“Won’t somebody please think of the children?!”
BRITISH PATRIOT’S SUBSTACK
Politicians want to be popular. In the past they would seek to achieve this by governing the country effectively, giving us a healthy economy with rising living standards, a low crime rate, an increasing quality of life and all the other things that ordinary people expect from their government to make them happy. But nowadays politicians cannot deliver any of these things. They cannot control crime or immigration. The economy is flatlining. Living standards are falling.
So if they can’t control the big things, politicians increasingly resort to trying to control the little things, and if they can’t show that they are able administrators of the country, then they will resort to trying to play on your emotions. Thus politicians today increasingly engage in emotional blackmail, claiming to be morally virtuous and devoted to protecting you and your loved ones, especially your children.
After all, who doesn’t want to protect children? How evil must you be to object to measures that keep children safe from harm and abuse? But the desire to protect children, and fear of being seen as someone who puts them in danger, is also the weapon used by oppressors who deceitfully pray-in-aid child safety when in reality they want to control you and remove your freedom. This is why the Simpsons meme “Won’t somebody please think of the children” is so effective at highlighting the manipulative dishonesty of controlling and abusive people who hide behind their fake concern for children.
Politicians want to be in control. They don’t trust you. Why, you might have the impertinence to not vote for them! You might even be one of those far-right extremists that thinks that the British government should, maybe, prioritise looking after the interests of the British people! No, this sort of ‘wrong-think’ needs to be stamped out. And the only way to do that is to crush all freedom of expression on the internet. Just like those wonderful Chinese, Iranians and North Koreans have done.
And thus was the Online Safety Act 2023 born. This was created, never forget, by the Tories: originally conceived by the emotionally incontinent feminist and religious fanatic Theresa May, then put before parliament as a Bill by Boris Johnson, the man who, despite pretending to be a libertarian, was actually the enemy of freedom (remember the lockdowns?), and finally passed into law by Sunak. You can never hate the deceitful Tory scum enough! Labour want to control you because they are socialists who think they are morally superior to you (you are probably racist, sexist, nationalist and who knows what else!) and you need a Stasi state to keep you decent, while Tories want to control you because they are patricians who think they are intellectually and emotionally superior to you, and you are just a child that needs a nanny state to tell you what to do.
But it is only now that the Act has come into force. And the result is that we are now all subject to more censorship and internet oppression than exists in any other democratic country in the world. There is no freedom of expression on the internet any more – either to say what you want or to see what others have said. We are now living in a dystopian nightmare where even music websites like Spotify are restricted, and valuable discussion forums that help families going through difficult times, like Dads With Kids, are forced to close down because the Act’s compliance costs are just too onerous and costly for small organisations.
To give you an idea of how far-reaching the consequences are, you now need to verify your identity to access the Reddit forum on cider, and we have even lost – and no, this is not a joke – The Hamster Forum: “Home Of All Things Hamstery”! The owner of the website explained: “I would probably need a lawyer and team of experts to be able to fully comply with everything” and that he was quoted £2,400 a year to use an external age-verification service in compliance with the Act. So the forum has closed. Now if you are not a lover of cute little hamsters you may not think this is particularly important, but it is a straw in the wind, an indication of how restrictive and burdensome the new rules are. And that is not funny.
The government, however, is intransigent and will not back down. Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, has said “verifying your age keeps a child safe” and has accused Nigel Farage – who has said he will repeal this appalling legislation if Reform win the next election – of being ‘on the side’ of paedophiles like Jimmy Savile! Peter Kyle is, of course lying. Adults having to prove their age when they visit a perfectly legal website does NOT keep children safe. Age verification will not present an obstacle to paedophiles, nor will it protect children. Oh, and by the way, if anyone is ‘on the side’ of Jimmy Savile then surely that’s Keir Starmer, who was Director of Public Prosecutions when the Crown Prosecution Service decided NOT to bring charges against Savile!
The Online Safety Act has, in fact, got absolutely nothing to do with protecting children from paedophiles. This was not what it was designed for and was never its intention. So let’s get that clear from the start. Child porn was of course already illegal and therefore on secret and unregulated websites and the Act does not prevent paedophiles from trying to contact and groom children. Talking about Jimmy Savile was a complete distraction and misdirection by the lying piece of shit Peter Kyle, who was trying to deceive the public and use emotional and moral blackmail to browbeat people into complying with their own oppression.
The government says that “The Act requires all companies to take robust action against illegal content and activity.” Yes, this is true, but it is a smokescreen. You do not need a new law to tackle things that are already illegal, as these are dealt with in the existing legislation that makes them illegal in the first place! If that legislation is not strong enough it is a simple matter to amend the existing law – you do not need a new law.
