Hi all,
Recently the UK government has Implemented the another tool in its arsenal of fascism. The Online Safety Act, ensuring anyone that is accessing 18+ content to verify their age first. This is an extremely harmful measure that at best limits people's access to valuable resources such as r/transdiy and at worst pushes them towards harmful online forums and sites.
These measures exist to only censure speech and limit access to information. There is no good reason for this law to exist and instead should have been built around the EUs Digital Service Act. Realistically this is an attack on encryption and for the increasing level of government surveilance. If you live in the UK I would encourage you to contact your local MP.
Furthermore, Reddit seems to have joined the fascist bandwagon recently with branding all LGBT subreddits as 18+ meaning you can't access queer subreddits unless you have verifies your age.. Meanwhile the conservative hate subs are free to access I guess. This is despicable behaviour and I would recommend complaining about it.
But that said it is now imperative that you use a VPN. When picking a VPN try and stay away from shady companies that steal and sell your data and do your research. ProtonVPN and Mullvad are good options that don't log your data and have privacy tools built in by default. Proton has a free plan too. Worse case you can use Opera's built in VPN.
We would like to remind users to stay safe on the internet and do stuff like not reuse usernames or passwords, not to share personal information and to to practice good digital hygiene.
Please note we will be removing the NSFW enforcement from Ableism posts as they restrict UK accounts from accessing them. The spoiler tag will remain and we will clarify the post flair to make it stand out more.
Edited: confused Nord with another company so removed it.
š£š£š£ NOT A BIG FAN OF THE GOVERNMENT!!!
Fun fact, VPN usage in the UK has shot up 1400% for a company called ProtonVPN
Yeah its the most known free VPN, I'd recommended everyone in the UK downloads it.
Autistic people who are reallly good with calendars and keeping track of time - you can exploit free trials and moneyback guarantees of this (incomplete) list!
Free trials:
Moneyback Guarantees:
There's a couple of months between these.
Windscribe also has a plan where you can pay what you want for certain features. I pay $1 a month for unlimited use.
30 on 30
'think of the children!' mfs on their way to not think of the children
More like 'think of our loss of control' mfs. Big babies ruining everything for others because they didn't mature past the stage of thinking the world revolves around them
...wait nordvpn keeps logs of ur data? Do u have a source on this? o o
Edit: i found a pcmag article that says that NordVPN would comply with law enforcement if it had to, but also states that it wouldn't have much information to give them because they dont keep logs. Also, NordVPN has never received warrants from any foreign law enforcement anyway. https://uk.pcmag.com/vpn/138232/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-with-law-enforcement-data-requests
As for data collection, all i could find was a reddit post that was a screenshot of a quote tweet
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/s/ex10Pstw6L
I could be just not looking hard enough tho
I would definitely recommend Proton in this case. Swiss law is great, not only do they not keep logs (being verified in several real cases), but even if they are ordered to begin keeping logs on you, even if youāre not a Swiss citizen youāre still afforded the privilege of being notified that a court injunction is in place regarding monitoring of your internet activity. I believe Mullvad may be even better in some regards but Iām not up to date on Swedish privacy law
Nord is an American company so no matter how hard they try to fight tracking of their users by no logs etc, if they are ordered to begin tracking the activity of one of their users, it is against the law to notify them itās happening, while in Swiss privacy law itās a crime to not notify them
The CEO of proton is a massive piece of shit from what I heard. Some people in another thread recommended mullvad
Holy shit i didn't see he endorsed some of the Trump stuff. It does appear that he's pro small businesses and that he thinks Dems are only pro big business. But still if you are that blind to what's happening then jfc.
Nord is either Lithuanian/Dutch/Panamanian (according to Wikipedia) but definitely not American. Also I use NordVPN and pay for it, so I'm not really sure what to do
Same here. I bought a multi-year subscription and then was a little miffed when I read they were moving their servers to the US; an ominous sign.
Looks like they're only moving some stuff to the US, not their VPN services for most people, but I might be wrong
thanks for digging, Iām also curious about receipts if anyone has any
I could be wrong, I do remember some stuff but I could be confusing it. I'll do some research and edit the post.
Donāt use Opera either, it also logs your data and is comically inefficient compared to other browsers
Agrrr, if one wants a browser with a built in VPN, Vivaldi has built in Proton VPN since recently
Tell me of this software. I am curious.
Vivaldi is a highly customizable browser I love it! It has the most functionality I've ever seen in a browser it's perfect. Sadly it uses Chromium so there's the drawbacks with that. That's also why I switched backed to Firefox, I want the best adblocking I possibly can. But I still have Vivaldi installed and it's totally worth giving it a try
Thanks so much! I'll definitely consider it!
Opera is also running on Chromium and if you're concerned about privacy, getting off anything Google is highly recommended.
Chromium is open source and does not collect your data. Opera does.
I literally had to use a VPN to look at the Aljazeera sub. THE NEWS: WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO READ THE FUCKING NEWS.
fuck keir starmer
Anytime I hear his name I silently say āder Starmerā, just canāt help. Iām from Poland and honestly I donāt understand why Labour do what they do, they look extremely conservative now. Will voting Greens next time help? Iām just curious, never been in UK.
If Zack Polanski wins the leadership election (he friggin better) it absolutely will, screw the polls and tactical voting narrative.
Btw you're right that Labour's recent behaviour makes no sense, Kier himself was a raging socialist before he lost his backbone. It's an outside job - the media narrative is that the British public want illiberalism, they've managed to make this half true sadly, and the prospect of upsetting the media now scares Labour more than that of betraying themselves.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has formed a new party which has exploded in popularity (half a million members have joined).
Based on discussions I've seen I'm not sure about his new party. Members of the independent alliance have been transphobic and homophobic in the past. So if they join then that would be a bad thing.
The law was passed by the Tories, it didn't go into effect until this year
... And was not stopped by the government this year. Please don't make excuses for him.
And Keir Starmer has been actively attacking trans people. As of a few days ago, teachers can no longer discuss gender identity with even openly trans students.
Fuck Keir Starmer.
Fuck Keir Starmer
As a Swede and a user of Mullvad, I can't endorse Mullvad enough. No subscription, just pay for what you need, and you're always anonymous. They're a local company in my city and they really care about privacy. It's very easy to use as well.
Going to look into this now, thank you for posting about it
TOR is also an option but it's probably less user-friendly (and slower) than a VPN. The benefit is you don't have to trust a VPN company at all.
IIRC Reddit specifically blocks TOR. I tried it a few times and could never get it to work. Many many sites are set up to block proxies and IPās of ānotableā VPN companies which is so fucking stupid because it pushes towards data farming companies that donāt care at all about privacy
Wonderful. I'll admit I haven't actually tried browsing reddit with TOR as my current computer runs Linux on ARM (the TOR project doesn't release ARM binaries to my knowledge) and I can't seem to get it to build from source.
I've been using TOR on Debian Linux on ARM64 for years now without the need to build it from source. There's not much more needed than "apt install tor" and then configuring your browser to use it. I recommend the FoxyProxy plugin to do this in Firefox.
That's probably a smart way to do it, I hadn't thought of configuring Firefox.
I can install TOR itself just fine, but the TOR project's fork of Firefox only has x86-64 binaries.
So by TOR in this case you meant the TOR-Browser. I have that on my ARM64 machine too, although i don't remember exactly where i got it from. I'm pretty sure it's not a Debian package, so either i got it from the TOR project itself or from some third party website. But be assured, it exists :-) But you wrote ARM, i'm working with ARM64 here, i don't know if that's what you meant by ARM. May very well be that there ist no TOR-Browser for 32bit-ARM.
ProtonVPN has servers that are setup as onion nodes for fast TOR browsing. Only available on the paid tier though. That is back to having to trust a VPN company though.
i'm using ProtonVPN :3 gonna be using it if the Australian social media ban ever happens (why the fuck are we getting more and more censorship online today?)
Because information control is behaviour control.
When data is contrary to the conservative manifest, they do not change their opinions, they change the data.
I second Mullvad! Very easy to use and inexpensive.
Also probably the most private there is, like you can literally send then an envelope with money and accounts aren't tied ti anything
Yeah I think that's actually great: at least it illustrates actual privacy. I don't think most people understand how much of their personal information they give out every single time they're online.
