Another post restricted on X shared an image of Francisco de Goya’s 19th-century painting entitled Saturn Devouring His Son. The striking work depicts the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus – known as Saturn by the Romans – eating one of his children in fear of a prophesy that one would overthrow him and has been described as depicting “utter male fury”.<\/p>\n
The examples gathered by BBC Verify are largely focussed on X and Reddit, as they clearly flag age-restricted content. Meta has a different system whereby ‘teen’ profiles are a different type of account with parental control – making it harder for us to identify which content is age-restricted.<\/p>\n
It is unclear exactly how many posts commenting on debates of public interest are being restricted. X and Reddit did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
But Prof Livingstone noted that it was “possible that the companies are over-blocking to undermine the Act”.<\/p>\n
X owner Elon Musk has been highly critical of the Online Safety Act. The billionaire has launched a stream of attacks against the legislation online and X suggested that it could dissuade companies from launching products in the UK.<\/p>\n
“[The law’s] purpose is suppression of the people,” Musk wrote on X on Monday, before sharing several posts by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson which also opposed the law.<\/p>\n
Data suggests that the legislation could heavily impact adults in the UK. Large proportions of users – up to 37% on X and 59% on Reddit – access these platforms whilst logged out, according to data from the platforms. This means those users won’t be age-verified and will experience the internet in the same way as children.<\/p>\n
The Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) emphasised to BBC Verify that it was up to social media platforms themselves to decide how to implement the requirements of the act, but insisted that the risk-based approach must not “censor political debate”.<\/p>\n
Ofcom, the UK media regulator tasked with enforcing the act, has warned that firms could face fines not only for failing to protect children, but also for breaching freedom of speech under the act.<\/p>\n
BBC Verify’s analysis also suggested that the legislation had succeeded in blocking some harmful material online. Since Musk bought X, previously called Twitter, the platform has earned a reputation for being flooded with pornographic material, as well violent, antisemitic and racist posts.<\/p>\n
However, we found that violent and pornographic content was significantly restricted when using an account without age verification.<\/p>\n
The new obligations effectively puts firms in a position where they must comply with the law. Prof Livingstone suggested that they could still be in a period of “working out how best” to make judgements over the sort of content on their sites, which could be refined over time.<\/p>\n
But Prof Wachter said that the level of self-regulation afforded to tech companies in choosing how to comply with the Online Safety Act called for well-staffed moderation teams equipped with “time, resources, expertise and nuance” to effectively make decisions.<\/p>\n
She also noted that many major social media companies, such as X and Meta, have slimmed down their moderation teams in recent years or dissolved them completely.<\/p>\n
“This trend is very worrying when opaque rules are now applied to make these take down decisions, especially in the current political climate,” Prof Wachter said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another post restricted on X shared an image of Francisco de Goya’s 19th-century painting entitled Saturn Devouring His…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[2000,299,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-315866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114967676480669874","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}