https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taki...

>"Nigel Farage ‘on the side of predators’ with Online Safety Act criticism, says Labour"

Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist?

The end goal here is digital ID and censorship. Compare this to the perennial efforts for encryption backdoors. If there is a characterization that accurately encompasses this, it is the illiberal, statist, authoritarian impulse. Sure, they used a sex-panic to advance their agenda. However, this is merely symptomatic of the larger illiberal trend towards authoritarianism and the expansion of the state.

First we hear that the people behind the push for online identity verification are Christian nationalists. Then, after being informed that the British Labour party is also pushing for the same measure, we hear that the common denominator between those factions is their crypto-fascism.

To call the Labour party fascist, you must be some sort of extreme Thatcherite. To call Christian nationalist fascists is somehow even less defensible, as fascism is strongly collectivist[1] and the American political Christian extremely individualistic.

This entire discussion points to a horrific crisis in civics education, which I believe can explain the increasingly authoritarian policies of modern western governments far better than some crypto-fascist plot.

[1] "Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State", The doctrine of Fascism by Mussolini

So... national socialists and National Christians have a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram... to deny or miss those parallels seems disingenuous or ill informed.

I'm not informed of the British political landscape, so I can't speak to that.

And no, not every Christian is a NACHRIST, and it also isn't a coincidence that NAZI's co-oped and used Christianity opportunistically when it suited them.

And it's near universal because fascism is the major exception as it really doesn't desire any conformity from the designated inferior. That's what distinguishes the policies of NSDAP from prior cases of anti-Jewish oppression - the Nazi party wasn't interested in conversions at all.

As such, you really shouldn't call anyone ill informed on political topics.

In the US however, this campaign came from the same think tanks and strategists associated with Project 2025 (taking cues from folks like Enough Is Enough), who are pretty upfront with their Christian Nationalist views. In Project 2025 they include a bizarre connection of porn with transgenderism that tips their hand on the religious bent to all this, but elsewhere in the plan outright state their Christian Nationalist ideals.

I expect the make-porn-illegal crusade is more common in the US than elsewhere.

Of course this just shows the English Dissenters ended up being quite influential on both the left and right over the course of Anglophone history.

The law could mandate that retail device OSs ship with a turnkey child safe mode complete with app and extensive site whitelists and run an educational campaign on the subject. But instead they've gone the needlessly invasive route which is telling about the true motives.

The law was passed in 2023 by the tories, and Ofcom has concluded what the tories asked them to do -- write the statutory instruments that implement the law.

The Labour government would have to repeal the law (really unlikely; governments don't usually rip down their predecessors' laws because if they did no progress would occur) or set the statutory instruments aside.

I think the "true motives" are what the law says. I don't think they will ban VPNs (which would support an alternative reading of motive).

I also, again, encourage US readers to understand that your own supreme court has rubber-stamped a law that requires US porn firms to do all this and more for the benefit of Texas, and there are 24 more state laws that have similar impacts.

Pretending this is just something crazy we Brits are doing out there on our own is disingenuous at best and often hypocritical and whiny at worst.

As it happens I am from the UK and have no particular love for the way the US handles things either. In fact one of my biggest problems is that it encourages us to send extra PII to some of the most odiously associated US companies out there.

But in general I don't think doggedly pursuing this route where children get access to the full internet sans some self-selecting sites with ID checks is the way to go. There's too much out there which is outside the realms of accountability. If everyone installs VPNs (which appears to be what's going on, especially given that far more than just pornography is being blocked this way) then guess what happens when the child borrows the shared family device?

People want a magical solution which exonerates caregivers from having to worry about this and shifts the burden elsewhere but unfortunately one doesn't exist and the online safety act certainly isn't it. Education and turnkey child proofing of devices are the only thing that will really help.

Strongly agree. It kills me that nobody is seriously discussing robust, industry-standard childproofing.

Even if you require a driver's license, how hard is it really to swipe your mom's ID from her purse and write down the serial number? There is no solution to this problem that doesn't require parents to actually parent their children a bit and lock down their devices.

Another factor is that a lot of sites won’t work well with a VPN these days. So you really need to keep switching back and forth, which is a pain (especially on mobile).

Preventing children from accessing porn has broad public support (as we might hope). That is very different to saying the OSA has broad public support though.

The YouGov survey results that have been much discussed in the past week came from three questions - one about age restrictions for porn, one about whether the new measures would be effective, and one about whether the person had heard of the new measures before the survey. The answers were essentially that the majority hadn't heard of the measures, almost everyone supported preventing kids from accessing porn, but the majority didn't think these measures would be effective in achieving that. Probably none of those results is very surprising for HN readers.

