Farage will risk safety of women by repealing Online Safety Act… his boasts tell predators they can get away with crimes

The Sun

4 days ago

MET Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told me this week that what young boys are seeing online is directly influencing violence against women and girls.
It's not just London. Police across Britain are battling an epidemic of male violence. But our Government's mission is to halve that in the next decade.
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Others shout from the sidelines but no other party is promising to do this.
When Nigel Farage boasts he would scrap the Online Safety Act, he's admitting he's happy to leave the internet as a Wild West and put women and girls at risk.
He'd rip up protections that crack down on so-called revenge porn, violent misogynistic content, and posts encouraging self-harm or suicide.
He would tear down the defences we've built to hold back dangerous content and make the police's job much harder.
The Act age-restricts pornography that has been too freely available for children, with those as young as ten exposed to degrading material.
Humiliate and traumatise
What it does not do is stop adults from saying or seeing anything legal.
In fact, it enshrines protections for freedom of expression, explicitly referring to it 50 times.
But Farage and Reform would sacrifice women's safety for empty concerns over free speech.
Farage's plan to scrap the Act doesn't simply return us to a bad old status quo.
It would tell predators they can get away with this behaviour.
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Our research, published today, shows that Farage's decision to scrap the Act would mean hundreds of these violent men being free not only to offend again and to hurt, humiliate and traumatise women, but to become more confident in their offending.
Men like Nicholas Hawkes, who sent photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl and was the first person to be convicted of the new offence of cyber-flashing, created by the Online Safety Act.
In Farage's future for Britain, behaviour like this is apparently deemed fine.
Or Tyler Webb, who was the first person charged with encouraging serious self-harm online, another offence contained within the Act.
He used a communications app to repeatedly tell a vulnerable 22-year-old woman to cut herself, and then to kill herself by hanging during a video call so he could watch.
When I visited the Met I was able to see how they've changed tack towards violent and abusive men.
Their V100 programme applies counter- terrorism tactics to track down and convict the most prolific perpetrators of violence against women and girls.
But those rapists and abusers often begin by testing the water, seeing what they can get away with before evolving into the beasts they now are.
Indecent exposure becomes rape. Soliciting naked photos can become something even more dangerous too.
No one who abuses women and girls should expect to get away with it, either online or off.
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And while policing these crimes has stepped up, the police also need to have the powers to act, and strong online rules in place, to halt the tide we've seen in recent years.
That's why our Labour Government is making non-fatal strangulation in online pornography illegal, toughening the law and ending the normalisation of a dangerous practice.
Not only will making its depiction illegal mean that the police can crack down on those breaking the law, it also brings it into the scope of the Online Safety Act, so porn sites and social media platforms would also be liable.
Too often, children have innocently stumbled across dangerous and distressing content. We must do everything we can to stop that from happening.
I don't mince my words when it comes to this issue, as it's so important.
Labour is on the side of protecting women and girls. It's clear Farage is anything but.
By Zia Yusuf of Reform UK
THE Online Safety Act is the biggest assault on freedom of expression in this country in our lifetimes.
Since it came into force, what has been censored?
Footage of a protest against mass immigration in Leeds, comments demanding the end of illegal migration, even biographies of Richard the Lionheart have been quietly removed from social media.
If this was really about protecting children from predators, why did this law result in the censorship of a speech in Parliament tearing into those who covered up the grooming gangs?
In any case, use of Virtual Private Networks – which allow children to bypass the law's restrictions (as well as parental controls) – has rocketed.
The kids run rings around the dinosaur politicians who drafted it.
Censorship is so widespread because the law was drafted to give the Government draconian power.
This Act threatens social media bosses with criminal liability for their staff if they don't block content the Government deems 'harmful'.
Faced with that, who wouldn't overblock?
Don't forget this law was cooked up by the Tories.
The same Tories who pretend to champion free speech and civil liberties, when it suits them.
A Reform government under Nigel Farage will repeal this Act, and pass a law that is fit for purpose to actually protect children, not to silence British people.