I think you'd be surprised how many people are actually in favour of this bill. Mainstream press totally fell for the "think of the children" angle pushed by a mixture of legitimate children's safety organisations, anti-porn activists, and intelligence apparatus. Meanwhile the privacy argument got little to no lobbying or public discourse.

E.g.:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/15/digital-g...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/19/online-safety-ac...

It's how the (previous) government was able to look like it was doing something about the mental health crisis caused by social media, even though this bill won't fix that at all.

I appreciate that it has a lot of soft support, however concerned parents won't stop being concerned as a consequence. I struggle to see it as being a vote winner but its clear how its a vote loser to many. That the mainstream press have published many positive articles about it, just demonstrates the bias IMHO. Fleet street is become less and less of a proxy of public opinion over time but our political parties still treat the press like they did in the 90s, which I think can often be a mistake given how different the press is since the advent of the internet and how much more fragmented news now is, and how the electorate now receive it.

IMHO the argument for "doing something" is one of those things that people are noisy about but ultimately care little about at the ballot box. The risk is that the typically politically apathetic are driven to the ballot box as a consequence of disrupting their habit in order to protest. Most governments do very little that actually directly interfere with people and their habits, COVID was a very rare event and Boris Johnson fell in no small part due to circumventing the rules his own government imposed on the populace. There's huge electoral risk in giving so many people consequence.

Given the numbers at play, I just don't see how you can square the huge internet traffic for pron and the intrusion into their "workflows" against some presumed other number of electors that will suddenly vote for you because you allowed this bill to take effect. Irrespective of the ethics of the subject it just doesn't feel like good electoral statecraft in a democracy. This is particularly surprising given that most UK political parties generally veer away from doing things that might lose them any significant amount of votes.

This is what happens in a low-trust society. More people start to believe more should be monitored and controlled. Meanwhile society doesn't get better, low-trust continues and so does the loop.

Mainstream press is owned by the same rich who own corporations that benefit from OSA.

British voter here who voted Labour and could change. I'm not wholly against nerfing the web a bit to protect kids. I haven't read the bill or analysed the details to try to figure if it'll work. I think that's not so atypical for voters. Grown ups can always VPN etc.

It's hard to know how it'll work in practice without trying it.

I feel like the law should change to prevent children from having devices that can freely access the internet. i.e. they can still access devices but not own them. Then its about parental supervision. We're only here because parents give their kids smartphones with zero oversight.

"grown ups can always use vpn"

until they can't because they're also made illegal

don't forget this is also the same government that has effectively tried to ban e2e encryption by forcing companies to install backdoors into their algorithms under gag orders

it is no longer (if it ever was) about the children

This is just a corporate land grab disguised as "safety measure". It just shows government corruption at work. If corporations want something, they will get it.

People no longer start their own forum, but create a Facebook group etc.