What is notably missing from the debate so far is any evidence about whether the public support the (probably) unintended consequences of the actual implementation of the OSA - which are what almost all of the criticism I am seeing is about. As with any political survey the answers probably depend very much on how you ask the questions and it's easy to get people to say they support "good" measures if you gloss over all the "bad" parts that necessarily go along with them.

Oh yeah? How's that anti-terrorist legislation working out?

Mobile phone subscriptions in the UK go the other way: By default they filter some content. If you tell the phone company to turn it off, they do. It's less invasive than this law because you don't need to tell them why you want it turned off, but still more draconian than if we could turn on a child safe mode that e.g. then required a pin or something to disable.

I can't imagine that it would pass as-is since on its face it seems to apply to all computers and all software including things like nginx or nftables that the entire modern economy relies on, but who knows?

[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

It doesn't need e.g. code signing or anything else of the sort.

To be clear, I think all of this is a massive overreach - my point is only that you can achieve the claimed aim with far less invasive means.

That, if anything, makes the chosen idiocy even more troubling to me, as either they're incompetent, don't care at all about the implications, or there are unstated aims.

There is a conspiracy and it's being rolled out. There was already some country that declared anyone running non-standard OSes on their phones are highly suspect.

Labor during the Corbyn years made Bernie Sanders look like a fascist and the current labor is back to being milquetoast and embracing its social authoritarian roots.

Similarly, Americans cannot understand that the Canadians have an "NDP" and "Liberal" and they don't understand their differences - though these days I don't think the NDP knows their differences either!!!

Honestly? Yeah, pretty much. It's a little hard to think of them that way since they're the leftmost establishment party in the UK, the same as the Democrats in the US, but historically speaking they're pretty right-wing. And theocracy has pretty deep roots in Anglosphere politics, so it's not necessarily that visible from the inside.

All of our platforms are inundated by an overwhelming amount of well crafted, targeted (specific per person) campaigns of disinformation by foreign actors.

China, Russia, Iran, and others cannot even remotely hope to stand against the West. Yet if you cannot stand against your adversary, you must weaken them.

You promote infighting. You take minor issues which can be cooperatively resolved with compromise, and seek to turn them into issues of great division. You spread falsehoods, creating useful idiots in great numbers.

You find the most radicalized, most loony of citizens that you can, and then secretly fund them.

Understand, any concept of "we do that to ourselves" is like a gnat in comparison. This is a real threat, it's been getting worse, and the common person is not capable of even understanding the concept. The common person, even when told repeatedly, thinks there is no downside to having their Pii stolen, or hacked. They simply read click bait titles, youtube or tiktok videos and 100% believe every word without any skepticism.

You may disagree with any or all of the above.

However! The above is what is actually behind the move for KYC to this extent. It's not about age verification, it's about identity. And it's not even about one westerner talking to another, it's about a foreign adversary seeking to pretend to be a domestic.

Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.

And I say this as someone that has fought for an open internet. It's already dead. It's dead because foreign interests use it as a tool to destroy our societies. It's dead because soon AI will replace most generated information.

Age verification laws are really identity laws, and any work to provide anonymous verification will fail, sadly, unfortunately, because the perceived threat is so large.

(I do not even necessarily agree with this, but if we don't understand the logic and the why of this, of why it is happening, then we're complaining about the wrong thing...)

The issue is no one in government would buy into this. You'd prevent them from catching bozo criminals who can't use a VPN.

*For example, you get up to N anon tokens a day you can use for anoning online. Only a count is stored daily to limit generations.

All of which is the fault of the establishment parties and not of foreign actors.

Even Trump now continues or, in the Middle East, exceeds the existing long term neocon policies. So the foreign online propaganda, which does exist, is completely overrated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXqTMwN4MtY

At the time she was the Neocon Presidential candidate.

I've always found it difficult to believe that voters are capable of critically consuming information and voting for wars, regulations or confiscatory taxes, and simultaneously are incapable of thinking critically about propaganda. Under this model, the fact that some deceptive sources may be foreign is largely a red herring. The entire premise of Democracy rests upon the presumption that voters are capable of making informed decisions in an adversarial information landscape.

I don't see the desire to control Internet speech as a novel phenomenon. The rationalizations have evolved over the years. The proliferation of AI, Russian sponsored podcasters and Wumaos are iterations of an appeal to special circumstances.

If the West truly believes that authoritarians like the CCP are immoral and should be opposed, it stands to reason that they shouldn't be seeking to emulate the CCP's methods. That's the surface level, ideologically consistent view.

