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Spectator
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Ctrl U: the Online Safety Act is shutting down the internet
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.
Spectator
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Spectator
The cult of safetyism harms us all
Last month, the government announced that 16-year-olds would be able to vote at the next general election. If these new voters had wanted to inform themselves about political issues over the weekend, they would have found it strangely difficult. Take, for example, a recent speech about the rape gangs made by the Tory MP Katie Lam in parliament. It was blocked on X, alongside transcripts of the trials of the perpetrators. X users also discovered that they were unable to watch videos of protests against illegal immigration, unless they could prove they were over 18. Even if 16-year-olds are now wise enough to vote, the government believes there is information that they are too childish to know. This mess was a consequence of the Online Safety Act, which was passed by the last government, and is supported by the current one. The act returned to the news last week as porn websites were made to implement age checks. The act is driven by a noble goal: to protect children from online pornography and the perversions of social media. But the legislation shows the problems with putting protection from harm ahead of everything else. We are turning a well-intentioned concern with safety into a cult of safetyism. For most of the 20th century, opposing safety meant opposing a more secure and better life. Resisting seat belts, for example, was a strange hobby for myopic libertarians; condemning the contraceptive pill the sign of an unrepentant reactionary. These protective measures were not only accompanied by unprecedented reductions in mortality – the RAC calculates that vehicle fatalities fell by 60 per cent in the three decades after seat belts became mandatory – but helped our lives become less burdened by fear. Yet the reduction of unnecessary evils has descended into the absurd. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote that safety has become sacred, creating an unwillingness to make trade-offs. Over the past two decades, this has stunted the emotional, intellectual and moral development of young people, leaving them less psychologically resilient and more anxious. Safetyism has become a moral anaesthetic, tranquillising the free spirit that young people need. Haidt and Lukianoff charted safetyism's spread across American universities in the early 21st century, in the form of content warnings and safe spaces 'protecting' students from ideas that might upset them. But safetyism moved out of the campus and is now the defining mindset of our age. We have become obsessed with mitigating every potential harm or distress, with no thought given to the consequences. The Covid lockdowns represented the peak of safetyism. A fetishisation for protection spread rapidly through our political class, with politicians competing to demand ever-tighter restrictions. Stay-at-home orders, social distancing, mandatory mask-wearing: the overriding political goal was to achieve as few Covid deaths as possible. Concerns over the cost of the measures, the long-term effects on the nation's health and the resilience of freedom appeared to occupy less ministerial time than defining what a 'substantial meal' was. Not only did a generation of children see their educational and social development stunted by politicians' reaction to a disease that posed little danger to them, but voters also became far too used to their freedoms being curbed under the pretence of 'security'. The move to make smoking illegal for anyone born after 2009 was a natural outgrowth of a belief that the public can't be trusted with choosing whether to put themselves in harm's way. Overzealous ministers have questions to answer, but not all of the blame should be put on them. The sanctification of caution begins at home. The public supports the smoking ban and were hardline on lockdowns. At one point towards the end of the pandemic, one in four people polled by Ipsos Mori said that nightclubs should never reopen, regardless of the Covid risk. Last year, the TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp hit out at Britain's 'risk-averse' culture after she was reported to social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to join his friends on a post-GCSE interrailing trip. For some parents, we exist in a Brass Eye nightmare-world, where a paedophile or drug dealer lurks around every corner. Only a third as many children play outside regularly as they did 60 years ago. Plonking a child in front of an iPad is far less stressful than letting them out. Yet this overprotectiveness will only do children more harm in the long term. The best way to keep a child off social media is to encourage them to go out and play. What should be encouraged is not the worship of safety but the embrace of risk. Exposure to danger, to trauma, to heartbreak and to wickedness is the only way human beings develop experience and resilience. A nation that forgets that will lose its self-confidence. By the time he was the age of Allsopp's boy, Horatio Nelson had twice crossed the Atlantic, come within ten degrees of the North Pole and chased down a polar bear. While today's Royal Navy recruits might now have to be a little older, it didn't set the young Nelson up too badly. Both politicians and parents need to learn that putting safety first is not always the least dangerous option.
