UK Online Safety Bill

So the UK government has had it's "Online Safety Bill" in the works for some time. I honestly keep forgetting about it as news on it goes quiet for a while and then it pops back up again.

Been trying to find out how this new law will work, mainly seeing comments about targeting "illegal or harmful content" on social media platforms. Naturally I'm concerned if and how this new law could also affect the usage other websites such as Danbooru, Pixiv and others but I'm still in the dark as to how they plan to implement it exactly.

The whole thing reeks of government spying and censorship with "Protect the children!" as the smoke screen lie they always use. "Harmful Content" is nice and vague so it can be anything they want it to be.

A couple of of references for the unaware, it's been in the works for quite a while now.

Worse comes to worst the site would have to stop operating in the UK completely, like Pornhub has in a couple of US states where age verification for adult content has been codified into law.

I've seen a copy pasted news article appear on a few news sites that go on about the recent flood of realistic AI generated works of children posted on Pixiv as well as people using the comments on said works to link to site with more explicit works. All AI art, not just the photo realistic stuff, is banned outright on Fanbox and other Pixiv services. However, there is still a great deal of AI art flooding onto the main Pixiv loli tag not so much fully photo realistic but still might be considered close enough with the new law. Though I've noticed even those accounts are gradually weeded out and banned.

Again worst case scenario could be that Pixiv is blocked in the UK and inaccessible without a vpn.

I never considered pixiv but not being able to access Danbooru is still a nightmare situation for me...

But at the end of the day, pixiv and Danbooru aren't porn sites. They're artwork websites. There's a lot of sfw artwork on both.

And as much as the UK gov't hates freedom of artistic expression (and they do, believe me), blocking an artwork website strikes me as something that would honestly come back and bite them in the ass later on.