The Online Safety Act is plumbing new depths of stupidity

Spectator

4 days ago

As anyone who has endured a pointless argument on the internet probably knows, there's a decidedly useful rule for such situations. It's called Godwin's Law. Coined in 1990 by American lawyer Mike Godwin, in its most well-known version it states that in any sufficiently lengthy online row, the first person to invoke the Nazis – whether as comparison, example, or evidence – instantly loses by virtue of their luridly stupid exaggeration.
Now it seems we have a shiny new British equivalent. Let's call it Jimmy's Law. The principle is similar: anyone who drags infamous paedophile Jimmy Savile into a political argument has already lost. Why? Because they've reached up for the most grotesque, emotive analogy in the rhetorical pantry: an act of political flailing that signals not moral clarity, but a lack of real argument. Put it another way: if you're mentioning Savile, you sound daft, you sound objectionable, and, above all, you sound desperate.
Plenty have broken Jimmy's Law before – not least Boris Johnson, who, as Prime Minister, pitiably tried to smear then–opposition leader Keir Starmer by invoking Savile. But this week saw a new and even more egregious case. Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, claimed that Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was – brace yourself – on Team Jimmy Savile in opposing the contentious Online Safety Act. Kyle's exact words, on Sky News, were: 'Make no mistake about it, if people like Jimmy Savile were alive today, he would be perpetrating his crimes online – and Nigel Farage is saying that he is on their side.'
Yes, it's cringeworthy. Yes, it's hyperbolic and foolish. And yes, it's a naked attempt to distract from the fact that Peter Kyle – a man so well suited to his role as Technology Minister that he appears to have no background in technology, no experience in the technology sector, no career with technology companies, no obvious technological training, and a degree in 'International Development' – has no argument. Because the Online Safety Act, birthed by Conservative MPs supposedly worried about hurty words on social media, is a total disaster: for online discourse, for the UK tech sector, and possibly for the future of free speech itself.
Why? Let us count the ways. The OSA, already pejoratively rebranded by its millions of worldwide critics as the Online Surveillance Act, has begun to smother the internet under a morass of bureaucratic fear and ill-defined obligations, far beyond its limited and worthy aim of 'protecting kids from porn by asking them to prove their age.'
Since the Act came into force (originally in 2023, but with greater effect in recent days), the absurdities have piled up fast. Entire Reddit communities – from harmless subreddits about cider to basic vape advice chatrooms – have gone half-dark, unable to easily implement the age verification systems. Niche forums for LGBT teens, survivors of abuse, and mental health support groups have shrunk away rather than risk falling foul of vague 'harmful content' clauses. A forum about 'fixed gear cycling in London' (yes, really) shut down because it feared it couldn't afford the compliance overhead.
Bloggers now face the threat of the newly empowered Ofcom commissars jackbooting into their homes simply because they allow unmoderated comments. Indie developers are meanwhile withdrawing apps rather than navigate opaque new obligations. Tiny academic discussion boards are self-censoring, worried that robust historical debate might be misread as hate speech, or something 'harmful' – a truly terrifying concept, if you think about it for more than ten seconds (a cognitive task apparently beyond the average MP).
Even porn filters, supposedly the law's core goal, have ensnared art, education, and health sites in overzealous net sweeps. All the while, actual abusers and scammers, who rarely host content on UK servers, will likely carry on largely undisturbed.
The result? Not a safer internet, but a smaller, duller, more paranoid one. A place where freedom shrinks, innovation flees, and everything begins to sound eerily and deadeningly pre-approved, like Russian poetry under Stalin.
It is already noticeable that the OSA is not being used to shut down Pornhub or xHamster for adolescents, but to silence discussion – or even basic news – about those topics most awkward for the world's worst government: Pakistani rape gangs, illegal immigration, protests about asylum hotels, and all that dreadful jazz that soundtracks Britain's decline.
What's more, the OSA threatens to destroy Britain's AI industry – one of the few areas where we might actually be exploiting our post-Brexit freedoms. Just as the EU ties itself in knots with dim, restrictive AI regulations, we are busily ushering in something arguably worse.
Looking through the Act's 200 densely bureaucratic pages for anti-tech landmines is like looking through Proust for long sentences. But already tech insiders have expressed alarm at particular gems. For example, next year the OSA will allow Ofcom to require companies to hand over any information about their algorithms as well as internal documents, data and software source code as part of its 'regulatory functions'.
The result is a legal ambiguity so vast it could engulf an entire industry. Startups will die under the compliance burden. Larger tech and AI firms will shift labs and headquarters abroad. And Britain's AI industry, briefly a potential world leader, will find itself reduced to the digital equivalent of a wine bar shut down for not having a government-approved corkscrew made of chocolate.
How has it come to this? How has Britain ended up with perhaps the worst piece of legislation since King Cnut brought in his Stop the Tides Act of 1023? I can hazard a guess, and it is evidenced by one of the progenitors of the Act: Nadine Dorries. Apparently, when she was Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Dorries once walked into a meeting with Microsoft and bluntly asked when they were 'going to get rid of algorithms'.
This is an Act devised by silly people, passed by silly people, enforced by silly people. And now it is being sold to us by silly and desperate people who know they've screwed up, but nonetheless think they can win a crucial argument about technology by invoking dead, disgraced disc jockeys.
Britain, we are ill-served.