Legislating tech companies, free speech and porn: discourse on the online safety bill
Some governments legislate with the delicacy of a watchmaker. Keir Starmer’s appears to prefer the technique of a toddler armed with a mallet and an iPad restriction timer.
Yes, the Online Safety Bill has passed into law, another proud addition to this government’s growing collection of “authoritarian chic,” the legislative equivalent of a trench coat worn by someone who definitely shouldn’t be wearing a trench coat.
The top line: restricting access to porn, because nothing says “serious governance” quite like the Labour Party deciding you must be protected from the terrifying possibility of seeing a woman’s nipple without a state-issued permission slip.
The problems of porn
Now, I’ve written before about the problems of the porn industry, especially when you mix greedy businesses and tech platforms with commodified human desire, exploitative labour practices, algorithmic degeneracy, addiction, etc.
Sure. Fine. Terrible. But, and here comes the shock twist, people should still be allowed to make their own minds up. That’s how threats to freedom of expression works: slowly, quietly, starting with something most people agree is “probably fine to censor” and then escalating until one day your group chat is illegal and you need a VPN just to watch Only Connect.
While Labour put up their “No Pleasure Without State Oversight” signs, the right wing had what can only be described as a group aneurysm. This is a political movement that wants businesses to “do whatever they want,” even if “whatever they want” includes eroding workers’ rights, crash-coursing the climate into oblivion, and selling your private data to anyone who pays in crypto. Freedom for the market, you see. No freedom for actual humans and especially no freedom from being exploited.
Free of hate speech
Of course, the right also wants the sacred constitutional right to post whatever unhinged abuse they like on social media. Racial slurs? Mandatory. Transphobia? Heritage culture. Death threats? A lively night online. All cheerfully packaged as “free speech,” by which they mean “the freedom to hurl bile at Muslims and trans people with absolutely no consequences.”
It’s the classic dynamic: The Nanny-State Left vs. The Freedom-Loving Right.
Except when I say “the right,” what I really mean is Reform UK, who have run off with the entire right-wing discourse like a poorly trained puppy absconding with a supermarket rotisserie chicken. The Tories are too busy drawing chalk outlines around their political careers to keep up.
Legislating for tech platforms
Now - and please sit down, sip water, steady your pulse - despite my sizeable issues with this bill, there are parts of it that make sense.
The genuinely good bit: tech companies are finally being held responsible for moderating hate and disinformation on their platforms. This is long overdue. Platforms are not neutral. They’re not Switzerland. They’re not even Lichtenstein. They are attention-maximising machines that push the most viral sludge to the top of the feed because the longer you doomscroll, the more ads they can show you for mattresses, therapy apps, and bulk underwear retailers.
The design of tech platforms’ algorithms shape our culture. Shape elections. Shape who we think is human. The decisions in their design that tech companies make, means they are responsible for the content that appears on their platform, and pollutes the public discourse, as much as a newspaper editor is responsible for what appears on their pages.
Making tech companies responsible
These tech platforms have been an unregulated Wild West where far-right propaganda spreads faster than an Elon Musk tantrum (see: my previous column on Musk, Farage, and Tommy Robinson cosplaying as saviours of “Western civilisation” while basically eroding democracy via meme warfare).
So yes, making tech companies responsible for the horrors they enable? Good. More of that please.
If the right is up in arms about it then it’s probably not because they value your freedom of speech (or your freedom to watch feet JOI videos without having to log in to Porn Hub to prove that you are 18) it’s probably because they’re looking out for their mates in big tech who don’t like this bill and find it a bummer that they now need to be socially responsible and not profit off hate speech videos that encourage mass shootings.
A good first step
This is one of the few pieces of legislation anywhere in the world actually pushing back on Big Tech. A small, imperfect, baby-giraffe wobble in the right direction. Ideally, it’s just the start. Ideally, this is the warm-up act to a full-on regulatory headline tour.
Ideally, we might stop letting Silicon Valley billionaires decide what half the country believes, or allowing complete falsehoods to spread halfway around the world while the truth is still looking for its hat. Ideally, we would regulate tech companies like cigarette companies: make them responsible for their harmful products and prevent them being sold to children.
Then again, “ideally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting these days.
The world’s most annoying dragon
For now, the UK’s Online Safety Bill stands as a surreal political artefact: hated by the left for being censorious, hated by the right because it interferes with their God-given right to be vile on the internet, and applauded only by the handful of us who’ve realised that tech companies have been joyriding our democracy off a cliff for years.
The truth is simple: The government shouldn’t be your digital parent. Tech companies shouldn’t be your digital god. And Reform UK shouldn’t be your digital anything.
Yet here we are, Britain in 2025: One side trying to confiscate your porn, the other trying to defend your right to scream abuse at vulnerable people, and tech companies in the corner counting their money like the world’s most annoying dragon. Isn’t democracy fun?
