By now, you’ve probably realized the internet is being slowly fitted into a digital checkpoint.
Everything is being scrubbed down, sanitized, and locked behind a digital turnstile with a flashing sign that says: Show us your ID.
Substack, that cozy digital home where newsletter authors rant, muse, and argue about everything from politics to fan fiction of 19th-century philosophers, is the latest to be roped into the bureaucratic puppet show known as the UK’s Online Safety Act.
And the British government has decided that if you’re reading a mildly spicy newsletter, you must first present identification. No, really.
To access some of the platform’s content, you may soon have to upload a selfie and a government-issued ID.
What this means for readers in the UK is simple: prepare to be interrupted. You’re sitting down to read your favorite newsletter. Maybe it’s political commentary, maybe it’s a writer who occasionally uses words like “orgasmic” while referring to cake.
Either way, you click. And boom. Content blurred, comment section blocked, and your feed now behind a velvet rope manned by an algorithm with a clipboard.
Here is the full list of types of content impacted:
Sexually explicit or pornographic content
Content that encourages, promotes, or instructs on:
a. Suicide or self-harm
b. Eating disorders or disordered eating behaviours
c. Dangerous physical challenges
d. Misuse of harmful substances (ingesting, inhaling, injecting, or otherwise self-administering)Bullying or harassment
Hate content targeting people based on:
a. Race
b. Religion
c. Sex
d. Sexual orientation
e. Disability
f. Gender reassignmentViolent or graphic material that:
a. Promotes or instructs on serious violence, or
b. Depicts real or realistic acts of serious violence or injury to people, animals, or fictional creatures.
c. Polarized recounting of mass casualty events
Substack says this all comes down to the UK’s new rules. Anything that might be “explicit” or “potentially harmful” will now require you to confirm your age. Some lucky folks will have this pulled from their payment info, but the rest? Well, say cheese.
You now need to flash ID not just to read some articles, but to comment on them. That’s right. Clicking “Reply” in a Notes thread could soon be treated with the same suspicion as trying to buy a bottle of tequila.
Substack, to its credit, isn’t thrilled about this. “These laws are not necessarily effective at achieving their stated aims,” the company said recently, which is a diplomatic way of saying, “This is pointless, dangerous, and won’t even work.”
They’re playing the compliance game while muttering under their breath.
What’s fascinating here is that Substack isn’t some shadowy porn grotto or terrorist cesspool. It’s a publishing platform. Most of the time, the most harmful thing you’ll find is a writer stretching a metaphor too far.
But because anyone can write about anything, and because the UK’s new laws are written with the precision of a toddler describing a dream, everything is now suspect.
And the price of that suspicion is privacy.
