I am an unabashed fan of The Free Press in general and of Nellie Bowles' column TGIF in particular, but I am hardly surprised that, due to the UK's Online Safety Act, her column was put behind an age restriction wall, as have other columns that have appeared in The Free Press and no doubt many other publications.
— Nico Perrino (@NicoPerrino) December 15, 2025
The Online Safety Act was put in place in order to protect vulnerable children from things like pornography and material that promotes self-harm, just as other UK speech-related laws are promoted as necessary to suppress incitement to violence.
That's what they say, but the reality is quite different. These are censorship laws, pure and simple.
The Free Press opposes efforts at online censorship. Such laws are bad for the exchange of ideas, bad for truth-seeking, bad for politics, and bad for independent thought. But we’ve also opposed them because, no matter how much lawmakers swear that they will censor only the most abhorrent material, it never turns out that way.
Sooner or later—and it’s usually sooner—the censors start finding “objectionable” material everywhere they look.
Including, we discovered recently, in The Free Press. Specifically, TGIF, Nellie Bowles’ witty take on the week’s news, is being censored in the UK.
This is because the UK this summer put in force its Online Safety Act, an omnibus law sold to the British public as providing protection for children against pornography, suicide promotion, and similarly dangerous materials. Ofcom (the “Office of Communications”), Britain’s media regulator, summarized the law in a few screenfuls of material, helpfully pointing out that the new law can keep children from seeing content that might promote, say, eating disorders.
Digging a little deeper, the full text of the Online Safety Act runs to roughly 136,000 words, very few of which are about eating disorders, suicide promotion, or porn. While its backers talked incessantly about pornography, the law itself demands that online platforms police broad categories of “abuse,” and a seemingly limitless category of content (a word beloved by bureaucrats) that poses “a material risk of significant harm” to children.
Who gets to decide what constitutes a material risk? The bureaucrats, of course.
And they have apparently concluded that our weekly TGIF column poses harm to children. Not that anyone at Ofcom told us this. Rather, last week, UK visitors to TGIF on the Free Press website encountered a demand that they provide age verification to see the newsletter.
The verification is not just the kind of “yes, I’m over 18” check mark some U.S. sites have used for years. The UK insists on a robust age verification regime, so we are talking about sending a photo (with a computer deciding if you look old enough) or an official government ID, or in some cases verifying your age through banking, credit card, or phone company records.
Oh joy. The government gets to track what you read now.
So what in Nellie's column triggers the censors in the United Kingdom? She wrote about the growing scandal in Minnesota in which Somalis are committing billions of dollars of welfare fraud.
You wouldn't want people to learn that diversity may not, in fact, be our strength. So, it's best to make certain that nobody reads anything that may make them doubt it.
The Online Safety Act adds a layer to the censorship regime in the UK. If the content is not quite objectionable enough to make its publication criminal and get one extradited across the pond, the bureaucrats can at least make it as hard as possible for anybody to read it, and to ensure that anybody who is a minor is unable to read it.
It seemed to fall afoul of “language around groups of people”—in this case, Somali scammers in Minneapolis. Substack helped us untangle what happened, and removed the age-gating on TGIF. But there’s no way they can assure that the filters they are required to install won’t allow this to happen again. Substack would prefer not to have to make these kinds of calls at all. They did not volunteer to be censors. But this is how speech regulation works: It deputizes publishers and technology companies as reluctant enforcers of the censors’ demands. Those publishers effectively have to farm out that responsibility to AI tools. And those tools must pass muster with Ofcom as being sufficiently strict. When in doubt, filter out. So much for TGIF (or for this Substack piece from Free Press contributor Rod Dreher, about attacks on Christianity, which was also censored).
Protecting children from harmful or age-inappropriate content is a difficult task in this age, and no system will ever be watertight. But when a system becomes so broad that random bureaucrats can arbitrarily decide what one can see and what one cannot, it's obviously not just about "protecting children."
It may be possible to devise online safety protocols without massive overreach; for instance, a Texas law to block kids’ access to porn is carefully written to apply to porn sites without grouping the rest of the internet in with them. There are genuinely well-intentioned efforts to counteract the pull of social media on young kids. Unfortunately, though, the general tendency of speech regulation is to expand the work of the censors.
The UK could have created a law that stuck to the basic principles of, say, blocking pornography or providing instructions for suicide. But it did not write such a law. In actuality, the UK created a law that can be used by activists or regulators to shut down inconvenient discussions—even of news events, like the Minneapolis scams—that have little to do with the UK.
In the UK, they have reached a point where people who complain about adults r@ping children are subjected to prison sentences longer than the abusers. Child protection is not the purpose. Shutting people up is.
"We've had free speech here for a very, very long time." -Keir Starmer https://t.co/fd1HV8fHZe pic.twitter.com/D060rKiLdH
— Norm Cruise (@normposter) December 8, 2025
As I wrote earlier today, leftists are appropriating Orwell to push messages that are, in themselves, Orwellian. Animal Farm has been turned into a children's movie that is an anticapitalist screed, and the UK has a bureaucracy named OfCom, which has the same ring as Ingsoc.
LOL the UK government is using 1984 as a instruction manual pic.twitter.com/1nfjSkxwQF
— Emerald Apple (@AI_EmeraldApple) December 8, 2025
The US was moving down this path until Biden and Harris were kicked out of office, and our government was actively funding censorship organizations abroad and referring content to European regulators for censorship.
When the Internet was young, the techno-optimists assumed that it would ensure an active free speech zone that would undermine totalitarian control. As is so often the case, the optimists underestimated the ability of tyrants to adopt new technologies to undermine our freedoms.
The problem is power itself—our Founders understood this and tried to create bulwarks to contain its creep into every aspect of our lives.
It worked for a time, but utopians believe that the only thing that stands between us and nirvana is insufficient power for technocrats. As usual, they are wrong. But also as usual, holding them in check requires eternal vigilance, and too many of us have kept our eyes off the ball.
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