Despite a declassified US intelligence report finding no link between Venezuela’s government and the Tren de Aragua gang, Trump’s campaign of airstrikes in the Caribbean has killed 27 people thus far
US President Trump carried out yet another lethal strike off the Venezuelan coast on October 14, killing six people. In a social media post, Trump claimed the six men killed above the ship were “narcoterrorists,” without providing any evidence.
This latest airstrike is the fifth of its kind, with world leaders and international activists condemning the Trump policy as a violation of human rights. The death toll of Trump’s strikes against small boats in the Caribbean Sea now stands at 27.
The airstrikes represent the latest escalation of a tense relationship between the United States and Venezuela. Last week, Trump ordered the termination of diplomacy with Venezuela. Richard Grenell, special presidential envoy, was directed by Trump to halt all diplomatic outreach and talks with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
On Tuesday, October 14, Trump once again repeated allegations that the Venezuelan government is responsible for introducing gangs into the US. “What they do very well is they send their criminals into the United States, and they send Tren de Aragua.”
The Trump administration has pushed the narrative that Venezuela is a leader in drug trafficking through the groups “Tren de Aragua”, now designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the Trump administration, and “Cartel de los Soles” as a way to push escalation in the Caribbean Sea and justify Trump’s draconian immigration policies, including justifying massive ICE raids and the illegal deportation of 250 Venezuelans to El Salvador earlier this year.
A declassified assessment from the US National Intelligence Council, released in early May 2025, that the Venezuela’s government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Residents and protesters clash with federal agents in the East Side neighborhood on October 14, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
A group of veteran Chicago activists said the latest immigration enforcement operations are “a brazen attempt to instill fear in and demand obedience of all Americans.”
Federal immigration enforcement officials have been ramping up operations in Chicago in recent days, including in a violent confrontation on Tuesday in a neighborhood in which agents deployed smoke grenades, pepper balls, and tear gas against local demonstrators.
As reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, the confrontation began when federal agents deliberately rammed into a car that they had been pursuing on the Southeast Side of Chicago.
The collision with the vehicle forced the car’s two occupants to exit the vehicle and flee from law enforcement officials on foot. Shortly after this, a crowd of local residents came out of their homes and began protesting against the actions of the immigration agents.
According to the Sun-Times, “a large number of armed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents responded to the crowd by hurling smoke grenades, shooting pepper balls and deploying at least three rounds of tear gas over the area, even with children and seniors in the area.” By the end of the confrontation, four protesters were placed under arrest, as were the two men who were targeted for arrest by immigration enforcement officials.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker expressed outrage over the incident and demanded accountability from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over what he described in a social media post as “unchecked attacks on Chicago residents.”
“[Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is an out-of-control danger to our peaceful communities,” he added.
Andre Vasquez, a Chicago City Council member, toldThe New York Times in an interview that federal immigration officials are causing chaos throughout the city.
“Chicago’s been doing just fine, and then these guys showed up,” he said. “There is big concern about what these unidentified, masked men are doing in this city without accountability. Chicagoans are just trying to live their life. We’re not going to tolerate unconstitutional authoritarianism.”
As Common Dreams has reported, the Trump administration has deployed federal agents to several cities that it claims are overrun with crime—but statistics have shown violent crime on a significant decline in recent years in Chicago and other cities targeted by the president.
Oscar Sanchez, who volunteers for a local rapid response network that tracks immigration enforcement activities, told the Sun-Times that the latest actions by CBP agents mark a significant escalation in law enforcement aggression.
“When you’re using these tactics, you are asking people to be hospitalized,” he said. “You see elderly folks on the [ground], so you just ask yourself, what is this for? Why is the aggression needed? Why are these elevated tactics even being used?”
Sanchez’s words were echoed by six Chicago activists who took part in 1960s demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and who wrote an editorial for the Sun-Times in which they described the tactics being used by law enforcement as a “terrifying escalation” beyond anything used by law enforcement officials during the famous anti-war demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
After describing the actions taken by the Chicago Police Department and the Illinois National Guard during the 1968 protests—including “clubbing, corralling, gassing protesters, dragging many of us into patrol wagons”—they said that what the Trump administration is doing today is even worse.
