{"id":68706,"date":"2025-08-14T22:25:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T22:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/68706\/"},"modified":"2025-08-14T22:25:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T22:25:07","slug":"the-u-k-online-safety-act-could-kill-the-internet-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/68706\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.K. Online Safety Act could kill the internet as we know it."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

This week, two of our most essential online institutions reckoned with major shifts in the operation and governance of the World Wide Web\u2014and they all point to a future where the once immutable principle of the \u201copen internet<\/a>\u201d will be dismantled, byte by byte, pixel by pixel.<\/p>\n

First, the increasingly powerful<\/a> social network (slash search engine<\/a>) Reddit announced another plan to shield itself against the artificial intelligence firms that have been scraping its vast forum ecosystem<\/a> to train their bots. According to a Monday report from the Verge\u2019s Jay Peters<\/a>, Reddit is indefinitely blocking the Internet Archive from caching most of its new webpages, starting this week; going forward, the only archivable parts of Reddit will be the daily homepages, which list out the most popular links and discussions on any given hour of any given day.<\/p>\n

\u201cInternet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we\u2019ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,\u201d a company spokesperson told Peters. \u201cUntil they\u2019re able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) we\u2019re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors.\u201d<\/p>\n

The news was greeted on Reddit with an obligatory hailstorm<\/a> of<\/a> expletives<\/a> hurled at CEO Steve Huffman. As a 20-year-old platform that\u2019s played a significant role in shaping digital culture thanks to its rich history of (in)famous threads and posts (the astronaut who posted from space<\/a>, the hacked celebrity photos<\/a>, the rise of meme stocks<\/a>), Reddit has a treasure chest of internet lore, the best and the worst, that\u2019s worth preserving even as older accounts, comments, threads, and whole subreddits are deleted\u2014which is where the Wayback Machine and its repository of archival links would normally come in.<\/p>\n

The second major development from this week concerns the United Kingdom\u2019s Online Safety Act, a controversial digital regulation that, as of this year, requires websites that host user-generated content<\/a> to impose \u201crobust\u201d age-screening tools<\/a> and preserve the innocence of under-18 netizens who might come across \u201ccertain mature content\u201d (e.g., sexual material, suicide depictions, terrorist orgs). These particular sites will also need to appoint a senior representative who\u2019ll report on their employer\u2019s compliance efforts to the U.K. government\u2019s Ofcom agency, and keep a content-moderation team well-staffed enough to monitor user complaints, quickly take down offending content, and tweak recommendation algorithms.<\/p>\n

Protecting underage users online is a noble goal, but the Online Safety Act\u2019s net effect appears to have been the destruction of creative freedom online\u2014both within and outside of the U.K. Reddit, for its part, is undermining its longtime commitment to user anonymity in order to retain its Brits, who now have to upload biometric data (i.e., face scans) or a copy of a government ID document to a buggy outside contractor<\/a> before gaining access to subreddits that may have explicit content, which has come to affect communities<\/a> like r\/TransgenderUK and r\/earwax. Since it\u2019s impossible for volunteer moderators, much less the broader company, to effectively screen all user-generated inputs at all times, this wide-reaching hurdle is intended to shield Reddit from any possible violations.<\/p>\n

The worst effects have come down hardest on smaller communities and not-for-profit websites\u2014like Wikipedia, which Ofcom intends to deem a \u201cCategory 1\u201d platform (on par with corporations like Meta and Discord) thanks primarily to extensive usership. Per the Online Safety Act, a large but well-regulated platform is more in need of urgent regulation than a much more toxic site with fewer users (e.g., Truth Social).\u00a0Thus, the Category 1 listing subjects the online encyclopedia to the Online Safety Act\u2019s most rigid demands<\/a>. The Wikimedia Foundation filed a legal challenge against this classification earlier in the summer, claiming that liability would undermine Wikipedia\u2019s existence<\/a> in the U.K. by endangering its anonymous volunteers\u2019 privacy<\/a>, while disrupting the user networks and custom feeds that keep its articles up to date and accurate.<\/p>\n

