15 Aug 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, United Kingdom
The Online Safety Act could have been worse. When it was still a bill, it included a provision around content deemed “legal but harmful”, which would have required platforms to remove content that, while not illegal, might be considered socially or emotionally damaging. We campaigned against it, arguing that what is legal offline must remain legal online. We were successful – “legal but harmful” did not make the final cut.
Still, many troubling clauses did make their way into the Act. And three weeks ago, when age verification rules came into force, people across the UK began to see the true scope of the OSA, a vast piece of legislation which already is curtailing our online rights.
Setting aside the question of how effective some of these measures are (how easy is it, really, to age-gate when kids can just use VPNs, as we saw a few weeks back?), many of our concerns focus on privacy.
Privacy is essential to freedom of expression. If people feel they are being monitored, they change how they speak and behave. Of course, there is a balance. We use Freedom of Information requests to hold power to account, so that matters of national importance aren’t hidden behind closed doors. But that doesn’t mean all speech should be open to scrutiny. People need private space, online as well as off. It’s a basic right, and for good reason.
We’ve landed in a strange place in 2025. Never before in human history have we had such powerful tools to access people’s inner lives. But just because we can doesn’t mean we should. The OSA empowers regulators and platforms to use those tools, mostly in the name of child safety (with national security also a stated goal, albeit one that seems secondary), and that’s not good.
To be clear: I empathise with concerns around child safety. We all want an internet that is safer for children. But from every conversation I’ve had, and every piece of research I’ve seen, it won’t make much of a difference to the online experience of our children. There are too many loopholes and the only way to close them all is to further encroach on the privacy of us all. Even then there will still be get-arounds.
What does a less private internet look like? Just consider a few ways we use it: we send sensitive data, like bank details, ID documents and health records, to name just three. That data needs to be private. We talk online about our personal lives. In a tolerant, pluralistic society, this may seem unthreatening, but not everyone lives in such a society. Journalists speak to sources via apps offering end-to-end encryption of messages. Activists connect with essential networks on them too. At Index we use them all the time.
The OSA is already eroding privacy. Privacy is being compromised by the OSA’s age-gating requirement under Section 81, which mandates that regulated providers use age-verification measures to ensure children – defined as those under 18 – don’t encounter pornographic content.
This means major platforms like TikTok, X, Reddit, YouTube and others must comply. Several sites already have profiles of us, based on information we’re had to upload to register, and the tracking of our online habits and patterns. Now our profiles will grow bigger still, and with details like our passports and driving licences. Although the OSA says age verification information should not be stored we already know that tech is not infallible and this additional data could be extremely powerful in the wrong hands. We’ve seen enough major data breaches to know this isn’t a worse-case abstraction.
But it could get worse. Section 121 of the OSA gives Ofcom the power to require tech companies to use “accredited technology” to scan for child abuse or terrorism-related content, even in private messages. Under the OSA, technology is considered “accredited” if it has been approved by Ofcom, or a person designated by Ofcom, as meeting minimum standards of accuracy for detecting content related to terrorism or child abuse. These minimum standards are set by the Secretary of State. By allowing the government to mandate or endorse scanning technology – even for these serious crimes – the OSA risks creating a framework for routine, state-sanctioned surveillance, with the potential for misuse. Indeed, while the government made assurances that this wouldn’t undermine end-to-end encryption, the law itself includes no such protection. Instead, complying with these notices could require platforms to break encryption, either through backdoors or invasive client-side scanning. Ofcom has even flagged encryption itself as a risk factor. The message to tech companies is clear: break encryption to show you’re doing everything possible. If a company doesn’t, and harmful content still slips through, they could be fined up to 10% of their annual global revenue. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Yes we want a safer internet for our children. I wish there were a magic bullet to eliminate harm online. This isn’t it. Instead, clauses within the OSA risk making everyone less safe online.
Sometimes we feel like a broken record here. But what choice do we have, when the attacks keep coming? And it’s not just the OSA. The Investigatory Powers Act, formerly dubbed the “Snooper’s Charter”, has also been used to demand backdoors into devices, as we saw with Apple earlier this year.
