The ongoing repercussions of the Online Safety Act

A few months ago, we wrote about a new piece of legislation which was coming into force in an attempt to stop children seeing inappropriate content on the internet.

While we welcomed the attempt to keep impressionable young minds away from photos and videos aimed squarely at adult audiences, we highlighted several concerns about the new Online Safety Act.

It’s now been three months since the Act came into force, and it appears to be increasingly overstepping its original brief…

Caught in a net

When the Online Safety Act debuted in July, it blacklisted a swathe of pornographic sites in the UK.

Yet as our original article pointed out, sites with lower traffic volumes were exempt, potentially driving adults (and the children the Act was intended to protect) towards more ‘niche’ platforms.

It was announced a few weeks ago that Ofcom is now investigating almost two dozen more adult websites, whose traffic has spiked since their bigger competitors became blocked.

It’s easy to see how this might turn into a game of regulatory whack-a-mole, with the criteria for traffic volumes or ‘adult content’ endlessly evolving to drag more and more sites under the Act’s auspices.

We all define inappropriate content differently, and it appears the Act is also struggling to differentiate between pornography and more mainstream content.

A fortnight ago, the popular image sharing website Imgur.com was suddenly blocked to UK consumers.

Yet Imgur is not an adult website. It hosts GIFs, photos and short videos, most of which are family friendly – though not all of them.

To avoid having to ensure British consumers verify their age before every visit (which they weren’t asked to do when originally registering), Imgur.com has blocked access from any UK IP addresses.

This internationally hosted website has pre-emptively withdrawn from the UK market, before a child sees a risqué GIF and the regulators levy fines.

This is a significant loss to many regular Imgur users, but it also represents the thin end of an alarming wedge.

Could social media sites end up having to age-verify everyone to ensure they’re over-18, insisting on a copy of your driving licence before you can sign up to TikTok?

Will the Act eventually cover websites which publish jokes, or cartoons, or streaming services like Twitch, or gaming platforms with a few PEGI 18 titles among a collection of 12s and 16s?

How can I respond to this?

The first point to note is that the OSA only applies to unfiltered domestic broadband traffic.

Attempting to view an age-restricted site through your broadband router may cause it to be blocked.

Yet access the internet after activating a VPN or logging onto the Tor browser, and you won’t encounter any accessibility issues.

Any decent VPN will enable you to choose the country you wish to spoof your location from.

Since much of the content we view nowadays is American, we’d recommend a US or Canadian server, which also tend to be relatively rapid.

Other European countries have also introduced age verification, so switching to a French server won’t necessarily allow you to view age-restricted content in the UK.

While nobody wants children to be exposed to extreme content, adult internet users are finding relatively innocuous activities increasingly restricted.

Whatever you do, don’t go down the age verification route.

Our previous advice not to upload personally identifiable information like passport scans to the mysterious operators of overseas websites remains as strong as ever.

That’s especially true following news 70,000 government-supplied ID images have been stolen from gaming app Discord, after they were uploaded to prove users were over 18…