Olu Online

online safety act

Last updated 2 weeks, 4 days ago

the online safety act was passed in october 2023. enforcement started on the 25th july 2025, four days ago as of writing. it's the reason that reddit, bluesky and porn sites are asking to see your face or your identification. many helpful forums and mastodon servers have pre-emptively shut, and the open rights group has a list of sites blocked due to osa.

the three genders, I mean, age verification techniques:

give us 5p phrenology give us your passport

I was going to write a whole piece for my "o" blog post on the online safety act but loads of people have said it better and it's still happening lol!

— Olu Niyi-Awosusi (@olu.online) 23 July 2025 at 23:20

this is being done under the guise of protecting children, and i understand that many people don't want them to accidentally or purposely come across adult or distressing content, but it's been clear that the roll-out of this has not led to these consequences. unless it was intended to shutter small sites, cause a lawsuit with wikipedia, or such a huge surge in vpn usage that the government maybe considered banning them1, anyway. the age verification techniques themselves, such as video selfies, can be circumvented by simply scanning a face in a video game.

i consider myself pretty engaged with matters of technology ethics and try to read the news, and "follow the pulse", and yet i'd never heard of this until i saw people on bluesky dissing their implementation of the rules a few weeks ago. i'm shocked and can't wrap my head around how that can happen, not personally, but because of how far reaching the implications of the act are.

shot:

As you will be painfully aware by now, Ofcom’s implementation of the UK’s Online Safety Act requires all services in scope – which, in their view, means 90% of the sites and apps in the world, as long as they can be accessed in the UK – to perform a risk assessment.

— heather burns, mephistopheles and the original sin

i was not painfully aware on initial reading. read the whole thing, it's worth it.

chaser:

Proportionality is a core principle of the Act and is in-built into its duties. As regulator for the online safety regime, Ofcom must consider the size and risk level of different types and kinds of services when recommending steps providers can take to comply with requirements. Duties in the Communications Act 2003 require Ofcom to act with proportionality and target action only where it is needed.

Some duties apply to all user-to-user and search services in scope of the Act. This includes risk assessments, including determining if children are likely to access the service and, if so, assessing the risks of harm to children. While many services carry low risks of harm, the risk assessment duties are key to ensuring that risky services of all sizes do not slip through the net of regulation. For example, the Government is very concerned about small platforms that host harmful content, such as forums dedicated to encouraging suicide or self-harm. Exempting small services from the Act would mean that services like these forums would not be subject to the Act’s enforcement powers. Even forums that might seem harmless carry potential risks, such as where adults come into contact with child users.

— anti-osa government petition response from the uk gov

how will this impact the small and smaller web? how will they survive in a world/uk where even the ability to hyperlink is incriminating? i worry that big players in social media who already dominate our minds and time online have the resources to play along, and "the little forum that could" actually can't under these circumstances, driving even more online communities into whatsapps and discords.

things to do

the eff's petition is as of writing down for maintenance but maybe keep an eye on it and their output. i'll add other resources to this post after sharing if anyone has any suggestions for things to do.

this piece is part of my attempt at alphabet superset, a “6-month” creative challenge (i passed a year in september 2024 — with a long break! — and the creator of the challenge hasn’t finished yet either). other posts so far: abolition, bump, boost, culture, discussion, english, formulaic, gone, home, immortality, jargon, knowledge, leaving, monotony and no.

if you liked this post, please:

  1. this was from guido fawkes and i can't find any reputable sources for the claim or counter claim that the tech secretary of the labour party said it wouldn't happen, so meh.↩

#alphabet-superset