It is the position of His Majesty’s Government that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are old enough to vote, old enough to join the military, old enough to drink, old enough to have sex, and old enough to pay income tax, but not old enough to go on the computer after the watershed.

They want to protect the children by boxing at shadows, but all they’re doing is trapping the sons and daughters of abusive parents tighter between the walls of their cruel homes. They are condemning the transgender child of a fundamentalist drunk to suicide instead of allowing them any outlet to discover themself, all on the back of flimsy evidence and moral panic.

And yes, the internet is shit sometimes. There are bullies and hate-mobs and vicious cycles and predators. But the approach that this country has taken has overwhelmingly been one that targets users, not companies, and only places them at further risk. Children, teenagers, and adults are made to submit sensitive biometric data to sketchy startups all so that it can get leaked out onto the open internet. Independent websites shut down under the burden of compliance, leaving only the faceless conglomerates able to operate.

They go to Australia to “fact-find”, only to find that teenagers are less aware of the world around them and get around the age checks with ease. They decide instead to “go further than Australia’s”, seeing that the problem must be that they have not placed enough restrictions on their country’s young citizens, and enact an infantilising curfew on seventeen-year-olds — the very demographic they are trying to court to vote for them! — whose extent would make China blush. And the media laps it all up, because they’re thinking of the children, and nobody who thinks of the children could ever be too restrictive of civil liberties.

All the while, the world’s first trillionaire stokes pogroms from his chair on his personal echo chamber, Facebook does away with any pretence of fact-checking, and the Americans cut off AI access to anyone who’s too forrin. But doing anything about that would require effort, thought, investment, and a functioning set of vertebræ.

I hope, dearly, that the NSPCC, and everyone who agitated for a censorship régime to “protect the children” that will do anything but, can never look themselves in the face in the mirror again. Peter Thiel is laughing at us from hell.