https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/britons-back-online-safety-acts-...
Middle England is conservative and authoritarian.
If you consider all we know about the excesses and influences of big tech companies, and then blunt that down to a more lay perspective, it's pretty easy to understand why we've landed up here.
People have lost faith in us.
That's a very powerful way to sum up what I've been feeling for a while.
People did lose faith, and to be honest, I can't really blame them. From a layman's perspective, it's not obvious that there's a distinction between "Big Tech" and other so-called "providers of services" (the term itself feels kind of icky) in the internet. Throw the "Tech Bro" term in there and things get even more difficult.
I'm guessing a lot of people never really knew about forums, chat communities and other things like that existing outside of the big social media companies' mostly-walled gardens. Maybe they heard some scary things about 4chan, well, that'll help.
To many of them, it's the little man vs. the big tech companies that skirted regulations for way too long. That there's a possible third party (or rather, category) involved is not obvious from the outside.
It’s the end of democracy in country X! The government’s taking away the people’s rights to x, y and z!
I mean, kinda, but it’s also hugely popular. Regular folks want their kids protected from some of this stuff, don’t believe that Silicon Valley and allied tech bros have their best interest at heart (and shouldn’t) and will readily vote for it.
Heck, I don’t have kids and I’m broadly in favour of the principle of keeping kids off social media, it’s just very hard to answer “what exactly do you mean by social media?” or “how are we going to do this without impacting adults’ ability to interact freely?”
Of course it's useful to have people like you make it about fake left v right tribalism so you don't realize how far from a democracy these parliamentary systems are.