“Flouting the Constitution, President Donald Trump has declared war on the very people he was elected to serve,” they wrote. “The Trump administration, weaponizing the Department of Homeland Security against ordinary Americans, is occupying Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Memphis, Chicago, and Portland, deploying military tactics to stifle free speech, staging performative raids under the pretext of pursuing dangerous criminals, and subverting democratic norms without accountability.”
The end goal of these operations, the activists warned, is “a brazen attempt to instill fear in and demand obedience of all Americans.”
Federal agents, including members of the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol, and the police, attempt to keep protesters back outside a downtown US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility on October 5, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The incident comes as immigrants’ rights advocates warn ICE’s tactics in US cities are growing increasingly violent.
Amid report after report of increasingly aggressive tactics used by federal immigration enforcement, a pair of Portland medical workers say that an agent threatened to shoot them as they tried to transport an injured protester last week.
According to publicly archived dispatch records reported by Willamette Week, an ambulance crew was attempting to transport a protester with a broken or dislocated collarbone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in southern Portland on October 5.
The facility has been a flashpoint in recent weeks as the site of several small but persistent protests, which the Trump administration has attempted to characterize as violent provocations by “antifa” in order to justify its deployment of military troops.
After entering through the facility’s front gate around 9:19, the two medics were able to load the patient into the ambulance without issue. But at 9:40, the driver reported to dispatch that “we are still not being allowed to leave by ICE officers.”
ICE agents deployed to Portland, Oregon, apparently blocked EMS from leaving and then threatened to shoot the ambulance driver… https://t.co/DkDWL9nVoV
Confidential incident reports filed by each of the two medics, and obtained by WW, describe in more detail what was happening at the scene.
Each of the drivers’ separate reports says the agents had demanded to ride along in the ambulance en route to the hospital. The driver replied that without arrest paperwork, they were not permitted to ride along. Agents continued to insist that the vehicle would not be allowed to leave until an officer was permitted to accompany them.
“I repeated again,” the driver said in their report, “that no officer is permitted to ride in the ambulance and that they can meet us at the hospital and that we needed to be let out of the facility. Officers then began walking away from me whenever I spoke. At that point, a group of 5-8 civilian-dressed men walked into the garage and just stared at me. No identification on any of them. I walked back to the ambulance and got into the driver’s seat. I flipped the emergency lights on and put the car into drive. I inched forward slowly out of the garage.”
A man described as being in civilian clothes and a neck-wrap then stepped in front of the vehicle and ordered the ambulance not to leave, according to the report. As more agents amassed about 15 feet in front of the vehicle, the driver assumed they were preparing to escort the ambulance off the property and continued to slowly inch the vehicle forward. But agents continued to obstruct the ambulance’s path. As of 9:39, a dispatch report said there were “50-60 fed agents completely blocking the road.”
At this point, the crew member in the passenger’s seat exited the vehicle to attempt to reason with the officers. After putting the vehicle into park, the driver began to exit as well. They said that as they opened the side door, “I looked up and suddenly the entire group of officers… were crowded around the open car door, some of them leaning forward towards me, inches from my face.”
The driver recalls that an agent “pointed his finger at me in a threatening manner and began viciously yelling in my face, stating, ‘DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN, I WILL SHOOT YOU, I WILL ARREST YOU RIGHT NOW.” The vehicle had rolled forward slightly after the driver put it in park, apparently leading the agents to believe the medics were attempting to hit them.
“I was still in such shock,” the driver later wrote, “that they were not only accusing me of such a thing, but crowding and cornering me in the seat, pointing and screaming at me, threatening to shoot and arrest me, and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene. This was no longer a safe scene, and in that moment, I realized that the scene had not actually been safe the entire time that they were blocking us from exiting, and that we were essentially trapped.”
The ambulance was finally allowed to leave after being delayed for more than 20 minutes. An unmarked vehicle followed the ambulance to the hospital, where several men in civilian dress exited and walked in.
