Online safety act is not to protect kids
Do you remember the old internet ? Early 2000s the internet looked very different compared todays, we are slowly heading into deeper and deeper dystopian Orwells 1984 style of world in every aspect of our life more we integrate our society and life in modern internet. The AI is going to make this even more stupid than it already is. The ‘Online safety act’ is just the begining of that.
This is my observations about the changes of internet and I’m worried for the first time of my life for internet, again this is just my observations don’t cancel me for what I’ve noticed.
early 2000’s
When I was kid, we didn’t talk about internet like we do today, the thing is that the internet back then was a thing for small minority of nerds, like me, we were the people who were concidered weird because we knew things that people did not understand and we would spend whole summer break sitting inside playing games, coding and tinkering around the computers. We didn’t care that much about what people said, we might have said something mean online and next day the whole conversation is forgotten. The government was not so much involved, heck I remember that we build an virus, ijected that in school network to teachers computer to get the teachers username and password, we just got after school detention. Today it would be called criminal act and you’d be in alot of trouble.
There was potential of making money on internet like dotcom bubble was showing but the most users were not so tech savvy and most users were nerds or companies. I would even argue that there was not so many people that were interested in internet or computers because it took some effort to do or find things. We, smelly nerds, used to have our own places to hang such as IRC and there was overall less companies trying to pump every dime from people. It was more like traditional business tried to leverage internet and get customers, no one tried to monetize them selves in every corner(all though adds and websites were absolutely more aggressive than nowadays) and less or if any data was collected of individual users.
Nowadays, it is completely different story, you can be complete NPC and still manage to do something on a computer. Modern kids aren’t tech savvy, the technology just has gotten so easy to use, even our three year old daughter can use phone(all thought we don’t let her use phone almost at all).
This simplicity obviously did bring alot of people on different devices and the internet, now internet was always full of all kinds of ‘thruths’ but at the sametime there was traditional media that was easily controlled by governments and ideologies. Now the internet is not so easily controlled by governments, it is much more difficult to control it and they know it.
2015 Last one out turn off the lights
I would argue that around 10 years ago the internet censorship started to happen, around 2015 to 2017 you were still allowed to say what the hell ever you wanted without getting your comments deleted or completely banned from any platform. Maybe ocassionally you would get into a trouble if you were very very mean. I my self was not so active in social media back then but I surely was very active in other online communities and talk was much much rougher than it is nowadays, one would argue it was extremely hostile environment.
2016 and the dead internet theory
Between the period 2015 and 2017 the censorship seems to start get slowly into platforms and at the sametime we see increasing amount of bots filling the comments(Dead internet theory), bots were always present but through years they got more advanced and I would argue that it is different governmental agencies trying to build conflict in people.
2020 COVID-19
Jumping to year of COVID. At this point I think we started to get very very confused about everything, government officials were telling something in traditional media that wasn’t true so social media was filled with people telling different thruth. One is saying use mask, other is saying hell no, don’t use mask, one is saying use vitamin-d, morning news governement official says, no take vaccinations they are safe, people online says no way people are dying to these vaccinations.
Now there is real actual specialists who tell online completely different narrative than government narrative is and we start to see all kinds of banners of disinformation warnings, this goes on and on for years. People even lose jobs and careers for what they said online.
For example if you’d watch anything that even mentions about corona in youtube video, you’d see small banner that directs you to WHO website and governement officials go heavily against all disinformation but it is nearly impossible to control on the internet.
2020 - 2025 heading to human driven AI dystopia
In 2023 everyone forgets the Corona, now governments are actually trying to forget the whole situation and everyone have just returned to the office like nothing happened. But something hasn’t changed. The whole internet did change during the Corona. It is essentially a battlefield where you are not allowed to say anything without begin called something: facist, racist, anti-vaxxer, nazzi, neo-nazzi, extreme right wing, left wing, leftist etc. You are not allowed to have any kind of opinion anymore, the confusion from corona situation and all of the government and other bots are making the internet almost unusable.
We started to see woke ideology where I literally as a white straight man can’t just enjoy my life but I have to be remembered all the time about my ‘superiority’. He/she, they/them, this/that etc. came alive, gender ideology is everywhere. You’ll be swarmed by gender ideology bots if you happen to make some comment that has a remote smell of ‘misogyny’ or ‘toxic masculinity’, you’ll get banned or silenced for wrong opinion or just being a man.
We have now LLMs around, the bot issue is getting worse day by day, you literally can’t tell if you are talking with the Python script that can sophisticaly argue with you about something or is it real person.
Freedom is about to die
What is worrying is that just this year United Kingdom made an Online safety act that is stated to be protecting users(mostly children) online from illegal and harmful content. It is not going to protect children online, because it is not ment to do that. It is parents jobs to protect their children until they can understand things. I see kids, daily, using some device in their stroller, watching something, this is parents task to make sure kids are not using any of the devices, trust me the devices are so simple they don’t need 18 years of experience from age 2 to use them.
What this act might do is to put freedom of speech in danger, leave millions of people without government ID out of platform to share their thoughts, dox millions of people who has different opinion than government and possibly putting them in danger. You have to remember that the country who is making the act is the country that is heavily investing in policing the social media commenting, of course they want everyone to identify with the government ID.
The AI is making this even worse as we are handing the power more and more to algorithms, I hadn’t posted in facebook for a loong long time, recently I did and asked people who know about thing X to send me DMs and my message got flagged for potentially harmful content and the harmful content was DM as it is some drug apparently, what the f… this is getting out of control.
Anyways, Online safety act is not to protect anyone it is to censor the internet, catch you on next one.