Inside the Hall of Mirrors: The Telegraph’s Dangerous Games Over Online Harms

One of the most remarkable things about the current backlash against the Online Safety Act (OSA) is that it is emanating from the very same newspapers that have agitated for internet censorship ever since the World Wide Web became accessible to the public in 1993. 

The press campaign against the internet had already reached such a pitch by 1996 that the Observer’s technology correspondent, John Naughton, felt impelled to write a column headed ‘Monsters from cyberspace’ in which he complained that, to judge by British press coverage of the internet, there are basically only three stories about the online world: ‘Cyberporn invades Britain’, plus its variant ‘Police crack internet sex pervert ring’; ‘Net addicts lead sad virtual lives’; and ‘pupils get bomb info on Net’.

Such stories, he claimed, were produced by journalists who were “hell bent on misrepresenting it [the internet] in the interests of sensationalism and easy news bytes. Where there is ignorance, they sow fear; and where there is fear, they sow technophobia”.

He also argued that they deeply disliked the arrival of competing sources of news, which “enable people to get whatever they want rather than whatever pap an editor or a proprietor deigns to give them, which liberates rather than enslaves its users”.

One of the flood of stories that Naughton could well have quoted to illustrate his point appeared in The Telegraph, 13 September 1995. Headed, ‘Electronic porn floods network’, it complained  that “paedophiles and pornographers are becoming the biggest users of the Internet” and claimed, without any convincing evidence, that “half the non-academic material in the ‘global village’ is pornographic”.

Jumping forward to 10 June 2018, less than a year after Theresa May’s Government had launched its Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper, The Telegraph was agitating for what would eventually become the OSA by launching its campaign for a statutory duty of care, administered by Ofcom, to be placed on all social media companies that allow young people access to their systems.

This on the grounds that the internet “allows content, images and opinions that would once have been curtailed or forbidden to be easily available at the touch of a button. Whereas children in the past could not access pornography, watch violent films or join adult communities without great difficulty, now it is commonplace for them to do all three”. And, confirming that nothing had changed since Naughton’s malediction, it linked to a contemporaneous Telegraph story, headed ‘Sexting, suicide and addiction – the children whose lives have been ruined by the Internet’. 

---

A Screeching U-turn

However, since 25 July, with the coming into force of the parts of the OSA requiring companies to introduce safety measures to protect children from online content deemed harmful to them, measures which include pornographic sites having to put in place rigorous age-checking procedures, those papers that once so enthusiastically demanded internet censorship have considerably changed their tune.

And, The Telegraph in particular, has performed what can only be described as a screeching U-turn. The reasons for this tell us a great deal about the nature of the right-wing press in Britain, and especially the Telegraph (now described by Private Eye as a “former newspaper”). 

The first reason is the extremely belated realisation that the OSA actually involves a great deal more than simply trying to stop children watching porn online, as I have explained here and here.

In this respect, it should have been blindingly obvious, but clearly wasn’t, that age-verification would be required of anybody visiting a porn site. Given that, according to Ofcom’s most recent Online Nation report, nearly 14 million adults in the UK visited porn sites in one month in 2024, these no doubt include Telegraph readers and quite a few of the (un-named) fellow MPs cited by Neil Parish, of tractor porn infamy, who presumably are now beginning ruefully to consider the kinds of privacy and security problems associated with age-verification pinpointed by Matt Gallagher in Byline Times.

Painfully difficult though it may be to agree with Daniel Hannan, the headline over one of his Mail articles, ‘The Online Safety Act was born out of a moral panic and now we’re all having to live with the unintended consequences’, actually contains a good deal of truth.

The second reason for this volte-face on the part of the right-wing press concerns its absolute determination to see off what it perceives as attempts to limit what can be said in its pages and on social media about the current unrest over hotels housing refugees (or “illegal migrants” as it would undoubtedly have it) and immigration in general.

This is linked to these papers’ outright hostility to any measures to combat mis- and disinformation, which I have already discussed in Byline Times here and here, and which is all of a piece with its embrace of what has come to be known as free speech fundamentalism.  

The Telegraph is way out in front of the press pack here, and its stories have been picked up uncritically by numerous like-minded papers (not least those owned by Murdoch).

---

‘Anti-migrant sentiment’

The die was cast on 25 July when the paper announced that “an elite team of police officers is to monitor social media for anti-migrant sentiment amid fears of summer riots”.

However, what the team will be charged with monitoring is not “anti-migrant sentiment” but anti-migrant disorder – in other words, not thought crime (in Telegraph-speak) but violence on the streets.

