The seemingly innocuous act of introducing age verification for social media apps in the United Kingdom has ignited the country’s already notorious censorship regime with the new terms of the Online Safety Act being weaponised within hours against free speech.
Examples include a parliamentary speech by Conservative MP Katie Lam on the topic of rape gangs (her address to the House was restricted* for UK citizens on X) and footage of immigration protests. The Online Safety Act has been shown to incentivise over-censorship under the guise of protecting children.
The thorny topic was raised during Trump’s visit to Scotland with the British press reporting an 1800% surge in demand for Virtual Private Networks driven by UK citizens wishing to sidestep the new regulations by altering their location.
The Online Safety Act was able to enable the crackdown by framing censorship as “child protection,” obscuring its broader impact on lawful speech. Similarly, by outsourcing enforcement to private companies, the state concealed censorship behind corporate moderation.
This week Sky News reported that:
“Hundreds of thousands of people are protesting against the UK’s new online safety rules, with accusations of censorship being levelled at the government.
“Five days since Ofcom’s new internet regulations began being enforced, nearly 400,000 people have signed a petition asking for them to be repealed.”
Let me be clear: it is admirable to seek to protect children both in the real world and online, but, this week, a Labour MP admitted that the law is intended to be used more broadly than that.
From the European Conservative:
The suspicion that many analysts and British citizens have harboured for months has now been confirmed: the Online Safety Act, introduced as a pioneering piece of legislation to protect minors from harmful content on the internet, in reality serves a much more anti-democratic purpose. Labour MP Barry Gardiner acknowledged on Monday, July 28th, in an interview with GB News that the law also aims to identify and restrict content deemed “harmful,” including expressions of “sentiments contrary to immigration.”
This admission marks a turning point in the debate over freedom of expression in the United Kingdom. Until now, the Labour government had avoided explicitly confirming that the law had an ideological and repressive component, hiding behind the rhetoric of child safety. But Gardiner’s statements have removed any ambiguity.
While Northern Ireland is directly caught under the net of the Online Safety Act the Republic’s own social media censors, Coimisiún na Meán (CnaM), are quietly replicating the same mistakes in conjunction with the European Commission and the government – again under the guise of child safety.
On 21 July, CnaM rolled out Part B of its Online Safety Code, mandating effective age assurance for accessing adult or harmful content on platforms like YouTube, X, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
Perhaps recognising the mistakes of the UK rollout, Irish censors have granted social media platforms just nine months to comply with Part B raising the prospect of more gradual and less noticeable censorship.
Much like the UK’s 25 July 2025 OSA deadline, Ireland now requires platforms to vault past “self‑declaration” age checks, demanding ID scans or live selfies—tools which can gate otherwise lawful content.
This structural similarity means Ireland may repeat the UK’s pattern: preemptive age‑gating of borderline or public interest content effectively censoring content en masse.
What happens in Ireland is of major European concern considering CnaM’s gatekeeper role for the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) effectively setting the tempo for pan-European content moderation thanks to the placement of most major platforms in Dublin.
Effectively, overregulation in Ireland can and will trigger platform-wide suppression across Europe. The UK’s Online Safety Act shows, in abundance, how vague categories like “content harmful to children” become a backdoor to censorship when platforms err on the side of risk-aversion and mass content takedown.
The Oireachtas needs to insert amendments to the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022 with a clearer definition of what constitutes as harmful, safeguards against industrial-scale censorship and a regular review process.
The right to access political speech, protest footage, and sensitive but lawful content must not be collateral damage in the name of safety. Free speech is not a loophole – it’s the foundation of a free democratic society for the online era.
Ireland must protect the right to speak freely where the UK failed, and that is why time is running short.
*An earlier version of this piece said Ms Lam’s address was inaccessible.