Britain’s War on Words: The Online Safety Act
“So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
“Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
“Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”
Robert Bolt’s wonderful play ‘A man for all seasons’ features this scene, in which Thomas Moore argues against a vicious witch-hunting prosecutor in the defence of his Catholic faith. It is a powerful demonstration of the fact that attempts to restrict even the most unsavoury and offensive of speech create the instruments with which it will be curtailed further.
It was only a matter of time before dynamite - initially a tool for mining - would be used to kill. In potentia, even those restrictions on free expression that are borne of good intentions open the door to abuse of freedom by the less well-disposed in the future.
The United Kingdom used to be the foremost global power and a bastion of Enlightenment values. Today, it leads the world in only one thing: arrests for posts made on social media. At first glance, its tally of over 13,000, which doubles that of its second-place contender and dictatorial hellhole, Belarus, seems almost comical. It is impossible for many to imagine a United Kingdom without a guaranteed right to freedom of speech. In reality, in the absence of strong and clearly defined speech protections as is the case in the USA, the British government is vested with a broad discretion to restrict speech that may be deemed offensive, or damaging to the institution of democracy. The problem with an unaccountable state regulator such as Ofcom curtailing expression it deems underserving of participation in the marketplace of ideas is that, in the words of George Orwell, ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
The Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, is only now coming into force in earnest, and has been used as a justification for certain clear breaches of the right to the freedom of speech. Not only does it fail in its aims, but its adverse chilling effect upon speech in Britain has mean that its implementation has, and will continue to do, more harm than good - to put it mildly.
What are the aims of the OSA?
The online safety act claims to be making the UK ‘the safest place to be online’, in particular for children. The clear implication of such a stated aim is to relegate those who stand in opposition to it as opposing safety for British children. And, if Ronald Reagan’s warning to approach with great suspicion the words ‘I am from the government and I am here to help’ is anything to go by, this aim clearly rings alarm bells. It aims to achieve this goal of world-class online safety in the following ways:
The protection of children from harmful and age-inappropriate content;
Reducing harmful and illegal content on major platforms;
Giving adults more control over what content they see;
Holding platforms responsible for how their services are used.
Parliament has resolved to implement these aims through far-reaching reforms to the regulatory environment. These reforms have come to police speech such as to minimise - and punish - speech that falls within a revised category of unacceptability. In addition to the designation of threats and violent pornographic materials, for instance, as falling into the range of unacceptable expression, it has designated ‘hate speech’ against protected characteristics (characteristic which one cannot change about themselves) in the same manner. On the surface of it, hate speech is a depraved activity that ought not to be allowed in society. However, the fact that ‘hate speech’ is defined in a nebulous and broad way as being anything which inflicts ‘non-trivial offence’ upon its supposed recipients, makes this designation something that is amenable to subjective interpretations, as well as something which has an unprecedented scope.
In addition, the broad regulatory powers the act extends to Ofcom allows it to set requirements for social media sites to limit content that is legal but harmful (especially to children). The Act empowers regulator to issue codes of practice detailing how platforms should identify and handle illegal or harmful content, investigate and fine services that fail to meet duties of care, and block access to websites that repeatedly fail compliance. This gives an unaccountable and bureaucratic body unprecedented scope to ban and fine social media platforms and websites. We just saw Ofcom flex its regulatory muscles currently by insisting on changes to Elon Musk’s platform X, which has been backed by threats of confiscation of 10% of its worldwide revenues and the prospect of a country-wide ban.
Why the OSA fails at its aims.
Dr. Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first great dictionary of the English language, upon the completion of his work was visited by a delegation of respectable ladies of London. They had come to congratulate him on his choice to exclude ‘indecent or obscene words’ from his dictionary. He retorted, ‘and I congratulate you ladies on being able to look them up!’
The OSA may at least be partially praiseworthy if it actually achieved its own stated aims of protecting children from harmful content, such as pornography. However, for many people, these are very easily accessible simply through the use of free online VPN’s. The case for banning expressions of suicidal ideation, along with other content that could potentially be harmful for children’s mental health, is more nuanced. Most people tend not to deliberately seek out content of this sort. There is, however, one major exception to this. Those who are already suffering with mental health concerns are the ones who would be most likely to do so - and they are the ones, incidentally, that are most affected by this content. Hence, the causal link between ‘harmful’ online content and mental health challenges is, at best, ambiguous.1
In other words, restriction of certain content in the UK does not render it inaccessible. An old joke about Dr. Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first great dictionary of the English language, captures this concept perfectly. Upon the completion of his work, he was visited by a delegation of respectable ladies of London, who lauded his exclusion of ‘indecent or obscene words’ in his dictionary. He retorted, ‘and I congratulate you ladies on being able to look them up!’ Under-18’s accessing pornographic materials will not be discouraged from doing so by some piddling subsection of the Online Safety Act.
Even if it is granted that children are somewhat protected by the new age-verification requirement, this policy effectively strips people of their anonymity on the internet. Age verification is now necessary for many activities that one conducts on the internet. X posts about controversial topics, for instance, are hidden from view pending age verification, and much coverage of recent anti-immigration protests has been similarly veiled from unverified eyes. Anonymity has long been an important safeguard which has enabled activism and journalism that would have otherwise been precluded by concerns about one’s own safety. For instance, Muslim apostates, should their identities be compromised on the internet, may have their lives put at risk for denunciations of Islam. Refugees from oppressive regimes such as Russia, China and North Korea are often shielded from hostile foreign secret services by this safeguard. Although platforms guarantee that this data would not be allowed to leave their servers, this act makes it far easier for government to demand and gain access to these ,arterials in the future. And, considering the British defence ministry - which one would like to think guarantees quite stringent security measures for the contents of its databases - recently leaked the names of 33,000 of its Afghan collaborators to the Taliban, there is always a risk that data on these amor platforms is not as secure as it would seem…
This also brings with it a powerful chilling effect on the character and range of speech in Britain. The nebulous character of many terms and clauses in the voluminous, dense online safety act - combined with the sheer quantity of arrests made for minor speech ‘infractions’ - serve as a powerful function for deterring speech and journalism that falls into the range of potentially offensive and contentious issues. This hasn’t been helped by the thinly-guised partisanship that has motivated these arrests. As ridiculous as it sounds, the filming of anti-immigration protests, criticism of migration into the United Kingdom, and silent prayer near abortion clinics have all motivated incarcerations on the basis of the perceived ‘non-trivial offence’ they posed to others. The established laws for the protection of speech that falls outside government-ordained versions of the truth are slowly being felled, and people are scared of voicing opposing opinion online for fear that they will be the next victim of state arrests.
A petition for the Act’s repeal, which garnered over 550,000 signatures, was rejected recently by Parliament. The trend towards state censorship appears far from relenting, and puts the future of Britain as a democracy which guarantees its citizens basic freedoms in jeopardy. The British people mustn’t acquiesce as these protections are wrested from their palms.
Footnotes
Sedgwick R, Epstein S, Dutta R, Ougrin D. Social media, internet use and suicide attempts in adolescents. Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2019 Nov;32(6):534-541. doi: 10.1097/YCO.0000000000000547. PMID: 31306245; PMCID: PMC6791504.