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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”.
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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.