Censorship? AGAIN???

I am getting deja-vu. I can't remember if it's from the last ICTA proposal in Mauritius for regulating "harmful content" on social media. Or if it's from when the government shut down access to social media to prevent the sharing of "problematic content" surrounding a wire-tapping scandal. Or if it's from when the US first introduced the "Kids Online Safety Act". Or if it's from the shutdown of TikTok in the US as it was a medium for dissemination of content the government didn't want people seeing.
Bottom line, censorship and the shutting down of parts of the Internet have been brought up again and again and again by wannabe dictatorships or authoritarianism-infatuated governments.

Right now, end of July 2025, there appears to be a massive push, particularly in the West, for online censorship and it is nothing other than rehashed fascism and invasiveness. Since when was 1984 an instruction manual?

United Kingdom of No Wikipedia Access

The Online Safety Act has come into force in the UK, introduced by the Labour (allegedly left wing) party. The premise behind the OSA is to help protect children and shield them from sensitive or mature content on the internet. Content which is restricted is anything relating to sexual material, alcoholism, self harm, suicide, eating disorders and terrorism. That makes sense to me! We don't want children exposed to such content, right?

The restrictions are enforced through thorough age verification methods – ie not just clicking "Yes, I'm 18+. The two most common methods right now are through ID verification or by taking a recording of your face and having an AI judge your age. Other places are using AI to track your every move on the website and use that to profile you – for example, YouTube would probably judge your age from the videos you watch.

Now, of course, I'm sure you're excited to upload your IDs to whichever website you are accessing, all so you can keep your children safe! However, there isn't even a structure behind the ID verification and no official government-provided platform for this. Instead, each platform like Twitter and Reddit have to implement verification of their own.
Unsurprisingly, controversies have sprung out because some ID verification platforms are based in the very trustworthy countries of Cyprus and Seychelles and simply operate in the UK through a shell company. Additionally, it's an ironic coincidence that the Tea app was hacked last week and all the personal identifying information used for sign-ups including IDs, drivers licenses, and passports were leaked. So I'm sure we're just thrilled to have more repeats of this breach!

Since your online activities are being linked to an ID, people are also worried that it can lead to intense profiling of users – such as interests, hobbies, political affiliations, chance of joining the inevitable rebellion ... you know, that sorta thing.
I don't necessarily agree as profiling was feasible and easy enough since most of the tech world is controlled by a handful of tech conglomerates, particularly Meta and Google.

The European Union of Getting Censored

And now, as if the massive uproar regarding the UK's censorship was nothing significant, the EU have decided that it's a splendid idea for them to implement too! The EU's proposals follow similar guidelines of what is and isn't "appropriate content" as the UK.

The United States of No Freedom

The US is also reintroducing the Kids Online Safety Act. Despite having "kids safety" in the name, this proposition sets a legal framework for banning and censoring any media deemed "problematic" (same as the UK and EU).

The KOSA was initially drafted several years back but was shut down due to concerns over the wide impact it could have on online freedom of speech.

More Countries of We Hate Free Speech

More countries looking to join the brawl are Australia, Mexico, Ireland, Canada and potentially even Mauritius (where I live). And I'm supposed to believe that all these countries coming up with identical proposals is a coincidence??

Credit Card Companies of No Don't Spend Your Money There

Recently, there was massive outcry by gamers as many games were taken down from the popular platforms Steam and Itch.io and outright deleted from the libraries of the people who had bought them. This came after Collective Shout, a self-proclaimed anti-porn group (but probably closer to christofascist) pressured these platforms to delist the offending games by directing the complaints to Visa and Mastercard.

Sadly, the platforms folded under the pressure of losing the two payment processors which are likely the largest sources of income for them. And while I'm on the topic, having a duopoly of card companies deciding what you can and cannot spend your money on is ridiculous and the third-party censorship is both unnecessary and unwarranted. Other affected content includes NSFW content on Patreon.

My Conspiracy Theories

First and foremost, the rushed and seemingly global push for censorship is not at all "for children"; it's just a way to justify the massive overreach.