The incident reports provide the latest account of what Portland city officials described to WW as a pattern in which “federal agents have in several cases needlessly intensified situations that might have easily remained far more calm.”
Over the same weekend, peaceful demonstrators and journalists were ambushed with pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, and rubber bullets without clear provocation. In one viral incident earlier that week, a demonstrator who danced at protests in an inflatable frog costume had pepper spray shot directly into his air intake vent by an officer as he attempted to help a fellow protester who was injured.
The reports come as experts say ICE has been intensifying its tactics around the country, which have been captured in several videos taken by bystanders.
One video in Hyattsville, Maryland, shows an officer who dropped his gun while pinning a man to the ground, before picking it up and pointing it towards onlookers.
In another video from Alamosa, Colorado, agents were filmed hopping out of a car and immediately pointing their weapons at a young couple whom they’d boxed in at an intersection. As the woman in the car shouted that the driver’s 1-month-old baby was riding in the back seat, an officer in a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) hat used his baton to smash open the car’s driver’s side window, spilling glass into the vehicle.
ICE stops family at gunpoint—smash car window on top of newborn baby.
"I was screaming that there was a baby. But they didn’t care," cried mother.
“I covered my baby with my body—I was so scared he was going to be hurt because glass was landing on him."
Another video from the Chicago area, where President Donald Trump has surged ICE as part of “Operation Midway Blitz,” shows agents firing pepper spray upon a pastor who was speaking outside a facility.
And a recent photo shows a masked agent in the passenger’s seat of an unmarked van pointing a weapon at a woman who was attempting to film him from the neighboring car.
On October 4, CBP agents in Chicago shot a woman, 30-year-old Marimar Martinez, whom they similarly claimed had provoked them by ramming them with her car. Body camera footage would not only contradict this claim, but show that the agents had in fact plowed into Martinez’s vehicle after one of them shouted “Do something, bitch.”
Prosecutors said Martinez had a licensed gun in her car. But her attorneys say she did not brandish the weapon, and she was not charged with any weapons-related offense. She was the second person shot by immigration agents in the area in less than a month—the other was also unarmed.
In the meantime, the Trump administration has attempted to describe peaceful demonstrations against ICE’s behavior as acts of “terrorism,” with deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller calling those in Portland “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers.”
Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told NPRthat the latest spate of attacks by federal agents “are just the tip of the iceberg.”
“This administration,” he said, “overall seems more interested in heightening the tensions instead of trying to ramp them down.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Police arrest supporters of Palestine Action taking take part in a civil disobedience protest in Trafalgar Square, London, 4 October 2025. Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/EPA
The rights we enjoy in the UK, and the movement the PM purports to lead, were built on protest. Those rights are in dire peril
…
The Labour party arose from a long wave of protests by workers against capital, calling for workers’ rights and for sweeping democratic reforms. These protests and their organisers came to be known as the labour movement. Its early actions included the radical war in Scotland, the Merthyrand Newport risings in south Wales, the Swing riots in England and the General Strike of 1842. No such protests would have meant no such movement. No such movement would have meant no such party.
Yet somehow, the party that arose from protest has formed, in terms of our rights to free expression and democratic challenge, the most illiberal government the UK has suffered since the second word war. This Labour government would have banned the labour movement.
Any government that fails to contest and reverse this trend, even if it did nothing to add to this bleak legacy, sides with illiberalism. Far from doing so, Starmer’s has already gone further than the Conservatives dared, by classifying a civil disobedience group – Palestine Action – as a terrorist organisation and banning it. It has also (so far with remarkably little resistance) inserted a clause into its crime and policing bill enabling the police to stop demonstrations “in the vicinity of a place of worship”. As our towns and cities are so richly endowed with religious buildings, that means almost any urban area.
But its latest proposal is even worse. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced that the police should be able to stop protests that have a “cumulative impact”, by recurring in the same place. She will also consider “powers to ban protests outright”.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.Palestine Action joke that appeared in the UK satirical magazine ‘Private Eye’.
