The Online Safety Act is a censor’s charter

The UK government is on a crusade to destroy free speech.

The baton has passed. On Friday, the previous Conservative government’s ‘Online Safety Bill’, newly refined by Labour, became law. This collaboration between left and right is all the evidence we need that one of the core aspects of woke ideology has prevailed. Specifically, the unevidenced belief that words cause real-world harm and therefore censorship is essential for the sake of social cohesion.

This has been a long time coming. Opposition from MPs has been lacklustre; most of our political class simply does not understand why the principle of free speech should take priority in a civilised society. This was evident from Keir Starmer’s comments this week during his joint interview with Donald Trump at the Trump-Turnberry golf course in Scotland. With nuclear-strength audacity, Starmer claimed that he was ‘not censoring anyone’. Rather, his government was simply putting measures in place ‘to protect children, in particular from sites like suicide sites’.

It all sounds noble enough, until one realises that the impact of the Online Safety Act will not simply stop at child protection. Social media platforms are now liable for ‘false communications’ that may cause ‘non-trivial psychological harm’, a crime that can result in a jail term of up to fifty-one weeks. Here is the specific section of the Act:

A person commits an offence if –

(a) the person sends a message,

(b) the message conveys information that the person knows to be false,

(c) at the time of sending it, the person intended the message, or the information in it, to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience, and

(d) the person has no reasonable excuse for sending the message.

As with all ‘hate speech’ legislation, one suspects that the ambiguity is the point. If the standard is psychological harm, then almost anyone who speaks in public is vulnerable. I certainly receive abuse regularly that would qualify, but I would much sooner block these angry trolls than see them arrested. Moreover, we have already seen the claim of psychological harm weaponised against perfectly legitimate and sensible points of view. In other words, this nebulous legislation is wide open to exploitation by activists looking to silence their critics.

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