In recent months, the internet as we know it has started to change — and not for the better. In the UK, the Online Safety Act (OSA) has passed into law under the guise of protecting users, especially children, from so-called “harmful” content. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find that the law poses a serious threat to freedom of expression, online creativity, digital privacy, and the very structure of a free internet.
Who Gets to Decide What’s “Safe”?
The OSA mandates broad and invasive age-verification requirements, including government ID checks or even biometric facial scans. On paper, these measures are meant to shield minors from adult content. But who decides what qualifies as “adult” or “harmful”? In practice, the definitions are vague and overly broad — encompassing everything from explicit material to complex discussions of real-world trauma, such as those shared by our clients at The Book Whisperers.
We help people tell their truths — stories of abuse, violation, and survival. These aren’t light topics, but they are real and necessary. Should they be censored because they don’t conform to someone else’s definition of “safe”? We don’t think so.
ID Checks Put You at Risk — Seriously
Requiring users to upload personal identification or facial scans just to browse a website is not only invasive — it’s dangerous. These systems create massive databases of sensitive personal information, and no database is truly secure. As recent breaches have shown, even tech giants like Apple, Facebook, and Google aren’t immune. Just last month, 1.6 billion passwords were leaked in a major data dump (Forbes, June 2025).
If companies of that scale can’t protect your information, how can we expect smaller sites — or third-party age-verification vendors — to do better? Submitting your ID online is a high-stakes gamble, opening the door to identity theft, phishing attacks, fraud, and long-term privacy loss. Most experienced internet users will tell you: never upload your ID online unless you absolutely must. The OSA demands you do it just to read or post on many websites.
That’s not safety — that’s surveillance.
And there’s a new layer of danger: deepfakes. Thanks to advances in AI, it now takes just a few facial images — the kind uploaded for age-verification scans — to digitally replicate someone’s likeness. Bad actors can use these to spoof your face, commit fraud, or impersonate you online without your consent. As reported by the BBC, deepfakes are on the rise and increasingly accessible to the public (BBC Newsround, July 2025).
By handing over your facial data, you’re not just proving your age — you could be giving someone the keys to your digital identity.
A Law That Favors the Big Players
Big Tech platforms can afford to implement high-end age-verification systems and legal teams to stay compliant. But smaller forums, niche communities, and independent publishers often cannot. As a result, many are either closing their doors to UK users or shutting down altogether.
Even non-adult spaces like ours — which support writers aged 16 and up — risk being swept into this dragnet. If we’re forced to label content as “potentially harmful” simply because it talks about real-life experiences like abuse, loss, or trauma, we may be required to impose the same intrusive barriers that would be applied to adult entertainment.
That is not proportionate. It’s silencing.
This isn’t just regulatory overreach — it’s a recipe for corporate consolidation. Only the biggest, richest platforms survive, while grassroots voices are driven offline under the pretense of “protection.”
The Free Internet Is Under Threat
And this doesn’t stop with the UK. Similar bills are being proposed around the world, with the same patronizing logic: that governments — not users — should decide what’s safe to view. But the internet was never designed to be a sanitized, top-down experience. It was built to be a global forum of ideas — imperfect, messy, challenging, but essential to democracy and human rights.
Parliament Isn’t Listening — Yet
A petition demanding the repeal of the OSA has gained over 360,000 signatures, far surpassing the threshold to force a parliamentary response. But as of July 28, 2025, the UK Government has stated it has no intention of repealing the law.
That answer is unacceptable.
Parliament must consider that this law goes far beyond protecting children. It is eroding online civil society to avoid tackling bad actors directly. That is not justice — that is cowardice.
What Can You Do?
If you care about freedom of speech, digital safety, and protecting the internet for future generations, now is the time to act.
📣 Share this article with friends, family, and colleagues.
🖊️ Sign the petition if you haven’t already.
📬 Contact your MP and demand proportionate, privacy-respecting reform.
🧠 Educate others about the dangers of digital overreach and mass surveillance.
💬 Speak out online while you still can — your voice matters.
We cannot allow fear to be weaponized into control.
We cannot allow freedom to be traded for false security.
We cannot allow governments to become gatekeepers of thought.
The internet belongs to all of us — let’s keep it that way.
— The Book Whisperers