How to kill the Online Safety Act

Rhodes Napier

The Online Safety Act has seemingly crept on many on the right as a surprise. As of July 25th, anons logging into their X accounts found that entirely legal, previously accessible content, was blinkered with the Orwellian caption 'Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to the content until X estimates your age'. As you surely know reader, its not just two dimensional anime, or actual pornographic material, which is now off-limits. Footage of live political events like Israel's ongoing offensive in Gaza and domestic protests are no longer viewable. Indeed, you might live adjacent to some of the anti-migrant hotel demonstrations taking place, but you are deemed by the state as being insufficiently mature to observe these virtually.

More problematically, as the Conservative MP Katie Lam has publicised, a speech containing transcripts from the Oxford rape gang trials is now blocked for viewing (indeed it seems that the entire original transcript can no longer be accessed on X). As of the time of writing, there is actually no mechanism on X to verify one's age, although there is indication that this might involve a mixture of the entry of personal details such as birthdates and facial scanning, amongst other measures. More eclectic examples of redaction abound beyond the confines of Musk's platform; subreddits like /r/cider, /r/sexualassault (a forum for survivors) and /r/stopsmoking all require users to enter their age and are automatically blocked for under 18s. As part of the efforts to prevent minors from accessing ''harmful content'', information also on how to bypass verification policies by changing location or through the use of VPNs can also be hidden.

The Online Safety Act, originally drafted in 2023, is a dreadful, poorly designed piece of legislation, typifying the post-Brexit authoritarian drift of the British state. It divides online platforms into arbitrarily tiered categories based on number of UK users, placing onerous and impractical safeguarding duties on 'Category 1 and 2' sites (those which 3 million UK users or more). These platforms are required to prevent under 18s from accessing 'harmful' (which can be, and under government guidelines, often is, legal) content. This includes not just the expected material relating to self harm, pornography or sexual abuse, but also content linked to illegal and legal migration and political violence more generally. Firms which fail to enact their duties as ruled by OFCOM can face fines of up to 10% of their qualifying global revenue, seriously incentivising the censorship of online material as well as of search engines.

Theresa May was a short lived and little remembered Prime Minister. However, her legacy was to set into a motion an increasingly maternal 'nudge factor' era of policy making, in which a domestic political establishment, freed from the oversight of Brussels, embarked on the abuse of its new found powers. What distinguishes the act from other thematically similar initiatives, such as the proposed generational phase out of smoking and the under-16s phone bans, has been the relative stealth with which it has crept up on the country.

The latter initiatives, often panickily launched as 'legacy' policies or as purported vote winners in the run to general elections, normally floundered in the wake or widespread public opposition. Conversely, while some were alert to the dangers, there was relatively little understanding of the extent to which content would be regulated under the Online Safety Act. In this sense it is a more dramatic version of Martyn's law. Martyn's law, named after Martyn Hett, one of the victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, 'tiers' venues into standard and enhance categories. The former (200-799 people) require protective measures such as staff training and emergency procedures while the latter (800 plus) require CCTV installation and professional security staff. For enhanced categories, fines (in a way which is highly analogous to the Online Safety Act's punitive measures) can be up to £18 million pounds or 5% of global annual turnover, whichever is greater.

Martyn's law is similar to the Online Safety Act in two ways. First of all it was the product of victim's families' lobbying the government to enact the change. The Hett family engaged in public awareness campaigns such as a 200 mile walk from the site of the terror attack to 10 Downing Street, as well as collaboration with pre-existing campaign groups like Survivors Against Terror. Similarly, the Online Safety Act is partly the product of the campaigns of the Russell family in the context of the suicide of Molly Russell after viewing self-harm content. While both extremely tragic and avoidable cases, politicians' responses to this type of familial lobbying tends to knee-jerk and reactive, drafting policies which are draconian in their scope and difficult to enforce. It also gives license to their worst authoritarian instincts, providing them with a causes belli to initiate broader programs of censorship which ultimately become political in their dimensions.

Its similarity extends to the fact that it also places the onus of enforcement on private providers, who are incentivised to interpret their responsibilities as risk-aversely as possible given the weight of the financial fines they can face. In the case of Martyn's law, community halls and local theatres have been issued with compliance warnings and outdoor venues have had to pause their operations. Undoubtedly many providers will eventually be inoperable. The Online Safety Act ensures that X and other platforms will blinker any material which might be construed as harmful, even if political in nature and of interest to the public. The British political class is keen to legislate away social problems (some of which, like Islamic terrorism, originate in its own machinations) while outsourcing the authority to do so to financially blackmailed private actors. Its a form of Putinism by proxy, which results in a more accentuated form of authoritarianism than conventional state repression.