The main focus of the Act is on material that is completely legal, but which the government says might be harmful to some children – and even adults! One of the inspirations for this new law was the tragic suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell. This poor girl was extremely depressed and spent most of her time online viewing thousands of pages of material and images concerning suicide and self-harm on Instagram and Pinterest. She also had a Twitter (as it was then known) account where she wrote about her feelings of being “unwanted” and “irrelevant” and said that her mind was “full of suicidal thoughts”. She even wrote “everyone is better off without me”. This is just so, so sad. No child should ever feel this way.
So of course I can understand that the government felt it should ‘do something‘. But just because the Online Safety Act is ‘something‘ this doesn’t mean that this is what should be done! The Act will not help future Mollys. One of the stated aims of the Act is to reduce the amount of material on the internet that children will see “that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for either: self-harm, eating disorders or suicide”. The BBC report that “Peter Kyle said key to the rules was tackling the algorithms which decide what children get shown online. “The vast majority of kids do not go searching for this material, it just lands in their feeds,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live.”
This just shows how unbelievably stupid Peter Kyle and the rest of Tory and Labour ministers are! YES – children (and adults) DO ‘go searching for this material’! That’s precisely how algorithms work: by offering you more of what you have shown you are interested in! Has material on suicide ever ‘just landed’ in YOUR feed? It hasn’t in mine. Ever. Molly did go looking for this material, and that’s why it was promoted to her. So yes, by all means get internet companies to change their algorithms if you want, but it won’t make any real difference, because those attracted to this material will just go looking for more of it anyway.
And the same applies to (normal, legal) porn. Ofcom claim that 8% of children under 15 visited an online pornography site or app over a month-long period. In other words, they went searching for it. And enforcing age-verification won’t stop this, as they will simply use a VPN. Besides, this is perfectly normal and a rite of passage for teenage boys – like passing round adult magazines at school in the old days. It’s part of growing up and we shouldn’t become hysterical Victorian prudes.
As for ‘violent online content’ Ofcom say: “Sharing videos of local school and street fights has also become normalised for many of the children. For some, this is because of a desire to build online status among their peers and followers.” So banning the sharing of these videos because they are “violent” will simply prevent children from seeing and being aware of what is happening in their area, and thus make them more vulnerable to attack because they won’t be aware of the danger!
The internet is NOT the problem. And very few websites actually promote this self-harming behaviour. Most are there to provide help for people feeling this way. One of the main Twitter accounts that Molly followed actually promoted a helpline for those who are suicidal – it did not encourage suicide at all. But that is irrelevant if one feels this way. And truth is irrelevant to governments when what they really want is to censor things they don’t approve of.
The internet is actually part of the solution. Child suicide is heartbreakingly sad, but the answer isn’t to treat adults as children, or indeed treat all children the same way. Happily, the vast majority of children are not suicidal, and are therefore not at risk. So the answer is to focus on those children who are at risk. And the best – indeed, the only – people to do this are the children’s parents. Now I accept that even good parents might not realise their child is depressed. Molly’s didn’t. But they would have realised if they had seen what she was looking at and what she was writing online! So there is the answer: make it easier for parents to monitor their children’s online activities.
All children’s phones and computers are bought for them by their parents, so, when buying these, it should be possible to require that they come with software that allows them to be monitored by another, specified, phone or computer. Parents need to take responsibility and, to coin a phrase, take back control! Children are children, not short adults, and they need care and guidance, love and instruction. They cannot and should not just be allowed to do what they want without their parents knowing what they are doing, or when or with whom they are doing it! Parents should not offload their responsibilities on others and ask the government or internet companies to do their work for them.
Sadly, the government are only too happy to usurp the role of parents, because this allows them to treat us all as children, and control us all. That’s why the Online Safety Act extends to so much more than preventing children seeing material related to suicide and self-harm.
So the Act forces companies to take action on what the government decides is ‘misinformation‘ or ‘disinformation‘, or what the government considers “hate content including where such content is racist, antisemitic, homophobic, or misogynist”. The Act justifies this by declaring that internet companies have a “duty of care” and must therefore “protect” users from harm, where “harm” includes psychological harm. But this is absurd, because what might cause psychological harm to one person will have absolutely no effect on someone else. But if internet companies fail to comply they can be fined up to £18 million or 10% of their worldwide revenue, whichever is greater, and criminal action can be taken against senior managers.
These penalties are so severe that they have, and will, and are designed to, provoke a risk-averse response, resulting in anything and everything that might not meet the rules being restricted or outright banned. So X has now restricted access to footage of people being arrested in Leeds while protesting against asylum seekers’ hotels, and videos of a speech made in Parliament by Katie Lam MP detailing the horrors of the rape gangs have also been blocked. Just think about that: instead of tackling child abuse the government now bans the reporting of child abuse. The result of this is to protect child abusers, whose actions we will not now know about. Hey, Peter Kyle, who’s the paedophiles’ friend now, eh?
