US companies say the UK’s Online Safety Act forces platforms to police lawful speech under the guise of protecting users.
CINDY HARPER
Major American companies and commentators, including Google and Substack CEO Chris Best, have condemned the United Kingdom’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), describing it as a measure that risks censoring lawful speech while failing to make the internet safer for children.
They argue that the law normalizes digital surveillance, restricts open debate, and complicates how global platforms operate in the UK.
Their objections surfaced through The Telegraph, which published essays from Best and from Heritage Foundation researchers John Peluso and Miles Pollard, alongside new reporting on Google’s formal response to an Ofcom consultation.
That consultation, focused on how tech firms should prevent “potentially illegal” material from spreading online, closed in October, with Ofcom releasing the submissions in December.
Google’s filing accused the regulator of promoting rules that would “undermine users’ rights to freedom of expression” by encouraging pre-emptive content suppression.
Ofcom rejected this view, insisting that “nothing in our proposals would require sites and apps to take down legal content.” Yet Google was hardly alone in raising alarms: other American companies and trade groups submitted responses voicing comparable fears about the Act’s scope and implications.
Chris Best wrote that his company initially set out to comply with the new law but quickly discovered it to be far more intrusive than expected. “What I’ve learned is that, in practice, it pushes toward something much darker: a system of mass political censorship unlike anywhere else in the western world,” he said.
Best describes how the OSA effectively forces platforms to classify and filter speech on a constant basis, anticipating what regulators might later deem harmful.
Compliance, he explained, requires “armies of human moderators or AI” to scan journalism, commentary, and even satire for potential risk.
The process, he continued, doesn’t simply remove content but “gates it” behind identity checks or age-verification hurdles that often involve facial scans or ID uploads.
“These measures don’t technically block the content,” Best said, “but they gate it behind steps that prove a hassle at best, and an invasion of privacy at worst.” He warned that this structure discourages readers, reduces visibility for writers, and weakens open cultural exchange.
Best, who emphasized Substack’s commitment to press freedom, said the OSA misdiagnoses the problem of online harm by targeting speech rather than prosecuting actual abuse or criminal behavior.
“This is how you end up with ‘papers, please’ for the internet,” he wrote, warning that the law could become a model replicated by other governments.
In its submission, Google contended that Ofcom’s interpretation of the OSA would “stifle free speech” by imposing vague obligations on platforms to police “potentially illegal” posts.
It cautioned that these measures would “necessarily result in legal content being made less likely to be encountered by users,” extending the law’s reach beyond what lawmakers intended when it passed in 2023.
Ofcom, meanwhile, pointed to incidents of online unrest such as posts that spread following the Southport killings and subsequent riots and protests to justify its approach.
The regulator argued that recommender systems should withhold questionable material until moderators review it, to prevent harmful content from going viral during crises.
Yet this example has since become contentious. Following those events, authorities made several arrests, including that of Lucy Connolly, under laws critics say were applied in an excessively heavy-handed way leading to international condemnation.
The use of the Southport unrest to defend tighter speech controls has therefore raised further questions about how the government interprets and enforces the boundaries of “illegal” online communication.
The regulator argued that recommender systems should temporarily withhold questionable material until moderators review it, to prevent viral dissemination of possible hate or violence.
The OSA’s enforcement has created new friction between the UK and the US. Negotiations over a £31 billion technology partnership were recently frozen after Washington voiced concern about Britain’s direction on online regulation.
US Vice President JD Vance has accused the UK of following a “dark path” on free speech, while Elon Musk’s X platform declared that “free speech will suffer” under the new rules.
An Ofcom spokesperson reiterated that its goal is to protect both safety and liberty online, stating: “There is nothing in our proposals that would require sites and apps to take down legal content. The Online Safety Act requires platforms to have particular regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression.”
However, this line of defense sidesteps the real issue. While Ofcom insists that legal material will not be removed outright, the regulator’s approach effectively requires platforms to limit how widely such content can spread.
By obliging companies to restrict “potentially illegal” posts before any clear determination of their status, the policy would lead to broad suppression of lawful speech.
The UK’s legal landscape already (and unfortunately) criminalizes categories of expression that would fall under constitutional protection in the United States.
As a result, any automated or large-scale moderation system built to comply with the OSA may inevitably block lawful content in order to ensure that no illegal material slips through.
The distinction between taking content down and throttling its visibility is, in reality, far narrower than the regulator is pretending.
This article (Google and Substack Warn Britain Is Building a Censorship Machine) was created and published by Reclaim the Net and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Cindy Harper
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