The Online Safety Act: Now More Than Just Child Protection
As of 25 July 2025, UK platforms were required to introduce robust age-verification systems to keep harmful content away from children. This is the current phase of the Online Safety Act 2023, now being actively enforced by Ofcom with penalties as severe as £18 million or 10% of global turnover Online Safety Act Explainer from Gov.uk
From Age Checks to Immigration: A Strange Crossover
A seemingly unrelated item—immigration control—has cropped up in this online-safety legislation sphere, lurking between the lines.
- X (formerly Twitter) has flagged that the Act is “putting free speech at risk,” especially pointing to notions like a “national internet investigations team to monitor anti-migrant content” as potentially excessive.
UK Online Safety Act risks ‘seriously infringing’ free speech, says X
- Peter Kyle, Minister of Science, disgracefully used X to try and manipulate and gaslight everyone. But it fell flat. He should apologise to Nigel Farage. But it just how Labour are Terrified of Labour and Reform. The responses rightly corrected his vitriolic statements as it being a strike against Democracy.
These signals show that the government’s online safety framework, originally pitched around protecting children, is being leveraged to influence or police conversations on immigration—a red flag for how broad and invasive the scope has become.
Border Security Bill: Immigration Gets a Digital Enforcement Arm
The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (2025), which is nearing final stages, includes a provision that explicitly criminalises social media ads and content promoting illegal Channel crossings, fake travel documents, or smuggler services. Offenders could face up to five years in prison, hefty fines, and criminal proceedings
This is not the Online Safety Act—but it shows an expanding trend: using online platform regulation to enforce immigration control.
What This Means—and Why It’s Alarming
- A law framed as protecting children is being used to police political or expressive content, especially around immigration.
- Platforms are caught between keeping children safe and stifling public debate—especially when immigration-related content is swept into—or conflated with—”harmful content.”
- The Border Bill demonstrates how immigration enforcement is acquiring an online infrastructure, making moderation tools essentially policing tools.
In the week ahead we will be digging into this further. And making transparent what the govt is hiding from the public or what it continues to gaslight us by obfuscating the facts.
In the week ahead we will be digging into this further. And making transparent what the govt is hiding from the public or what it continues to gaslight us by obfuscating the facts.
If you don’t want to miss out sign up to get notified of updates:
