The Sorry State of Free Speech in Britain
Ahhhh, the United Kingdom.
Land of cricket, The Beatles, William Shakespeare, deep-fried Mars bars, and, these days, turning its corner of the internet into an Orwellian bureaucracy.
Over the past few years, we have watched our government turn the World Wide Web into a tightly-monitored, state-approved parish newsletter.” They vowed, initially, to make our country the “safest place to use the Internet in the world”, a promise to shield toddlers’ eyes from Colombian snuff movies. Today, we see it for what it is - digital totalitarianism. From social media clampdowns, threatening to ban VPNs, to requiring a literal biometric check to gaze upon a mere sideboob.
When did this happen? How did they do it? And, most importantly, why?
I: Biometrics in the Bedroom
These things always happen the same: slowly, then all at once.
Not this time. The UK didn’t wade gently into the pool of online censorship; they strapped on concrete ear-warmers and cannonballed headlong into the deep-end.
It was called the Online Safety Act. Every authoritarian law has a lovely name. Apparently the “Give Us All Your Freedom Act” didn’t test well. Drafted under the Conservatives and passed under Labour in October 2023, this was a comprehensive (but still expanding) list of new laws concerning the British peoples’ use of the internet.
We’ll get to some of the more terrifying ones later, but honestly, at first, some of them sounded alright. Bad laws never arrive twirling their villainous mustaches. For example, in light of the act’s passing, platforms hosting adult material would be legally required to verify the age of any visitor before granting access.
It’s a hard one to argue, particularly if you wish to avoid a stay-order from your local primary school. “Only adults can watch porn.” Fine, who could take issue with that?
To access these platforms, a British adult can no longer just click a box that says “I am over 18” (has anyone in the history of mankind ever been stopped by that?) That era is dead. Instead, users must submit government-issued photo IDs, passports, driver’s licenses, or undergo third-party biometric facial age estimation scans via their webcam.
Yes, you read that correctly. It’s the only website that opens by negging you. To browse the web in the privacy of your own home, you have to look into your webcam and let an AI determine if you’re ravaged enough to look at tits.
This government is asking the law-abiding, erection-nursing adult population of their country to hand over their most sensitive and highly-classified identity documents to random third-party verification companies. If a financial institution gets hacked, they steal your credit card and you get a new one. If an adult-industry verification hub gets breached, hackers don’t just have your password, they have your literal passport, your driver’s license, and a high-resolution biometric mapping of the worst photograph ever taken of a human being: your horny, lonely face at 2am.
Ofcom’s gone from checking TV subtitles to auditing your wank. If these porn sites don’t play ball, Ofcom hands them a bill. Our communications regulator is currently investigating over 90 online services, ranging from 4chan to X,specifically targeting Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot. They are handing out devastating penalties, including a £1 million fine to one adult site operator and an £800,000 fine to the streaming platform Kick for age-check failures. The statutory maximum penalty? A staggering 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue. For a major tech firm, that isn’t a slap on the wrist; that’s corporate execution.
That’s not a fine, that’s a divorce settlement.
II: Digital ID - Have You Got A License for That Life?
And what if you don’t want to watch porn? Yes, you, the one eunuch watching this. What about you? Are you safe?
No, and the fact you’re not tells you everything about this policy. The porn wall is no wall at all; perfect stalking horse for the state’s broader, systematic push to eliminate online anonymity entirely. Porn’s just the pilot scheme..
With the passage of the landmark Data (Use and Access) Act, the UK government has formally built the legal scaffolding for a nationwide Digital ID network. They call it the Digital Verification Services (DVS) “Trust Framework,” (because nothing sinister has ever had the word “Trust” in the title), overseen by a brand-new bureaucratic beast called the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes (OfDIA).
“OfDIA.” Sounds like Swedish flatpack; Assembly required. Surveillance included.
Under this law, the state is creating a statutory register of certified, private digital ID providers decorated with an official government “trust mark.” A “trust mark.” From the government. It’s like Jimmy Savile issuing DBS certificates. The act also establishes a legal “information gateway”, which sounds like somewhere you buy compost. which enables public authorities and government departments to share your personal data directly with these private digital ID ompanies.
They insist that this is “strictly voluntary,” but that’s clearly political code for “voluntary until you want to buy food.” Once the infrastructure is normalised, the transition from voluntary convenience to mandatory access is just a single stroke of a minister’s pen. And if their current actions are anything to go by, don’t think they won’t do it.
III: The Tweet Police
Let’s say you somehow bypass the biometric walls, you get your digital token, and you decide to actually use the internet to express an opinion.
Nope! In Britain, even your sentences come with sentences. Unlike our transatlantic counterparts, our government sees free speech as a serving suggestion. Libertapas.Sending a message that a court deems “grossly offensive”, which is a wonderfully objective legal standard, or “indecent, obscene, or menacing” isn’t just bad etiquette, it is a literal jail sentence. We’ve criminalised being a dickhead. Which as you can imagine is terrible news for me.
If you think this is an exaggeration, here’s just some of the data revealed through Freedom of Information requests. In a single year, across just 37 police forces in England and Wales, 12,183 people were arrested for online comments and electronic communications. To put that into perspective, that means the British state is arresting roughly 33 people a day for things they said down a phone line or typed on a keyboard. If the crime scene doesn’t have an IP address, they’re not interested.
It’s not just about being offensive. You’re not even allowed to be wrong.