The government says that “Ofcom is now the regulator of online safety”, but that’s a lie. It’s the government that now has the power to decide what you can say or see. The Secretary of State can set Ofcom’s strategic priorities and direct them to modify any code of practice, “for reasons of public policy”. The government can also issue guidance to Ofcom about how to exercise its duties, and require Ofcom to issue public statements that oblige a platform to take action in response to public health, public safety, or national security. Basically, the government has complete control over what Ofcom does, and Ofcom has complete control over what internet companies are allowed to do. Are you beginning to see the problem?
Well, the bad news is that things are going to get worse. Oh yes. Much worse. As reported in The Critic: “The Prime Minister himself has said he is considering strengthening the Online Safety Act in the wake of the 2024 summer demonstrations, and it is reported that the police have established new units to monitor online discussion which could provoke civil unrest. The ratchet is only turning in one direction, that of far greater monitoring of speech online, and the use of age-verification laws as a form of digital ID card by stealth”.
And what nobody is reporting is that on 25th February this year Starmer introduced the Crime and Policing Bill 2025 to the House of Commons; it’s currently going through the House of Lords and is well on its way to receiving Royal Assent. The government say that the Bill aims to“crack down on crime and antisocial behaviour”, and one of the ways the Bill will achieve this is through the introduction of ‘Respect Orders’. If you haven’t heard of these yet then just you wait – you will!
Although the government claim that these Respect Orders are needed to keep the streets safe, there is no restriction in how or why they are used. As reported in Spiked, “These orders are potentially so draconian and wide-ranging that they could well end up being used for very different purposes – including silencing anyone who says anything online that the authorities disapprove of. Under the bill, police, local authorities and a number of other bodies will be empowered to ask courts for ‘respect orders’ that can either prohibit someone from doing or require them to do ‘anything described in the order’. You read that right – anything. The only condition that needs to be satisfied is that the court thinks, on a balance of probabilities, that the person ‘has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person’.”
So what if the police, or your local council, dislike something you posted online? Maybe you complained about illegal immigrants who had assaulted a child, or criticised the council over their bin collections. All they have to do is persuade a judge that this caused someone “distress”. And what could happen then? You could then be legally forced to delete your post, avoid discussing the topic or the person in future, stay off social media completely, or even hand over your phone and computer.
We saw after the atrocious triple child murder in Southport by the vile second-generation immigrant Axel Rudakubana how the government tried to crack down on free speech. Well the new Crime and Policing Bill will make such suppression and oppression of the British people so much easier, as the bar for conviction will be so much lower. Indeed, you won’t be able to defend yourself at all, since there won’t even be a need to warn you before the trial. Yes, the court can issue an interim order without notice, and breaching it carries an unlimited fine or two years in prison. This new law will be the perfect tool for the state to censor speech.
In 1983 the band The Police sang: “I’ll be watching you, every single day, and every word you say.” In 2025 it’s the real police who will be saying this. Get a VPN. Only use anonymous accounts. Protect yourself. You are now living in a communist dictatorship. The government, the police and the courts are your enemies. You have been warned!
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This article (INTERNET CENSORSHIP AND CONTROL: FROM BAD TO WORSE) was created and published by British Patriot’s Substack and is republished here under “Fair Use”
See Related Article Below
Censorship, NOT Safety: Revealing the Truth Behind UK Online Agenda
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In the UK, the Online Safety Act (OSA) was sold to the public as a way to shield vulnerable people from harmful content, and protect children from internet predators. It sounded like it would ensure a safer, more accountable online experience. The true motivation for its implementation is revealing itself, and is being met by waves of backlash – not only by privacy campaigners, but from regular internet users, tech professionals, artists, and whole sections of parliament. Hundreds of thousands have signed petitions, and legal challenges are underway.
Increasingly, then, the question is being asked: was this ever really about safety?
What This UK Law Actually Does
The OSA gives Ofcom (the UK’s communications regulator) unprecedented power over the country’s digital content. It now mandates that platforms proactively monitor, censor and remove any content it deems “harmful”, even if there’s nothing illegal about it. This includes, by increasingly blurry definitions, hate speech, misinformation and bullying – and can even introduce jailtime for companies failing to comply with them.
Among the most vocal opponents are the encrypted messaging apps, Whatsapp and Signal. The OSA means government regulators can compel these services to install backdoor services to scan the content of messages, which fundamentally undermines the core principle of their end-to-end encryption offerings. Any companies found refusing to comply may now be fined, blocked, or even criminalised. In short: the privacy we were promised is now being mandated against.
