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Internet Censorship is a Worldwide Problem That Makes us Less Safe

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A fake news website showing some stories blacked out with a warning that the user "must give us your personal information to unlock this story." The only uncensored story is that "Nothing Bad Ever Happens! Puppies!"

News deemed “dangerous” may require your personal information to unlock

A long time ago, I started giving out advice to use VPNs to ensure someone could stumble on my site and the knowledge would leak through the “Great Firewall of China.” I thought that, because my site is so small, it might be one that someone could find, but a government would just assume it’s too small to bother with. I hoped a few people could get tips on using a VPN to bypass their government’s authoritarian restrictions. I wasn’t thinking about just how likely that very same censorship was going to come to my country and other western, “free” societies the moment the working class started to become desperate for a better life.

Like so much oppression, our internet censorship and surveillance is disguised as measures to “protect children.” But as a kid who had an unfiltered internet, I can promise you there’s nothing on the internet as harmful as the creeps who prey on children, and these laws will only empower them. We’ll drive children to the same dark recesses of the web we’ll need to use for free information, and they may not like what they find.

So if you had a problem with China’s censorship, but not your country’s own, have you considered that you might just be a little racist? Because your country is censoring media too. Let’s talk about why these laws will hurt free speech, hurt you, and, yes, put children more in danger by forcing them into darker corners of the internet while training them to relinquish their privacy more easily, the one thing that keeps them safe from creeps.

A Longstanding Effort to Censor Media

An excellent write up of the “anti-porn crusade” right-wing groups have lead comes to us via 404 Media’s Samantha Cole. In it, she details the work of Collective Shout, a pro-censorship and anti-porn organization that calls itself one “for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture.”

The group was able to push for a ban by claiming that Steam and Itch.io contained “hundreds of rape and incest games,” but despite repeated requests, refused to elaborate by listing all those supposedly harmful games. They also seemingly only grabbed games by tags, which can be provided by anyone, not the developer alone. They didn’t play the games to confirm them.

Perhaps they won’t reveal their “research” because in the past they’ve called out games like Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human for glorifying child abuse. The game actually featured a situation in which the protagonist could save a victim of child abuse, but would have to take a risk to do so. Stories need to be about these topics. How else will people learn to recognize abusive situations for themselves or others, either to step in or seek help? But people with strong ideologies often aren’t interested in actual results, they instead seem fixated and obsessed with one goal, damn the consequences.

Other groups, such as church groups or “women’s” groups that fight against porn rather than attacks on women’s autonomy have tried to censor games before. Movies and other media would require more work and support due to their larger view base, but TV shows and games get less attention, and therefore are easier to attack. This may be why they so frequently become targets of these campaigns. Meanwhile, these so-called “women’s interest” groups align with the very people trying to take away our rights.

It’s Not Just Porn

Censorship like this never is well thought-out. They don’t appropriately target specific issues. For example, the game No Mercy which featured glorification and graphic depictions of rape and incest was certainly something most people would agree was harmful. However, it wasn’t removed. The creator took it down himself, though it presented an extreme example for these groups to capitalize on. Nothing else came close to showing or rewarding that kind of abuse. But organizations used it to push the idea that there were hundreds of games like that. Instead, most of the content that’s being blocked, removed, de-listed, or otherwise censored is harmless. Some of it is vital to the survival of democracy itself.

News, Current Events, Facts

Bluesky had to block their entire service in Mississippi. The service refused to comply with a ridiculous age verification law, and therefore had to pull their app from the state. Bluesky, if you’re not aware, is a social media website, like Twitter once was, but with less hate speech and more news. It has guidelines against violence and other dangerous content, but carries posts about current events, news, and other things the state of Mississippi seemingly objects to.

They’re not alone. Reddit blocked off a number of subreddits. Reddit hosts user content, it’s a message board for a large variety of topics, including news. News could include graphic images, such as gruesome photos from Israel’s attacks in Gaza. These are deemed too objectionable for consumption. But they’re news. We need to know these things. An informed populace is the only way a democracy can exist. A government can decide that the only news organizations are ones that they approve of, and that’s exactly how you get 1984. The death of free speech comes at the cost of “protecting the kids,” or, perhaps, in this case, hiding indefensible governmental actions behind a requirement that you hand over your personal information that could track you or get leaked.