People gather in Trafalgar Square ahead of the Trans+ Pride 2023 march in July 2023 in London | Hollie Adams/Getty Images. All rights reserved
We all want accountability for Big Tech, but the OSA’s moralising aims are hurting LGBTQ+ people and sex workers
New Ofcom regulations, introduced in July, are forcing a reckoning for online content. This overhaul of the digital landscape is part of the second phase of the Online Safety Act (OSA), which ostensibly targets content harmful to children.
First passed in October 2023, the OSA’s stated objective of protecting young people garnered widespread support from children’s charities. This was echoed by digital safety campaigners frustrated with the lack of accountability placed on Big Tech and desperate to see its power reined in.
But while these new rules may aim to protect one group, others are being put in harm’s way. Sex workers and other marginalised communities are now less able to access content on harm reduction, face huge income losses due to their accounts being targeted, and risk losing precious anonymity due to identification rules.
Minimising online harms and holding powerful tech companies to account are worthy goals. But despite fixating on explicit content, the OSA isn’t even delivering on its key aims – a recent study by the Children’s Commissioner for England showed children’s exposure to porn is higher now than before it came into effect, and algorithms continue to bombard young people with content promoting suicide and self-harm. And when that non-progress comes at the expense of other vulnerable groups of people, such as sex workers, it’s clear that it’s not fit for purpose.
We’ve heard ‘protect our children’ before
Blanket calls to ‘protect the children’ should always be treated with caution. Safeguarding young people often serves as a flimsy pretext for discriminatory legislation, and the emotive language provides useful cover for lawmakers seeking to shield themselves from criticism.
There are many examples of this in action. In the US, racial segregation during the Jim Crow era was justified in part as promoting the “best interests” of children. The US’s 1996 Communications Decency Act also has marked similarities with the OSA, which aimed to protect minors from “indecent” internet content, although most original provisions were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
In the UK, the notorious Section 28 prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in schools under the guise of giving children “a sound start in life”, according to then prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Section 28 was repealed across the UK from 2000 to 2003, with then prime minister David Cameron offering a public apology in 2009. In 2018, he was joined by the key architect of the law, Baroness Knight – but who maintained in her apology that her intention had only been the “wellbeing of children”.
Children need protecting, but not everything that claims to protect them does what it says on the tin
The following decade saw significant gains for LGBTQ+ communities and, until 2015, the UK was considered among the most progressive countries for queer and trans people globally. However, it has since crashed into 22nd place, with hate crime up by 112% against gay people and 186% against trans people in the last five years. Amidst a rollback of LGBTQ+ rights, the language of protecting children is once again never far away. Last year, statutory guidance was updated to require schools to teach about biological sex, advising against materials that encourage pupils to question their gender. Politicians claimed to be safeguarding children from “disturbing”, “inappropriate” and “contested views”.
Even the 2023 Illegal Migration Act, which provided for draconian measures to tackle irregular dinghy crossings on the English Channel, was framed by the government as “a way to protect vulnerable people, including children” from criminal gangs. This rhetoric has featured heavily in a recent surge of far-right demonstrations, with Tommy Robinson telling a London rally earlier this month that migrants have made “our daughters scared to walk the streets”.
Children need protecting, but not everything that claims to protect them does what it says on the tin. While the OSA has not leveraged child safety for such openly xenophobic purposes, it is causing profound harms in the name of protection.
OSA phase two
The OSA is a behemoth piece of legislation with three distinct phases of implementation. The first was completed in mid-March 2025, requiring services to conduct risk assessments and implement safety measures to tackle illegal content. The second phase focuses specifically on content harmful to children – but that is not necessarily illegal.
At the start of 2025, a statement was published by Ofcom, the government’s regulatory body for online and offline communications. This outlined requirements for in-scope user-to-user services (where content generated, uploaded, or shared by one user can be seen or “encountered” by another user) and search engines to complete an assessment on the likelihood of children accessing their service by April 2025, conduct risk assessments and implement safety measures by July 2025, and pornography services to introduce age checks by July 2025.