So, we’re grateful that WhatsApp recently renewed a grant to support our work defending encryption and our privacy rights. As always, our funders have no influence on our policy positions and we will continue to hold Meta (WhatsApp’s parent company) to account just as we do any other entity. What we share is a core belief: privacy is a right and should be protected. And at Index we work on a core principle: human rights are hard won and easily lost. Now is not the time to give up on them – it’s the time to double-down.
13 Aug 2025 | News and features, United Kingdom, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
Ella Ward sat in jail in the UK for 10 months, waiting to be sentenced for planning to disrupt Manchester Airport in August 2024. When the sentence was handed down this May, it was 18 months in prison for Ward, with other protesters receiving up to 30 months.
Ward and their fellow activists from climate change direct action group Just Stop Oil never reached the runway, where they intended to glue themselves as part of a co-ordinated European action. Instead, according to an account from Ward, police arrested the activists on a side street in Manchester just after 4am on 5 August for planning the protest, which would have caused “severe delays”.
Four JSO activists were charged with conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and found guilty in February.
Ward, 22, a former environmental science student at the University of Leeds, is a serial activist. They have slow-marched down roads for JSO (for which they spent time in prison before charges were dropped) and thrown paint over think tank Policy Exchange, and they were one of three young people – under the banner of Youth Demand (an offshoot of JSO) – who left children’s shoes outside the home of Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition, to protest against the killings in Gaza.
None of these actions have been violent, although many have caused offence and disruption. But the fact that Ward and others have been sentenced to prison for months demonstrates how the UK has been clamping down on protest when it would once have dealt with such direct actions with fines.
JSO, whose activists threw soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery, announced earlier this year that it was stopping its activities.
The official reason given was that its demands – for no new oil and gas licences to be issued – had been met. But at the group’s final demonstration through London in April, it was clear that the imprisonment of key activists was a major concern: there were as many protesters holding up pictures of activists who had been jailed as there were messages about climate change and the fossil fuel industry.
Ths shift in protest policing
Mel Carrington, 63, is a JSO spokesperson who was acquitted in June after blocking the departure gates at Gatwick Airport with suitcases last year. She told Index: “We have to respond to repression, and all our most radical people are in prison. So it does have an impact.”
There are currently 11 JSO protesters behind bars. Co-founder Roger Hallam (also co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, or XR) is serving a four-year sentence (reduced from five years) for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. His crime was playing a major role in a Zoom meeting where he was found to have conspired in a “sophisticated plan” for activists to climb gantries over the M25 – a motorway which circles London – and disrupt traffic. Hallam did not participate in the action, which took place in November 2022, but the law enabled him to be imprisoned for the protest nonetheless.
Locking up climate protesters is relatively new in the UK. Richard Ecclestone, an XR spokesperson and a former police inspector, said the attitude of the police, as well as actual laws, had changed dramatically over the last six years, which he found “very disturbing”. Police used to facilitate protest, now they are shutting it down.
“We don’t want to be like Russia, China or North Korea. That’s not who we are,” he told Index.
Recent anti-protest legislation has given police the power to stop almost any action they don’t like and granted the courts expanded powers to imprison protesters, although the Court of Appeal decided in May that the idea of “disruption” – which led to Swedish climate protester Greta Thunberg being arrested in London – had been drawn too widely and that “serious disruption” could not be categorised as anything “more than minor”.
The 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act has proved particularly effective at shutting down civil disobedience, while protest-related offences under the Public Order Act 2023 were introduced in direct response to environmental activism. Serious Disruption Prevention Orders introduced in 2024 also mean the courts can prevent people from taking part in disruptive protests after they’ve been convicted of protest-related offences, and breaching the order would be a criminal offence.
Mothers supporting daughters
The Labour government, elected last year, is seeking to give police even more powers to control demonstrations. Amnesty International has highlighted provisions in the new Crime and Policing Bill currently going through parliament which seek to ban face masks and criminalise climbing on war memorials.
The courts have also blocked the right for defendants to use beliefs and motivation as a lawful excuse for causing a nuisance, damage or disruption in most cases.
Ward’s mother (who didn’t want her name to be published) was on the march, as was Rebecca, the mother of Ruby Hamill, another protester who, at the age of 19, was held in prison for slow-marching. Ruby has now been released. Both mothers went on the final JSO march in support of their daughters.
Ward’s mother told Index: “My daughter is very passionate and compassionate and feels deeply about the injustice of the climate crisis and how it’s affecting the global south, and wants to let people know as much as possible. She’s done the most she possibly can do by putting her liberty on the line. She knew the potential outcome.
