The mountain…
According to the polling company Ipsos,
2 in 3 British adults (69%) would support a law that requires social media companies to use age-verification tools to ban children under the age of 16 from accessing their platforms in the UK, and 3 in 5 (61%) support social media curfews / hour restrictions for 16- and 17-year-olds
The route up the mountain…
Support for a law requiring social media companies to use age-verification tools to ban under-16s from platforms drops of 50% if it means everyone in the UK would be required to upload an ID or credit card to verify their age. This holds if ID verification is held by individual social media platforms (50%) or by the device owners, such as Apple or Android / Google (51%).
and
Support dips to just under half (48%) if the law necessitates a total ban on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) within the UK to prevent circumvention.
People sometimes think that all the mockery of the cry of “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” means that it has ceased to be a persuasive argument. This assumption is not true. “We must do this to protect children” is an eternally powerful appeal to humanity’s deepest instincts. Our task is to demonstrate that requiring age verification before any British person can use the internet will not protect children. On the contrary, given the ease with which hostile or criminal forces can steal government data, it will endanger them and endanger adults too. There is also the threat from the government itself to consider – not just this government, but all future ones. Throughout history, authoritarian states have sought to “get them while they’re young and bend their minds”.
“First they came for the children. But I wasn’t a child, so when they asked, I said I approved.”
This ‘think of the children’ mentality didn’t apply when the bozos were all in favour of children being given a totally unnecessary RNA based and untested ‘vaccine’ to ‘protect the vulnerable, who were mainly people in their 80s with co-morbidities.
The ‘public’ also willingly went along banging effing pots on their doorsteps, wearing ineffectual masks and shopping neighbours for having ‘gatherings’ of more than 6 people to the authorities at the same time. They were the ultimate’ pointers’.
Most of the voting public do not think seriously about issues – pro and cons – before voicing support for authoritarian measure related to internet censorship. We are sleepwalking into 1984, which has now become an instruction manual.
I’d like to know how the 21% whose minds change when implications are explained to them thought this was going to work.
It’s always interesting to see when an idea that provokes near-universal loathing and ire amongst “my” crowd” – such that one might think it is a generally losing argument – is actually highly popular with “the voters.”
We’re all getting Digital ID and Digital Currency soon, aren’t we? We’re clearly in the minority in opposing them.
They want to ban children from a certain activity? Go ahead then, just ban *CHILDREN* from doing it. Leave me the fuck alone, I’m not a child. Require *CHILDREN* to provide age verification so they can be banned from using the services. And bang them up in chokey if they refuse.
This is nothing to do with protecting children from sexual images.
This is about political control – indoctrination, of children and adults.
Even if one ignores the Marxist influence on the “educated” (for example Herbert Marcuse and his doctrine that tolerating “right wing” opinions is “Repressive Tolerance” – which is how he justified his support for censorship and persecution, both by the government and by mobs of leftists shouting down the voices of anyone they did not like – or just beating them up, all this was supposed to be “true tolerance”), what thinkers the British establishment admire are Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham – you will not find natural rights, most importantly the right, and moral duty, to use lethal force to defend the innocent AGAINST the state, in these thinkers. Nothing like the right of Revolution in the New Hampshire Constitution of 1784 (which comes, for example, from the 16th century Scottish scholar George Buchanan).
Even the one liberal thinker the establishment have heard of, J.S. Mill, is rather mixed in his teachings – still he is better than the rest of the thinkers the modern establishment is educated in.
It is not even a new trick….
300 years ago Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole showed a horrible play to the House of Commons – full of rape, murder, and so on – these days the play would be written to contain kiddie porn as well. Parliament was horrified and gave the government the power to censor the theatre.
What Parliament was that the person behind the play was Sir Robert Walpole himself – he had-had it written. He was not really interested in fighting pornography, he was interested in crushing political dissent.
It has nothing to do with protecting children.
Once digital ID is required to surf the net, then every web page you access can be recorded in one of those ever-so-nice data centres and your browsing habits examined.
If you seek out “misinformation” (defined by the powers that be) and evil right wing thoughts and writings, then expect a visit from the Police for wrongthink.
“The children” are a very convenient false flag to introduce this Orwellian legislation.
When my children were young I kept an eye on what they were reading, (it was the beginning of the internet).If they were accessing something iffy I pointed out to them the pitfalls and dangers and then left them to think about it. They both turned out to be responsible sensible adults. It was MY job to take care of my sons and no one else. A lot of people cannot be arsed to bother about looking after their kids and are only too happy to hand over the job of looking after them to someone else.
WTF does “drops of 50%” mean?
Simon Jester – it is a typing mistake. Clearly the person meant “drops by 50%” not “drops of 50%”.
Support for the government’s latest censorship move drops by 50% when people find out it is directed at adults – not just children.