Beneath that, there is a rabbit hole of fringe theory. Like the above poster, I provide this information to better explain possible motives, without endorsement. In the conspiracy sphere, the PRC is regarded as a trial lab for social engineering schemes. The allegation is that concepts are ironed out there first. Examples would include: social credit scores, digital ID, Internet censorship and the confluence of all three. Whether these theories are true or false, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be wary of these outcomes.

I worked on the latter problem space precisely for the US State Department. Its challenging, esp at scale, and esp if the folks trying to fight back are not given a free enough of a hand to do whats needed.

Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radical idea, I know.

Mass alienation didn’t begin in a troll farm in St. Petersburg, it began in think tanks, boardrooms, and editorial meetings that decided ordinary people were an obstacle to be nudged, not a public to be served.

The propaganda in Britain isn’t loud or foreign (largely). It’s quiet, domestic, and politely credentialed. It's Otto English, it's James O Brien, it's the BBC. It doesn’t scream at you, it nudges, omits, and reframes until systemic rot looks like unfortunate happenstance.

The message from the BBC and the like is overwhelmingly don't think too hard about why things are the way they are, don't ever question the root causes, and if someone from the credentialed classes says something, they're probably right about it.

It's why the article is never "Wait why have your living standards fallen through the floor?" or "Is lockdown actually working?" but "Here's how to make a meal for £1" or "How to make a really good sourdough loaf".

By setting up a world where people can only access "pre approved" bits of information, you're not lessening access to propaganda, you're just picking winners.

That's not working so well in the US at least. That gave us Trump.

I mean arguably, Labour could have repealed it or could have decided to disown it and discourage implementation, but the terrible design of the legislation is pretty much entirely the responsibility of the last government.

The only thing to do is denounce every bit of bullshit and not try and "find a way to make it work". Just stand for freedom for once instead of bending the knee or pushing for authoritarianism like most people do with every invasion for oil, during covid, when there's an accusation of some -ism or whatever the next label is.

I ask this in all seriousness: have you been paying attention to what's happening recently in the US?

Hilarious, you literally have a president shutting down free speech by getting a talkshow taken off the air so that the owning media company can pass its merger regulations; he’s also threatening to sue or actually suing other media organisations, universities, newspapers,... And on top of all that has built a private militia to grab people off the street and deport them.

All while major corporations have so much money and control over the government and its representatives that individuals have little to no say in how things are done.

And let’s not even start on the electoral system that encourages only the issues of a few states to ever be ‘heard’.

The whole country is indoctrinated to pledge allegiance to the flag and is taught that the constitution is of equivalent standing as the stone tablets brought down from Mount Sinai, leaving you all more vulnerable in a world where anybody can say anything and have it broadcast to billions of people at once. Or, you know, to being shot. You're indoctrinated to believe that the founding fathers were infallible geniuses, when they were just men, with opinions.

Often in these discussions we get quotes like:

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

That was said by a man, a regular man. He said a thing. It is entirely devoid of nuance, but you will all recite like it's the word of god. It's a form of self-oppression in its own right.

The vast majority of so-called oppressive laws introduced in the UK were well meaning, not done for power (like with your current president). The anti-hate speech laws were brought about because preachers were openly indoctrinating people who went on to commit atrocities like 7/7. I have never fallen fowl of those laws because I don't preach hate and foment violence. But to Ben Franklin that's the thin end of the wedge.

This latest law is for sure misguided, but it came from a desire to reduce online harm for children -- more opposition was needed when it was going through parliament. I get it, they messed up, it's bad law, but we also have a parliamentary system that functions, so it will almost certainly be refined over time.

The goals are right, the implementation is wrong, but that doesn't mean the UK is falling into authoritarianism. We're not trying to overturn elections, or you know, stop them altogether.

The idea that the US is some paragon of freedom and liberty is utter, utter nonsense. It’s more fucked than the UK will ever be.

You wrote: "The UK is an increasingly authoritarian nightmare." - it just isn't. For those of us who live here, nothing is really different. Not being able to access porn without a VPN is not the definition of "authoritarian nightmare".

The UK, for sure, has its problems. Some related to our democracy. But it isn't on the precipice of losing its democracy altogether (like the US).

Linking your real identity to the ability to load text on a computer you own absolutely is. Not being able to step out onto the street without having 50 government-operated cameras take your picture absolutely is. "Knife control" absolutely is.

> But it isn't on the precipice of losing its democracy altogether (like the US).

Good god come on. I hope I remember to come back here after the next election and accept your apology.

