UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety • The Register
opinion Implementation of the U.K.’s Online Safety Act is giving internet users around the globe – including those in U.S. states moving to enact their own age verification laws – real-time proof that such laws impinge on everyone’s rights to speak, read, and view freely.
The new OSA rules require all online services accessible in the UK – social media, search engines, music sites, and adult content providers — to enforce age checks to keep children from seeing “harmful content”. Online services also must change their algorithms and moderation systems to keep such content from young people.
Social media platforms Reddit, Bluesky, Discord, and X all introduced age checks to block children from seeing harmful content; adult websites implemented age assurance checks on their sites asking users to either upload government-issued ID, provide an email address for comparison against use on other sites, or submit personal information to a third-party vendor for age verification. Sites like Spotify are requiring users to submit face scans to third-party digital identity company Yoti to access content labelled 18+.
The scope of so-called “harmful content” is subjective and arbitrary, and often sweeps up content that governments and CEOs of online services might not want online — regardless of whether this is legal content or not. Add to this the law threatening large fines or even jail time for non-compliance, and platforms pre-emptively over-censor content to ensure they won’t be held liable.
And reports from the UK are already showing how age checks are being used to censor content that falls outside the OSA across the internet. This includes footage of police attacking pro-Palestinian protestors being blocked on X, multiple subreddits blocked, including r/IsraelExposed, r/safesexPH and r/stopsmoking, and some smaller websites closing down entirely.
No one — no matter their age, no matter what country they live in — should have to hand over their passport or driver’s license just to access legal information and speak freely. And users in the UK know this: Days after age checks went into effect, VPN apps —”virtual private networks” that protect your internet connection and privacy online — became among the most downloaded apps in Apple’s App Store in the UK.
A similar spike in searches for VPNs occurred in January when Florida joined an ever-growing list of U.S. states implementing age verification laws. But while VPNs may be able to disguise internet activity’s source, they are neither foolproof nor a solution to age verification laws. Ofcom has started discouraging their use, and some Labour Party politicians have even argued for a ban on VPNs — a terrifying effort to excercise authoritarian control on accessing information.
This censorship regime also extends to the physical realm, with the arrogant and inaccurate assumption that every person has an official identification document or their own smartphone. Millions of peopleUK and US lack official ID, and many might share a device with family members or use public devices at libraries or internet cafes. These millions — often lower-income or older people who are already marginalized, and for whom the internet may be a critical lifeline — will be excluded from online speech and will lose access to much of the internet, further restricting access to information and the possibility to engage online.
Some U.S. officials seem to see the writing on the wall. “The UK now requires ID to read about Middle East politics, visit r/stopsmoking and listen to almost any hip hop music online,” US Senator Ron Wyden, D-OR, wrote on X, adding that after the Wikimedia Foundation lost its court challenge to the OSA, “using Wikipedia could be next. Once sites require age verification for the U.K., there’s little stopping them doing the same in the US”
That sentiment is bipartisan. After visiting the UK in late July, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, issued a statement saying the OSA helps “create a serious chilling effect on free expression and threaten the First Amendment rights of American citizens and companies.”
“We absolutely need to protect children and keep harmful, illegal content off these platforms — but when governments or bureaucracies suppress speech in the name of safety or regulation, it sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the core of Western democratic values,” Jordan said.
Yet other state and federal US lawmakers are moving full-speed ahead. Twenty-four states already have passed some sort of age verification censorship law, and more are considering doing so while some bipartisan bills in Congress would do the same.
The UK’s scramble to find an effective age verification method underscores that there isn’t one, and it’s high time for politicians around the world to take that seriously – especially those pondering similar laws in the US Rather than weakening rights for already vulnerable communities online, governments everywhere must acknowledge these shortcomings and explore less invasive approaches – such as comprehensive privacy legislation – to protect all people from online harms, especially as authoritarianism spreads around the globe.
Politicians in the UK, the US, and beyond must consider what’s best, not what’s easiest.
Paige Collings is a Senior Speech and Privacy Activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital civil liberties group based in San Francisco.
