“The UK war on VPNs is an embarrassment” | Jimmy Wales

Quote:

The UK war on VPNs is an embarassment. For child safety, we should be teaching children about Internet safety – including why you should use a VPN to protect your privacy, block malware, etc.

To keep children safe, we are legislating to prevent them being safer online? Mad.

https://x.com/jimmy_wales/status/2015799679762448515?s=20

Crossed wires derailed a UK child abuse case for months | The Register | Two botched police CSAM raids on innocent persons because literally crossed wires

…police burst through AFG’s door, only to find SPR and FYC in attendance … Police seized devices from the property and took them away for analysis, which yielded no findings of [CSAM] … an engineer carrying out maintenance on a street cabinet serving both properties eight years earlier crossed two wires, which meant that Individual X’s traffic was misidentified as coming from AFG’s home

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/17/crossed_wires_iioc_case/

New York Times: Spam and Scams Proliferate in Facebook’s Political Ads. This link goes to a gift article. “The ads are a lucrative part of Facebook’s advertising revenue that, the project’s researchers and others say, has led the company to turn a blind eye to a flood of low-quality or deceptive content, spam and in some cases outright fraud on the platform.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/10/04/new-york-times-spam-and-scams-proliferate-in-facebooks-political-ads/

New York Times: Spam and Scams Proliferate in Facebook’s Political Ads. This link goes to a gift article. “The ads are a lucrative part of Facebook’s advertising revenue that, the project’s researchers and others say, has led the company to turn a blind eye to a flood of low-quality or deceptive content, spam and in some cases outright fraud on the platform.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/10/04/new-york-times-spam-and-scams-proliferate-in-facebooks-political-ads/

Reminder: Adults aged 18+ using a VPN to circumvent age verification is not strictly a child safety issue

Whatever regulators & government may say, we are not facing a zero sum safety problem where if a 40-year-old uses a VPN to visit Reddit or PornHub without age verification then a small child will somehow be tortured to compensate.

This is all about stopping kids getting to stuff that they cannot cope with, right?

Who cares what the 40-year-olds do?

It is bizarre to believe both: 1) 16-year-olds are mature enough to vote in general elections 2) 16-year-olds should be prohibited from content adults can legally view or create

Big Brother Watch’s Matthew Feeney on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/M_feeney/status/1950220785332715574