Control of Opinions

The governments in the West have had some issues recently - they are finding it harder and harder to influence and control the opinions of the masses. What used to be simple in an offline world has become so much more complex with the numerous social media, their differing algorithms, and the ever-evolving way that people interact. This lack of control is fueling panic; and this has manifested in the past such as when the US aimed for a TikTok ban (chinese algorithm without US control) and when the Mauritian government shut down social media because of the wiretapping scandal which was being talked about everywhere.

It's also why there has been a concerted effort to undermine Wikipedia and the Internet Archive - both being important sources of truth in a world where it is becoming increasingly hard to know what's real and not.

Vague Language

In a lot of these regulations, very vague language is used. Terms such as "terrorism" or "sexual content" are straightforward in conversation; one refers to ISIS or Al-Qaeda and the other refers to pornography.
Yet when it comes to applying these restrictions, the vague terminology can easily be abused to censor information the government doesn't want to be proliferated.

To take the example of "terrorism", the UK recently labelled "Palestine Action", an activist group protesting against the one-sided "war" in Gaza, as terrorists.
In the example of "sexual content", right-wing politicians have been going non-stop about how LGBTQ+ media is supposedly inherently sexual and is an affront to the innocence of children (eyes rolling). Furthermore, they seem equally obsessed with labelling queer people as "pedophiles" or "groomers" (obviously without substantiating their claims).

The major concern is that the vague language would allow censoring information the government doesn't personally agree with, and this overreach cannot be tolerated.

Control of Truth and People

It should be known by now that I dislike AI. However, my personal conspiracy theory is that AI will be a tool to control the concept of truth, and, with it, people. It is already known that images and text content and videos and audio across the internet is gradually getting polluted by fake AI-generated things. The line between what is real and what isn't is gradually getting blurred. And the ways AI is being used is drawing alarming parallels to 1984 (the book by George Orwell, not the year). With places like Wikipedia being restricted and the Internet Archive being under fire, and people turning to AI for everything, people are rendering themselves subservient to the opinions of these LLMs.

Added to this, AI is being proposed to monitor people's online habits – supposedly to estimate their age and thus regulate access to age-sensitive media. However, a British politician also got caught on TV slipping up and saying it would also be used to monitor adults and know if they have opinions which go against the government.

I don't know how to write a conclusion for this – it all seems so bleak. So, well, this has been tyranny in a nutshell.

I CANT KEEP UP

Let this be a small repository for all the ways it's actually getting worse. I will add as I find more information; do not expect linearity or coherence.

The EU age verification shenanigans are going to ban Android apps not licensed by Google. Does this mean the end of installing apks? Is it also the end for free (as in freedom) alternatives to the Google Play Store, such as F-Droid?

And while I'm at it, what's going to happen to messaging platforms with end to end encryption like WhatsApp and Signal?? Is the government going to demand a backdoor to read my messages?? And apparently I side with pedos if I don't want this shit.
Ireland has now proposed a new law which lets the state intercept your private messages without breaking encryption, but by scanning the messages directly on your phone. So this would probably mean installing a government spyware app on your phone. You know who else has this shit??? CHINA.
To add, apparently a similar thing is hidden deep within the UK's OSA as well.

Australia wants to ban YouTube for under-16s.

The US, the country which is currently protecting pedophiles from the Epstein list, is getting involved with the censorship, starting with S737 - the Screen Act. Here's what it says:

To require certain interactive computer services to adopt and operate technology verification measures to ensure that users of the platform are not minors, and for other purposes.

"and for other purposes" - gee, fascism in a can.

New update from the 3rd of August! The UK politicians who, reminder, said that "if you use a VPN then you support pedophiles" have been using VPNs to circumvent their own internet-blocking policies. It is funny that the government is deciding "rules for thee but not for me" in this case, and I would've found it depressing if they didn't have a history of doing this. The most insane part, however, is that they are charging the VPNs (which are public, commercial VPNs, not private special government VPNs) on the public taxpayers.