Bizarrely, the online safety act was even more aggressive in its original form. In initial drafting, it would have involved the mandatory screening of encrypted messages, much broader discretionary powers for OFCOM to regulate the codes of practice of online platforms, as well as an requirement for platforms to address 'legal but harmful' content for adults. Even in its watered down form it still marks Britain's continued decades long departure from any pretension to liberal democratic norms, nestling the country amongst its new authoritarian peers like Erdogan's Turkey. Indeed, Wikipedia has warned that it might have to exit the UK (Wikipedia was inaccessible in Turkey from 2017-2020). This is due to both the possibility that Wikipedia content itself might be deemed 'harmful' but also the threat age verification policies pose to the ability of anonymous editors to take part in the review of articles. Wikipedia might be forced to use a quota based system to limit the number of regular visitors from the UK so that it doesn't fall into a Category 1 website. While Wikipedia is a highly imperfect forum, it often provides a mechanism for dissent, particularly with regards to minor articles on niche topics, and allows people to access comparatively impartial overviews of contemporary and historical issues. Conversely, a 'Great British Encyclopaedia' could be monitored by an oppressive left wing government, with the enforced removal of 'harmful content' relevant to the rape gang phenomenon and asylum seeker sexual violence.

Notwithstanding its authoritarian implications, there are other issues inherent in any law which mandates platforms to engage in age verification policies. Platforms now have to collate sensitive biometric, financial or government ID related data, which are vulnerable to malicious leaking or external cyber attacks. Even if one were to support the notion that newly enfranchised 16 and 17 year olds shouldn't be able to access domestic and global news stories, adults will legitimately be weary of undergoing formal age verification and will forgo accessing these as well. As we have seen recently with the mass leaking of 16 billion login credentials in June in the United States, this is entirely rational. An act of legislation ostensibly designed to make the internet a safer place has made it a considerably more dangerous one.

The act is only in the early stages of implementation; according to the Centre for Policy Studies, OFCOM's powers will expand next year, including the right to extensively access companies' internal documents, data and algorithmic coding, as well as the ability to enter companies' premises to enforce compliance. However, as egregious as it is, the Online Safety Act should not be viewed in isolation or as a unique spasm of authoritarianism. It is part of wider set of tools which are being rapidly swept through with a view to repress the mounting dissent against the British state. Only recently the government has announced the creation of a 'National Police Coordination Centre' in Westminster which will monitor the internet for online indicators of unrest.

It also has recently been revealed that the government has been paying foreign social media influencers through NDA contracts under the auspices of the media agency Zinc Network, to influence elections against populist candidates in Europe. Given the existence of the Research, Information and Communications Unit and its role in narrative control in the aftermath of terror attacks, doubtlessly the scale of government-media collaboration is much broader than we think and is likely to intensify. The BBC for example is already opting to omit key information about the names and locations of migrant hotels in its articles.

How should the right react to the new government policy? Thankfully Reform is relatively inoculated against post-liberalism, despite the protestations of Miriam Cates. Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf, in spite of my mistrust for both figures, should be commended for assuming the functions of the opposition and for spearheading public criticisms of the policy. However, I fear, however valid the libertarian critiques of the dreadful legislation are, the knuckle dragging Paddington Bear populism of the Labour front bench will resonate with a significant chunk of the electorate. When Peter Kyle, Labour's Secretary of Tech, says opponents of the bill 'are on the side of predators' and equated opposition to the bill as enabling latter day Jimmy Savilles, he is not making a one off gaffe. However, crude and grotesquely hypocritical it is (Kyle himself of course voted against a national enquiry into rape gangs), this is the line of attack they are going for. 'Farage doesn't care about kids' needs a more decisively critical rejoinder then highly reasonable defences of civil liberties.

While some people might allege I have a monomaniacal focus on this policy, the easiest way to counter Labour's strategy is to call for a Nuremberg for Rotherham. If you want to neutralise moral grandstanding about child safety from a government which is favour of the importation of foreign rapists, simply call for capital punishment for paedophiles. While advocacy of this policy should be rhetorically focused on the South Asian, Arab and Somali rape gangs, as well as asylum assaulters, it should extend to all people convicted of substantive child sex offences (e.g. any instances involving the predatory sexual assault and/or trafficking of a minor, therefore excluding Romeo and Juliet wedge cases). Indeed, such a policy would coincide well with the plethora of cases manifesting throughout towns and villages, as Starmer sequesters itinerant migrant child molesters in provincial England. Capital punishment for paedophiles; Nigel Farage, this is your silver bullet, the Excalibur with which to unlock the realm of England. Nothing else can end the moral tyranny of the censorious left, safeguarding and the broader panoptical hellscape of Modern Britain.