This Act also criminalises “unauthorised access” to online content, which critics say could affect basic functions like right-clicking certain things, viewing source code, or accessing archived information.
It’s legislation with sweeping intent, but vague definitions.
The Great Push Back
Over 300,000 people have already signed petitions demanding urgent reform, or total repeal, of the law. Tech experts have confirmed that it can potentially “break” the internet by requiring companies to do things that are either privacy-destructive, or technically impossible. Reform UK has vowed to repeal the Act totally if elected. Conservative MPs are seemingly split, with a growing number now expressing unease over the law’s scope and implementation.
Writers, artists, and musicians have criticised how the Act suppresses political or controversial content under the vague “harm” banner. Journalists say it’s threatening investigative reporting, academics say it will limit digital research and chill free speech, and cybersecurity professionals warn that the law undermines basic encryption, putting users at risk.
This has grown from being a fringe campaign to a nationwide, cross-ideology backlash.
When “Safety” Becomes Control
Public safety was the official justification for the Act, but critics argue that it’s another measure aimed to monitor and control what the public get up to.
This is particularly concerning when considering Ofcom’s granted power of encrypted platforms. It’s one thing for governments to demand the right to scan private messages in the name of “safety” – and it’s another to criminalise its refusal.
As The Critic said: the law is treating adults like disobedient children, and The Spectator compared the Act to internet regulation in authoritarian regimes. There’s a clear growing concern that the OSA is not a public safety measure at all, but is rather a tool to discipline the space and its users – an early step towards controlling what can be said, how, and by whom.
Why Now?
The UK is in a period of high public distrust of its government. There’s economic strain, mass migration, and generally volatile political sentiment. Online platforms are arenas in which dissent still finds traction, with articles being published, memes shared, and videos posted, expressing dissatisfaction with current events.
Public sentiment is poor in the country, and censoring how and where people can express these feelings – and even hiding the protests or demonstrations that showcase how the public is feeling – is not having the intended effect. It’s making people more outraged, not less.
The OSA, therefore, feels like a way of managing dissent under the guise of protection. Perhaps trying to fragment any political opposition to stop it becoming organised, and a way to throttle speech while telling people it’s for their own good.
Censoring the Edges
Under the Act, content deemed vaguely “harmful” – even if not illegal – is still subject to penalty. This can include political criticism, satire, and controversial opinions. Content moderation algorithms will now need to make moral judgements about what qualifies as emotionally or mentally damaging. These are systems that are already fallible. Will there be any oversight or appeal to these digital decisions?
For critics, this is where the law becomes dangerous. There is a blurry line between harm and offence, giving regulators the ability to redefine these terms as they see fit, with near-total discretion to remove or suppress content that deviates from their imagined centre. Online reactions display the thoughts of many:
“And there it is, the real reason for the OSA — the prevention of wrongthink. Can’t have the plebs thinking outside the status quo”
“Funny how gambling adverts on YouTube seem to be exempt.”
With the following also including the recent decision to lower the voting age in the UK:
“16-year-olds will be allowed to vote, but won’t be able to learn what is happening in their own country?”
“This blocks 16 year olds from seeing news footage from warzones. So now we’re in the place where they can vote for a party that wants to go to war but not view the consequences of that.”
Thoughts like these are being echoed nationwide. They are not put forward by fringe conspiracy theorists, but ordinary people trying to reconcile the contradiction between an open society and a closely controlled information architecture.
Public Mood & Rise of Reform UK
Reform UK, under the leadership of Zia Yusuf, has made repealing the Act a central plank of its campaign. Yusuf recently told supporters that the Act is a “borderline dystopian overreach” and a betrayal of democratic principle. His criticism taps into a broader frustration: that the people who supposedly serve the public no longer trust them to think, speak, or decide for themselves.
What makes the current backlash unique is how unifying it is. For once, tech libertarians, artists, and populists are on the same side. They all see the same threat: that this isn’t about safety at all. It’s about obedience.
Changing the Infrastructure of Speech
Laws like this change the way we operate. The internet is altered with friction rather than with force. Platforms pre-emptively remove content in anticipation of fines, journalists pause before publishing, whistleblowers go quiet, and the public learns to think twice before speaking to ensure they don’t get censored.
Final Thought
The Online Safety Act is the start of a new chapter in how speech is governed in the UK. And it’s clearly extremely unpopular with the public. If the goal is safety, then the government seems to have missed. If the goal is control, then it’s well on its way.
Is this about keeping children safe? Or has it far extended its reach to keep everyone in line?
Add your thoughts below.
This article (Censorship, NOT Safety: Revealing the Truth Behind UK Online Agenda) was created and published by The Expose and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author G. Calder
Featured image: Shutterstock
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