Britain’s latest online safety act now wants its residents to verify that they’re over 18 to visit any site that might have potentially explicit content on it, including Wikipedia, Discord, and a number of other innocuous apps. There are immediate issues with such a broad decision – many forums, valuable sources of hobbyist information for everything from fishkeeping to welding to crochet are going to be age-gated because yes, they are social media. As a result, arts that are already struggling to carry on (think arts like tatting, watchmaking, Irish crochet…) are going to hit yet another barrier in being passed on to the next generation. The larger implications of blocking websites like Wikipedia, barring teenagers access to information they’ll need to be informed adults, are currently being hammered out in British courts, but it’s not looking good.
Australia is in equally dire straits, fully blocking teenagers and children under the age of 15 from accessing ‘social media’ in the name of protecting them.
What are the longterm consequences of such a decision?
As many children’s rights activists point out, adults in Australia can now film their children for vlog content, and the child can’t watch it on the platform it’s been uploaded to. Children are being treated like pets at best and inanimate objects that will one day turn into people at worst. The whole decision rings hollow when other, more pressing issues affecting children’s welfare (in Britain, for example, plenty of kids are going hungry as a result of a benefits cap (here: https://endchildpoverty.org.uk/two_child_limit/), and in the U.S., four states allow for marriage with no lower age limit (Wikipedia has a chart here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States)), so the reality of the decision for anyone who knows these things is that this is not for the sake of the children, it’s for the sake of wrangling the internet.
Why block Wikipedia to protect children? Wikipedia has awesome pictures of dinosaurs on it! But Wikipedia also has the historical record of British archeology, which sometimes featured Britain simply taking culturally significant items from other countries and then not returning them, among lighter examples of behavior Britain’s government might not want its younger citizens knowing.
Simply gatekeeping the internet, shooting from the hip with a shotgun like this, is an obvious ploy to maintain power and prevent children from accessing relatively unbiased materials that might concern the government, leaving them with exclusively the materials the government has whitelisted, instead of the way it has historically been where offensive materials were blacklisted instead, leaving the rest of the space open to access.
Sources: https://endchildpoverty.org.uk/two_child_limit/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_marriage_in_the_United_States
