Censorship creep continues to be a running theme for age verification as Australia expands it to AI chatbots.
Once upon a time, many months ago, age verification was about websites that specialize in pornographic material. If a website had a certain percentage of pornographic material, then that website would be required by law to implement age verification technology that doesn’t actually exist to prevent minors from viewing such content.
Then governments gradually stopped pretending that this has anything to do with “sexually explicit” content or “protecting children” and more about controlling speech online.
Of course, this whole transition to this being about thought control was slow and subtle at first. At first, it was just about dropping the percentage of adult content a website has to have in order to fall under the given laws. Then, lawmakers began tacking on language to these laws, saying that content can also be about being “harmful” to minors. Shortly after that, all bets were off and it seemed like age verification can apply to anything.
The censorship creep started trickling into political speech. It then expanded into personal health and addiction prevention discussions. The UK specifically then started discussing the idea of expanding age verification to include VPNs. Australia, for its part, expanded age verification to social media in general under the guise of there potentially being “harmful” content on there. That blanket rule would later get expanded to include all of YouTube.
As the mass government censorship continues to spiral out of control, Australia seems to not be slowing down in adding to its list of sites and services it intends on censoring. Recent reports are suggesting that Australia is expanding its mass government internet censorship to include AI chatbots. From the Financial Review:
The same software needed to implement the under-16 social media ban will be required to enforce the eSafety Commissioner’s new industry-backed online safety codes, which aim to protect all children under the age of 18 from pornography and other age-inappropriate content.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant registered the new codes on Tuesday, which focus on harmful content primarily created by unregulated AI chatbots that can have sexually explicit conversations with minors and encourage suicidal ideation, self-harm or disordered eating.
So, what’s the reason for expanding age verification to chatbots? Well, it’s the same old tired typical bullshit response any government is using these days to try and pretend this has nothing to do with thought control:
“We know there has been a recent proliferation of these apps online and that many of them are free, accessible to children, and advertised on mainstream services, so it’s important these codes include measures to protect children from them,” Grant said.
Yup, these services have been advertised in the media, so you get added to the government censorship lists. You know, those services might generate something that could be harmful to minors, yadda yadda yadda, it’s getting censored. Typical nonsensical jackwagon response, really. Obviously, if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
Of course, governments aren’t the only ones culpable of locking down the free and open internet. Part of the blame falls on major platforms and services just going along with this and normalizing mass government censorship behaviour as well. If they found a spine and fought these obvious nonsense laws, we wouldn’t be anywhere near the levels of government censorship we are seeing now. Instead, most of them folded like a cheap lawn chair and just let it all happen. That has obviously given various governments like the Australian government the green light to start dreaming up other things they intend on censoring. Now, we are this much deeper into this censorship mess and witnessing larger and larger parts of the internet get subjected to mass government censorship. This will only continue until more people stand up and say “enough!”
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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ok this is a weird one and definitely censorship which Im against but…is it bad that part of me thought “good. less people using those annoying data harvesters”?
It’s not terrible because the fewer people that use AI products, the better. The only thing here, and this is something that had only occurred to me after I published this article, is that this is censorship based on what could be on there, not what is actually on there. I find it disturbing because there is nothing stopping government from saying, “well, yeah, we couldn’t find anything bad on your website, but you never know! You could publish something that is harmful on that site some day and we have to take action now to prevent that… uh… harm! Yeah, that’s the ticket. To prevent harm!”
to be fair, its pretty easy from what I hear (second hand knowledge admittedly because I avoid all things AI as much as possible like the plague.) to get a AI chatbot to make porn for you so its less what could be and more what would definitely be with a simple request.