“She told the jury in the trial she would be at peace with whether she is found guilty or not guilty … the point of her action is to get the message out there. I’m here in solidarity with my daughter and all the other people who have been imprisoned.
“It’s a very conflicting place for a parent – so worried about them being in prison but conversely proud of them for standing up for their beliefs.”
The UK’s deteriorating record
The UK has a poor record when it comes to arresting climate protesters who, like JSO members, have been non-violent and allow themselves to be arrested.
A recent report from the University of Bristol, called the Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests, looked at government responses across a range of countries.
The report found that 17% of climate and environmental protests in the UK involved arrest, making it the second most likely country (after Australia at 20%) to take environmental protesters into police custody.
It is not the only country to have clamped down heavily on climate protest. France has reached for anti-terror laws, and Spain, Germany and the USA have used legislation designed to tackle organised crime.
Separately, climate activists in the UK have often been subject to civil proceedings such as injunctions which prevent named (and sometimes unnamed) individuals from going near certain places. Carrington says these injunctions can be as intimidating as criminalisation, making people afraid they could lose their savings or their jobs.
In 2022, JSO protester Louise Lancaster was ordered to pay £22,000 for breaching an injunction preventing her going on the M25.
Carrington herself found that she couldn’t renew her house insurance because of proceedings against her. She also claimed teachers had discovered their jobs were at risk because criminal prosecutions for climate change action turned up in Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks.
Another way forward?
All of this risks environmental protesters going underground and carrying out actions with less accountability. There are already organisations such as The Tyre Extinguishers whose members deliberately let down the tyres of SUVs and then scarper, or Shut The System, which sabotages infrastructure.
But the authors of the Bristol report recommended another way forward.
“Governments, legislatures, courts and police forces should operate with a general presumption against criminalising climate and environmental protests,” it said. “Instead, climate and environmental protest should be regarded as a reasonable response to the urgent and existential nature of the climate crisis, and activists engaged as stakeholders in a process of just transition.”
The leaders of climate change movements agree and are working out how to pivot to a less disruptive street-based approach and one which might garner more public support. Ecclestone says XR was interested in using citizens’ assemblies to achieve change and that a lot of work was going on to see how that could be made to work.
Carrington said JSO had a project as part of the umbrella group Assemble which aimed to build on the idea that politics was broken and corrupt, and that building a political project from the grassroots up was the way to achieve change.
She said: “What we need to do more than ever is to come together and to work together to survive the storm that’s coming.”
12 Aug 2025 | Americas, News and features, Newsletters, United States
There was a full house for the launch of the summer edition of Index this week. The theme was the Trump administration’s war on free expression, and our panel of experts attracted an impressive and noticeably young audience. Some were there to support Anvee Bhutani, from the Wall Street Journal. She’s now based in the UK but previously reported from the frontline of the US government’s attacks on immigrants and protestors. Also speaking were the American historian and journalist Erica Wagner, now working at the Observer, and lawyer Charlie Holt, who specialises in environmental law and is a longtime ally of Index in the fight against SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation).
There seemed to be a consensus that it was now possible to talk about “the American dissident” in light of the administration’s attacks on state-funded media, the legal establishment and academia. Erica caught the mood when she said she was “both shocked and not shocked” by what was going on and Trump’s behaviour. “When people tell you who they are, pay attention,” she said.
Charlie reminded us that Trump has been involved in over 2,000 lawsuits, many of them used to target journalists. As chair of the discussion, hosted by St John’s Church, Waterloo, it felt like the work of Index was more vital than ever. Anvee said she had accepted the invitation when she heard it was about the crackdown on press, protest and academic freedom: “I feel I have seen all three collapse in the last year in America.”
It also felt appropriate that the audience was reminded of Index’s history and tradition as the champion of dissident writers and artists in eastern and central Europe. The Belarusian poet Hanna Komar read from her collaboration with Greek poet Katerina Koulouri using words which the Trump administration has banned federal agencies from using.