People looking to ask if their period or cycle issues are normal may find the subreddit dedicated to periods feature lockouts now. As do subreddits that help people stop smoking or drinking. Sites with resources for sexual abuse victims are blocked by these censorship laws. The very resources that child victims of sexual violence will need to seek help are blocked to children. Who besides sexual abusers does that benefit?

Any and all real news is blocked. Anything that could be troubling is blocked. Brainrot, it seems, is okay. Digital soma for the masses seems to be fine, as long as it doesn’t reveal the state of the world.

LGBTQ+ Content, Especially for Women

As part of the Itch.io mass removal of content, many LGBTQ+ games were de-listed. However, one innocent tag stood out as a possible primary reason for this: “lesbian.” Lesbians are, of course, actual human beings, and not just a porn category that men are obsessed with. However, to the far-right goons trying to get these content bans in place, the fact that lesbians are people really doesn’t seem to matter—or register—with them. What would a far-right person, the kind of person pushing for these content bans, care if another one of the victims of their policies gets caught in the crossfire? It’s a win-win for creepy censorship advocates.

This also has reportedly affected games featuring transgender characters and topics. Trans people are, of course, more than a porn category. Try telling that to the conservatives obsessed with them though. These are human beings, and they deserve the same right to their own stories as anyone else. Yet, because some people can’t stop touching themselves to content featuring lesbians or trans people, right-wing lunatics deem their stories as sexual or pornographic.

And What’s Wrong with Porn, Anyway?

Really, what’s wrong with consenting adults making porn for and by adults anyway? Let they who is without masturbation throw the first stone. I can say with near certainty that, if you’re an adult, you are almost certainly a masturbator. Porn makes up some of the oldest art forms. Stick figures in caves drawn to represent sex acts. We may hide it, we may feel shame for it, but nearly each and every one of us who experiences sexual attraction and arousal has enjoyed porn, even if we only fantasized about it in our own imaginations. None of you are innocent.

“But what about the children?”

What about them? Many of these sites require a credit card for full access. Parents are in charge of keeping their children from objectionable content. Install a logger on your router, check internet histories, check your credit card statements. You wouldn’t ban graphic magazines because a child was able to escape supervision, find a stand with them, open the packaging, and read them, right? So why is the internet, something that is far easier to track, the victim here?

Platforms have policies against the worst material children could find. And children hit puberty and are curious about this stuff early in life. We can’t pretend that shielding them from all knowledge of sexuality until they’re 18 is healthy. Sexual education is likely important. We should let parents decide how to raise their kids, not create laws that put all of us in danger for some imaginary risk that has never, in all of human history, been a real issue.

And yes, these bans are extremely dangerous. Censorship always is. “Protecting” kids by taking away their access to materials that help them recognize sexual abuse does not protect anyone but abusers. But there’s a danger for all of us, and we all just saw it perfectly illustrated by an app called Tea.

Privacy is Safety, and These Laws Seek to Eliminate It

Tea was an app for dating advice for women. Similar to social media pages that asked women if they’re dating the same man and to talk about potential abusers to help other women avoid them, Tea was an app to make dating safer for women. The idea was that women could join the service, share the stories about abusive men they dated, and help others avoid those men. It’s a longstanding tradition. Women have been scrawling the names of abusers on women’s restroom walls for decades. “Whisper networks” of friends warning friends about a man who just didn’t want to take “no” for an answer one night. It’s a time-honored tradition that people who date men need.

Tea wasn’t interested in actually protecting its users though. They required scans of people’s drivers licenses to sign up. These scans were stored, instead of being deleted after processing. On top of that, they were stored in an insecure Firebase database. This allowed anyone to go in and pull out those drivers licenses. That’s what happened.

Thanks to vibe coding—AI-assisted coding by inexperienced developers—we’re going to see far more leaks like this because AI cannot understand how to harden code or build security. Any, and potentially most services. could be just as open and insecure as those that have already had leaks. And if they all require drivers licenses, something terrible could happen.

Proving just how necessary apps like Tea are, misogynists acquired those drivers licenses. They created ways to search through the women’s private information, even map them out by their home addresses.

