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News - 18 August 2025

Online Safety Act is blocking negative headlines about Labour on X

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The Canary

@the_canary


Many people have criticised the Online Safety Act for its potential to block information which may be harmful to the government. If you’re one of the people who worried that might happen, you can stop worrying, because it’s already happening:

Tweet from the X account ARTIST TAXI DRIVER with the screengrabbed blocked because age verification isn't turned on. His tweet reads: 'Has a single journalist at the BBC asked… Why is Yvette Cooper why are the British Government protecting Israeli arms factories building weapons of genocide in the UK?'

Wondering what the obscured headline was? If the government had its way, we suspect many of you would have to carry on wondering.

Government overreach via the Online Safety Act

Canary writer Steve Topple recently summed up the Online Safety act, describing it as “another corrupt piece of political theatre that benefits big tech”. Going deeper, he explained:

While the Online Safety Act was sold as a child‑safety milestone, critics argue it’s structurally incapable of delivering that outcome. Campaigners from organisations including Barnardo’s, the Molly Rose Foundation and CARE UK warn that loopholes around algorithmic recommendations, autoplay, live‑streaming, and age verification mean the legislation “will not bring about the changes that children need and deserve”. Rather than curtail harmful exposure, the law risks becoming symbolic rather than effective.

Since enforcement began on 25 July, age verification—via ID scans, facial estimation, or mobile verification—has triggered over five million age checks per day, mostly on porn sites. But this in turn has driven a rapid surge in VPN downloads as users seek to bypass access controls, shifting minors toward less‑regulated parts of the internet and raising their exposure to greater harms rather than reducing it.

The Online Safety Act 2023 received Royal Assent under the previous Tory government. On July 25 this year, online platforms’ “legal duty to protect children online” came into force. Despite this being Tory legislation which is wholly incapable of delivering its intended goals, our current Labour government is backing it to the hilt:

Labour’s support of the Online Safety Act puts them to the right of even some centrist groups like the Liberal Democrat pressure group Liberal Reform, which also pointed out several more issues with the act:

 

How many parents in this country feel like their children need protecting from Wikipedia? While we’re still waiting for the polling to come back, we’re guessing the number of concerned parents is somewhere between zero and negative seven million.

Labour’s support of the act is somehow also putting them at odds with the Tories who created the Online Safety Act:

It’s almost as if these Tories will do or say anything to get positive attention, although the polls suggest their ploy isn’t working:

This poll isn’t great for Labour either, as Stats for Lefties explained:

“One small scandal away”, eh? It’s no wonder Labour would potentially want to hide negative headlines.

Speaking of which.

So what was the hidden headline?

So here it is:

The same tweet as earlier from ARTIST TAX DRIVER. The BBC headline reads 'Cooper defends Palestine Action ban again as 60 more face charges'

You were possibly expecting that the article came from a more radical outlet, but no, it was from the BBC. So why did it get filtered out?

As Evolve Politics noted, the Online Safety Act immediately began benefitting Israel and its ongoing genocide:

The BBC headline didn’t mention Israel, but it did mention Palestine Action – a group which exists to oppose Israel’s illegal of Palestine. Importantly, our current Labour government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. This was controversial for many reasons, as we’ve previously reported:

a damning Declassified UK report shows the Labour government’s own advisers told it Palestine Action didn’t pose a clear violent threat. Yet amid pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists, who have significant influence on Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, the state opted to ban the group anyway. This unprecedented crackdown came amid ongoing UK support for the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza.

Staying on topic, we can guess that X censored this image because it referenced a terrorist organisation (X infamously began responding to journalists with a poop emoji in 2023, so we’ve not sought confirmation). If that is the case, is that good? What happens if your child is in a major UK city and there’s a terrorist attack; do you still want such messages hidden then? It’s yet another instance in which the people who created this act clearly didn’t think things through.

Well that’s convenient

Regardless of why X blocked this particular screengrab, the fact is the site blocked a headline which was negative of the government. Let’s be real, if a human being is of reading age, they’re old enough to learn that this government cannot be trusted. And everything else aside, we already had a way to protect children from the toilet that is Elon Musk’s X; it’s called ‘never allowing your children to go on the toilet that is Elon Musk’s X’.

Featured image via Number 10 (Flickr) – image cropped





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