In the @newscientist.com talking about why the Starmer government's latest promise to 'stop children from seeing and sharing explicit images' sounds great as a headline, but is going to have severe unintended consequences in practice, and it's going to be hard to implement successfully.
Our paper underscores the importance of affordances like anonymity, the ability to interact with forums without verifying your identity, and learning from peers *particularly* for Queer users of all ages.
So a nuanced conversation is needed, and not a politically motivated, rushed plan making for convenient PR for a govt in crisis.
And yet they push for technosolutionist approaches that are going to do exactly the same, while failing to invest in offline digital, consent and sexuality education and pathologising nudity in the process. Why do public consultations when the answer is always populism?
The reality is that the functionalities that parents and people are most afraid of can also be crucial for people whose identities, preferences and needs aren’t covered by mainstream education or by their immediate network.
This is an ahistorical perspective: we know that previous, broad laws forcing platforms to detect nudity have resulted in snowballing censorship (including the shadowbanning of women's health that the government say they want to stop).