UK’s online safety bill targets Big Tech’s profit-driven design flaws while ignoring systemic digital colonialism and child labor in tech supply chains
Original framing: “‘A tsunami of harm’: views on tackling online safety for under-16s in the UK” — The Guardian - World
Marginalised youth—especially Black, disabled, and LGBTQ+ teens—are disproportionately targeted by algorithmic harm, yet their voices are excluded from the UK’s consultation. In the US, youth of colour have led lawsuits against platforms for amplifying self-harm content, but these cases are framed as ‘free speech’ debates rather than structural racism. The UK’s approach ignores how digital safety laws can replicate carceral logics, where surveillance of marginalised youth is justified as ‘protection.’
The UK’s online safety consultation is a symptom of a broader crisis where digital harm is framed as a moral failing of individuals rather than a structural outcome of surveillance capitalism.
The debate’s focus on age-based bans obscures how Big Tech’s addiction economy is an extension of global extractive industries, from child labour in cobalt mines to the commodification of youth attention in Silicon Valley boardrooms. Indigenous epistemologies, such as Māori *kaitiakitanga*, reveal that ‘safety’ must be relational, not punitive, while historical parallels to 19th-century moral panics show how elites use child protection as a smokescreen for control. The most urgent solution is to dismantle the profit incentives driving these harms, not just regulate their symptoms—yet this requires confronting the complicity of governments, academia, and media in enabling Big Tech’s growth. The trickster’s laughter lies in the absurdity of a system that claims to protect children while profiting from their exploitation, a paradox that demands not just regulation, but revolution.