“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” warned United Kingdom parliament member Nigel Farage when speaking on the imminent threats of European online speech regulation in a committee hearing earlier this month. He was specifically referencing the dangers of the UK’s Online Safety Act—and he’s right to be worried.
The UK’s Online Safety Act requires tech companies to remove illegal and harmful online content, enforce age-verification for minors, and comply with broad government-set duties of care over user safety. It adds to laws that also try to remove ‘harmful’ information online, such as Section 127 of the Communications Act of 2003. Among its many problems, Section 127 has led to a significant increase in arrests over “offensive” or “hateful” online content over the last 5 years. Now, arrests keep increasing as the OSA makes matters worse.
While Section 127 and the OSA intend to address online issues such as disinformation, misinformation, and kids’ online safety, their enforcement has given bureaucrats the power to be judge and jury over what is appropriate to say online and what is not.
The OSA gives the Office of Communications (Ofcom) the power to run audits of tech companies, require their algorithm recommendations to assess the reduction of ‘illegal content,’ and also allow Ofcom to access any internal documents, all justified under the guise of regulatory compliance. Many technology companies will be subject to the arbitrary discretion of the regulatory entities that enforce the law.
With a document of guidelines that surpasses 500 pages, the law criminalizes specific instances of online misconduct, like harassment, threats, and abuse—but it also criminalizes nebulous harms like hate and false communications.
When defining false communication, for instance, the law covers “false communications deliberately sent to inflict harm.” Consider the cases in which Section 127 was enforced and resulted in multiple arrests merely for stating a comment or opinion. In many of these cases, the speech was deemed ‘harmful’ or ‘offensive,’ but these classifications were inherently subjective. Now OSA offers the same vague enforcement, adding to laws that chill speech and impart fear.
The bad design of the law goes even further. When implementing age verification restrictions so minors don’t access certain content, it overlooks a simple reality: individuals can pretty easily circumvent such restrictions. Consider that downloads of Virtual Private Networks spiked after the UK started enforcing the OSA, just as they did when Louisiana enacted its age verification law. Such workarounds led lawmakers, particularly in Europe, to threaten stricter regulations as a response. This response shows the risk of a cycle of escalating regulations that harm consumers.
Despite the alarming detriments to online speech in the UK, some lawmakers and academics still believe that action is better than inaction. At the judiciary committee hearing on Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation, one of the witnesses, David Kaye, a clinical professor of law at UC Irvine, voiced precisely this point in his testimony, when he praised Europe for its Digital Service Act (DSA) and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) for at least ‘doing something’ in the face of issues like misinformation during elections or lack of content moderation for kids.
Fortunately, a better path exists. Let private market actors, not politicians, respond to consumer desires. Many social media companies have built-in content filters so parents can curate appropriate feeds for kids. General search engines like Google or Bing offer Safe Search features to reduce exposure to explicit content online. A growing number of companies now even design phones without social media apps and explicitly limit online features, catering to parents worried about their children’s screen time and to adults who see social media as more of a distraction than a benefit.
Market solutions are still developing and are not perfect, but they often do a better job meeting parents’ demands for online safety and with far fewer unintended consequences. Politicians and companies, of course, must spend more time making sure parents know these tools exist—but these tools do exist, nonetheless.
Everyone wants an online environment where kids are safe, but policymakers should be careful not to do more harm than good. As famous economist Milton Friedman once said: “One of the greatest mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
Pablo Garcia Quint is a technology policy analyst with the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, follow us on X @ConsumerPal.