Ctrl U: the Online Safety Act is shutting down the internet

Spectator

2 days ago

This time last year, the UK was consumed by the worst race riots since 2001. It was precipitated by the spread of online rumours that the perpetrator of the Southport atrocity was a Muslim refugee. This summer, there have been smaller protests following reports of sexually motivated attacks allegedly perpetrated by migrants.
But something is different. Legislation which was originally passed in 2023 came into force last Friday and the effects can already be felt. Social media posts showing rioters fighting with police have been suppressed; those referring to sexual attacks have been automatically flagged as pornographic. Footage from a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in Leeds, which showed police officers restraining and arresting a protestor, now can't be easily accessed in Britain.
While it could be argued that this is all helping to keep the peace, it is also the case that the government is exerting far greater control over what can and can't be viewed online. Even MPs are at risk of having their content deemed extreme. A video of a speech in parliament by Tory MP Katie Lam about sexual crimes committed by grooming gangs was restricted on X, having been flagged as 'harmful content'.
The Online Safety Act promises to protect minors from harmful material such as pornography, self‑harm forums and pro‑-suicide websites. It sounds good in principle. Yet it is the most sweeping attempt by any liberal democracy to bring the online world under the control of the state.
Platforms are now threatened with fines as high as 10 per cent of their global revenue if they misstep, so instead these sites are adopting a patchwork of intrusive measures. These include ID verification and credit-card checks to prove users are who they say they are and that they are over 18.
The security flaws are obvious. Forcing people to hand over private information to pornography sites creates a goldmine for hostile states and hackers. When Ashley Madison, the dating site for people seeking extramarital affairs, was hacked a decade ago, millions of users found their names, credit cards and intimate details dumped online. Imagine that on a national scale. If those state‑mandated databases are ever breached – by, say, the Chinese government – every user is instantly at risk of blackmail.
There was no need for the Online Safety Act to be so expansive, or to sprawl into undefined categories such as 'hate'. An act that was intended to protect children could have been tightly focused on access to explicit material, built with robust privacy safeguards and clear limits on enforcement. The deliberate conflation of privacy concerns with child protection is a sinister form of emotional blackmail. A case in point is the Science Secretary Peter Kyle's recent smearing of Nigel Farage. Kyle accused the Reform leader of being 'on the side' of predators such as Jimmy Savile because of his opposition to the new legislation.
Clamping down on online content to 'protect children' is not without precedent: Russia introduced a child safety measure in 2012, which was soon weaponised to block political opposition and LGBT content. Turkey introduced the Social Media Law in 2020 to safeguard 'family values'. Unsurprisingly, it quickly became a tool for throttling dissent and compelling platforms to hand over users' data.
The UK's Online Safety Act is designed to conceal a similar outcome: controlling the channels through which dissent, especially the kind that makes the government deeply uncomfortable, is organised. It is as much a crisis‑management tool for a flailing political class as it is a piece of digital regulation. Similar motivations are behind the recent formation of a police squad to monitor 'anti-migrant' posts online. It is far easier to criminalise dissent than to confront the failures of policing or the breakdown of social cohesion.
But the practicalities of the act matter less than the principle. For centuries, this country exported the idea of free speech. Long before the 1689 Bill of Rights, John Milton's 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica fought the licensing of the press. Today, however, the nation that invented free speech has turned against it.
Even Wikipedia has been forced into a legal battle with Ofcom, fighting for its right to exist on its own terms, stating: 'It is in the interest of UK society for laws that threaten human rights to be challenged as early as possible.' OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has said it will limit the introduction of some of its services in the UK because of the conditions of this law. These resources have greatly enhanced access to human knowledge. To abandon them is a terrible step backwards.
The costs of enforcing the act are not just falling on Silicon Valley but on Britain's digital hobbyists. A hamster owners' forum, a local residents' group in Oxfordshire and a cycling enthusiasts' forum have shut themselves down or limited their activities to avoid liability. On the app Reddit, various subreddits, including those for beer and cider, no longer appear to unverified British users because the risks of discussing such subjects are seemingly too high because the platform has to assume they are under 18.
