Will Starmer make the Online Safety Act even worse?

Good God, there’s a lot of guff being talked about the Online Safety Act. This was a piece of legislation passed by the previous government to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online’. To free speech advocates like me, that sounded ominous, given that ‘safety’ is always invoked by authoritarian regimes to clamp down on free speech. But after we raised the alarm, the government stripped out the most draconian clauses and put in some protections for freedom of expression, so even though it’s bad, it’s not quite as awful as it could have been.

Step forward Sir Keir Starmer. In the wake of the riots, the PM has dropped heavy hints that his government will toughen up the Act if social media companies, whom he blames for whipping up violence, don’t do more to remove supposedly harmful content from their platforms.