Local democracy reporter, Dan Esson, has given his views on the Online Safety act…
In recent weeks, if you sought to access any adult corners of the internet, you will have encountered the Online Safety Act in the form of being ID’d by your own phone.
The influence unfettered access to some forms of online content has on children is clear, so clear that the British political class finally hit it with their knee-jerk response to everything: ‘Ban it.
’The Act makes social media companies and websites responsible for making sure that age-inappropriate content does not make it before the eyes of children.
In practice, this means sites hosting sexually explicit or violent content will require users to provide identification.
It should go without saying that these rules are easy to circumvent for even the least enterprising web surfers
Users can employ VPNs (which even China has not figured out how to successfully ban), and illegal websites will simply not comply.
Some have also predicted that the Byzantine web of responsibilities, regulations, and possible penalties included in the Act will disincentivise tech firms from operating or starting up in Britain.
According to Big Brother Watch, the Act contains provisions to allow en masse scanning of personal communications.
Given the government’s enthusiasm for surveillance and the security state – expanding facial recognition technology and using anti-terror legislation to crack down on protest – it does not seem unduly paranoid to worry about providing ID to websites newly compelled to surrender any info the state asks of them.
The fixation of (mainly older) politicians on the youth’s access to certain kinds of online material belies the fact the real influence of the internet is as much in its form as its content
The real but limited influence of, for example, eating disorder glorification or misogynistic influencers is nothing compared to the overall effects of the internet now being the primary social space for the young.
Indeed, that sort of content has only become prominent and more readily produced because of the internet replacing in-the-flesh conversation as the first frontier of social life.
For those children who have been surfing Instagram Reels since age seven and fluent in the use of iOS before their own native language, the damage might already be done, barring some external intervention.
Whether they will be able to readily access videos of beheadings when they’re teenagers is neither here nor there by now.
What was once treated as the paranoid hysteria of parents – that the internet would rot your mind, corrode your mental health and wither your attention span – now seems undeniable.
Especially for children, using TikTok and its ilk is essentially like holding your brain up against a sanding belt.
With the collapse of reading for pleasure among teenagers, we are only beginning to see the impoverished personalities and social life created by the marketisation of attention.
In his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher described the condition of many teenagers not as dyslexia, but postlexia.“Teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read – slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane,” he wrote.
I believe that it is no coincidence that with the rise of smartphones and internet access, rates of mental illness and SEND have skyrocketed.
As Fisher argues, these conditions may be “neurologically instantiated”, but their causes have “a social and political explanation”.
Nobody could deny that easy access to extreme pornography, real violence and aptly named ‘brainrot’ is harmful for children.
The media to which we’re exposed helps shape the frame of cultural reference necessary to generate morality and personality, and thus our ability to process, express and control our feelings.
But the Online Safety Act is unlikely to do anything to remedy these ills. Some children may be prevented from seeing porn or violence, but they’ll watch seven hours at a time of Instagram reels instead.
Perfectly PG but probably about as cognitively hazardous.A generation of children who are less plugged in would not need to be banned from seeing gore and the like online, because they’d be less likely to go looking for it.