The internet's revolutionary power as a means for communication has transformed British politics, allowing anti-Establishment figures to flourish online. Take the Brexit referendum or the rise of Jeremy Corbyn – both were brought about through the exchange of ideas on the internet. The fight against trans ideology also began online, despite the state repeatedly attempting to hinder it through the threat of arrest and the recording of 'non-crime hate incidents'.
The internet has been at least as transformative to our political debate as the advent of the printing press. When Gutenberg's innovation first spread across Europe, it printed not just scripture and scholarship but heresies, seditious pamphlets and vulgar broadsides. It was abused, but no liberal society would have dreamed of hobbling it for fear of how it might be misused. The platforms being muzzled today are the very ones that have dragged this country's ugliest failures into the light.
What happens when the state tries to police speech and behaviour online with a heavy hand? We discovered the answer during the Covid pandemic: people take their discussions underground. The lockdown years drove vast numbers of people into encrypted chatrooms, Telegram channels and the outer reaches of the internet – a dynamic that hardened their opposition and radicalised the discourse. The Online Safety Act risks doing exactly the same.
For all the rhetoric, forcing people to use workarounds such as VPNs will not make the content disappear; it will simply push conversations into less visible, less accountable corners of the internet, where anger curdles and where the state's reach is weakest. Far from civilising the internet, this legislation may end up bolstering its most dangerous fringes.
While the Labour government should be held to account for the legislation's implementation, the Online Safety Act was a Conservative project, originating with Theresa May's 2019 Online Harms White Paper, and driven by Nadine Dorries and others who demanded that the bill be even tougher. Even Conservatives on the right of the party, such as Miriam Cates, fell for the supposition that the legislation would protect children, comparing tech companies who opposed the bill on the grounds of privacy and cost with business owners in the 19th century who wanted to keep sending children down the mines.
Kemi Badenoch, one of the few senior Tories to express early concerns, has been proven right to have feared overreach. She was only one of a few voices to resist this tyrannical juggernaut. Fraser Nelson, the former editor of this magazine, also fought it from the beginning, labelling the then bill a 'censor's charter'. Farage, seeing a political opening, has pledged to repeal it, while attacking the shadow home secretary Chris Philp for his support of the legislation – a position that exposes how far the Conservatives strayed in government from their supposed commitment to liberty.
Freedom was once an intrinsic British value, felt far more deeply than the new watchwords of 'diversity' and 'tolerance,' which emerged as bureaucratic mantras of multiculturalism in recent decades.
Britain's moral authority now lies in tatters. We have long used our tradition of free expression as diplomatic capital: from Cold War‑era BBC broadcasts that cut through the Iron Curtain to our self‑presentation as a haven for journalists and dissidents. How can Britain lecture authoritarian regimes on the virtues of open discourse while throttling it at home? To countries watching from abroad, the Online Safety Act is a clear signal that the oldest liberal democracy in the world no longer believes in itself.
The US rightly views this legislation with contempt. Last week, the State Department described regulation of social media in the UK and EU as 'Orwellian'. The US-UK trade relationship is now snared in a values clash, complicated further by the ongoing dispute between Apple and the government over iCloud encryption. Vice-President J.D. Vance is known to oppose the legislation, seeing it as part of a wider suppression of free speech across Europe. Despite this, the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has said that the law will not be watered down for the sake of a trade deal.
It is not lost on those in the MAGA movement that Donald Trump was able to become president in no small part because of freedom of speech in the digital world. In the 2016 election, Trump's supporters congregated online and spread his messaging through memes; in 2024 he eschewed TV appearances in favour of internet podcasts.
Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter (now X) on the grounds of upholding free speech, rightly or wrongly, has been seen as crucial to Trump's victory. The MAGA crowd see the traditional media as a cartel which misrepresents information to control public opinion, and therefore events.
When American officials implore their British counterparts to respect freedom of speech, they are emphasising our shared intellectual and philosophical heritage. The failure to resolve these differences risks shutting Britain out of data‑sharing agreements worth billions to the financial services sector, jeopardising the flow of investment in technology at a critical juncture.
Besides all that, it should not fall to US politicians to have to speak out about authoritarianism in Britain. That is the job of parliamentarians who were elected to safeguard their constituents' liberties.
No academic recapitulation of Britain's constitutional history can capture the importance of its liberty better than Wordsworth: 'We must be free or die, who speak the tongue/ That Shakespeare spake.' Once we no longer believe that, then Britain as our forebears would have understood it will have ceased to exist.