Last week, the latest provisions in the Online Safety Act 2023 were enacted, introducing age verification checks for online content which the Government believes could be harmful to children. Its effects have been immediate and widely criticised. Footage of British people being arrested in Leeds while protesting against asylum seekers’ hotels was censored on X for users who had not verified their age.
Even worse, videos of a speech made in Parliament by Katie Lam MP detailing the horrors of the rape gangs have also been blocked by these new rules. Speech which has been constitutionally protected from censure since the 1689 Bill of Rights is now being censored online via age verification technology.
It is hard to overstate the significance of this. British people are being forced by the state to verify their age and hand over personal information to view political news about their own country. It is the sort of thing for which British diplomats would castigate third world or tyrannical governments, but there seems to be little awareness of the danger of this law among our own governing class.
When the Online Safety Act was making its way through Parliament under the previous Conservative Government, there were few voices opposing it. Aside from a small number of skirmishes within the Conservative Party over the extent of the regulations, the Online Safety Bill was passed with overwhelming cross-party support. Concerns raised by organisations like the Free Speech Union about the threat it posed to freedom of expression were waved away with vague reassurances by the then-Government. Meanwhile, the Labour Party wanted the laws to go even further. Last week’s news suggests that the Labour MPs and those who wanted the Online Safety Act to regulate political speech got their wish, and the reassurances of previous Conservative ministers have crumbled into dust.
Readers will know that the main reason that age verification checks were introduced online was supposedly to stop children viewing pornography. This is a noble aim, and a valid target for policy-based solutions. The problem is that the definitions in the law are so poorly-defined that a much broader category of information and content is captured by the law. The Online Safety Act enforces a duty on tech platforms to “prevent children of any age from encountering, by means of the service, primary priority content that is harmful to children.” Government documents accompanying the act also provide a long list of examples of content that it deems illegal, and which must not just be taken down from the internet but stopped from “appearing at all.” While the law specifies the kind of pornographic material which makes up “priority content”, the use of a much broader list of illegal content which the Act intends to remove muddies the water hugely, and expands the scope of the law much further.
The list of illegal content is supposedly a list of criminal activities which the Government wishes to be taken down from the internet, such as videos advertising ways to enter the United Kingdom illegally, or footage of people committing hate crimes. However, the broad duties that Parliament has imposed upon tech platforms to eliminate the potential for harm to children online, combined with the threat of huge fines levied on companies for non-compliance — ten percent of global turnover — has unsurprisingly provoked a risk-averse response from tech platforms like X, which has restricted access to all manner of political speech, and even from forums devoted to discussing alcoholic drinks, such as the Reddit forum r/cider.
During the Bill’s passage, free speech activists scored a minor tactical victory by forcing the Government to remove provisions which would order online platforms to remove content which was “legal but harmful” to children and adults. Sadly, it seems that this principle still essentially applies de facto, judging by how the Online Safety Act is working in practice.
One might suggest that this risk aversion on the part of tech platforms is temporary, and that companies will work out a sensible compromise with Ofcom, the regulator charged with implementing the law. This would be a mistake. Laws designed to restrict access to pornography are liable to be used to restrict political speech, as well as other things that the state would like to suppress. The Prime Minister himself has said he is considering strengthening the Online Safety Act in the wake of the 2024 summer demonstrations, and it is reported that the police have established new units to monitor online discussion which could provoke civil unrest. The ratchet is only turning in one direction, that of far greater monitoring of speech online, and the use of age-verification laws as a form of digital ID card by stealth.
Last year, some of the economic ramifications of the Act began to emerge when tech company OpenAI said it would not deploy the latest ChatGPT tools in the UK because of the conditions applied by the new laws. Now we are seeing the political ramifications emerge.
In a way, it is helpful that the immediate consequences of the Act have been the restriction of political speech in such an undeniable manner. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has criticised the law and multiple politicians in the US Government, including the Vice President and the Secretary of State, have attacked the rise of censorship in Britain and Europe. The Prime Minister defended his record on free speech in the White House recently, but the latest developments will hopefully invite more scrutiny.
This law poses a huge challenge to the established political class. First, Conservatives who implemented the Online Safety Act are in no position to plead for freedom of expression when they ignored the very same warnings while writing the law between 2019 and 2023. The Labour Government has floated the possibility of taking down X altogether. Such a move would be perilous considering their continued collapse in the opinion polls and complete paralysis when it comes to governing the country. Few things could be more authoritarian and tin-pot than a government suffering economic collapse and anti-immigration protests up and down the country responding by trying to turn off the internet.
It is one of the worst laws passed under the previous Parliament, and it should be repealed
Reform UK, by contrast, sense opportunity. They are staking out a position as the most unblemished advocates of free speech in Britain, explicitly linking it to matters like two-tier justice and supporting those who are protesting the taxpayer-funded accommodation of asylum seekers up and down the country.
Every law which attempts to regulate speech in the interests of children’s safety will be used to restrict uncomfortable or dissident political speech, one way or another. This week has shown the ugly reality of the Online Safety Act. It is one of the worst laws passed under the previous Parliament, and it should be repealed. It is as important to the future of Britain as stopping mass immigration and reforming our human rights laws. Without the free exchange of ideas, British democracy will become little more than an entirely cosmetic, stage-managed affair.
