Won't Somebody Think of the Children?

Getting back to this Online Safety Act, I see that we now have that sack of shit Nigel Farage jumping on the bandwagon and claiming that said act represses free speech.  Which it patently doesn't.  Porn sites and some social media sites requiring age verification in no way hinders anyone's right to express their opinions = let's face it, you are hardly going to pontificate about politics or religion while talking to one of those girls on those video cam sites and there are plenty of channels other than social media available for expressing one's opinions.  What it does do is impinge upon my rights as an adult to view perfectly legal content on the dubious grounds of 'child protection'.  Now, I'm not saying that I actually have any desire to trawl porn sites, but the fact is that I should, as an adult, have that option without having to prove my age to some dubious third party which these sites are being forced to use, (for UK visitors, at least).  As I never tire of pointing out, the primary responsibility for ensuring children don't see inappropriate content lies with their parents or guardians.  It is perfectly possible for content restrictions to be set up on internet-connected devices.  If you can't do that, then your ISP can impose restrictions for you at router-level.  There really is no excuse for parents to wring their hands and despair about all that nasty stuff their kids can see online - if you don't like it, then do something about it yourself instead of waiting for the government to start eroding our civil liberties and endangering our personal data in the process.

Obviously, we didn't have the internet when I was a child, but we did have TV, which was that era's favourite bogeyman for allegedly exposing children to inappropriate material.  It was largely scaremongering as TV (we only had three terrestrial channels back then) had a clear 'watershed', with programming of a more adult nature being shown after nine o'clock in the evening.  When I was younger, that was well past my bedtime so there was no problem, but as I got older, my parents carefully vetted what I could and couldn't watch after that time, as did virtually every other kid I knew parents.  I know that the internet and streaming TV are somewhat more complicated, but the ultimate power for access to them still lies with parents.  The Online Safety Act - the creation and implementation of which has spanned two governments, one Tory, the other Labour - is an extraordinarily poorly framed piece of legislation.  A kneejerk reaction to a problem that shouldn't really exist if people were to start taking responsibility for their own offspring,  It is taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut, the result of successive government's unhealthy obsession with internet pornography and apparent belief that you are bombarded with it as soon as you log onto the web.  It's like all those magazines on the top shelf of the newsagents when I was a kid: everybody knew it was there, but you didn't have to look at it.