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I have to disagree with the "Christian Nationalist" characterization. https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taking-the-side-of-predators-with

I have to disagree with the "Christian Nationalist" characterization. https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/nigel-farage-taking-the-side-of-predators-with-online-safety-act-criticism-says-labour/ 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.

b112 1y ago
The elephant in the room, is 'foreign actor'. 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...)
- wbl 1y ago
  Well the politicians could make that argument but haven't.
  - palmfacehn 1y ago
    "We need our social media companies to verify everybody, says fmr. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXqTMwN4MtY 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.
- lan321 1y ago
  Even in that context, I believe you could provide semi-anonymous verification. You just need a weaker encryption of sorts. One you can crack in a month instead of never ever. Then have that shit rotate, and the government can invest money to find that one identity posting BS all day with multiple bots until it rotates/regenerates, but they can't keep track of everyone.
JohnFen 1y ago
I believe the commenter said "in the US".
- SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
  I guess I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that Americans who want age verification laws have some entirely different motivation than people in other countries who want age verification laws.
  - palmfacehn 1y ago
    I'm more interested in the motives of those who would utilize the fear of pron or other taboos to advance this agenda. The coalitions reacting with fear are less interesting.
  - lurkshark 1y ago
    It doesn’t have to be the case that everyone who supports age verification has the same reasons. 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.
  - altruios 1y ago
    Oh, no. Same impulses and motivations, Different dress.
  - ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
    The motivation is the same, power and control, but you need to run a slightly different playbook in different countries. In US, Republicans have been having Christianity as a front for decades.
  - alsetmusic 1y ago
    They're all would-be fascists in sheep's clothing.
captainbland 1y ago
Strictly speaking the law was passed under the conservatives, albeit in collaboration with Labour (it's bi-partisan). But I would agree that the drive is more authoritarian and it just uses moralistic arguments to shame people into siding with it. 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.
- exasperaited 1y ago
  It has broad public support. 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.
  - captainbland 1y ago
    The problem to me is this thing is full of holes. It basically just sets up ID checks but it can only do that on accountable websites who self select to do so. It can't stop people sharing extreme content on WhatsApp groups for example which are one of the modes of communication increasing in popularity the fastest. 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.
Der_Einzige 1y ago
Americans don't understand that the liberal democrats are the "anti-authoritarian" party of the UK and would be who most American mainstream democrats would vote for in practice. 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!!!
lblissett 1y ago
Worth noting that this bill was introduced in 2021 and passed in 2023 under the previous Conservative governments, all of which were fairly libertarian/anti-state at least in their rhetorical positioning. 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.
BoxOfRain 1y ago
Interestingly while it'd be daft to call them Christian Nationalist the Labour Party does owe a lot of its early philosophy to various religious groups descended from the English Dissenters. This is also true for many groups that'd fall under the Christian Nationalist label in the US, even though their politics are very different. 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.
NoGravitas 1y ago
> Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist? 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.

b112 1y ago

The elephant in the room, is 'foreign actor'. 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...)

wbl 1y ago
Well the politicians could make that argument but haven't.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  "We need our social media companies to verify everybody, says fmr. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXqTMwN4MtY 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.
lan321 1y ago
Even in that context, I believe you could provide semi-anonymous verification. You just need a weaker encryption of sorts. One you can crack in a month instead of never ever. Then have that shit rotate, and the government can invest money to find that one identity posting BS all day with multiple bots until it rotates/regenerates, but they can't keep track of everyone.

JohnFen 1y ago

I believe the commenter said "in the US".

SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
I guess I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that Americans who want age verification laws have some entirely different motivation than people in other countries who want age verification laws.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  I'm more interested in the motives of those who would utilize the fear of pron or other taboos to advance this agenda. The coalitions reacting with fear are less interesting.
- lurkshark 1y ago
  It doesn’t have to be the case that everyone who supports age verification has the same reasons. 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.
- altruios 1y ago
  Oh, no. Same impulses and motivations, Different dress.
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
  The motivation is the same, power and control, but you need to run a slightly different playbook in different countries. In US, Republicans have been having Christianity as a front for decades.
- alsetmusic 1y ago
  They're all would-be fascists in sheep's clothing.

captainbland 1y ago

Strictly speaking the law was passed under the conservatives, albeit in collaboration with Labour (it's bi-partisan). But I would agree that the drive is more authoritarian and it just uses moralistic arguments to shame people into siding with it. 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.

exasperaited 1y ago
It has broad public support. 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.
- captainbland 1y ago
  The problem to me is this thing is full of holes. It basically just sets up ID checks but it can only do that on accountable websites who self select to do so. It can't stop people sharing extreme content on WhatsApp groups for example which are one of the modes of communication increasing in popularity the fastest. 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.

Der_Einzige 1y ago

Americans don't understand that the liberal democrats are the "anti-authoritarian" party of the UK and would be who most American mainstream democrats would vote for in practice. 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!!!

lblissett 1y ago

Worth noting that this bill was introduced in 2021 and passed in 2023 under the previous Conservative governments, all of which were fairly libertarian/anti-state at least in their rhetorical positioning. 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.

BoxOfRain 1y ago

Interestingly while it'd be daft to call them Christian Nationalist the Labour Party does owe a lot of its early philosophy to various religious groups descended from the English Dissenters. This is also true for many groups that'd fall under the Christian Nationalist label in the US, even though their politics are very different. 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.

NoGravitas 1y ago

> Is the UK's Labour Party now Christian Nationalist? 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.