Governments recognize that the quickest way to win a culture war is to control the narrative before anyone else can. Essentially, a rat race. The easiest way to do that? Claim you’re protecting the children. Because who’s going to argue against the safety of children? However, that’s not their true motive. It’s to censor, hide, and filter out the media. To pick and choose what they want, not only our youth, but our society as a whole, to see.

The Illusion of Protection

In the United Kingdom, the Online Safety Act has been sold as a safeguard against dangerous content such as pornography, sexual exploitation, grooming, and more. In reality, vague definitions of “adult content” are already wiping out legitimate educational resources, independent journalism, and even community support forums. The targets aren’t predators but rather minors seeking information that might help them understand their rights, their health, or their place in the world. ‘Adult content’ blatantly refers to what they don’t want you to see.

When it was newly introduced, they pitched it as an act about shielding minors from explicit content. But in practice, its definition of “explicit content” is news coverage of political protests, documented evidence of war crimes, reproductive health education, Reddit forums on recovery from addiction, or even forums about menstruation, due to the vague guidelines. This effectively criminalizes access to health resources, unbiased news, sex education, and more, which, nowadays, is already hard to find. A YouTuber, Jonny Mozza, reported that he was no longer able to access r/stopdrinking, a subreddit if he didn’t enter his ID.

Why do these matters affect the youth?

The U.S. Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA, 2000) requires schools and libraries receiving federal funding to filter online content, a policy that critics argue restricts access to legitimate educational resources and limits intellectual freedom. This illustrates the unimportance of making education accessible to governments and institutions and demonstrates how the erasure of accessible education is immoral and inconsiderate. Children need to be able to learn anywhere and everywhere without having sites blocked or certain articles censored, and the use of censorship is not in favour of education—it is against it. They want us to get dumber, question things less, consider censorship the norm.

One commenter noted that this act doesn’t consider how much easier it is for abusers now. Victims are no longer able to question their abuser's behavior. By cutting off these sources of information on the internet, it is easier to isolate victims and leave them in the dark. Another commenter noted that this act does not help kids being groomed, as it is usually the groomers who stumble onto platforms for children and lure other children in.

The other side of the law is its so-called “age verification” measures. Want to view specific articles or watch certain livestreams? Be ready to hand over your government-issued ID and, in some cases, biometric scans to third-party verification companies; all in the name of protection. For many minors, that’s impossible. For others, it’s a choice between surrendering privacy or staying in the dark. And for vulnerable populations such as LGBTQ+ teens, abuse survivors, and youth in controlling households, they are 5x more likely to attempt suicide without support, according to the Trevor Project in 2021. A 2020 survey found that 84% of young people ages 13–17 used online resources for sexual or reproductive health information (Rideout et al., 2020).

The Price of Vague Laws

And because the law’s language is vague, platforms have to overblock content to avoid legal trouble, removing anything that might be seen as too “mature.” Spaces crucial for understanding have now been taken away and barred as a result. The only option is government-approved media, showing you only what they want you to see. Essentially, the media is filtered, and opinions are narrowed down in the long term. You no longer have the freedom to choose your news source; this is the reality. This is how a support group like r/periods, where many young women learn about their bodies, ends up behind an age wall. This is how war reporting disappears from search results for anyone under 18. This is how information about contraception is treated as if it were porn. And guess who owns the ID company, AU10TIX, that is used by X and Australia? Israel. Yet another reason why war crime documentation is being affected by these acts. It’s all political by nature.

The Erasure of Media

Independent journalism is among the biggest casualties. Investigative reports are being mass-removed from the public eye for under-18 audiences, while state-aligned sources, those least likely to challenge political power, remain untouched. The result is a generation that will grow up consuming only government-approved narratives, with the inability to independently verify these sources and view dissenting perspectives. The activist passive voice of state-run papers makes sure that on-the-ground journalism is quietly erased. And today, this is seen within Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and many more countries. Journalists under occupation and oppression can no longer reach these demographics due to censorship, and viewers are fed the polished version. The version that paints reality as hyperbolic. They’ve censored subreddits such as r/israelexposed, r/israelcrimes, and r/ukrainewarfootage, a direct showcase of their ability to censor whatever they feel doesn’t suit the narrative they want to paint.

Australia and Ireland are moving in the same direction. These decisions from well-established countries form a consensus to normalize surveillance and information control, all in the name of child protection. The long-term stakes are simple. These laws are building an internet where young people encounter only a narrow, government-sanctioned piece of the world. They’re cut off from global solidarity movements, cross-cultural dialogue, and activism. This has the power to shape generations.

The Motive Was Never Protection.

