Enforcement of the UK’s controversial Online Safety Act (OSA) keeps delivering political blows. Reports continue to emerge of legitimate political content and speech being blocked. Meanwhile, new releases of content that could potentially be considered “inappropriate” for minors under OSA is sparking speculation about whether users will be required to upload passports or submit facial scans just to access it.
By putting controversial, sensitive and newsworthy topics behind privacy-endangering barriers, journalists and activists are rightly warning that creators and publishers will need to sanitize and curtail their speech to ensure it’s accessible.
Within days of the OSA’s enforcement, support forums like r/periods and r/stopsmoking needed to block non-verified users, meaning that potentially vulnerable people seeking health advice are now forced to upload their IDs just to participate in basic online communities. If that ID verification system is ever hacked, as many already have been, the leaking of such sensitive information about users discussing important topics would utterly violate their privacy.
Additionally, the Act includes heavy-handed regulation of direct messaging which could be used to force messaging providers to stop providing end-to-end encryption so they can fulfill the government’s mandate and surveil users’ messages to identify possible harm in private communications. The rules are not currently being enforced, but if they are, they could fully end any expectation of privacy consumers might have when messaging over services like WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage.
This sweeping attack on online speech is more characteristic of authoritarian regimes like Iran or Russia than Britain, the country that gave rise to free speech philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, who argued fiercely against censorship and in favor of liberty as a safeguard against tyranny.
Born from public anxiety about kids’ media consumption, the Online Safety Act was sold as a shield from online harm. Proponents frequently compare online speech to tobacco or alcohol—but that comparison reveals the core problem with laws like the OSA: speech is not a harmful substance. According to the World Health Organization, there is no safe level of tobacco consumption. Tobacco and alcohol contribute directly to cancer and heart disease, the leading causes of death globally.
To compare online speech with tobacco or alcohol is to suggest free expression and open debate are societal poisons, rather than fundamental pillars of liberal democracies and free societies.
Because the Act is premised on speech being inherently harmful, intermediaries like social media sites are incentivized through massive fines and even jail time to over-police, chilling speech to stay on the right side of the law. Put simply, governments treating speech like a carcinogen will make platforms do the same, resulting in widespread self-censorship and suppression of lawful speech.
So how can we address genuine threats to minors online?
For one, we need to bolster the police. Law enforcement in the U.S. is routinely under-resourced and undertrained to pursue online predators. Arrest and conviction rates are shockingly low, even as predators lurk on the open web. No amount of age gates or content labels will protect kids if predators are allowed to escape the law.
Free speech is not a toxin—it’s a right.
When the UK’s Online Safety Act treats speech as inherently dangerous, it legitimizes censorship under the guise of safety. That approach offers no real protection to minors; it empowers a surveillance-driven, bureaucratic system that ultimately stifles expression.
That’s why the Online Safety Act, alongside America’s own KOSA and KOSMA proposals which haven’t succeeded yet in Congress, are so deeply misguided. They treat speech and debate as key issues the government needs to address online, rather than what the government is better equipped to deal with in almost every context: identifying specific, harmful behavior like predation and using law enforcement to go after the perpetrators.
We should focus on actual solutions: proper law enforcement resources to prosecute predators and robust digital education for parents and families.
NetChoice believes policies like Congress’ KOSA and KOSMA, and the UK’s OSA, not only fail to protect children but undermine civil liberties and degrade the integrity of public discourse. It’s time to reject these authoritarian fixes and support policies that empower families and law enforcement to keep our kids safe online.