UK Expands Online Safety Act to Mandate Preemptive Scanning

More likely it would just silently not be sent, and potentially a week later you get a visit from the cops. Censors hate drawing attention to their actions, that is why you never see a "this message censored on government request" as sender or recipient.

This is where someone conflates it with anti-spam and acts confused, because showing such a notice for every spam message would make a service unusable. As if spam is equivalent, as if users cannot be given the choice to opt in/out of however much anti-spam and other filtering that they want as recipients, and as if "This was censored" messages cannot be collapsed/shown per category, e.g. "Messages blocked: 12 spam, 4 unwanted sexual content, 5 misinformation/lacking context, 7 hate/harmful content". As a rule, when someone raises an objection that can be resolved with less than 60 seconds of thought, they are not being genuine.

But more importantly, it would make it illegal to provide any kind of messaging software without government approval, which is only given by letting government-designated censorship and surveillance services act as middle-men. And then the law can be more or less strictly applied, depending how much the government dislikes the general sentiment that is spread on your network, regardless of its legality, thus controlling discourse.

I am not speculating here - this is what the UK government has admitted they want:

First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. - https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...

Most of these comments I think are off the mark. For some reason anything to do with EU or the UK legislating to protect citizenry is seen as some Orwellian conspiracy to mind control people. I agree some of the policies feel like always using a hammer - but I strongly suspect it's because the tech industry is clearly not playing ball.

Children being sent dick pics, or AI generated nudes of them being sent around schools, etc. are real problems facing real normal people.

I think people here need to be reminded that the average person doesn't care about technology. They will be happy for their phones to automatically block nude pictures by Government rule if the tech companies do not improve their social safety measures. This is the double edged sword: these same people are not tech savvy enough to lock down their children's phones, they expect it to be safe, they paid money for it to be "safe", and even if you lock a phone down, it doesn't stopped their class mates sending them AI porn of other class mates.

Musk is living proof that a non zero number of these giant tech companies are happy for child porn ("fake" or not) to be posted on their platform. If I was in his shoes, it would be pretty high up on my list to make sure Grok isn't posting pornography. It's not hard to be a good person.

Grok AI generating child pornography has been a leading news story in the British press for the past few days.

Goodbye all small independent forums with no AI budgets. An attacker posts a nude picture, 18m fine from OfCom ("whichever is larger", not proportional to revenue)