‘Child safety’ or deliberate political censorship? | #childsafety | #kids | #chldern | #parents | #schoolsafey

Australia is set to ‘quietly’ introduce ‘unprecedented’ age verification checks for YouTube and Google as part of a wider push to gate-keep access to social media.

Quietly.

Without the consent of the Australian people.

Labor is pushing ahead despite alarming fallout from the UK where their Online Safety Act, claimed to be created in the interests of ‘child safety’, has led to the immediate censoring of political discussion surrounding mass migration and Grooming Gangs.

What began as genuine concern for children on social media has rapidly expanded to mandatory, wide-ranging, biometric age checking across the digital landscape.

Not only here – throughout the Western world.

Australia, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have all decided that information is the enemy of political ideas.

The Coalition established the eSafety Commissioner.

Liberal Leader Sussan Ley continues to support the eSafety ‘Commissar’s’ proposed restrictions on X, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, set to begin in December and now expanded to YouTube and Google.

Failure to comply will see the imposition of extraordinary and ludicrous fines.

This is to satisfy an age verification technology whose reliability is yet to be proven. While these biometric technologies can guess at ages, they cannot return a reliable result to distinguish teenagers, even for the same individual. How can this be the proposed basis for adult rights to digital communication?

It is only natural that when adults find themselves unable to access essential digital services, or a 16-year-old on their birthday wants to download X, that a more reliable form of identification will be sought – and that will almost certainly be Digital ID.

So much for promises that this will be ‘voluntary’ and ‘only for government paperwork and applying for rental properties’.

Most believe, logically, that the point of ‘child safety’ legislation is to force the implementation of Digital ID and perhaps begin the crackdown against VPNs.

These are policy positions that would have been rejected if it weren’t for the added layer of ‘think of the children’ just as deconstructing our energy grid required the weaponisation of screaming children gluing themselves to the road believing they were ‘going to die’ because of fossil fuels.

It is a sickening form of confected emotionally-manipulative hysteria.

We may ask, for what other reasons have these extreme measures been placed upon the digital realm?

Especially considering YouTube is one of the most heavily regulated established platforms and Google has a fully-functional adult-content setting.

Safety?

I don’t believe that. I’m sure you don’t believe that. Chalk up another Uniparty lie.

There is more going on.

While the government continues turning a blind eye to gaming chats and unregulated message boards, it clearly does not believe in child safety online. And even if the eSafety Commissioner believes in her mission to ‘protect children online’, why not wait until the Under 16 social media comes into force in December?

There is enormous doubt about its functionality and, most assume, its public reception. It is likely to be a social disaster. Children around Australia will suddenly realise that government power extends beyond campaign slogans aimed at their frustrated parents.

The UK is experiencing a fraction of the power the Australian legislation proposes, and it is an unmitigated disaster which has been called an assault on fundamental human and civil rights. Instead of protecting children, the UK’s Online Safety Act has put them in danger because it silences information about alleged police complicity in the Grooming Gang assaults and removes public protests about illegal migrants who have been accused of sexually assaulting young people on the street.

Censorship is creating a world where criminals and predators are protected for the sake of political harmony.

This is why we say, over and over, the government cannot be trusted with censorship.

Even good intentions turn sour, and we are confronted with ridiculous scenes, such as Peter Kyle, the UK Science Secretary, accusing Reform leader Nigel Farage of being on the side of Jimmy Savile. Needless to say, Farage is demanding an apology.

‘If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that,’ Mr Kyle spat back.

This is what authoritarian governments do when they have overreach – falsely frame a legislative reform as an existential threat to safety. If you don’t want your free speech rights or privacy erased, you must be supporting predators. If you think industrial renewable energy projects are a bad idea, you must want the world to burn. Or freeze. Or flood. (They’re not quite sure on that one.)

The truth is, the UK has shown us what awaits Australia in the immediate future.

Even those who dislike social media need be concerned about the impacts on search engines such as Google and Microsoft. Those who do not verify their age will have their results automatically filtered to child settings. This does not mean the standard ‘safe search’. No, it is instead a more complex algorithm that we have been warned will include harmful content which could simply mean a discussion on migration or whatever the government deems to be misinformation.

It might be an article from the wonderful Professor Ian Plimer challenging the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It is via these methods of ‘child safety’ that our access to knowledge shrinks.

The government has become what the late Christopher Hitchens warned about – an entity deciding what you can read.

Did the Prime Minister mention this at the last election?

Who is responsible for subverting democracy and taking this decision away from the Australian people and our elected representatives?

This intolerable story of the erosion of rights comes down to the eSafety Commissar, Julie Inman Grant. She seems absolutely giddy at the thought of more power. I’m disgusted. Enough is enough. We need to have a talk about digital overreach and the misuse of child safety as a means to control people’s access to the digital world.

Based on the Coalition’s introduction of necessary precursor policies and legislation, Labor’s assault on the digital world is so expansive and severe it is difficult to know which argument to take into battle.

And that is the point.

Destroying the modern public forum is an essential step on the path to cementing an era of unchallenged propaganda capable of re-shaping the social conversation of Australia.

The people who founded our democracy wrote privacy into the system for a reason.

It was to protect people from the government.

First, terrorism was used. Then climate change. Then Covid. Now, child safety.

All of these have been used to deceitfully chip away at privacy and free speech. It must stop. We have to draw a line in the sand and protect the internet, for ourselves and for the next generation of children who deserve to grow up in a free country and indeed, a free world.

Life will never guarantee safety. That is not an excuse for the government to legislate danger.

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This article was first published on the Senator’s Substack. You can follow it here.