When Nadine Dorries first introduced the Online Safety Act (OSA) in 2021, she said it would be ‘watertight’. Now, she is calling it a ‘dog’s dinner’. The former cultural secretary said at the start of this week that her change of heart came after she saw the OSA ‘limit freedom of speech’ and ‘fail to fully protect children online’.
‘Victims of the OSA’s bureaucratic burden include ‘Dads With Kids’, a forum geared at offering community support, tips and resources to single fathers, and ‘London Fixed Gear and Single Speed’, a forum for cycling enthusiasts.’
You can see her point if you look at the content the OSA has semi-censored through age-gating. Age-gating is where platforms requires users to prove their age before viewing certain content. It is enforced by the OSA, which threatens platforms with huge fines, up to £18 million or 10 per cent of their annual revenue (whatever is higher) if they fail to hide harmful content from children. This forces all of the UK’s 68 million internet users to upload digital ID scans or biometric face checks just to access legal, even non-explicit content.
Reddit has age-gated posts ranging from complaints about littering to images of album covers like Rage Against The Machine (1992). X has also age-gated an image of Francis de Goya’s famous painting ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’, which has been on public display for 150 years.
On Reddit, discussions about safeguarding family members suffering from domestic abuse were age-gated, as was, ironically, a thread discussing how to make the internet safer for children. On the board r/movies a clip from the film Children of Men was age-gated for under-18s even though the film is rated 15 by the BBFC, and posters of the horror film Clayface were blocked despite plans to display them in public. Meanwhile on r/mildlyinfuriating, a series of puns about milk, an image of a housemate’s dirty dishes and a picture of a paper cut have all been deemed ‘harmful’ enough to be blocked for users unable –or unwilling– to submit to digital ID checks.
The few remaining proponents of the OSA argue that ‘age-gating’ is not censorship, and that, as Kemi Badenoch so eloquently put it, ‘freedom is not for children’. But digital ID uploads and biometric face scan technology comes with huge cybersecurity risks that remove freedom for adults as well. ID and biometric information used for age-verification frequently gets leaked, hacked and sold, and these threats are particularly chilling for journalists, campaigners and even victims of domestic abuse who rely on online anonymity for safety and freedom of expression.
Big Brother Watch’s new evidence that the OSA also censors political content is especially concerning. On X, BBC footage of an unmanned Ukrainian drone being destroyed was put behind an age gate, as was a BBC video of a man in Gaza looking for bodies of loved ones after an Israeli strike, despite the BBC’s own confirmation that neither clip contained graphic imagery. Posts about UK politics, including a link to an article about Zack Polanski complaining about the prevalence of ‘bookies and vape shops’ in Levenshulme and a Reform video about migration policywere blocked on Reddit and TikTok respectively.
OSA goes beyond just blocking content. Section 179 creates the offence of “sending false information with the intent of causing ‘non-trivial psychological harm”. This gives police the terrifying power to determine what constitutes ‘non-trivial psychological harm’ and even which information is true or ‘false’. In January 2026, animal rights activist Anneka Svenska posted a video sharing information from a whistleblower about a beagle breeding facility in Cambridgeshire. In July, the police accused her of committing a Section 179 offence, even though her statement was correct, and asked her to complete an ‘online thinking skills’ course or face investigation. Though Svenska’s case was thrown out as soon as a lawyer got involved, this remains a chilling example of how the OSA has already been used to repress independent journalism and campaign activity.
Our research, published in a new Big Brother Watch Report, shows only a handful of platforms have capacity to deal with the 100+ pages of paperwork associated with the OSA. Before the Act’s implementation, Dee Kitchen, a London-based engineer, ran Microcosm, a platform on which other users could host their own online communities. Unable to single-handedly run risk assessments and implement child safety measures to avoid OSA fines, Kitchen was forced to shut Microcosm down in 2023. Out of its 300 original communities, only 2 or 3 survived. Victims of the OSA’s bureaucratic burden include ‘Dads With Kids’, a forum geared at offering community support, tips and resources to single fathers, and ‘London Fixed Gear and Single Speed’, a forum for cycling enthusiasts. A law designed to tackle the dominance of Big Tech has inadvertently led to the consolidation of its power.
While examples of the failures of the OSA are plenty, Ofcom has refused to show the Children’s Commissioner documentation that it’s working, and now the Government is using the language of child safety to smuggle spyware onto our phones. Lisa Nandy announced on Wednesday that there will be primary legislation to force tech companies to install ‘nudity detection software’, which means every image on every mobile device will be scanned. This is also being used to age-gate all mobile devices, meaning adults will need to prove their age before using a tablet or a phone.
The OSA sits in a web of poorly drafted speech laws. Over the last 5 years, 62,199 people have been arrested for ‘communications offences’, with rates varying wildly between forces, and last year, the police interviewed a 14-year-old for watching a TikTok video. If neither police nor platforms can make sense of our laws, and implement them in ways that respect our rights, surely it is a sign they are not fit for purpose?
If we care about our children, and want them to grow up in a country that respects human rights, we should call on the Government to implement a wholescale free speech reset.
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