Britain calls it safety. It is censorship
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/11/6/britain-calls-it-safety-it-is-censorship
The Online Safety Act, sold as child protection, now hides Gaza’s suffering, silences dissent and exports censorship to the world.
The United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act was meant to keep children safe. Instead, it is keeping the public uninformed. Within days of the law taking effect in late July 2025, X (formerly Twitter) started hiding videos of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza from UK timelines behind content warnings and age barriers. A law sold as safeguarding has become one of the most effective censorship tools Britain has ever built. What is unfolding is no accident. It is the result of legislation that weaponises child-protection rhetoric to normalise censorship, identity verification and online surveillance.
The roots of Britain’s online censorship crisis go back almost a decade, to MindGeek, now rebranded as Aylo, the scandal-ridden company behind Pornhub. This tax-dodging, exploitative porn empire worked closely with the UK government to develop an age-verification system called AgeID, a plan that would have effectively handed Aylo a monopoly over legal adult content by making smaller competitors pay or perish. Public backlash killed AgeID in 2019, but the idea survived. Once one democracy entertained the notion that access to online content should be gated by identity checks, the precedent was set. The Digital Economy Act 2017 laid the groundwork, and the Online Safety Act 2023 made it law. Today, several European Union states, including France and Germany, are exploring similar legislation, each cloaked in the same rhetoric of “protecting children”. This is not conspiracy; it is the natural convergence of corporate capture and state control, wrapped in the moral language of child safety.
The Online Safety Act empowers Ofcom to police almost every corner of the internet, from social media and search engines to adult content platforms, under threat of fines of up to 18 million pounds ($24m) or 10 percent of global revenue. Platforms can be designated as “Category 1” services, triggering the harshest rules, including mandatory age verification, identity checks for contributors and the removal of vaguely defined “harmful” material. Wikipedia now faces this exact threat. In August 2025, the High Court dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation’s challenge to the categorisation rules, clearing the way for Ofcom to treat it as a high-risk platform. The foundation has warned that compliance would force it to censor vital information and endanger volunteer editors by linking their real identities to their writing. If it refuses, the UK could, in theory, be legally empowered to block access altogether, a breathtaking example of how “child protection” becomes a tool for information control. Already, Ofcom has opened multiple investigations into major porn sites and social networks over alleged non-compliance. The law’s chilling effect is no longer hypothetical; it is operational.
Age-verification systems are fundamentally incompatible with privacy and security, in fact, any id-verification system should immediately raise suspicion. The July 25 breach of the Tea dating app, with thousands of photos and over 13,000 sensitive ID documents leaked and circulated on 4chan, or the even more recent Discord data breach exposing over 70 thousand government ID documents after a third-part service was hacked, proved the point.
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Strip away the child-protection rhetoric, and the Online Safety Act’s true function becomes clear: it builds the infrastructure for mass content control and population surveillance. Once these systems exist, expanding them is easy. We have seen this logic before. Anti-terror laws morphed into instruments for policing dissent; now “child safety” provides cover for the same authoritarian creep. The EU is already entertaining proposals that would mandate chat-scanning and weaken encryption, promising such measures will be used only against abusers, until, inevitably, they are not. The immediate consequences in the UK – restricted Gaza footage, threatened access to Wikipedia, censored protest videos- are not glitches. They are previews of a digital order built on control. What is at stake is not just privacy but democracy itself, the right to speak, to know and to dissent without being verified first.
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Original article at https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/11/6/britain-calls-it-safety-it-is-censorship