Not to defend the UK too vociferously (it _is_ going in a weirdly authoritarian direction and I certainly wouldn't want to live there), but this is also a thing in many US states: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/11/politics/invs-porn-age-verifi...

> Not being able to step out onto the street without having 50 government-operated cameras take your picture absolutely is.

This is a _bit_ of a myth; very few CCTVs in the UK are run by the government. It does have a very large number of CCTVs but they're generally privately owned and operated; they're largely a product of insurance company requirements.

As someone who lives in neither, the US seems considerably scarier at the moment, in general, and a lot further down the road to Hungary-style authoritarianism. The British government hasn't, as yet, made a serious effort to take over the media, say.

Nor has the US.

Also, as sibling says, you’re simply misinformed about CCTV. There is no centralized government-operated network of CCTV cameras. In fact, all figures you read about total numbers of CCTV cameras are basically just guesses, as there is no accurate way to track numbers of privately operated cameras.

> Linking your real identity to the ability to load text on a computer you own absolutely is.

You're responding to something I didn't say.

> Not being able to step out onto the street without having 50 government-operated cameras take your picture absolutely is.

That's not true either. You're just lying. There are police CCTV cameras in trouble areas, sure, but the idea that there are 50 pointing at you at any one time is a lie. Most CCTV cameras are privately owned and they can only be sequestered by the police with a warrant.

But just to be clear, you call that an "authoritarian nightmare". It's an exchange of some freedoms (privacy on a public street) for some safety (freedom from criminal assault/theft/etc.). Because we haven't been constitutionally indoctrinated we can see the nuance in that exchange. Some may think it's gone too far, others not far enough, most appreciate the drop in crime.

> "Knife control" absolutely is.

The last time I bought a knife the Amazon delivery driver just had to check my ID to make sure I was 18 or over. But again, because we haven't been indoctrinated to believe that the constitution was given from upon high, we understand that if kids or young adults are buying knifes to stab each other, then we'll do something about it.

How many school shootings have there been in the US this year? The fetishisation of guns and violence is literally insane. The rest of the world looks at the US and its lack of gun control as lunacy.

>> But it isn't on the precipice of losing its democracy altogether (like the US).

> Good god come on. I hope I remember to come back here after the next election and accept your apology.

You first. You've already lied several times about the UK, so whenever you're ready.

This whole debate is utterly pointless. There's a clear divide between how the constitutionally indoctrinated American sees the world and those of us who live in countries without constitutions. Our system will always seem crazy to someone who only believes in one set of laws written down 200 odd years ago.

The difference with the UK to the US is that we have tended toward freedom for the past 1000 years. We are more comfortable with our system and institutions. It's certainly not perfect, but on the whole it doesn't oppress.

The 'First They Came' poem in the UK would go something like this:

* First they came for the Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers, and I did not speak out because I was not a Islamic fundamentalist suicide bomber.

* Then they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out because I was not a Nazi.

* Then they came for my PornHub access, luckily I didn't need anyone to speak up because I had VPN access

* Then they came for me - and there were plenty of decent people to speak up for me, cos life in the UK ain't as bad as it's said to be on Hacker News.

It kinda doesn't punch quite as hard ;)

Not really. China's great firewall has been doing that a long time before these laws. It was only a matter of time till our leaders ask Big Tech "do for us what you did for China, except add a coat of paint over it so it doesn't look evil".

Several examples: government employees are being vetted for loyalty instead of qualification; public corps like CBS are not only self censoring political speech but they also have a "bias monitor" to appease the government; normal people are being denied entry to the country for various wrongspeak on socials.

It's possible to do truly anonymous ZKP's of being a member of a set (eg. over 18s) but in practice it would be very cumbersome. It would involve having a setup with a central authority (government) to build a Merkle tree where users would submit hashes of randomness and then a user would generate a token through a ZKP that would decouple them from their real identity with the anonymity dependent on the set size. New participants can be brought in but the anonymity set sizes would fluctuate.

Even with this method it will link together all services utilizing the token. And if you attempt to solve this by allowing to generate multiple tokens the entire scheme becomes somewhat meaningless as durable bypass services would emerge.

More pearl-clutching "think of the children" nonsense.

And even if it were somehow feasible to control internet access points 100% of the time, do you think most parents could figure it out? I have friends with teenage children, I assure you, most of them would be easily outsmarted by their kids with anything tech related, and they’re above average intelligence.

I’m not necessarily saying this is the correct solution anyway, I don’t know what is, I’m just saying we don’t need to make up dystopian conspiracy theories to explain the motivation of the people who want to do it.