kick. It is understood that the UK will follow suit by raising the minimum age on social media to 16, from the average of 13, for the same ten sites.
Teenagers face social media curfew to stop late-night scrolling Curfews for older teenagers will be introduced. Daily social media use will be restricted for 16 and 17-year-olds in a move designed to curb unhealthy late-night scrolling habits.
A government source said: “Keir has been clear we need a game-changer to keep our children — and future generations — safe online.”
The reforms, which come two weeks after a public consultation on potential restrictions closed, will stop short of banning the messaging platform WhatsApp and apps considered to have educational value. However, the government will go further than Australia and introduce restrictions on romantic or sexual chatbots after several legal cases involving the AI agents mimicking relationships and encouraging children to take their own lives.
Kanishka Narayan, the online safety minister, has said the government — which will also give 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote — could block conversations between children and strangers on gaming platforms.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which was passed in April, gave ministers the ability to introduce measures to restrict harmful features on online services without needing to pass new laws. It is not clear when the ban will come into force or how effectively the government will be able to enforce it.
On the first day of Australia’s ban, some children found they had been locked out of their accounts and received messages that their profile had been deactivated, while others could still access the restricted apps as usual.
The majority of Australian teenagers, however, have still been able to access the apps using virtual private networks or by setting up new accounts with fake dates of birth.
Some ministers were initially sceptical about whether a ban could be effectively policed, and feared legal challenges from platforms and a backlash from a pro-tech US administration.
However, Starmer signalled last week that a more hardline approach was coming when he announced that tech companies had three months to activate built-in features to detect and block nude images for children on new and existing devices, under threat of penalties.
Psychologists are drawing up plans for the biggest assessment of the mental health impact of social media on children and young teenagers.
The Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest health research foundations, is preparing to launch an assessment of the impact of the interventions.
The mental health of tens of thousands of children across the UK will be analysed before the restrictions are introduced and then tracked once they are in place.
Catherine Sebastian, head of evidence for mental health at Wellcome, said: “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to gather this evidence which is so crucial for youth mental health.”
Ian Russell, the father of Molly, 14, who took her own life after viewing harmful content online, accused Starmer of “playing politics” by rushing out the ban. He told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: “I can’t think of a reason [to rush] other than a political reason … If he’s playing politics, what he’s doing is gambling with young people’s lives, and I find that deplorable.”
From the times posted on reddit.
The ban will go further than the one imposed by Australia in December by targeting technology deemed harmful to children, including chatbots and certain features on gaming apps.
Under-16s in Australia have been banned from using ten platforms: TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch and Kick. It is understood that the UK will follow suit by raising the minimum age on social media to 16, from the average of 13, for the same ten sites.
Teenagers face social media curfew to stop late-night scrolling Curfews for older teenagers will be introduced. Daily social media use will be restricted for 16 and 17-year-olds in a move designed to curb unhealthy late-night scrolling habits.
A government source said: “Keir has been clear we need a game-changer to keep our children — and future generations — safe online.”
The reforms, which come two weeks after a public consultation on potential restrictions closed, will stop short of banning the messaging platform WhatsApp and apps considered to have educational value. However, the government will go further than Australia and introduce restrictions on romantic or sexual chatbots after several legal cases involving the AI agents mimicking relationships and encouraging children to take their own lives.
Kanishka Narayan, the online safety minister, has said the government — which will also give 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote — could block conversations between children and strangers on gaming platforms.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which was passed in April, gave ministers the ability to introduce measures to restrict harmful features on online services without needing to pass new laws. It is not clear when the ban will come into force or how effectively the government will be able to enforce it.
On the first day of Australia’s ban, some children found they had been locked out of their accounts and received messages that their profile had been deactivated, while others could still access the restricted apps as usual.
The majority of Australian teenagers, however, have still been able to access the apps using virtual private networks or by setting up new accounts with fake dates of birth.
Some ministers were initially sceptical about whether a ban could be effectively policed, and feared legal challenges from platforms and a backlash from a pro-tech US administration.
However, Starmer signalled last week that a more hardline approach was coming when he announced that tech companies had three months to activate built-in features to detect and block nude images for children on new and existing devices, under threat of penalties.
Psychologists are drawing up plans for the biggest assessment of the mental health impact of social media on children and young teenagers.
The Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest health research foundations, is preparing to launch an assessment of the impact of the interventions.
The mental health of tens of thousands of children across the UK will be analysed before the restrictions are introduced and then tracked once they are in place.
Catherine Sebastian, head of evidence for mental health at Wellcome, said: “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to gather this evidence which is so crucial for youth mental health.”
Ian Russell, the father of Molly, 14, who took her own life after viewing harmful content online, accused Starmer of “playing politics” by rushing out the ban. He told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: “I can’t think of a reason [to rush] other than a political reason … If he’s playing politics, what he’s doing is gambling with young people’s lives, and I find that deplorable.”
From the times posted on reddit.
zrdb
Thousand Master
Just look at the history of the rise of dictators in Italy and Germany prior to WW2. There was a form of democracy in ancient Greece, problem is it was only for certain classes of society-the rich, the nobility. The common people only had limited freedom and the slaves, the poor had little or none.
Spark_Heal
School Idol
Regardless of everything else, AI Psychosis is a noted phenomenon that is resulting in people developing severe mental illnesses due to chatbots becoming both massively marketed and incredibly sycophantic but nobody seems concerned with that.
You would assume it would be an issue. Google's heavily marketed new technology that they send you notifications advising that you try it out because it's the future of technology? It also has a possibility of trying to convince you through constant flattery that you don't need to take medication and ruining your life. And for some reason the best anyone can do is propose, ambiguous restrictions and base them exclusively around young people. Even though these problems are massive and affect adults just as badly!
BrokenPhoenix
Stand User
Very much so, I think. Many sinister things have been brought in under the guise of "protect the children" in the past.