Political censors have cynically hijacked vital child protections

Telegraph

4 days ago

Britons woke up last week to discover that their firehose of digital smut had been strangled, albeit temporarily for consenting adults. Undeniably, the introduction of age verification regulations does mark a huge change in our relationship with the internet, hitherto a pornographic free-for-all.
It may feel like a shock to find a third party inserting itself between you and a website, apparently demanding to know who you are, but it shouldn't be a surprise: it's eight years since the UK Government published its online harms green paper under Theresa May, and The Telegraph launched its Duty of Care campaign the following year.
After much wrangling, the result was the 2023 Online Safety Act. In March, the first part of went into effect, placing new obligations on platforms to remove content that is legal, but harmful to children: suicide advice, eating disorders or dangerous stunt challenges.
The second phase went into force last week, requiring age checks for pornography sites.
'Companies have effectively been treating all users as if they're adults, leaving children potentially exposed to porn and other types of harmful content,' wrote Melanie Dawes, Ofcom's chief executive, in January.
The UK is not an outlier in its desire to keep children safe, either. Texas and three other US states require age verification for adult material, and so will Australia.
But critics of the law have warned of consequences for free expression from the start, and over-zealous interpretations quickly became apparent.
X, previously Twitter, has already put material behind the age gate, with Benjamin Jones, director of case management at the Free Speech Union – of which I am a member – identifying a number of posts which were worryingly censored for unverified users.
Some supported calls for single-sex spaces for women. One by Wuhan lab researcher Billy Bostickson (a pseudonym) fell foul too; it was part of a thread on the use of bamboo RNA in vaccines.
Several posts in a thread discussing Richard the Lionheart were gated, which merely contained a reference to the crusades.
Most troublingly, a post linking to a live stream of police arrests at a demonstration at a migrant hotel in Leeds was also taken down. All these bans appear to have been the work of an over-zealous algorithm.
Some saw this coming. Baroness Claire Fox has written of her dismay at realising how outnumbered speech advocates were when she was in a room as the only free speech advocate, alongside dozens of groups all requesting some clause or addition.
'Only two of us [peers] consistently opposed the bill – myself and Lord Daniel Moylan. I was shocked that so many from the free speech camp of peers were silent,' Fox tells me.
'It became a Christmas tree bill with lots of other things put in it,' said Kemi Badenoch as she campaigned for the Conservative leadership last year. She also predicted 'it will go after people who aren't doing anything wrong'.
That hasn't quite happened yet, but long overdue moves to enforce accountability on giant, transnational platforms, and better protect children unfortunately coincided with a renewed desire to control political speech.
The good state must take an active role in removing inflammatory speech, the United Nations declared in its 2021 paper Our Common Agenda. It re-emphasised the point last year.
William Perrin, one of the architects of Ofcom's approach to regulating online platforms, who was not involved in drafting the legislation, recently posted a paper for the think tank Demos called Epistemic Security 2029: Protecting the UK's information supply chains and strengthening discourse for the next political era. It explicitly calls for the policing of social media platforms.
One gets the sense that 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.
'We have an establishment that is innately hostile to Free Speech,' Jones of the Free Speech Union tells me.
There is very much wrong with this. Against a backdrop of widespread concern about street crime, shoplifting and rampant fraud, the energy devoted by police to what we say online is confounding, from enthusiasm for the category of 'non-crime hate incidents' to the creation of a special monitoring unit.
The implicit idea seems to be that if we stop talking about something the underlying problem will go away. With Britain a tinderbox, and a long summer ahead, this seems a brave moment to test the proposition. It is understandable why age verification and clumsy algorithms sow suspicion of the system itself.
In reality, however, online anonymity was always illusory.
Your broadband operator has always known who you are and which sites you visit. So has the shady VPN provider. Google collected your pornography browsing history even while you were browsing in 'incognito' mode, for which it was sued, agreeing later to delete billions of records in a settlement.
What our alarm reflects is a wholesale loss of trust in the Government.
Ofcom points to polling showing the Online Safety Act is widely supported. It is highly regrettable that a bien-pensant blob has cynically hijacked child protection law to ensure it has a media landscape more in keeping with its views.
But there's plenty of blame to go around.
One lesson of the Online Safety Act is that free-speech advocates also needed a plausible child protection plan. They never came up with one – and were duly steamrollered.
The consequences for Britain may be profound.