We did warn that the Online Safety Act would chill free speech and vehemently opposed the legislation for that reason. We said the remit of the act was too wide and that perfectly legitimate legal points of view would be shut down under its provisions.
And we are beginning to see that happening and beginning to see also how it will be used politically, by all sides.
GB News on the right and The Canary on the left have both blogged about the case of Zia Yusuf the Reform spokesman on home affairs who had two recent TikTok videos taken down from the platform. GB News in outrage, and The Canary saying the platform was quite right to do so because Reform policies amount to “hateful behaviour”.
It all started when Yusuf told his X followers that a video of him saying that Reform would put migration centres in Green-voting areas – and which Yusuf claims had millions of views on other social media channels – had been taken down by TikTok which cited the Online Safety Act for their decision.
Then a second video was removed – also by TikTok a couple of days ago. Here Yusuf was saying some unpleasant, but not illegal things, about migration ie that Reform would deport everyone who is in the country illegally including foreign nationals committing crimes and those not paying their way. TikTok said it had acted on a complaint by a user. In this case, the platform first cited the Online Safety Act and then said that the video contained “hate speech and hateful behaviour”.
Yusuf was also furious that TikTok threatened to remove him from the platform altogether if he committed further “offences”, blasting the Conservatives for pretending to pass legislation to protect children, when in fact the law was “silencing voices the open-borders political establishment don’t like”.
Enter Nadine Dorries, the erstwhile Conservative Culture minister, today a Reform champion and Daily Mail columnist who steered the legislation through parliament and now says it has to be consigned “to the dustbin where it now belongs” because it is silencing her colleagues. Yusuf’s video, by the way, has now been restored.
None of this would have happened without the Online Safety Act – and this is exactly how we warned the legislation would be used – to shut down legitimate debate. Unless speech is aired in a public forum, it cannot be challenged.
And the implications go wider. What about other types of speech in the future, on the left say? Will these videos too be challenged by the TikTok community for being “hateful” or “causing public disorder”? Will there by a tit-for-tat war now with political players on all sides trying to shut down the speech of their opponents, because that’s what the Online Safety legislation is enabling. Maybe that’s what the Chinese-owned company TikTok wants – believing as the Chinese Communist Party does that liberal democracies cause chaos – but perhaps that’s a conspiracy theory too far. The spat has certainly fuelled the suspicions of many Reform voters that there is liberal establishment trying to shut down ideas they don’t like. And we agree, that’s exactly what it looks like. Free expression means nothing if it is not for all.
