In a recent article for the journal Porn Studies I raised doubts about whether children and young people watching porn online is apparently so harmful to them that the restrictive measures proposed by the Online Safety Act (OSA) are necessary, proportionate and compatible with the UK’s various human rights obligations. I also posed the question of whether these measures, and particularly the requirements for age-verification, are actually workable.
Press hypocrisy
Now, the hypocrisy of sections of the UK national press hardly needs stressing, but the speed and vehemence with which right-wing papers plunged their knives into the OSA the very moment that its age-verification provisions went live on 25 July has been startling to behold. Why is this hypocritical? Because these papers lobbied for internet censorship from the moment that the World Wide Web became publicly available in 1993, and vociferously supported what would become the Online Safety Act (OSA) once Theresa May’s government had mooted such a measure in 2017 in its Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper. However, their objections to the OSA come from a very different position from those organisations such as the Open Rights Group (ORG), Article 19 and Index on Censorship that repeatedly warned against the dangers in the OSA, and its predecessor the Online Harms Bill, as these measures made their arduous way through the parliamentary process.
Perish the thought that these papers’ wrath stemmed partly from the fact that, albeit highly belatedly, they had come to realise that from now on anybody, and not simply young people, visiting a porn site would be subject to age-verification, with all the privacy problems and pitfalls that bodies such as ORG have constantly pointed out. Since, according to Ofcom’s most recent Online Nation report, nearly 14m adults in just one month visit such sites, these would almost certainly include some of their own readers.
But, of course, the papers didn’t actually frame their objections to the Act in these terms. So, for example, a Sun editorial on 31 July complained that a measure ‘designed to protect kids has ended up becoming a blunt tool to censor free speech’, Daniel Hannan lamented in the Mail, 30 July, that ‘the Online Safety Act was born out of a moral panic and now we’re all having to live with the unintended consequences’, and Andrew Orlowski, a member of the libertarian Free Speech Union, argued in the Telegraph, 29 July, that
“long overdue moves to enforce accountability on giant, transnational platforms, and better protect children unfortunately coincided with a renewed desire to control political speech. As long as populists are rising, the impulse to censor will be irresistible to their political opponents. By controlling our discourse, they can control democracy”.
Disinformation and national populism
In spite of the OSA being sold repeatedly as primarily a measure designed to stop children and young people watching porn online, there is in fact much more to it than that. And some of it should definitely be welcomed by those concerned about the ease with which anyone, and not simply children, can access certain kinds of material online – for example, that which encourages suicide, bulimic practices and other kinds of self-harm, or making threats to kill or injure. Indeed, parts of the OSA actually need strengthening – in particular its wholly inadequate measures against dis- and mis-information, which are the result of a ferocious campaign by the News Media Association and the Society of Editors to strip out of the legislation anything meaningful or effective on this subject. No prizes for guessing why.
And it is right-wing newspapers’ neuralgic reaction to any measure which they fear will be employed to prevent the circulation of material, however inflammatory and distorted, which chimes with their own far-right, national-populist standpoint that has been brought into play in their attacks on the OSA. For example, in the Telegraph, 26 July, Zia Yusuf, the head of Reform UK’s so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ alleged that ‘content critical of government immigration policy – including videos of public protests outside migrant hotels – is quietly being censored from social media’ and that ‘if you’re under 18, you’ll be blocked from seeing “harmful” content – which, in practice, means anything critical of the Government’. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the OSA would know that this is arrant nonsense – indeed classic misinformation – but that did not stop the paper running an article by the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, three days later which simply repeated the same untruths while adding a few more distortions of its own. For example:
“These apparently well-intentioned checks enforce mandatory ID scans, not just for porn sites, but also for mainstream social media where political or any other content is deemed potentially ‘harmful’. This erosion of privacy could make it easier to identify online critics of government policy on migration and much else”.
Both politicians promised to repeal the OSA when Reform came to power. Getting across this message was, one assumes, the main purpose of these ridiculous pieces, an opportunity which the Telegraph, now to all intents and purposes a Reform-supporting paper, was presumably only too happy to provide.
Over-blocking
But amidst all the scaremongering, misinformation and political grandstanding there could just be glimpsed a matter of genuine concern, one as important as that relating to age-verification: namely, over-blocking.
A number of articles in the anti-OSA press did refer in vague terms to claims emanating mainly from Free Speech Union members that users whose age had not been verified had been unable to view online footage of anti-refugee demonstrations. However, as there is nothing in the Act that would require users to verify their age in order to view such footage one can only assume that the block was initiated by an over-zealous algorithm unfamiliar with the actual requirements of the new legislation. Only a cynic would suggest that, as far as X is concerned, Elon Musk, a sworn enemy of online regulation of any kind and of the OSA in particular, could have adjusted the site’s algorithms so as deliberately to cause such over-blocking and thus bring the Act into disrepute.
However, reports from more reliable and less ideologically-driven sources such as BBC Verify do suggest that over-blocking has actually taken place, although not all of it material which the right-wing press would be particularly concerned to defend. For example, Reddit communities such as /r/ukraineconflict and /r/israelexposed have found themselves similarly restricted, presumably because they show images of graphic violence, even though they do so for legitimate advocacy and informational purposes. This takes on added urgency in light of the UK government recently proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group under the Terrorism Act 2000.
What seems almost certain, however, is that online content of a sexual nature risks being restricted, particularly if it does not conform to the heterosexual norm. Anyone even remotely familiar with the topic of online censorship will need no reminding of the number of times that, for example, sex education and sexual health material, let alone references to Middlesex or Scunthorpe, have in the past fallen foul of crude forms of blocking and filtering. Indeed LGBTQ+ author Talia Butt was quoted in Byline Times to the effect that:
Content by LGBT creators is susceptible to being declared ‘adult’ and ‘sexual’ by default, especially in a media environment like the UK’s, where trans people are constantly declared a ‘fetish’, and political actors consider the very presence of trans women in public an affront to be curtailed. LGBT existence is sexualized, declared ‘obscene’, and subject to censorious regulations under the guise of ‘protecting children’ because our existence is deemed unacceptable by heterosexual society, and subject to suppression and erasure.
Julian Petley is honorary and emeritus professor of journalism at Brunel University London, and the co-editor, with John Steel, of the Routledge Companion to Freedom of Expression and Censorship (2023). A regular contributor to Byline Times and the British Journalism Review, he is also a member of the editorial board of the latter.
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