The BBC's technology editor Zoe Kleinman on the big changes coming down the line for young people online.
Remember Jess Phillips's recent resignation letter? Emphasis mine:
TW: it explains how CSA materials are created.
"Over a year ago I presented solutions, long worked on by brilliant civil servants that would end the ability for children in the UK to take naked images of themselves. 91% of online child sex abuse is self-generated by children groomed, tricked and exploited in to abuse. The technology exists to stop children being able to take naked images of themselves. We could make this possible on every phone and device in the country. We could stop this abuse. It has taken me a year to get you to agree to even threaten to legislate in this space. Not legislate, just threaten. This is the definition of incremental change. Nothing bold about it. The announcement was meant to be in March, I'm still on a promise this will happen in June, I've given up believing it. How many children were left without a safety net in the time we dilly dallied and worried about tech bosses?"
/end TW
I have my differences with Jess Phillips. Notably, she's fooling herself if she thinks Starmer is a good man, though I assume he once talked a good game to his Labour colleagues: after all, they made him leader.
But there is no mistaking Phillips' genuine sincerity here. This is an unusually candid example of the genre of "MP resignation letters" that drips with the real frustration of someone who knows, because she is a woman in politics, that even many "good" men won't act against abuse when it really counts.
She's asking what we're all asking:
If child safety was so important to Starmer, why did Mr. "My Father Was A Toolmaker" fail to use a tool at his disposal? I think the answer is twofold:
1. He's compromised by his relationship with the US state and its hand-in-glove relationship with Big Tech (consider the Palantir deal), and is reluctant to be seen as acting against the sector or the men - often abusers of women and eugenics enthusiasts - who are its most powerful exponents. It's easier to say, by implication, that it is the children who are wrong, and the children's overall online behaviour that must be policed.
2. Age verification's main intended utility is not child protection, but the ability to easily link adults' IDs to our activity online. This matches the hard lurch to the right that Labour, and our public institutions and processes, have taken under not just Starmer, but prior Labour governments. The Tories did not invent much of the damage they did: on many issues, they picked up Labour's ball and ran with it. Now Labour have the ball again.
There's growing criminalisation of protest. There's over-reach via the use of our counter-terror laws. We are seeing broader enshittification of the public consultations process for proposed legislation (in the linked example, as part of a longstanding ableist propaganda project meant to damage the disability benefits system). His government seeks to erode the protections we still enjoy under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Specifically, age verification seems intended to support the government's attempt to make digital IDs happen. The public have been saying clearly for decades now that we don't want national ID cards in any way, shape or form.
I'm not naive here.
I see that Jess Phillips's vaunted technological solution to CSAM creation would likely still be imperfect and heap limitations on adults who don't cough up our IDs. I'm saying this, after all, on Tumblr, whose auto-mod can't tell a photo of a snowfield from a photo of a body.
But we don't need a false choice between "adults who won't dox themselves cannot take nudes" and "adults who won't dox themselves are deprived of important community-building methods, during a time of spiralling political repression".
In an ideal outcome, the Starmer government would:
actually care about the internet-facilitated abuse of children, women, and marginalised people
give us the measures we've been asking for to combat the likes of Grok
create genuine and feared consequences for the people - mostly men - who harm us
fund real, actionable education for parents and guardians, to help them understand the online world through which their children move, and protect them from its dangers
But on the whole, that's not what Keir Starmer is offering us.
The question is, what are we going to do about it?
For one thing, digital privacy campaigning org the Open Rights Group has proposed a rights-based approach to protecting our freedoms online that would still address the child safety concerns the Online Safety Act purports to tackle, and it involves accountability for the digital giants, greater transparency, and greater protections. Join them here.
For another, human rights org Liberty has been fighting successive governments on repressive policy for decades now. Sign up for their email updates to learn about actions we can take.
Amnesty UK is also concerned with the rise of authoritarianism here and the international lurch right of which it is a part. They offer lots of ways to get involved, not just on this but on many other issues.
Edit: Just had to add this blistering take on the Australian government's similar legislative cock-up (so admired by Starmer), which covers an amazing amount of ground in its short runtime:
