Responding to the UK Online Safety regulator’s announcement about ID check methods to enforce Labour’s social media ban, Big Brother Watch’s director Silkie Carlo said:
“This plan for a government ‘social media ban’ is a national ID system by the back door. Both the government and Ofcom have admitted that children will get around the ban, which means the real effect will be normalising adults and children alike to hand over their passports just to get online.
“Hundreds of thousands of people without ID, who tend to be poorer people, and many more who don’t want to risk handing their passports over to foreign tech companies will be locked out of huge parts of the internet. The plan will kill anonymity online, whilst the UK’s culture of speech policing is reaching a crisis point. The policy is painfully misguided, an Orwellian assault on free speech and privacy, and will make children no safer at all.
“The false illusion that children aren’t on social media will cause the companies to abandon all their child safety measures. The Government could be promoting meaningful safety measures and supporting parental controls that genuinely protect children, but instead they’re demanding government ID from the whole population just for uncensored internet access. It is authoritarian madness.”
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Spokespeople are available for interview – please contact 07730439257 or info@bigbrotherwatch.org.uk
- More details on Big Brother Watch’s work on social media and internet restrictions are available on our website