Will online safety cost us our digital liberties?
The impacts of a two-year-old law are finally being felt in Britain—and, as the United States looks to pass its own Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), it should watch the unfolding situation with fear.
The Online Safety Act (2023) was passed by the previous Conservative government under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. But the legislative process began in February 2022, under Sunak’s predecessor-but-two, Boris Johnson. Implementation was delayed for an extensive period of time, largely due to controversy and logistics surrounding the law. The Office for Communications (Ofcom) laid out a roadmap for enforcement in October 2024, a full year after the law was passed.
As is usually the case, a law steeped in respectable aims—protecting children from harmful content—has rapidly revealed itself as a nefarious tool of control.
Nobody wants children to view pornographic content. That is hardly a controversial position. Yet so often the tools of authoritarianism are sold under the guise of protection. The echoes of Benjamin Franklin’s warning against sacrificing a little liberty for a little temporary safety ring louder in the Internet era; what was once the digital Wild West has become sanitized, watched, and regulated. And lurking behind the existence of the law itself is the question of who is actually responsible for the content that children view online—the government, the platforms, or—as seems to have been forgotten—their parents?
The Online Safety Act began with a reasonable goal: requiring platforms to remove content that was already illegal, such as child abuse or images that glorify or encourage self-harm. But the rationale, as explained by the government’s own “Online Safety Act Explainer,” was to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” by making platforms legally responsible for the content their users post. Even at the outset, the practicalities of forcing international corporations to police global content on behalf of a national government were pointed out as practically impossible. Yet the law quickly transformed into justifying the restraints on adults in the name of increased transparency.
And when the law partly came into effect last week, on July 24, the immediate reaction both in the UK and abroad focused on the limits on pornographic content. Major websites such as Pornhub, to the Not Safe for Work (NSFW) sections of major forums like Reddit, were affected. These restrictions digitized existing limits of content via Section 12 of the Act, through age verification procedures that now require users to upload a selfie alongside a government-issued ID, such as a driving license.
How exactly this data is to be stored, when it will be deleted, and the use of it in the meantime is not clear. This leads to significant questions over the security of these websites and how damaging a leak might be. Moreover, the timing of the implementation of this law coincided with a public relations disaster for a popular app—Tea. Designed for women to share dating advice, Tea faced a major data breach. Not only was its user base revealed (verified using the same process of a selfie paired with a government ID), but the platform also was discovered to be hosting images of other people (i.e., non-users) without their consent. It is deeply embarrassing for the government’s chosen method of user verification to be shown up as dangerously insecure and unreliable in the same week.
But the sinister consequences of the Online Safety Act go far beyond pornographic content. The real danger lies alongside the implications of the vagaries behind “harmful content.”
Almost the exact same week as the law implementation, the UK saw widespread protests and near-riots in towns such as Epping and Diss, and even in cities like Leeds. These demonstrations, largely led by mothers and local residents over the sexual assault and harassment of young girls by asylum seekers and refugees in nearby hotels, quickly spread, and are still bubbling away in small towns.
Not that you would know this. The Online Safety Act has enabled censorship of footage of such protests on major platforms like X, on the basis that the footage could incite harm or encourage violence. This is not without precedent—the Arab Spring was considered to be the first “digital revolution” due to the role social media played in the spread of the revolution across the MENA region.
Of course, you could always use Virtual Privacy Networks (VPNs) to circumvent these restrictions. Registrations for VPNs in Britain have skyrocketed in the last week, as citizens attempt to overcome the new law—for as long as the government will allow it. And while it might be a meme to joke about needing “a license for that” in the UK, Americans should take note of their own government’s attempts to introduce similar limitations to the Internet.After all, the words of another founding father must be remembered: The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