I love this sub, thank you
I hate living on Terf island
The thing that gets me is if the UK wanted to do this ārightā (there is no right way to censor the internet itās not for kids, but hear me out) they EASILY could have
Instead of letting whatever third party AI companies choose to use put your ID and faces into an insecure databank, they could have built a centralized, anonymous database held by either a government contractor or the government themselves
Instead theyāre letting people use whatever insecure AI bullshit they want. And that is going to end up with a lot of identity theft
Since nobody else has mentioned them: https://airvpn.org/
Been using them for 10+ years, no logs, fast and support for connecting in a variety of ways in case you ISP/Goverment tried to block VPN ( + a number of covert unlisted ways for countries like china where using a VPN gets you put in jail )
Oh yeah and they are EU based ( Italy iirc ), with all the consumer protections that entails
i'm outside of the uk what do i do ;-;
Drive on the correct side of the road
Nothing really. Tho it's still probably recommended to use a VPN at this point.
There's been some restrictions where I live, though far less severe than what the UK is doing, I've been using ProtonVPN for the last couple years and it's worked pretty well.
Itās also completely blocked a lot of trans subs and is not even asking for ID. Reddit hasnāt asked me for ID and I wouldnāt give it anyway. But Iām not being told I canāt access certain subs they have just been completely blocked from me being able to see any hint they exist.
I've said it before and I'll say it as many times as I have to. I hate this country so goddamn much.
If you can afford to pay a cheap monthly plan I would recommend windscribe. I currently have the custom plan with just us servers + unlimited usage and it's $3 per month
I'm from the UK and I didn't vote for Labour in the last election, because I figured they were nailed on in my constituency, which gave me free reign to vote for the Greens (I was right).
Despite this, I'm incredibly disappointed in how absolutely terrible they are at doing politics. They just keep scoring own goals over and over again, it's like they want Reform to win the next election.
It's a terrible shame because in my area the new Labour MP has been putting in some good work. The previous Tory MP was only backwards steps, but at least it was consistently shite, so there was no reason to get my hopes up. With the current set up it's one step forward and two steps back, which makes it more frustrating because they give you these nuggets of hope and then just spunk them up the wall.
I hope "Your Party" and/or the Greens take a stance against this so Reform don't dominate the voices of opposition.
VPN to circumvent geolocating is one thing.
If you're worrying about "log keeping" etc., then you're approaching it wrong already. For this kind of stuff you want VPN purchased with crypto, you want TOR, you want hardened OS like Tails etc., very different game.
Mullvad VPN is great for privacy! Has been 5ā¬ a month since it's release over a decade ago (maybe even more). Very recommended!
Swiss law is not as good as it seems. ProtonMail just tracked the IP of a highschool student in France for the crime of planning to skip school and do a protest against Climate Change. Mullvad VPN has a better track record. Proton is more marketing than actual quality.
Just? That was 4 years ago. But yes it has to comply with legal notices, but that was for ProtonMail, which you need a client for not its VPN service which is no logs. But Proton is better for free stuff Mullvad probs better paid
We'll have the same shit here in Brazil next year, yay
The UK government have also now introduced the SCREEN act as a version of the online safety act, but for adults! Yay! More censorship... š« (big /s)
Comparing this to fascism at best it makes light of what fascism really is, by comparing it to something that is at worst a bit annoying and fairly easy to bypass anyway. The law itself is mostly about porn, LGBT resources aren't a violation of it, but Reddit chose to just require ID for anything tagged NSFW, regardless of if the law actually says it's 18+. I guess 2 years and several billion dollars wasn't enough for Reddit to come up with a proper implementation. But I don't think that's the laws fault.
Also somewhat ironically the law actually says conservative hate subs should be blocked. It says that content which incites hatred on the basis of race, sex, sexuality, disability, or gender reassignment should be kept away from kids.
And the whole 'government surveillance' thing just feels borderline conspiracy theorist given that verification is done through the apps and not the government. And the law wasn't even passed by the current government, it just didn't go into effect immediately. I don't even support the law, at least in its current implementation, but so many people are being over the top about how bad it actually is.
Removing unnecessary NSFW tags on posts is probably the best response given that that's what's caused much of the issues on Reddit. There's also a petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 which is going to be debated in parliament.