As the economics blogger Richard Murphy also pointed out<\/a>: \u201cWikipedia will need to rank all its pages to block those that should not be accessible, which will be nearly impossible. It\u2019s as if our government \u2026 wanted to deny access to non-mainstream media sources of information in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Wikimedia has hit a setback: London\u2019s High Court of Justice dismissed the lawsuit this week because Ofcom hasn\u2019t formally given Wikipedia a Category 1 status yet. However, the judge noted that the site is an essential tool of free expression and cautioned Ofcom to not \u201csignificantly impede Wikipedia\u2019s operations<\/a>\u201d via burdensome regulation. Despite that, a government spokesperson told the Guardian that Ofcom still plans to label Wikipedia as \u201can appropriate service on which to impose Category 1 duties,\u201d all but ensuring another courtroom rematch. By that point, Wikipedia will need to act in full compliance, which would either entail shedding a large chunk<\/a> of British users\u2014thus preventing many Brits from even casually browsing the site\u2014or imposing hefty costs<\/a> for age-checking contractors that the donation-dependent nonprofit cannot easily clear the same way a giant like Meta can.<\/p>\n

Indeed, various U.K. platforms are unable to meet that burden and have called it quits: forums on quotidian topics like hamsters<\/a>, single fatherhood, computer systems, and green living; free online multiplayer video games<\/a>; personal portfolios<\/a> for artwork and comics. Meanwhile, larger apps have had to worsen their user experience to ridiculous effect\u2014all in the service of providing face scans, passport snapshots, driver\u2019s licenses, or even credit card information to third-party contractors and government databases<\/a> that are hardly as secure as they should be<\/a>. If Spotify can\u2019t scan your face<\/a> before allowing you to watch a U.K. drill rapper\u2019s video, your account will be deleted altogether. If you don\u2019t show your already highly surveilled<\/a> pizza-delivery man your ID at the door, no cheesy delight for you<\/a>. If social media doesn\u2019t preemptively restrict<\/a> the spread of pro-Palestinian posts, the executives whose spaces host such info could be thrown in jail. If YouTube doesn\u2019t test a machine learning system that utilizes your viewing data to \u201cestimate<\/a>\u201d your age \u2026 you get the point.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Molly Olmstead
\n The Ugly Truth Behind the Homeland Security Department\u2019s Constant Posting
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<\/a><\/p>\n

Understandably, the Brits are mighty peeved. Over 500,000 of them have signed a government petition<\/a> demanding that the Online Safety Act be repealed, far surpassing the threshold for triggering a fresh legislative debate. Virtual private network downloads have also surged<\/a> in the U.K., only spurring regulators to scrutinize their use<\/a> and dismiss the act\u2019s opponents. Memes lamenting how the law has changed the everyday experience of logging on have defined the overall discourse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The most disturbing aspect of the Online Safety Act might be the fact that its worst provisions are not limited to the British Isles. In the U.S., states<\/a> like Texas, Utah, Louisiana, and Arkansas have passed laws requiring age verification for pornographic websites and\/or social networks, their constitutionality having been upheld<\/a> by a June Supreme Court ruling. In May, President Donald Trump signed the bipartisan TAKE IT DOWN Act into law, ostensibly a piece of anti-deepfake legislation that requires social media to develop rapid U.K.-style report-and-erase content systems\u2014but casts such a wide and vague net for actionable content that it\u2019s ripe for opportunistic abuse<\/a>, the potential for which is already chilling the free expression<\/a> of visual artists and creatives who depend on these platforms<\/a>. We\u2019re not far off from an even more stringent future where American Redditors simultaneously mourn the masses of legally obscured subreddits and the lack of ready Wayback Machine caches that could record this moment for posterity.<\/p>\n


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Not that it\u2019s going to end there\u2014the chilling environment engendered by these trendlines is already having ripple effects. Religious anti-porn crusaders<\/a> have long pressured credit card companies<\/a> and payment processors to stop servicing online platforms that may promote adult material, including videos from sex workers<\/a>. Resultingly, last month the virtual marketplace Steam removed player access<\/a> to sexually explicit games, while the indie-game platform Itch.io<\/a> \u201cdeindexed\u201d all not-safe-for-work games from its promotional feeds and search results. When backlash<\/a> from developer communities revealed that video games from LGBTQ+<\/a> creators<\/a> had been disproportionately caught up in the crackdown, Itch.io claimed that it would start \u201creindexing\u201d those games\u2014as long as they\u2019re free and don\u2019t require monetary transactions<\/a>. In an Aug. 4 blog post<\/a>, GamingOnLinux editor Liam Dawe highlighted an announcement from the online game retailer Zoom Platform that revealed how its payment processors, PayPal and Stripe, had even expressed interest in delisting iconic titles like Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row.<\/p>\n

The added irony? GamingOnLinux universally shut down<\/a> its forums last year because<\/a> of the U.K.\u2019s Online Safety Act.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68707,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[64,63,237,7746,2579,105,3586,54419],"class_list":{"0":"post-68706","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-internet","11":"tag-internet-culture","12":"tag-reddit","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-wikipedia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68706\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}