A report is suggesting that Australia is looking into expanding what should be gated away from the open public through age verification.
Many countries are pushing laws that age gates “adult content”. This includes Canada, the United States, and several others. The efforts have drawn heavy criticism for very good reason.
For one, we are talking about government censoring speech that is actually lawful. For another, the “solutions” would cause far more harm than any alleged “cures” supporters claim they would have. Specifically, it calls for facial recognition scans and other copious amounts of personal information just to enjoy the free and open web. Additionally, many of these efforts are little more than a backdoor effort to suppress LGBTQ+ content by simply reclassifying it as “sexual” content. What’s more, even supporters of such laws admit that such efforts do little to stop underage people from accessing adult content thanks to anonymous services such as VPN’s and TOR. In short, such efforts solve nothing and endanger everyone involved.
Another problem with these laws is that such laws are generally little more than a shoe horn to start attacking other forms of speech. Some people dismiss this last concern as little more than speculative hyperbole, but it is the inevitable result of implementing a law that censors lawful expression. Among government workers, there is a very well known saying: “When you get a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. That definitely applies to government internet censorship. After all, if “adult content” can be censored, why stop there?
If a recent report is anything to go by, we were proven right on the fears that government censorship would only expand once it seems like adult content is on the constitutional chopping block. ABC is offering an extensive article on age verification laws in Australia. However, one part stood out to us in particular:
Despite those concerns from late last year, the government is now pushing ahead with a pilot to try and test some of those ideas.
It’s not yet known what it will involve, with the government saying $6.5 million will be included in the May budget, and work will begin then to figure out who will run it and what will be tested.
It may also look beyond just porn and into areas like video games, too.
Responding to eSafety’s roadmap last year, the government set a few tests that any age verification scheme would have to meet.
(emphasis mine)
If this report is accurate and the Australian government is well and truly looking to censor video games in the future, then the legitimate concerns about this being a slippery slope into other areas are proven (again) to be accurate.
Moral panics about video games have been going on for years now. They range from accusations that they only train people to be murdering psychopaths to being little more than crack/cocaine that is destroying the youth of today. Obviously, as we previously highlighted, the research has never actually materialized confirming this. In the end, it becomes little more than media scaremongering with potentially intentionally misdiagnosing the symptoms of numerous situations and coming to very wrong conclusions. Problem cases with video games invariably have other underlying causes such as bad parenting or psychological disorders that manifested in playing video games excessively.
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in numerous debates over the recent years such as Bill C-11, Bill C-18, Online Harms bills and age verification laws in general, scientific evidence and expert analysis means little to government policy making these days. A good moral panic pushed by the media or interest groups a political party happens to be close with is all it takes to push awful laws destined to cause significant harm. So, it wouldn’t be a surprise that if the debates about age verification slipping into censoring video games comes to fruition, that science and evidence would get routinely rejected in the process.
Political discourse these days have devolved quite a bit over the years. These days, it seems that the concept of mass government censorship has become increasingly normalized with freedom of expression being increasingly demonized. What’s worse, we are seeing a portion of the population support this mass government censorship simply because it is the political party they happen to support that’s doing it. Since we are talking about censoring speech they happen to not like in the first place, then that just automatically means that censorship is a good thing. This while paying little mind to the implications of censoring lawful speech in the first place. With people going so far as to saying that free speech is a threat to democracy, it appears that government is taking full advantage of the situation to try and crack down on the free and open internet as a whole.