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Brits rebel against Online Safety Act as petition reaches 380,000 signatures - and age checks spark concerns around privacy and free speech
Britain's porn crackdown went into effect at the end of last week, forcing users to prove their age to access hundreds of adult sites. From Pornhub to X, all platforms displaying adult content must now have measures in place to verify that users are over-18. Ofcom claims the new measures – part of the Online Safety Act – will make life safer online. However, many Brits are unhappy with the changes, and are now calling for the Online Safety Act to be repealed entirely. A petition, started by Londoner, Alex Baynham, has already been signed over 380,000 times. The new stand comes as campaigners warned that the Online Safety Act is having a 'catastrophic' impact on free speech after people were blocked from viewing videos of asylum seeker hotel protests. On X, users complained they were unable to view clips of police detaining activists in the UK, with messages on-screen saying it was 'due to local laws'. X even barred users from watching a powerful speech about grooming gangs which Conservative MP Katie Lam made to Parliament earlier this year. 'We believe that the scope of the Online Safety act is far broader and restrictive than is necessary in a free society,' the petition reads. 'For instance, the definitions in Part 2 covers online hobby forums, which we think do not have the resource to comply with the act and so are shutting down instead. 'We think that Parliament should repeal the act and work towards producing proportionate legislation rather than risking clamping down on civil society talking about trains, football, video games or even hamsters because it can't deal with individual bad faith actors.' The crackdown is part of the Online Safety Act 2023 – a set of laws that protects children and adults online. The idea of implementing age checks on pornography websites, and fining those sites that don't comply, has existed for several years now. Back in 2016, the UK government launched a public consultation over plans to implement age checks on pornography sites. It was then included in the Digital Economy Act 2017, but the provision was delayed and eventually abandoned in October 2019. The government said at the time age checks would be delivered through its 'proposed online harms regulatory regime' – in other words, the Online Safety Bill. Ofcom has listed seven methods that porn providers could use to check if users are over-18. These are photo-ID matching, facial age estimation, mobile-network operator (MNO) age checks, credit card checks, email-based age estimation, digital identity services and open banking. Open banking works by accessing the information a bank has on record regarding a user's age, while photo-ID matching involves uploading a verified photo-ID document, like a PDF of a passport of driving licence. Facial age estimate works by analysing the features of a user's face from a photo to work their age, while MNO age checks involve mobile-network operators applying age-restriction filters themselves. Because you must be 18 to get a credit card in the UK, credit card checks are also listed as 'highly effective', as are email-based age estimations, which estimate your age based on other services where you've provided your email address. One criticism of age-checking technology for porn is regarding concerns about handing sensitive identification information – namely age or date of birth – to third parties. Andy Lulham, Chief Operating Officer at Verifymy, claims that this shouldn't be a concern for users. 'Plenty of groundwork has been done and content providers should be well prepared for the change and the technology,' he explained. 'Age assurance methods, like email-based estimation, are reliable, privacy-preserving, safe and easy to implement. 'It's a matter of when, not if, explicit or harmful content online will be shielded from children, making a safer internet for everyone.' Beyond the petition, it seems many Brits are opting to use virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around the new measure. Online searches for VPNs, which can disguise a user's location, spiked by more than 700 per cent on Friday morning. This suggests thousands of Brits are already looking for ways around the restrictions. VPNs help users appear as though they're browsing from another country, allowing them to access sites without triggering the local ID checks.
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Nigel Farage vows Reform UK will scrap 'dystopian' online safety laws that puts a blocker on free speech
Reform has vowed to scrap the Online Safety Act because it creates a 'dystopian' world that suppresses freedom of speech. Nigel Farage 's intervention comes after it emerged that X blocked a powerful speech on grooming gangs by Tory minister Katie Lam in Parliament this year. Meanwhile, footage of arrests during asylum seeker hotel protests was also blocked 'due to local laws', according to the social media platform. Last week, the law changed to require websites to check users are over 18 before allowing them to access 'harmful' material such as pornography or suicide material. Failing to comply with the new rules could incur fines of up to £18million or 10 per cent of a firm's global turnover. Sir Keir Starmer today denied the legislation was censoring online content and said it was there to protect children. But at a Reform press conference today, Zia Yusuf, head of government efficiency for the party, said he would repeal the act, which he argued did nothing to protect children. He said the new powers were 'the sort of thing that I think [Chinese president] Xi Jinping himself would blush at the concept of', adding: 'So much of the act is massive overreach and plunges this country into a borderline dystopian state.' Arguing that the laws suppress freedom of speech, he said: 'We will repeal this Act as one of the first things a Reform government does.' Asked how he would protect children such as Molly Russell who took her own life after viewing footage promoting suicide, Mr Farage acknowledged he did not have the 'perfect answer'. He said his party had 'more access to some of the best tech brains, not just in the country but in the world' and would 'make a much better job of it'. Andy Burrows, chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation, set up in Molly's memory, said scrapping the Act 'would not only put children at greater risk but is out of step with the mood of the public'. After a demonstration outside the Britannia Hotel in Leeds at the weekend, X users said the site blocked arrest footage. They were shown the message: 'Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age.'
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Online Safety Act having a ‘catastrophic' impact on free speech after users blocked from viewing videos of asylum seeker hotel protests, campaigners warn
The Online Safety Act is having a 'catastrophic' impact on free speech after people were blocked from viewing videos of asylum seeker hotel protests, campaigners have warned. Users of X – formerly Twitter – complained they were unable to view clips of police detaining activists in the UK, with messages on-screen saying it was 'due to local laws'. X even barred users from watching a powerful speech about grooming gangs which Conservative MP Katie Lam made to Parliament earlier this year. Since last Friday, websites have been required to check users are aged over 18 before letting them access potentially 'harmful' material such as pornography or face being fined up to £18million. But critics including US Vice-President JD Vance have said legislation introduced by the Tories in 2023 could be used to attack free speech. After a demonstration outside the Britannia Hotel in Leeds on Friday, X users said it blocked arrest footage. They were shown the message: 'Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age.' Following a row over Essex Police allegedly escorting counter-protesters to a demonstration in Epping, West Yorkshire Police stressed it was not involved in censoring posts. X has not commented but its AI chatbot Grok suggested the Leeds clip was restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent conduct. As X does not have an age verification process, for many, access to posts defaulted to 'restricted' mode. Reform UK's Zia Yusuf last night branded the Online Safety Act 'the biggest ever assault on free speech in the UK'. 'This Tory monstrosity hands unelected bureaucrats sweeping powers to censor content they disapprove of,' he told the Mail. Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at Big Brother Watch, warned of a 'catastrophic effect on free speech online' with 'intrusive new age checks to access a range of websites'. A government spokesman said: 'Free speech is fundamental to our democracy and we've taken robust action to protect it, including through the Online Safety Act.'