It's not about the censorship parts, it's the law has provisions that would force anyone to break encryption, install a backdoor or leave the UK market. The government has committed to now implementing it into it's able to but at the end of the day you just have to trust them and whoever comes next like the reform party on that.
https://www.article19.org/resources/blog-uk-online-safety-bill-risks-emboldening-digital-authoritarians-around-the-world/
A reform or Tory party could easily use this legal but harmful to restrict the accessing of say, trans or LGBT in general websites and content, or similar stuff.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/online-safety-act-bill-uk-government-encryption-privacy-ofcom/
https://www.eff.org/pages/uk-online-safety-bill-massive-threat-online-privacy-security-and-speech
Speaking generally https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/28/fascism-britain-neoliberalism-opened-door-for-it-labour
https://paulmasonnews.medium.com/the-deep-fears-stoking-british-fascism-a65cfd8042cb
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00213624.2024.2381414
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/why-neoliberalism-needs-neofascists/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07393148.2022.2121135
Aka the left has drifted to neo liberalism and the right has drifted to neo fascism. If you apply the 14 characteristics of Fascism to the UK you get a pretty damning picture.
One major additional issue, though, is data privacy concerns. This is some seriously sensitive (and valuable) personally identifiable information (PII). Itād only take one hack of a major social media or porn site for huge swaths of the UK to have their info stolen. How confident can anyone actually be that this information is being safeguarded adequately by websites? Look at what just happened with the Tea app in the USA that also used ID. People trusted that the Tea company was storing things properly and they left the PII completely exposed. Bad actors know about this law, and they know thereās a potential goldmine for identity theft so if they can find some weak protections in a site they can massively score. Like this is adding a ton of new risk ya feel
I get that, that's a fair concern. As I said I think the law is flawed myself and don't support it I just think a lot of people have been exaggerating how bad, like comparing it to fascism
https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/3A8LAuP6
Imagine defending a censorship law
A) I literally said I don't support the law
B) It's not even censorship, you can still access all the stuff here if you're over 18 you just need an ID, so it's not even censored. It's just age restricted, but porn has supposedly been age restricted anyway.
Sure dude, hand your ID over to whoever asks for it.
I never said it wasn't a privacy concern but it's not censorship.
A lot of the time people say facism they seem to mean authoritarianism.
Even authoritarianism would be an exaggeration here. As I said I don't support this law, but people really need to stop calling things stuff that it just isn't. It's not like the porn industry is an opposition party being silenced. And if it was being silenced it wouldn't be very well considering anyone voting age (at the time the law was written at least) can still access it. And this law, again, wasn't even passed by the current government, authoritarianism would be a single government in power. And it's not some conspiracy either, another thing people are treating it as, the law is well documented and accessible by the public. There's literally a petition against it. If it was some conspiracy it would be one of the most poorly kept secret conspiracies.
maybe you're right. i mean, there's a petition!
Idk if you're being sarcastic or not. But if you are, petitions to the government are not really a sign of an authoritarian or fascist regime. Given the whole 'authoritarian' part. And if it were some secret government conspiracy, a petition on a government website regarding it would likely have been covered up well before it reached nearly 300k signatures.
But the government can just say nothing as has happened time and again with trans and other LGBT petitions.
Absolutely with you, fascism is an overreach for this legislation especially when we can very easily point to the proscribing of Palestine Action as a far more bear faced examples.
The part about goveremt surveillance is not so far fetched however. In 2016 legal powers were introduced that allowed goveremt agencies to view citizens Internet histories (backdated to 1 year). Information is the new currency and while this probably isn't the primary motive for the new law, it's certainly a nice bonus from their perspective.
I'm really torn on the matter of anonymity online. Ease of access for me also means the same for young kids and let's be real, there's a big problem of young kids viewing hardcore pornography and getting some wild ideas in their heads before having any life experience to pair with what they're viewing. On the flip side, we all know whatever ability we give the government to restrict information they will invariably overstep their bounds.
Multiple things can be true at once but yeah, calling this fascism is a bit a stretch.
Insane with the downvotes because you are RIGHT.
Youāre being downvoted because people donāt like to have to use ID to goon but youāre right. The only thing I do agree with OP about is websites that are restricting access to LGBTQ resources potentially but those are not covered by this law so unless there is something explicit or harmful to children in those sites they shouldnāt be locked behind the verification. Plus if youāre an adult you can just abide by the verification process and gain access but I do understand the security concerns but in theory any major website should be abiding by GDPR law.
