Social media companies may be "over-complying" with the UK's new Online Safety Act and blocking content that shouldn't be blocked:
Among the restricted content identified by BBC Verify was a video post on X which showed a man in Gaza looking for the dead bodies of his family buried among the rubble of destroyed buildings. The post was restricted despite not showing any graphic imagery or bodies at any point in the clip.
The same warning was experienced by users who attempted to view a video of a Shahed drone destroyed mid-flight in Ukraine. The Iranian-made drones, which are widely used by Russia in the full-scale invasion, are unmanned and nobody was injured or killed in the clip.
A speech by Conservative MP Katie Lam, containing a graphic description of the rape of a minor by a grooming gang, is available to view without restriction on Parliament's official streaming website, ParliamentLive, but is restricted on X.
What did the idiots who designed and voted for these laws expect? That you could just easily draw a neat little line around "harmful to children" and everything would be simple?
"We want censorship, but not like this!"
Sandra Wachter, a professor of technology and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, expressed alarm at the restrictions and told BBC Verify that the new bill was "not supposed to be used to suppress facts of public interest, even if uncomfortable".
Given that the fines are pretty hefty, you might not be completely surprised if social media platforms do a bit of overcompensation.
Organisations can be fined up to £18m or 10% of their global revenue if they are found to have failed to stop harmful content appearing on their platforms.
I haven't seen anything about this yet, but I'm curious what it signals you get if you are one of the people who's posts get limited. Do you even know that your post is getting hidden from a segment of users?
This is more or less what the algo has been doing all along, but now instead of being based on what makes money it is now being based on some rando's idea of "harmful." Also, in this new regime, posts are fully blocked, rather than just down-weighted.