The UK Online Safety Act 2023 is now in Effect and is a Disaster

Do I even need to say it at this point? Increasingly, as we march lock-step into a blend of Judge Dredd and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep sci-fi rather than Star Trek, more and more governments are finding ways to actively do stupid things “in the name of online safety.” The latest being the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023, which went into effect on July 25th, 2025. As with every single one of these bills going into effect, people realize that the idea of “safety” for the children is just another act of the nanny state and a select few trying to puppet you into a puritanical moral system.

If you aren’t aware, the UK Online Safety Act 2023 requires any online user in the UK who wishes to view material perceived as “adult” or “for adults” by the government to upload an image of their face or their photo-ID to certain apps. Each app is decided by which site you wish to enter, and the image you are uploading goes to the server of whichever app you are required to use. A good example of this would be Discord, which has millions of active users and uses K-ID for its age verification. However, K-ID is also a company based in Singapore, so it’s a foreign private tech entity storing your private information.

The obvious problem here is that private companies get hacked all the time, for one reason or another. However, that isn’t the problem here, as while using K-ID, people have found they could just upload images of game characters like Sam Porter-Bridges (Norman Redus), and nothing is checked beyond that. Not only is it ineffective at getting around it easily or could be hacked at any moment, releasing thousands of images of people’s actual IDs, but these things are being endorsed by governments and non-profits aligned with regulation, such as the ESRB.

Within hours and minutes of the bill going into effect, VPNs have surged in popularity in the UK. Some are also turning to TOR browsers. For legal reasons now and in the future, I’m not suggesting you get or engage in any of that. Often, these options have other activities connected to them. The least of which is online torrenting and accessing “The Dark Web.” The fact of the matter is, VPN sales in particular have gone up, and not just within the UK, but also in France, when it put in place a similar law banning PornHub.

Ahead of the change in law, Nexus Mods even announced that it would be removing access to all mods with sexual or adult content in the UK and EU. Before someone waves a stars and stripes flag, yelling “freedom” and “USA!” it is important to point out that in June, the US Supreme Court upheld Texas’ porn ID law, HB 1181. Restriction of online material, sexual or not, is very much en vogue right now across the globe, and it is done by idiots for idiots in the name of idiocy.

Should we be stopping kids from viewing pornography? Yes, absolutely! Should we be making it the wild west of uploading your ID and metaphorically hoping you don’t catch an STD? No, I think there should be more thought and an active process put into this, more so in a way that doesn’t negatively impact people who are actively sticking to the law. There are people who may just want to view something that is aimed at adults because they are an adult. Now, notice how I didn’t say pornography there? That’s because not everything that’s “adult” or “for adults” is hardcore pornography.

As well as seeing a massive uptick in governments trying to restrict what you, as a fully-grown adult, can view on the internet, many governments are increasingly signing anti-LGBTQ+IA laws. What is to stop, say, the UK government, which just recently (thanks to the UK Supreme Court) ruled in favor of the very transphobic For Women Scotland (the scum of Scotland), having the 2010 Equality Act redefine women, from deeming all LGBTQ+IA material as “adult” or “for adults?” The US government is actively erasing all LGBTQ+IA material from government services, including getting rid of LGBTQ+IA Suicide Prevention Hotlines.

What point is it that you realize the anti-porn, anti-LGBTQ+IA, all the rest of these beige people, and many governments are marching hand-in-hand to restrict everything you see? Is it now, when they are claiming it is for “the safety of the children” as they poorly implement these stupid and archaic laws ineptly? Or is it when you are trying to look at a piece of entertainment that has no sex involved but goes against another one of these ideas that “need to be” suppressed for the safety of you and the children?

This Online Safety Act 2023 wasn’t brand new; I’d known about it since before, around, and after BREXIT, when this law and others like it were first proposed and canceled. I have said since then, and of course continue to do so, that this blanket ban of certain terms and material deemed to be adult is stupid. Not only is it stupid in concept for the way that it was suggested to be implemented, but those who argued for it (Theresa May as the face of it in particular) don’t understand half of what they were/are arguing for in the first place.

Originally, the idea back then was to blanket ban every website that was deemed to have porn on it. I think as a modern social media user, you might understand why that’s a bit difficult to do, given the fact that places like Twitter are littered with outright pornography. I don’t mean the Instagram level of OnlyFans models doing funny lip-synced skits in skimpy clothes, which is now practically banned in the UK under this law, but outright pornography right there in any major hashtag if you scroll just a little bit.

