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When Mel Stride put out a YouTube Short last month, it got zero views. That, surely, is worth repeating: zero views. Stride’s unloved ‘short’ was a poorly cropped clip of a GB News interview, similar to dozens of other clips he had posted on his YouTube channel before being sacked as shadow chancellor. Most of them have fewer than ten views. Stride was born in 1961, so he can perhaps be forgiven for not being au fait with the latest meta on social media. But most of our MPs have similarly amateurish operations, despite recognising the importance of social media in modern communications.

Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez is proposing a ban on under-16s using social media, following the example set by Australia last year. Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai earlier this week, Sánchez said: "Today our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone… We will protect [them] from the digital Wild West." The Spanish premier’s announcement comes at a time when several other European nations are also attempting to combat the harmful effects of social media on children. France’s ban on under-15s using social media is expected to become law later this year, while Greece, Portugal and Denmark have signaled their intention to enact similar legislation.

Britain’s Online Safety Act is part of an escalating censorship war between Europe and the United States. It was sold to the British public as legislation that would protect children; in practice, it is a far-reaching internet censorship statute with explicit extraterritorial reach. The OSA purports to grant the UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, the power to do what no one on Earth has the lawful power to do: compel US websites to censor themselves and their users. This affects everyone, not just tech firms. If the UK can impose British speech rules on US companies, then the First Amendment stops being law and becomes a suggestion. At least 29 nations, mostly America’s allies, have enacted similar laws.