The issue is that we have a huge fucking problem with young people access dangerous content and any idiot that goes āitās the parents responsibilityā has never had kids. You cannot watch them every second or you get labelled rightly, abusive. They are also sneaky fuckers. Tbh itās flawed anyway as we all know VPNs are an easy work around.
I donāt like the way in which this has been implemented. Personally I think it could have been done differently and more effectively and restricted the verification process purely to porn sites with hefty fines for social media allowing certain types of content online but the internet is a difficult place to police and there is significant evidence of the harm social media has had on young people so something has to be done and Iām yet to see those complaining suggest a more effective measure that doesnāt inconvenient adults as much.
ExpressVPN. I never use the Internet without it!
Whatās with the downvotes? Is ExpressVPN not good? I was considering getting this one since all my favourite YouTubers are sponsored by it and Iād get a deal. Iāll go elsewhere if theyāre problematic tho
It works for me. I have no idea why people down voted, since, you know, they didn't bother to leave an opinion, they just hit an arrow and moved along.
They have been involved in some controversies in the last 5 years or so. They were a good company, then got bought out by an Israeli billionaire.
The company they got bought out by Kape used to be known as Crossrider where it developed SDKs for browser extensions they were primarily used by malware, ad injectors and adware developers and the company dropped the product and rebranded to Kape to focus on the cyber security market.
They then laid off most of ExpressVPN staff including a chunk of their tech team (but not marketing). After buying ExpressVPN they also bought another 3-5 VPNs, and a VPN review publisher. They also appointed a CEO that was fairly dodgy in the past involved in gambling sites and such.
Fair enough. Thanks for answering. Iāll look elsewhere then
My Dad lived under fascism so this is a tad insulting. This is age restriction yes but itās still a far step from fascism. The content is still available to anyone who is willing to prove their age or just use a VPN.
It's also the attacks on encryption in the bill which is pretty concerning. Honestly to me that's worse then just the 18+ shit. The fact that the government appointed head of ofcom can just enforce parts of legislation that would damage encryption is pretty horrifying. Esp with the rise of reform and Tory's going far right, the next government can just use this. Also allowing the blocking of lawful but harmful speech will just enabled the next government to further it's attacks on trans and LGBT people, and migrants in my opinion.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/online-safety-act-bill-uk-government-encryption-privacy-ofcom/
https://www.eff.org/pages/uk-online-safety-bill-massive-threat-online-privacy-security-and-speech
https://www.article19.org/resources/blog-uk-online-safety-bill-risks-emboldening-digital-authoritarians-around-the-world/
I never said this is the right method but something has to be done about it. The rise of misogyny and Andrew Tate with young kids is because of a lack of restrictions and his content would not be filtered by parental controls because parental controls donāt understand context. They only filter based on words or when something is marked as violent content for example. People will have to adapt how they speak about certain topics to stop it being affected by this bill but until the social media companies actually start to take responsibility for moderating content appropriately there arenāt really many other options. We are literally watching the world burn before us because of the internet but you know letās just keep letting it happen instead of doing something constructive and this kind of legislation is what happens when people online donāt take responsibility. As a parent who is incredibly tech savvy, our current systems are not working to protect kids, something had to be done but I donāt necessarily think this is the best way. But calling it fascism, seriously, thatās just childish
The attack on encryption is a fascist policy. As I put in the original post, they should have modelled it after the EUs Digital Service's Act that doesn't disproportionately fuck small forums, cause massive issues and attack encryption.
Also for the record this archives nothing. Because all it means is people who want to access this content will just download a VPN and switch to countries without regulations. There are ways to have helped and improved safety and security but this is not one of them.
The stats on girls being strangled their first time being intimate is terrifying. The stats on how misogynistic porn is and how the women are treated in it that teens are replicating is terrifying too. So many parents are unaware or don't care what their kids are watching online. I am terrified for my kids. Something needed to be done to stop just anyone getting on porn sites. I can only protect my kids in my home, not from the other kids that can do what ever they want with no regard to their developing brains
Yep but Reddit is full of teenagers and chronically online single people who donāt understand that fear
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it's supposed to if it promotes hate and violence towards women