April 2025 also saw the release of Ofcom’s Guidance on Content Harmful to Children, which details content that platforms must act against. Included in the highest priority tier of harm is any content that is pornographic or that depicts sexual activity. In its Codes of Practice, Ofcom recommends algorithmic filtering and age verification checks to prevent underage viewers’ exposure to adult content.
Pornography isn’t the sole focus of the OSA – the highest tier of harm also includes content that promotes suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, which should be filtered and removed entirely. However, placing all explicit content in the highest possible tier of harm, along with the distinct, extensive guidance exclusively focused on it, underscores the preoccupation of legislators and campaigners. Content that depicts or encourages serious violence is ranked lower, at merely priority content. And other content that should concern any parent – promoting conspiracy theories or medical misinformation, for example – doesn’t get a look in.
Compliance and enforcement
Failure to comply comes with a hefty price tag. Ofcom has the power to issue fines of up to £18m or 10% of a company’s annual global revenue, whichever is higher. For major tech companies, this unprecedented penalty could amount to billions of pounds, and is designed to ensure that even the largest platforms with significant revenue streams outside the UK are held accountable. Severe cases of non-compliance can lead to the government blocking access to the site from the UK, and criminal liability for a company’s senior managers and executives.
Sex workers have reported a huge spike in their social media accounts being flagged or deleted for photos and even usernames deemed too provocative
While these landmark penalties are a significant concern even for big companies, enforcement isn’t going to be easy. Already, the law’s reach beyond the UK is being tested. In August 2025, regulators handed down the first fine to US-based company 4chan for failing to comply with statutory information requests and were quickly met with a refusal to pay the £20,000 penalty. With undisclosed penalties racking up for every day of non-compliance, a hefty bill may be waiting for the controversial company if it loses its court case in the US. A victory, on the other hand, would significantly compromise Ofcom’s authority.
Catch-all censorship
Since the new regulations came into force in July 2025, tech companies appear to have instituted automated (and very risk averse) moderation systems to ensure they are complying with the new legislation. These sweeping systems act like digital trawler nets, indiscriminately capturing content that is not harmful, or that even actively contributes to reducing harms for vulnerable or at-risk groups.
Since July, sex workers have reported a huge spike in their social media accounts being flagged or deleted for photos and even usernames deemed too provocative. Social media shadow bans (where sites reduce the visibility of accounts) or account deletion can lead to a massive loss of income, as well as years of work building a following, leaving sex workers poorer and more vulnerable. These generally happen suddenly, without warning, clear reasoning or the right to appeal.
Content moderation algorithms also appear to be targeting harm reduction efforts and educational content on issues including drug use, reproductive healthcare and support services for LGBTQ+ communities. This has been well-documented in recent years, with queer content routinely flagged as pornographic or age-inappropriate, content focused on education and recovery from eating disorders removed. For LGBTQ+ youth, who are disproportionately likely to seek support online, blocking access to vital information and community support is particularly damaging. In the name of online safety, these systems aiming to comply with Ofcom regulations are censoring the very resources that protect and inform vulnerable populations.
Much of the problem here is that coarse filters are being applied that reflect narrow, moralising outlooks, and to minimise liability over genuinely reducing harm. Sweeping systems lack the sophistication to distinguish between harmful content and not; algorithms trained to flag and delete anything related to drug use don’t distinguish between content promoting the consumption of illegal drugs and content aimed at educating people on staying safe if they do. Content creators who are queer, trans or racialised, or whose content focuses on these communities, are disproportionately targeted, with anything “queer” indiscriminately labelled as “adult”. While the exposure of young people to explicit content, especially pornography that is violent, is a legitimate concern, such sweeping labels make these filters ineffective at best and downright harmful at worst.
Sex workers lose out, again
During the drafting and debate of the OSA, leading figures in the Labour Party pushed for provisions that would criminalise all forms of sex workers’ advertising (despite the exchange of sexual services for money being technically legal in the UK). These closely resemble the notorious US FOSTA/SESTA laws which forced sex workers on to the street, estimated to be ten times more dangerous than indoor work.
