The UK’s Online Safety Act: A Lesson in Technosolutionism
The United Kingdom has just delivered the world’s most expensive demonstration of why throwing technology at social problems doesn’t work. After two years of ignoring expert advice and billions in compliance costs, the UK’s Online Safety Act has achieved the opposite of its stated goal by making the internet less safe.
Six months into enforcement, Britain’s techno-solutionist fantasy has crashed into reality with predictable results. Beneficial online communities have been obliterated, VPN adoption has surged 1,400%, and the UK has created a perfect case study for why governments can’t regulate away complex social problems with algorithmic band-aids and surveillance theater.
If you wanted to design legislation to eliminate the internet’s safest spaces for vulnerable people, you couldn’t improve on the UK’s approach. The Act’s most spectacular own-goal has been systematically destroying community-run websites that provided genuine social support.
Consider Microcosm’s 300 community websites serving 275,000 monthly users. These weren’t dark corners of the internet. They were cycling forums, parenting advice sites, and local community hubs where people actually knew each other. Dee Kitchen, who ran these communities for nearly three decades, captured the government’s logic perfectly: “It’s too vague and too broad and I don’t want to take that personal risk.”
The community websites closed specifically because age verification would destroy the trust and openness that made them safe spaces. As site administrators noted: “The impact that these forums have had on the lives of so many cannot be understated… approximately 28 years and 9 months of providing almost 500 forums in total to what is likely a half a million people.”
Meanwhile, harmful content on major platforms continues largely unabated. Tech giants with billion-dollar compliance budgets simply absorb fines as operating costs. TikTok’s £1.875 million penalty represents roughly 0.01% of ByteDance’s $155 billion annual revenue, making it count less than a virtual parking ticket.
Perhaps the crown jewel of the UK’s techno-solutionist delusion is demanding “safe” encryption backdoors. Despite government admission that the necessary technology “does not yet exist,” officials refused to let inconsequential details like reality or mathematics interfere with their mandates.
Ciaran Martin, who founded the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, called out this “magical thinking”, essentially the belief that encryption can be weakened for government access while remaining strong against everyone else. This isn’t a technical challenge; it’s a fundamental impossibility as the Global Encryption Coalition noted.
Even the tech industry’s response was swift and unified. Signal, WhatsApp, and Apple essentially told the UK government to choose between secure communications and backdoors. Instead of magically solving encryption, the UK triggered a 1,400% surge in VPN adoption as users decided to route around the government’s technical incompetence rather than submit to it.
In other failures, within days of enforcement, automated systems were treating Conservative MP posts about grooming gangs, police arrest footage, and parliamentary speeches exactly like genuinely harmful content. This wasn’t a bug, it’s the inevitable result of the futility of trying to teach machines to understand human context, intent, and meaning.
When platforms face £18 million fines for missing harmful content, they predictably err toward censoring everything that might possibly be problematic, including discussions of the very problems they’re supposed to solve.
The meta-censorship problem showcases the system’s absurdity: documentation of censored content gets censored, creating a feedback loop where evidence of the system’s failures becomes impossible to discuss publicly. It’s compliance theater at its finest. It is visible enough to inconvenience ordinary users, yet ineffective enough to let determined bad actors adapt around it.
This reveals the UK’s techno-solutionism’s true beneficiaries: tech giants who can afford compliance theater while their smaller competitors get regulated out of existence. Meta and Google can absorb billions in compliance costs; community forums run by volunteers cannot.
he threshold-based requirements create what researchers call ‘vastly disproportionate compliance incentives’, which is academic speak for “we’ve built a regulatory country club and labeled it child safety.” The UK has essentially using child safety as cover for the largest anti-competitive regulation in internet history, with the result being an internet that’s simultaneously less safe and less accessible.
Not to be outdone, the European Union watched the UK’s comprehensive failure and decided to ask them to hold their beer. The EU is implementing almost identical age verification systems that require Big Tech technology as a key dependency while pursuing deeply unpopular “chat control” legislation that is planned be adopted by October 2025.
Despite Poland’s EU Presidency giving up on voluntary chat scanning, the fundamental legislative momentum continues unchanged. European policymakers have learned nothing from watching their neighbours systematically destroy beneficial online communities while failing to protect children. They’re implementing the same impossible technical requirements, ignoring the same expert warnings, and expecting different results.
The UK’s experiment has produced one unambiguously successful outcome: the largest grassroots digital rights movement in British history. Over 290,000 citizens have signed petitions demanding repeal, which is impressive political engagement for any cause, let alone internet infrastructure policy.
Proton VPN reported that 1,400% increase in UK signups within hours of enforcement, noting this was “sustained and significantly higher than when France lost access to adult content.” Multiple VPN providers reported similar surges, with privacy apps dominating UK App Store charts for weeks.
The circumvention became so widespread that Ofcom demanded platforms prohibit content encouraging VPN use, creating a perfectly Orwellian situation where discussing privacy tools becomes prohibited speech under legislation supposedly designed to protect online safety.
The UK’s experiment inadvertently provided a perfect demonstration of what makes the internet genuinely safer: community-based moderation, user empowerment, and addressing real-world social problems that manifest online.
The forums destroyed by the Act had operated safely for decades through transparent governance, engaged user communities, and voluntary compliance with clear standards. These spaces worked because they created genuine human relationships where inappropriate content was quickly identified and addressed by people who actually cared about the community’s wellbeing.
Technical mandates destroy these approaches by replacing human judgment and community accountability with automated systems that users cannot understand, appeal, or improve. When algorithms make moderation decisions, users lose agency over their own spaces, communities lose the ability to set their own standards, and the social dynamics that create genuine safety disappear.
This expensive UK experiment offers the world a choice: learn from their mistakes or repeat them at even greater scale. The evidence is overwhelming that age verification systems, encryption backdoors, and automated content moderation create more problems than they solve while systematically destroying community-based approaches that actually work.
The lesson is clear but politically inconvenient: protecting people online often begins offline, and requires addressing factors like social isolation, inadequate education, economic inequality, and lack of community support. Online factors can also help, but those require giving users agency to manage their own communities, and investing in digital literacy. Unfortunately these solutions involve long-term investment in unglamorous things like schools, social services, and community programs, not exciting technology mandates that primarily serve our big tech overlords.
#digitalRights #internetStandards #publicInterest #rant #regulation
