Summary
Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, all websites hosting pornography, including social media platforms, must implement “robust” age verification methods, such as photo ID or credit card checks, for UK users by July.
Regulator Ofcom claims this is to prevent children from accessing explicit content, as research shows many are exposed as young as nine.
Critics, including privacy groups and porn sites, warn the measures could drive users to less-regulated parts of the internet, raising safety and privacy concerns.
Back when the Snowden revelations came out the UK was worse than the US when it came to civil society surveillance and unlike the US, the Government there just retroactivelly legalized all that their NSA-equivalent (the GCHQ) did with no restrictions.
Oh, and the UK Press has a censorship mechanism called D-Notices.
In this domain the UK is already worse than the US, probably because the idea that the populus should know their place and be led by “their betters” is pretty old in Britain and, at least for the elites, the thinking about the relation between power and the people never significativelly evolved away from the original thinking in Absolute Monarchies, since the political and power structures there are still anchored on a Monarchy.