Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozin:
[ColonelCassad] From the news: a new law on mass censorship has been adopted in Britain, which is officially called the "Online Safety Act". Under the slogan "protecting children from...". From what? Practically everything. Everything marked as 18+ (pornography, materials with elements of violence and other categories of "sensitive" materials) will be available only after passing identification through a passport, driver's license, bank data or biometric face verification.
Violation of these requirements by platforms threatens with draconian fines - up to 18 million pounds sterling or up to 10% of the company's annual global turnover.
As a result, the largest resources, such as Pornhub, XVideos, and Airbnb, chose to block access for British users completely, regardless of age. And on Twitter, for example, age verification is only available with a premium subscription, no matter how old you are. This means that the lion's share of posts are censored.
All messengers and private correspondence are subject to mandatory control. The law requires online services to monitor illegal content even in private chats, including messengers with end-to-end encryption protection. WhatsApp and Signal have already said that if the government tries to force them to crack encryption, the companies will prefer to leave the British market entirely, and Telegram has introduced mandatory age verification.
A fine has been introduced for teenagers for searching content prohibited for them [18+]. This law was developed and discussed for more than six years, was finally adopted by the British Parliament and signed by the king on October 26, 2023, but its main provisions came into force precisely now.
France, Sweden and Germany plan to adopt similar laws.
Here, the author of these lines involuntarily recalls what I myself wrote in 2013, when similar processes began in Russia.
And then I wrote the following: "It is not harmful to remind that "perestroika" itself began a quarter of a century ago under the main and then seemingly indisputable slogan of "glasnost", the abolition of censorship. All the achievements of the past decades - social, scientific, technical, industrial, etc. - were crossed out and swept into the dustbin of history with one careless movement: but then there was no glasnost! there was no freedom of speech! And, therefore, all of this is absolutely worthless. At that time, few people understood that "glasnost" and all civil liberties (speech, press, assembly, etc.) were needed by the reborn late Soviet "elite" for about the same purpose as a house thief needs a lock.
Only in order to appropriate the people's property and throw overboard the red Soviet ideology, which strictly forbade such appropriation. Without "liberties" it would be quite difficult to arrange such a fraudulent operation. And after this operation was successfully carried out, it was the turn to throw the freedoms themselves overboard."