As the Home Office felt obliged to point out once this false claim had inevitably gone viral: “This new capability is not about monitoring what people say on their social media feeds – it is about equipping our police forces to respond more rapidly to the needs of the communities they serve, and enabling them to react in an agile way to real-time information about incidents and emergencies affecting those communities”.

However, this received considerably less media attention than the Telegraph’s coat-trailing.

Eagerly rising to the Telegraph’s proffered bait, shadow home secretary Chris Philp, was quoted in the article to the effect that “two-tier Keir can’t police the streets, so he’s trying to police opinions instead”.

Inevitably, he was echoed by Nigel Farage, who claimed with entirely characteristic opportunism that “this is the beginning of the state controlling free speech. It is sinister, dangerous and must be fought. Reform UK will do just that”. 

The article also quoted the Free Speech Union (FSU), which shares the Telegraph’s highly selective interpretation of freedom of expression, to the effect that “if you have a standard X account in the UK – presumably the majority of British users – it appears that you may not be able to see any protest footage that contains violence”.

This is because a screenshot shared by Benjamin Jones, an FSU director, apparently showed an online notice in place of a post about a demonstration that read: “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age”.

However, footage of such an event is highly unlikely to contain any of the kinds of contents listed in the OSA as being illegal for either a child or an adult to view, and thus it’s impossible to understand why this restriction was imposed, unless it was a result of zealous over-blocking on the part of X caused by an algorithm’s unfamiliarity with the new Act.

---

‘An Assault on Freedom‘

The political censorship line was hammered home in the following day’s paper by Zia Yusuf, the head of Reform UK’s so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’.

Headed, ‘The Online Safety Act is an assault on freedom’, this claimed, quite wrongly, that “content critical of Government immigration policy – including videos of public protests outside migrant hotels – is quietly being censored from social media”, that tomorrow’s targets will be “‘disinformation’ or ‘extremism’ – code for anyone who challenges the failed policies of the political elite”, and that age-verification means that “if you’re under 18, you’ll be blocked from seeing ‘harmful’ content – which, in practice, means anything critical of the Government”. This, again, is complete nonsense. 

However, nonsensical or not, many of the same points were made by Farage on 29 August. (There can surely be no serious doubt that the Telegraph is now to all intents and purposes a Reform-supporting paper).

For example, he claimed, erroneously, that ID scans were now mandatory “not just for porn sites, but also for mainstream social media where political or any other content is deemed potentially ‘harmful’. This erosion of privacy could make it easier to identify online critics of government policy on migration and much else”.

The article also contains a link to the original Telegraph piece about “anti-migrant sentiment”, adding to the vertiginous sensation of being trapped in an echo chamber or hall of mirrors which is now brought on by reading this once-serious paper.

A similar line was pursued the same day by FSU member Andrew Orlowski, who complained that the well-intentioned desire to protect children online has “unfortunately coincided with a renewed desire to control political speech”.

In his view, “as long as populists are rising, the impulse to censor will be irresistible to their political opponents. By controlling our discourse, they can control democracy”, and he finds it “highly regrettable that a bien-pensant blob has cynically hijacked child protection law to ensure it has a media landscape more in keeping with its views”.

To add to the impression of a hermetically sealed universe of discourse, Orlowski quotes not only the FSU director, Jones, mentioned above, but also Baroness Claire Fox, who is a member of the FSU Advisory Council (although the article omits to say so). 

---

Vassalage

A further component of The Telegraph’s volte-face on the OSA is the paper’s concern, one shared with the Murdoch press in particular, that the Act must not be permitted to alienate the US government (although this is also closely linked to the free speech argument, given the prevalence of First Amendment fundamentalism in the Trump regime).

Thus, a paper which used to howl endlessly about Britain being in vassalage to the EU appears to be more than happy to call for the modification, or even abandonment, of a statute which displeases powerful US interests.  

The original Telegraph article that set the “anti-migrant sentiment” hare running had noted that the US state department had complained that Europe’s increasing regulation of social media sites amounted to “Orwellian” censorship.

Similarly, on 28 July, the paper carried an article headed, ‘Musk brands online safety crackdown ‘suppression of the people”. This was followed on 30 July with a piece by the paper’s deputy US editor, Connor Stringer, under the headline, ‘White House warns Starmer: Stop threatening US tech companies’ free speech’, with the strap, ‘Members of Donald Trump’s administration monitoring Online Safety Act with ‘great interest and concern’’.

This quoted Republican congressman Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, as expressing to The Telegraph his view that the OSA “impacts American citizens, American companies and infringes on our First Amendment. As long as foreign legislators, judges, and regulators continue their attempts to silence US citizens, we will not stop fighting back”. It also claimed that several American websites were poised to bring a federal lawsuit against Ofcom.

