Are you feeling any safer yet? Has the Online Safety Act made you feel any less concerned about your children’s welfare in the digital world? It is early days, but I doubt we’ll be witnessing a golden age of online responsibility any time soon. The idea that Ofcom can hold the tech bros and their protector-in-chief President Trump to account increasingly feels like David requesting that Goliath fights fair.
And yet it is progress that on 17 March the act’s duties on illegal content came into effect. Social media companies, search engines and messaging apps are now required to remove illegal content more quickly and to reduce the risk of such content being published on their platforms. Ofcom is threatening to move fast to enforce the rules, which could result in fines of up to £18m or 10 per cent of global revenue (whichever is greatest). In extreme circumstances, executives of offending companies could be jailed. In reality, the regulator will work with offending companies to improve systems. It has taken over three decades of internet usage to get our biggest communicators to do something about illegal content. Imagine: it’s as if The One Show was only now being told to stop showing how-to terror guides.
Legislators have always lagged behind innovators. It took 40 years from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution until the first Factory Act, of 1802, began to legislate to protect workers – particularly children. Even then, the law went largely unenforced for several more decades. But gradually other factory acts came through and what was once a brutal, lawless world became safer. We can only hope the same may come to pass online.
Campaigners are disappointed that tech companies will be assessed on their compliance systems rather than on tangible reduction in harm, ensuring those who wish to make the minimum effort can. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has joined Elon Musk’s X in reducing moderation, admitting it will mean they now “catch less of the bad stuff”.
We’ll have to wait and see whether an Ofcom committee on misinformation, which will meet for the first time next month, has any effect. From the crossbow killer Kyle Clifford – an Andrew Tate fan – to the Southport riots, such content has terrible real-world consequences.
Yet there hangs over the government a tangible terror of doing anything that might antagonise the tech titans at the heart of Trump’s empire, or jeopardise the drive for growth. Both Musk and the US vice-president, JD Vance, have attacked Britain’s record on “free speech” (for which read “unregulated business”). Trump has already threatened the EU with tariffs in response to what he sees as the unfair treatment of US tech firms, after an investigation into X over illegal content and another into Meta over suspected disinformation under the EU’s Digital Services Act – an act very similar to our own. In such a landscape, it seems the next Factory Act for our present Industrial Revolution may be a long time coming.
An almost three-year battle by four BBC newsreaders has concluded just days before it was due to reach industrial tribunal. Martine Croxall, Annita McVeigh, Karin Giannone and Kasia Madera claimed they were victims of age and sex discrimination and lost roles in a “rigged” recruitment process. The BBC, which had denied their claims, has now reached a settlement without admitting liability.
We may never know how much this whole mess has cost. Let’s hope it was less than the £1.3m for the Huw Edwards case, or £3.3m for the Tim Westwood case. Libby Purves once criticised the BBC for double standards in how it treats middle-aged men and women. If those double standards extend to legal costs, it will at least keep the cost down for fee-payers.
Insiders at the BBC’s World Service, who are still reeling after 130 job losses were announced earlier this year, are bracing themselves for yet more pain. The government’s plan to redirect £6bn of aid funding to defence is likely to hit the service, which receives most of its grant from the aid budget. Insiders say no final decisions have been made, but staff are preparing for the worst. The World Service previously received a cash boost in the Autumn Budget amid fears about rising disinformation in countries where the BBC had been forced to reduce its services. If its budget is stripped back, those concerns will only grow.
Across the Atlantic, Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the public-sector broadcaster Voice of America, which he deems “anti-Trump” and “radical”. Voice of America has a similar role to the World Service, broadcasting around the globe – often in countries denied other information from the outside world. It was set up during the Second World War to counteract propaganda in Nazi Germany, and continued to broadcast to countries including China and Iran. But now programming has been replaced with music after an executive order dismantled the federal agency that oversaw it and put almost its entire 1,300 staff on paid leave. In this hard-man world, the president is abandoning this soft-power institution.
[See also: Who let the BBC inside Thames Water?]
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This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age