Ultimately, these provisions were not included and sites where sex workers can advertise – for now – remain up. However, some are now seeking to avoid falling foul of the new regulations by demanding sex workers upload public headshots, rather than images of their bodies. For people whose safety depends on anonymity, this is a devastating blow.
While advertising sites are still allowed, a cornerstone of the OSA’s second phase is mandatory age verification for anyone accessing adult content. Since July, internet users with a UK-based IP address have been required to verify that they are over 18, through uploading a valid form of ID or another approved method such as credit card verification or email-based digital footprint analysis.
In the two weeks following the enforcement of these new rules, UK visitors to Pornhub dropped by 47% and by 10% to OnlyFans. However, all may not be as it appears. Age verification doesn’t actually provide a strong deterrent to accessing porn for tech-savvy teenagers – anyone can sidestep this requirement with a virtual private network (VPN), which disguises their location. Unsurprisingly, July’s new Ofcom guidance coincided with an explosion in VPN use, with one provider reporting a 1800% spike in downloads. So this supposed slump in UK traffic is hard to verify.
The government has had no qualms about passing other laws that cause active harm to children. As a result, deprivation levels are at a record high
What a VPN cannot do is help sex workers wishing to preserve their anonymity, circumnavigate requests to post face-out pictures, or avoid sweeping algorithmic content moderation. There is no recourse for those left at the mercy of new stipulations or censorship. The result is sex workers having to choose between their privacy and their income – if they choose to prioritise privacy, they risk losing access to the platforms they use to make money, without delivering any benefit for young people online.
Protecting whose children?
While policymakers and campaigners rally around the cry to ‘protect the children’, we should ask: which children, and from what?
We are certainly not protecting young people who are being cut off from vital online educational content on sexual and reproductive health or resources on eating disorder recovery. We are not protecting LGBTQ+ children who are blocked from accessing knowledge, community, and history. Plus, given that the majority of sex workers are mothers, threats to their income and online safety can only have knock-on harms for the dependents they work to support.
Meanwhile, the government has had no qualms about passing other laws that cause active harm to children. As a result, deprivation levels are at a record high for this century, with around one in three children living in poverty in the UK. The Conservative government’s austerity measures through the 2010s are directly linked to reduced living standards, poorer nutrition and worse health outcomes for children.
The risk of young people being exposed to potentially harmful content online is real. But forcing sex workers to out themselves and implementing coarse algorithmic censorship isn’t doing much to keep them safer. And when so many other actively harmful policies are being enacted, it’s difficult to believe that legislators are that concerned with protecting the children.
Third phase incoming
The third and final phase of the OSA outlines additional duties for the largest and most influential platforms. While a final list has not been published, it is highly likely to include major social media platforms, search engines and messaging services. These sites will be required to publish annual transparency reports detailing how they are meeting child safety duties and assessing how their algorithms might expose children to legal but harmful content. The third phase of rules aren’t expected to be fully in force until 2026, but will almost certainly coincide with yet another spike in content moderation and deletion for sex workers, as companies scramble to avoid any potential liability.
The OSA is the first piece of legislation designed to try to keep people safe online, and to recognise that social media companies have a duty of care to their users. The concerns and aims of the legislation are no doubt important – we all deserve to be safe online. But using legislation purely to plant an ideological flag isn’t enough. Until policymakers can collaborate effectively with marginalised groups, true harm reduction will be unattainable.
Calls to protect the children’ should not give policymakers a free pass to enact blanket legislation without challenge. It is essential that legislators engage in meaningful consultation to shape laws, and that the voices of those most at risk are not silenced or ignored in the process. In this case, that includes not just children, but also the sex workers dependent on online platforms for their income, drug users seeking harm reduction resources and LGBTQ+ people looking for mental health support. Online safety cannot be realised through an uncontested, moralising agenda that sacrifices the rights and wellbeing of marginalised communities.
Thank you to Yiğit Aydınalp from the European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance and digital safety campaigner Adele Walton, who provided valuable context that helped inform this article.
Marin Scarlett is a sex workers’ rights and reproductive justice activist.