An app made to “protect women” put them in far more danger than they were in before, all because they had to provide personal information to use the service. It’s the perfect example of what happens when we don’t think of actual safety first, and instead listen to reactionary fundamentalists. Imagine the blackmail and data leaks that could come from porn sites or even just news sites. Everyone who accessed BBC News, or NPR, or Reddit, or Pornhub could have their data leaked, held on to, or used for ransom. Not to mention authoritarian governments searching for people who may have read materials they’d prefer they didn’t.

Darker and Darker Webs

Of course, there are easy ways around these blocks. If you live in an oppressive regime like a Republican controlled state, the UK, or, frankly, most of the U.S. at this point, you can use a VPN to pretend you’re accessing the internet from a more liberated country.

When I was a kid, we used proxies to access games and other media on websites that were blocked by our schools. Those proxies sometimes had popup ads. They could have exposed us to malware or collected our personal information. It was the perfect example of how something we had to use to bypass ridiculous rules could have put us in more danger. We were too naïve to recognize those dangers.

A VPN can be used to make your internet access more anonymous and secure. But only if it’s from the right source. Free VPNs may not be as secure or private as you might think. Facebook bought the Onavo VPN in 2013. By 2016, they were using it to track users’ Snapchat, Amazon, and YouTube usages. The data they pulled from users may have lead to the company buying WhatsApp. Their profits exceeded any repercussions, so it was a necessary loss. Mark Zuckerberg is still the CEO of Meta, and the company swears WhatsApp is safe to use.

But what if that VPN wasn’t just a corporation using data to make a profit? What if they decided to blackmail users? Many of these users could be children who use VPNs to bypass these ridiculous censorship techniques. Suddenly, children are in danger of exploitation online because of the measures that ignorant people thought would protect them.

The “dark web,” that is, accessing websites through the Tor network, is another way around censorship. But it’s also where you’ll find a lot of far more objectionable content, more like the old web. Unregulated content that could include abusive material of children, drugs, and frankly, anything else deemed illegal for the wider web. We’re forcing kids down the dark alleyways of the internet to “protect” them. It’s foolish, ignorant, and dangerous. We’re putting everyone in danger because people don’t understand how the world works and write laws protecting children with the same ignorance that only children should have.

Censorship Always Starts This Way

In Nazi-controlled Germany, Nazis said they had to protect children from transgender people, immigrants, non-whites, Roma, and, of course, Jewish people. We call this kind of libel or slander “blood libel” now. We see perfect examples of it today. Republican politicians still call LGBTQ+ people “groomers,” just as their Nazi forefathers did. Drag shows are being deemed objectionable, despite featuring no objectionable material. But more importantly, people are being deemed objectionable. From these bans that target trans and lesbian games, to politicians making a fuss about drag story time to distract from whatever mass shooting or list of Epstein friends they’re ignoring.

This is already happening. We’re literally seeing these far-right ideals pushed through in the name of protecting children. What it ends up doing is censoring the people that extremists want to eliminate from our society. The goal is always controlling thought, children are just pawns that make pushing that censorship easier. No one wants a child exposed to a game glorifying rape and incest, but that’s just not going to happen if parents do even a small, let alone appropriate, amount of supervision. The games like that are behind age restrictions and if parents want to protect their children, they have all the tools already to do so. The people we need to protect are the marginalized groups targeted by this legislation, as well as literally everyone who uses the web. These censorship laws often have bipartisan support because they look good on the surface. Everyone wants to protect kids. But these laws only endanger everyone, especially children.

What You Can Do

These campaigns work because a few people are making a big fuss. The screaming minority. Most people do not want to endanger the lives and safety of all people who use the internet, but a select noisy few can impact the law and company policies because they do the one thing most regular people refuse to do: take action.

Sign petitions, email companies, call your local politicians, join protests, post about censorship issues on social media, refuse to vote for anyone who supports censorship of the internet, even if they’re in your own party. You have to work to make your voice heard, otherwise our voices will be silenced forever, and we’ll never get another chance.

If you’re looking to use a VPN, I’ve had luck with ProtonVPN, though it does occasionally have issues with servers that lose a connection and doesn’t switch you. Still, I’ve had that same issue with others I’ve used. Start learning how to protect yourself online now, before they block that too.

Sources & Further Reading/Viewing
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