If that is indeed the case, it is sincerely to be hoped for their sakes that they will be basing their case on what the OSA actually says and not on a distorted version of it concocted by The Telegraph, then echoed by like-minded British papers and massively amplified on social media.

In this respect, it is surely significant that Stringer’s Telegraph article highlights the cases of the paper’s secular saint and martyr Lucy Connolly (gaoled for 31 months for inciting racial hatred in the wake of the Southport killings) and also of Livia Tossici-Boult and Adam Smith-Connor (both convicted of breaching buffer zones outside UK abortion clinics). However, not one of these was convicted under the OSA, which, anyway, does not, pace The Telegraph, “pressure platforms into censoring users by removing their content if it is disliked by others, even though it is perfectly legal”.

The suspicion that the paper’s reporting of online regulation in the UK is contributing to seriously distorting the understanding of what such regulation consists of is only heightened by the most recent stage in this saga.

---

 ‘A Secretive Whitehall ‘Spy’ Unit‘

This was sparked off by an article on 31 July headlined ‘Exposed: Labour’s plot to silence migrant hotel critics’. The gist of this was that emails recovered by the above-mentioned House Judiciary Committee as a result of a subpoena to TikTok “regarding the company’s compliance with foreign censorship laws”, showed that civil servants belonging to what the paper called a “secretive Whitehall ‘spy’ unit” had flagged the company’s Trust and Safety Team about certain posts on its platform.

The unit was the National Security and Online Information Team (NSOIT), based in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), and the posts in question were put up during the disturbances following the Southport murders in July 2024 (and thus before the OSA came fully into force): among other things these referred to “two-tier policing” and to asylum seekers as “undocumented fighting age males”.

In the unit’s view, there was a “serious risk of misleading and false claims in relation to this incident fuelling community tensions on a local level and the potential for further physical harm”.  

But the problem with the article is that, however hard it tries, it simply cannot stand up to the claim in its headline that the Government is plotting to “silence migrant hotel critics”, although this is certainly the impression that it strains mightily to give.

So, for example, we are told that “critics” (would these include Telegraph journalists by any chance?) have claimed that the emails “amount to Government censorship of free speech online” and that Congressman Jordan had stated that “Labour ministers had censored posts that were critical of the Government’s policy on asylum”.

The fact that they had done no such thing and that he added what is a clear reference to The Telegraph’s take on the Connolly case (‘Mean tweets get you a longer prison sentence than many violent offences’) serves only to deepen the suspicion that the paper and the politician were playing footsie with this issue for their mutual benefit.

Likewise, Robert Jenrick, who is quoted as telling the Telegraph that “when I called out ‘two-tier Keir’, little did I realise Starmer’s officials were pressurising tech companies to suppress debate about a ‘two-tier’ justice system”. 

To give The Telegraph its due, it does, albeit at the very end of the article, quote a Government spokesman to the effect that, “the Act places no curbs whatsoever on what adults can say and see on the internet – unless it is something that would already be illegal offline. The Government has no role in deciding what actions platforms take on legal content for adults – that is a matter for them, according to their own rules.”

But, ironically, it is by flourishing the full contents of the trophy emails obtained by Jordan (at the paper’s request, perhaps?) that The Telegraph holes its own case below the waterline, since there is nothing in them to support claims of attempted or actual Government censorship of messages posted by “migrant hotel critics”.

What they do contain are simply reminders of the platform’s terms of service and an acknowledgement of its “proactive efforts to support local law enforcement” at a time of increasingly violent protests.

One would have thought that a paper that traditionally prided itself on upholding law and order would have strongly supported measures aimed at calming social tensions and reducing violence on the streets, but obviously that was then and this is now.  

---

Settling Scores

However, the Telegraph has a score to settle here, apart from its newfound beef with the OSA, and that with the NSOIT, which was employed during the pandemic to monitor those espousing ideas and courses of action likely to endanger public health and safety. Or, as the paper inimitably puts it: “The emails have prompted fresh scrutiny of the secretive disinformation team, which was criticised during the pandemic for using the Government’s ‘trusted flagger’ status to report critics of lockdown and child vaccinations.”

Foremost amongst those who criticised the team was, of course, The Telegraph, which, during the pandemic led the right-wing press in desperately attempting to bestow credibility on a veritable clown car of “lockdown libertarians”, anti-vaxxers, anti-school closers, proponents of “herd immunity” and fringe voices of all kinds from and beyond the world of medicine, as repeatedly and tirelessly exposed by Nafeez Ahmed in Byline Times. 

Still, one really shouldn’t be surprised that a paper which behaved so grossly irresponsibly during a nationwide health emergency should be doing exactly the same thing at a time of rising social tension.