Ofcom's role in these matters, particularly regarding mental health and online spaces, is rapidly shifting from regulatory to authoritarian. The same organisation that remains relatively silent on widespread disinformation campaigns and algorithmic harm caused by Big Tech is suddenly invested in clamping down on fringe forums, disability communities, and safe spaces for those in psychological distress. It reeks of scapegoating.
Their framing of platforms like this as pro suicide rather than pro autonomy, pro discussion, or even just honest about despair, is incredibly telling. It says less about the forums themselves and more about a society that refuses to deal with the root causes of suffering. Poverty, austerity, chronic underfunding of mental health services, impossible waitlists, inaccessible disability support, and the dehumanising effects of late capitalism—none of that gets examined. Instead, the focus is on silencing those who speak openly about the consequences.
This is even more ironic (and infuriating) given the current discussions around the AD Bill. Parliament wants to decide who is allowed to die with dignity and yet, for the rest of us, especially those with mental illnesses, chronic pain, or neurodivergent conditions, the message remains clear: your pain is invalid, your agency suspect, your voice dangerous. There is a cruelty in legal systems that will permit a terminal cancer patient to request assisted death but criminalise a disabled person for even discussing it. It's the same here in New Zealand. I'd have to flee to some country I don't know just to be granted peace.
It also intersects with ableism. Ofcom and other regulators rarely consult actual disabled people about their lives. Instead, their policies are often framed through paternalism, through the lens of "protecting the vulnerable" which is a fuck off phrase that has come to mean "we don't trust you to think for yourself." The infantilisation is exhausting. Disabled and chronically ill people don't need protection from their own thoughts. They need protection from the systems that neglect, abandon, and punish them for not fitting the able bodied mould.
Online forums, especially those like this, often become lifelines. I know it has for me. They're not these dangerous echo chambers they'd like the wider populace to believe, but they offer the only space where people can be honest without censorship, medicalisation, or being shoved into the emergency system. Not everyone is here to CTB. Some of you are just here to speak, to be believed, to not be alone in a world that would rather bury our pain than listen to it.
If Ofcom and others truly cared, they would focus on why these spaces exist, not how to dismantle them.
