It’s not like I don’t engage in politics online or irl, but I was kinda expecting this blog to be more about myself. However, with the events recently unfolding in the UK, more than ever we need to speak up about online survalence.

I have a huge huge problem everytime a government puts out a new piece of legislation or techology intended to “catch criminals” and more recently “protect the children”. Don’t get me wrong, there are some major issues like human traficking and child exploitation which happen daily and hurt many lives. However, I keep stressing to people that these can also be used for mass survalence of the population as well as censorship, not just of harmful or adult content, but of criticism against the government and resources for vulnerable people and minorities. The government gets to determine what is “harmful” or “indecent”, and more often than not this ends up being resources for queer people, mental health resources, whistleblowers, and impartial accounts of history.

The Online Safety Act of 2023 has set a precident that other countries like the United States and Australia are already following. Under this legislation, social media and online chat apps now have a responsibility to follow guildines set out by Ofcom, the regulatory body for internet safety, or face large fines. Already this has resulted in many apps requiring ID and pictures of your face in order to not only view nsfw material, but also basic functions such as DMs in the case of bluesky. Additionally, chat apps such as whatsapp are now required to scan for child pornography even though doing this will most definitely result in a compromise of privacy.

This is supposedly done to “protect the children”, and though that might be true at face value, in reality this results in the government having a large increase in power over what people get to see online. Additionally, a poor implementation of age verification could result in large amounts of people getting doxxed online. More importantly though, the government now has a large database of online identities and their corresponence to real life people, which could be used for survalence and targeting. This is particularly scary as a queer person since the internet is what allows us to converse safely, and getting exposed could result in violence and death.

Additionally, there are pieces of legislation on other countries that restrict access to social media for people under the age of 16. We’ve already seen the other implications of these laws, so we will take it at face value. There are many studies showing how social media is harmful to mental health and results in exploitation and radicalisation. However, restricting or eliminiating access to social media is not the answer. Many people online have said that social media and chat apps like Discord is how they met people, escaped situations of opression such as religious groups, abusive parents, and the alt right pipeline by being able to see the perspective of other people. I know people who have found their sexuality and gender through resources and by talking to other queer people online which they never would have gotten from their community irl because of conservitism in their area or country, or how small their irl community is. I can talk about people who have climbed out of depression and anxiety and people who have found fandoms which they feel included. All this would be taken away, allowing governments and groups to teach false information and turn otherwise caring and empathetic people into hate mobs, as well as being able to control them easier, simply because they have no other perspective or experience.

1984 is a book about an athoritarian government who controls its workers using fear, propaganda, and survalence for the sake of raw power over people. Within it, there is the telescreen, a device that broadcasts propaganda 24/7 but can also record audio and video without the people knowing exactly when. At first, I naively thought that this was a future that, though we were inevitable going to trend towards it, was far away, and that the people would notice before it took hold. However, with legislation like this and other events such as payment brokers prohibiting nsfw material and the supreme court ruling over trans women in the UK being pressured by large organisations of people, we are already at the stage where false information and utilising it for targeting is spreading to the masses easier and easier. “Online Safety” and “Criminal tracking” technology is simply the next step in allowing for censorship and survalence of the internet. Perhaps governments see how information can be spread freely by anyone on the internet and how it unites people together, and are afraid of it. They want to eliminate the people who could start rebelion, and leave only the people who further advance their goal of total control.

This is all just my word soup from a person typing at 5am in the morning, but I hope somewhere within this mess, someone was able to see the future we’re heading towards. I’m not advocating for anarchy, and catching large scale harm is a good thing. Ultimately though, we need to be able to keep governments in check in regards to these laws and others they may make.