As a software engineer in the UK (and former schoolteacher) I'm supportive of the Online Safety Act. People prefer to interact with people who are similar to them, so they end up with a belief that most people are like them, but as a teacher, I had to grapple with the full distribution of human intelligence. It's wider than I'm comfortable with. Most people struggle to deal with the complexity of everyday life in the twenty-first century.

My grandparents used to fall for every scam phone call or email they received. It wasn't until I showed them a compilation[0] of the George Agdgdgwngo character from Fonejacker - and the rest of my extended family sat around laughing at the ridiculous scenarios - that my grandparents realised that giving their bank details to anyone claiming to be calling from Microsoft and then expecting the bank to refund them their money wasn't an acceptable way to handle their financial affairs. In the end, they disabled their Internet banking and now have to catch a bus to their nearest bank branch to do anything.

I'm sure there will be flurry of Americans along shortly to monotonously repeat that quote about not trading freedom for security. That's their political tradition, not ours. The people of Thetford in Norfolk don't give a flying fuck about the gold statue of Thomas Paine that the Federalist Society (or some other group, I'm not terribly interested in which it was) put up in their town, but they love the fact that a sitcom about the Second World War was filmed there.

Someone else will make a joke about police officers investigating tweets. That practice - which was put to an end a couple of years ago - stemmed from a particular interpretation of a law that required police forces to investigate all threats of violence made by post, that was enacted in the 1980s during a period of increased religiously-motivated terrorism. The following decade brought the negotiations that put an end to that terrorism; negotiations that were the culmination of nearly five centuries of religious conflict. It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.

I shall leave it to others to make the usual accusations about who funded the aforementioned terrorism.

The Online Safety Act is vague and non-specific. Social media platforms differentiate themselves in the market on the bases of: with whom users can interact (people they know personally or the user base at large); and the ways in which they can interact (photos, videos, comments, likes, &c.). Each platform therefore poses its own unique set of risks to its user base, and so needs to have its own unique regulations. The Act acknowledges by empowering Ofcom to negotiate the specific policies that platforms will need to follow on a platform-by-platform basis. And if those policies should turn out to be too strict, and a few social media companies should find it no longer profitable to operate in the United Kingdom, that is not all that much of an issue for His Majesty's Government. They're not British companies, after all.

You can't talk about the Forbidden Meatballs[1] on Reddit or HN. In the 90s, AOL users from Scunthorpe and Penistone were banned from user forums for telling the community where they lived to help diagnose their connectivity issues. Americans have enforced - and continue to enforce - their cultural norms on the entire Anglophone web, and now the rest of the world has started to do the same. I have much greater faith in my government to protect my freedom of speech (no matter how much I may object to their policies) than some foreign company.

For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is? 'Maximum effect for minimum effort and cost' has been the guiding principle of all government in Britain for decades - it's how Britain ruled its Empire, it's what drove the Thirteen Colonies to rebel, it's why the East India Company was allowed to rule a subcontinent, it's why many of the former colonies were given independence despite not wanting it, it's why the roads are so consistently bad, it's why the water companies are dumping sewage into rivers, it's why there aren't enough police officers.

To anyone who thinks that regulating social media is some sort of prelude to a totalitarian state, I suggest you watch Britons at a traffic-light-controlled pedestrian crossing. This isn't the end of the world; it's not going to lead to any social changes of any sort at all. The Act requires protections for free speech, after all. When it's all finally implemented, it'll just be enforcement of social norms that no one finds controversial.

NB: I read through the Act to see whether an idea for a social media platform was still a viable business idea, and apart from sending policy documents to Ofcom, it wouldn't require the business to do anything that wasn't already in that idea. If you want to argue about what the Act requires, I will expect you to have read the Act[2].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9biM_ZfIdo

[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/282049626

[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/contents