On 1 August, the Online Safety Act (OSA) came into force. The Act has introduced draconian measures under the guise of ‘protecting children’. It makes social media and internet search companies liable for not removing illegal and harmful content from their websites, but this is, quite possibly, its only redeeming quality. As with many recent laws, the Act is deliberately vague, which not only makes implementation and compliance difficult, but also gives regulators and police wide-reaching authority to censor content which could be interpreted to have contravened the Act, in a similar way to how the police utilise the slew of anti-union laws.
The Act also introduces new age-verification measures for internet users to prove that they are adults. What has been glossed over by the mainstream media, however, is that the verification process has been subcontracted to private companies, notably Palantir owned by the reclusive neo-conservative billionaire Peter Thiel, with barely any restriction on how the companies can use the highly sensitive data of anyone who wishes to freely access the Internet.
Grace Lewis, former Labour councillor in Coventry, recently quit the Labour Party and aligned herself with Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’. Her announcement on X (formerly Twitter) has been age restricted and is now only viewable to UK users confirmed over 18 years old. There is only one pretext under which political disaffiliation could be deemed ‘harmful’: censorship. We must also remain wary of how this Act will lead to further censorship of global events, particularly in Gaza, given that the government continues to support the Israeli state’s genocide of the Palestinians.
Theo Hercules, Worcester