It is always good to be reminded of the complexities of the debate over free expression and the final question of the evening provided just this check on complacency. Audience member Marko Begic asked whether we need to reconsider our understanding of the concept of censorship in the third decade of the 21st century. With the populist right and the activist left both claiming their free expression is under threat, we are certainly a long way from the Cold War certainties at the heart of Index’s origin story. But the concept of the dissident remains as powerful as it ever was, whether it is embodied by an exiled Belarusian poet or an American journalist in the progressive tradition.
11 Aug 2025 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Since 7 October, 2023, Israel’s military campaign across the Gaza Strip has claimed the lives of more than 260 Palestinian journalists and media workers: men and women, who carried nothing but their cameras, microphones, and notebooks. They were not on the battlefield, they were the battlefield. Targeted, hunted, threatened and killed alongside their families in what can only be described as a deliberate campaign to silence the truth.
Anas al-Sharif and Mohamed Qreqeh, along with five more colleagues from Al Jazeera were the new victims of truth. They did not die because they were caught in “crossfire” or in a tragic accident. Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues were killed because he refused to be silenced. Because they exposed the atrocities and crimes of the Israeli military against innocent civilians in Gaza. They reported on the massacres, on the weaponisation of starvation and thirst, and on the relentless bombardment of residential neighborhoods.
Anas paid his life as a price for his truth-telling, and so did many other colleagues. They all met the same fate.
Before them, their parents and families were also killed. These were not isolated incidents. They are part of a systematic pattern.
This is how Israel’s war on Palestinian journalism works: first, it eliminates the voice; then it erases the family; and finally it seeks to bury the story.
I know this because I am living it. I am a journalist who has reported for years from Gaza City, and my own family there has been threatened. My home has been surrounded by fear like many more, reminding us that our reporting comes at a cost. These are not random acts of intimidation. They are part of the same machinery that murdered Anas and Mohamed, a machinery designed to frighten Palestinian journalists into silence.
It doesn’t stop at bullets and bombs. Israel wages an incitement campaign against Palestinian journalists, smearing them with baseless accusations and without presenting a shred of credible evidence.
The aim is clear: to strip us of legitimacy in the eyes of the world so that when we are killed, our deaths can be rationalised, excused, and forgotten.
These accusations are amplified when parts of the Western media adopt Israel’s unverified narrative – sometimes word for word – while those same foreign correspondents are themselves barred from entering Gaza.
Yes, Israel has kept international journalists out of Gaza since the start of this war. It is not only silencing Palestinian voices, it is preventing the world from seeing the truth through the eyes of all journalists.
This unprecedented media blockade means the only witnesses left inside Gaza are Palestinian journalists, who are being systematically hunted.
By killing them, Israel is not just destroying the local press, it is choking off the world’s last source of first-hand account from the Strip.
Some will call this a tragedy for Gaza. But it is more than that. It is a tragedy for journalism everywhere.
Each time a Palestinian journalist is killed for doing their job, a bullet tears through the very heart of global press freedom.
When one government can murder reporters with impunity, threaten their families, smear their reputations, and block the international media from entering, it sends a message to every repressive regime on the planet: You too can kill the story by killing the storyteller.
What happens in Gaza does not stay in Gaza. If Israel’s campaign to silence journalists succeeds here, it will embolden governments worldwide to use the same tactics: violence, intimidation, and narrative control to shield themselves from accountability.
The chilling effect will ripple far beyond the Gaza Strip and Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Journalists covering corruption, human rights abuses, atrocities and war crimes, will all feel the shadow of what is happening in Gaza.
Freedom of the press is not a slogan. It is the breath of democracy, the safeguard against tyranny, the public’s last line of defence against lies, manipulation and corruption.
In Gaza, that breath is being suffocated. And if the world does not act; if governments, media organisations, and press freedom advocates do not unite to hold Israel accountable, then the suffocation will spread.
Anas is gone. Mohamed is gone. Too many of my colleagues are gone. I do not know how much longer those of us still reporting from Gaza can keep going under this level of threat. But I do know this: as long as we have breath, we will speak. We will write. We will record. Because the truth is worth more than our fear, and the story of Gaza must not be buried with its journalists.
Silencing Palestinian journalists is not just an assault on Gaza’s truth. It is an assault on the world’s right to know. And the day we allow that assault to succeed is the day press freedom dies everywhere.
[Editor’s note: The IDF claims that al-Sharif had been a member of Hamas since 2013. Al-Sharif and Al Jazeera had previously called these claims “baseless”.]