Meanwhile, legitimate resources vanish—there’s no distinction between a school-approved anatomy guide and adult entertainment. The law’s binary thinking, adult or not, leaves no room for educational exemptions, parental oversight, or basic common sense. It also removes the ability for parents to censor what they see fit. Instead, it takes away that flexibility and leaves a strict reinforcement of power. Many parents complain that they feel this is their job, not the government’s. There were already measures set in place so that parents could filter out what their children saw, such as parental controls on devices, and SafeSearch being an available alternative. It left room for parents to educate their children the way they saw fit; it never needed to be in the government’s hands. If it were needed, an alternative solution for kids would be to increase media literacy within schools, not nationwide censorship.

And many young users of the internet are finding their way around censorship through VPNS. But this is hardly a victory, as free VPNs can log user activity, inject ads, or carry malware. Paid ones require a credit card, which is not exactly an option for most minors. In other words, the kids the law is supposedly protecting are now being led toward riskier loopholes, just to access information that should never have been restricted in the first place. They failed to see that if people wanted to, they would. This law wouldn’t prevent people from seeing whatever they wanted. This is the real irony of it all. This censorship fails at the very thing it claims to do. Pornography remains as accessible as ever to those determined to find it. All you need is a minute to search on an unfiltered device or even a VPN. But the real issue is the underlying message.

Their Attempts at Disarming the Next Generation

Without independent reporting, without global context, we lose the ability to recognize patterns of corruption. We don’t recognize that oppression and restriction overseas often signal creeping restrictions in their own country. It affects the so-called “privileged” too. The absence of perspective doesn’t just leave them uninformed — it leaves them disarmed. It blurs the lines, and that’s the point. The government's ulterior motive.

It’s worth asking why this conversation isn’t louder, why so few people outside digital circles are talking about the normalization of this control. Part of the answer is in the branding. Opposing the Online Safety Act feels, rhetorically, like opposing safety itself. But the real opposition isn’t to protection, it’s to the pretext, because the aim was never to keep teenagers safe. It’s to shape the world they can see, and by extension, the kind of people they will become. When you control the flow of information, you don’t need to ban political dissent. You can simply make sure the next generation never sees it. They know people are waking up and using any platform to speak out against injustice, and they want to control that.

Internationally, there’s a lack of discourse on these laws. Reluctant acceptance, whether out of fear of seeming “careless about child safety” or sheer indifference, allows it to pass with minimal backlash. In that silence, the erasure of anonymity, free speech, and digital rights accelerates. The idea that young people should learn to navigate the world through exposure, critical thinking, and open discussion is being replaced by a culture of curated ignorance from those in power. And when young voices are silenced, so is the future capacity for democratic resistance.

History Repeats Itself

It’s not just this act either. Over time, more bills have been passed internationally that signaled this censorship, such as the book bans in schools, predominantly in the US. Since 2021, 16000 books have been removed by schools, two examples that have caused outrage being To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and 1984 by George Orwell. Two books that are often criticised for their rather blunt but educational approach to society. This signifies that diverse perspectives are being limited and reduced, just one example of censorship amongst hundreds. In 1873, the Comstock Laws in the US banned information about contraception under the guise of “morality” as a result of political and economic elites seeking control during a time of moral panic. Doesn’t that sound a little familiar to what's happening today?

The danger isn’t simply that certain information disappears. It’s that the awareness of its absence disappears too. When teenagers can’t read about protests abroad, they grow up believing those protests never happened. When survivors can’t find resources on consent or abuse, they may not even be able to name what’s happening to them. When the only news comes from government-friendly sources, the very idea that an alternative view exists begins to fade from public consciousness. They are making education on the internet inaccessible, and real-time journalism is being erased.

What’s Really at Stake

We are not dealing with something that can be fixed with better search filters or smarter algorithms. If not repealed, we will raise a generation that only knows one narrative, doesn’t know how to ask for help, doesn’t know how to question things, and is unable to form their own opinions; our voices will be lowered. And once that worldview is set, it’s almost impossible to unteach. If we, as a public, do not put pressure on governments to repeal these acts, this will soon become a reality worldwide.

Child protection is vital. But it must be honest, transparent, and proportional. Protecting young people from harm should never mean removing them from conversations that shape their futures. The next battle over narrative authority won’t be fought only in newsrooms or parliaments. It will be fought digitally because governments have begun to realize the power the internet holds and its ability to shape worldwide decisions. Its ability to unite people against injustice is threatening to them, which is why we can’t stop speaking about it. We have to push for these acts to be reversed before we no longer have a platform to speak. And no matter what, unity is key right now. We are the only people who have each other's backs through something like this, and we need to find community despite their attempts to divide us.