You might be thinking, “Well, what’s the harm in outright banning all of that?” At the time, Twitter wasn’t putting in a blanket ban on anything it viewed as pornographic, but with that new blanket ban in place and searching for a couple of things, different results are appearing. Searching for some explicit terms, the obvious things are removed in the UK. However, by searching other terms that aren’t inherently sexual, yet could test the waters, some media posts were lowered in the search. Some explicit material was removed, and some non-explicit material was also removed. The non-explicit term is simply “gay.”

Just the word gay on its own, no hashtag and no other words, saw a massive reduction in media in particular. A lot of which is just gay pornography, but some of it included a series of Drag Race clips which were removed in a tested UK-based search, a post on Wikipedia’s list of homophobic slurs, a Disney-style art piece of two men eating a sandwich, a post from 2023 about an all-inclusive bathroom, a picture of Wembly Way with pride flags, a picture of Lily Savage, and, of course the most explicitly homosexual act on the planet, a couple of pictures of Rhea Ripley on Monday Night RAW.

The funniest bit of all of this is that a post by an English-based trans-exclusionary group that hosted a trans-exclusionary lesbian, gay, and bi pride event was also removed from the same “gay” search. It wasn’t a post banned in the UK, but once again proving that these sweeping bans or flagged material, even on non-sexual terms, get caught up in the middle. It is that middle that is important here, because as I’ve said, young kids shouldn’t be looking at pornography. At the same time, what is caught in the middle could be important to someone.

I’m not saying pictures of a fully clothed female wrestler on internationally broadcast TV under a TV-PG banner on social media are important to someone’s life and well-being, but why that’s in the middle ground and removed from searches is important to note right now. This is why the banning and/or removal of terms and material that is considered “adult” or “for adults” is implemented very poorly by an inept few. That gray middle ground where images of Lily Savage, a young Ozzy Osbourne, and people simply (other than transphobes) celebrating pride are removed is a scary future where basic information could very well be eliminated.

So what is the solution? You’re not going to like this bit, but start with removing these useless and oftentimes ineffective laws. If you can use a game character to get past face-ID, it is useless. Having foreign private entities like K-ID storing images not only of your face or the face of video game characters is creepy, but if/when that server is hacked, everyone’s ID gets published. Then, we’re in a massive identity theft crisis, and the whole idea goes to pot. No one trusts it anymore, and then people start campaigning against this nonsense, finally.

The most realistic solution is to require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to do the checking and/or have a government-based ID-checking system. I’d rather the latter wasn’t the case in the first place, but at least it wouldn’t be a foreign third party that could very well sell your data. They’ll still sell it, though. So what would the ISP do? Well, basically, what mine does already. The same thing they have been doing every time you’ve tried to access Pirate Bay via Google Chrome without a VPN, block the site. You might not know this, but from your router settings, you can block or unblock explicit sites.

For the sake of the argument, staying true to stopping kids from easily getting access to said explicit material, I’m not going to give a step-to-step guide on how to do that. However, many routers have those blocks enabled by default. If you have young kids or teenagers and you don’t want them accessing these sorts of websites, there are plenty of ways you can do it. That’s the problem with this whole “for the children” argument. If you want parental controls to filter out explicit material, there are plenty of ways you could do it already without involving the Nanny State.

Are there things on the internet that are harmful? Absolutely, just as there are harmful things in school playgrounds. Not all playgrounds, but some of them have dangerous or harmful things going on. Saying that this photo ID thing is the only way to protect kids, especially with the likes of K-ID as the example in this article, is very narrow-minded and short-sighted. Having ISPs give paying customers the option of blocking explicit material, putting in place passwords on said material per household, and the already mentioned and established parental controls on your router are better, less invasive ways of doing all of this.

“Oh, but you just want kids watching porn!” No, as I’ve said, that’s a bad thing. However, I also know that not everyone in the country who uses the internet will have a photo ID, or more importantly, would be willing to upload images of that ID unfettered, going to the server of a third-party foreign private company.

It is said that just under or around 50% of US citizens have a valid passport (just to use that as an example), while many young adults in the UK don’t have a driver’s license. Elections in England, as recently as last year, particularly with the disabled and unemployed, found it harder to vote because they didn’t have photo ID. It might shock you to find someone who was previously homeless and is now unemployed might just be lacking a driver’s license or passport, which are the two most common forms of photo ID. In the UK, in particular, that’s more common than you think.

These porn bans and ID requirements aren’t about protecting the kids from specific sites like PornHub, but rather trying to claw back a socially conservative, traditionalist world view that is dominated by Western Judeo-Christian values. Values that not everyone in the country lives by, restricting their free will under the guise of “it’s for the children.” If you’re a parent and want to filter out words like “Porn,” you can already do so and have been able to for over a decade. You can also talk to your kids, teach them, have an honest discussion on it, and (like the gays), you can keep your talk about sex behind closed doors.