The Online Safety Act is a minefield for the next generation of voters

It’s a complicated time to be a 16-year-old. On 17^th July, Labour announced a plan to lower the voting age by the next general election, with Keir Starmer saying that teenagers who are old enough to work and pay taxes have a right to have a say over how that money is spent. So far, so good. Until…

A week later, the Online Safety Act came into force, promising to (amongst other things, like hiding content that encourages self-harm and eating disorders) protect under-18s from extreme pornography, content that incites violence, and terrorism.

This all comes directly after Palestine Action – an organisation with significant support from young people – was proscribed, on 23^rd June, as a terrorist organisation, meaning that any content seen to be in support of the group risks being hidden behind an age gate or classed as a criminal offence.

The combination of these three pieces of legislation sends a mixed message to young voters. On one hand, you’re allowed to work, serve in conflicts and vote. On the other, visiting a Reddit page like r/​UkrainianConflict, r/​IsraelExposed, r/​AlJazeera or seeing footage of a man in Gaza looking for the bodies of his family amongst rubble have been deemed too risky to access.

Under the Online Safety Act, platforms have been given the responsibility of moderating their own content and must establish with ​“high confidence” that users are over 18 when accessing a wide category of ​“sensitive” content, even when that content is lawful.

But in a statement released on 1^st August, X warned that the tight timetable to meet these new measures risks ​“encouraging over-censorship” in order to avoid fines, which could reach up to £18 million. This is coming from a platform run by Elon Musk, a so-called ​“free speech absolutist” who allegedly censored democratic voices while amplifying right wing accounts during the 2024 US election.

With so much money at stake, there’s a risk that platforms will err too much on the side of caution, sweeping lawful content behind an age gate in a rush to avoid exposing minors to ​“terrorism content” – for example, inviting support for, expressing an opinion supportive of, arranging a meeting for, or publishing an image of uniforms or emblems of a proscribed organisation.

Historically, social media sites like Facebook and Instagram have, at times, censored content around Gaza, with Human Rights Watch reporting that between October and November 2023, they saw 1,049 cases of peaceful content in support of Palestine ​“censored or otherwise unduly suppressed”. Last year, 200 Meta employees signed an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, expressing frustration at the censorship of Palestinian voices both internally and externally on Meta’s platforms.

The letter resulted in a demand from Senator Elizabeth Warren for more information around the allegation and a further investigation from the BBC that found that ​“newsrooms in the Palestinian territories had suffered a steep drop in audience engagement [on Facebook] since October 2023”.

Responding to the investigation, a Meta spokesperson told the BBC that the company had faced a challenge balancing the right to freedom of speech: ​“We acknowledge we make mistakes, but any implication that we deliberately suppress a particular voice is unequivocally false”. The BBC also spoke to five former and current (at the time of writing) Meta employees, with one sharing leaked internal documents about a change made to Instagram’s algorithm, which toughened the moderation of Palestinians commenting on Instagram posts.

The Online Safety Act risks making this exact kind of censorship worse. In another open letter, this time addressed to Ofcom, Meta, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), X and ByteDance, democracy watchdogs such as Open Rights Group, Index on Censorship and academics like Dr Bernard Keenan (a lecturer in the Faculty of Laws at UCL) have called on the letter’s addressees to provide clearer guidelines: both to distinguish between lawful protest and content that could be deemed as encouraging terrorism.

The onus, then, would be on tech companies to take down content as they see fit. ​“No matter your age, the Online Safety Act will restrict the content available to you online,” says Sara Chitseko, the Programme Manager at Open Rights Group. ​“Adults are being forced to hand over information to unregulated age verification providers in order to get the uncensored version of social media apps such as X, Reddit and Bluesky.”

The use of automated censorship raises other concerns. ​“If the court upholds the Home Secretary’s decision [on Palestine Action’s proscription], platforms will be strongly incentivised to remove any content that risks being deemed ​‘illegal’”, says UCL’s Dr. Keenan. ​“That will result in over-censorship of political content supportive of Palestine [because] it is cheaper to automate content moderation. But automated tools lack the capacity to form nuanced understanding of the difference between, for instance, ​‘support for a group’ and ​‘criticism of proscription of a group.’”

Ultimately, profit is a large part of what drives social media platforms, and if employing human moderators becomes too costly, it’s plausible that companies like Meta will turn to a mix of humans and algorithms to manage their age-gating instead.

For Sik, a 17-year-old from London, the Online Safety Act is more than frustrating. ​“It feels strange to be handed the ability to vote, but being restricted from the information needed to decide who to vote for,” they say. ​“Blocking protest footage and information about humanitarian crises and genocides while asking us to blindly trust the government on foreign policy, feels deeply counterintuitive.”

As a trans teen, Sik is already experiencing the effect of the Online Safety Act’s overreach, with subreddits like r/​TransDIY hidden behind an age gate. ​“Around 31 per cent of trans people in London rely on DIY gender-affirming care and almost all trans people rely on the Internet for mental and physical healthcare, many of whom are under 18,” they explain.

“When the Online Safety Act restricted access to trans healthcare info, it was the first time it directly impeded on my life. Restricting access to queer internet spaces takes away one of the only sources of hope and motivation that young queer people have, spaces that show us things can get better.”

For a new generation – a new age – of voters, having all the facts to hand is imperative. But the Online Safety Act’s vagueness risks overreach. Factually informative content around protests and conflict, risk being swept up under the act, and swept under the rug.

Labour is, rightfully, attempting to protect minors. But in doing so, it’s also taking away the full picture from young voters. And those are voters who will have Palestine in the forefront of their minds when they step up to the ballot box for the first time.