Despite no doubt good intentions, Liberal Reform’s recent piece on Lib Dem Voice seems to treat child protection online as an abstract policy preference. The evidence reveals something far more urgent. By age 11, 27% of children have already been exposed to pornography, with the average age of first exposure at just 13. Twitter (X) alone accounts for 41% of children’s pornography exposure, followed by dedicated sites at 37%.
The consequences are profound and measurable. Research shows that 79% of 18-21 year olds have seen content involving sexual violence before turning 18, and young people aged 16-21 are now more likely to assume that girls expect or enjoy physical aggression during sex. Close to half (47%) of all respondents aged 18-21 had experienced a violent sex act, with girls the most impacted.
When we know that children’s accounts on TikTok are shown harmful content every 39 seconds, with suicide content appearing within 2.6 minutes and eating disorder content within 8 minutes, the question is not whether we should act, but how we can act most effectively.
This is not “micromanaging” people’s rights – this is responding to a public health emergency that is reshaping an entire generation’s understanding of relationships, consent, and self-worth.
Liberal Reform’s abstract arguments about civil liberties need to be set against the voices of bereaved families who fought for the Online Safety Act. The parents of Molly Russell, Frankie Thomas, Olly Stephens, Archie Battersbee, Breck Bednar, and twenty other children who died following exposure to harmful online content did not campaign for theoretical freedoms – they campaigned for their children’s right to life itself.
These families faced years of stonewalling from tech companies who refused to provide basic information about the content their children had viewed before their deaths. The Act now requires platforms to support coroner investigations and provide clear processes for bereaved families to obtain answers. This is not authoritarianism – it is basic accountability
To repeal the Online Safety Act would indeed be a massive own-goal and a win for Elon Musk and the other tech giants who care nothing for our children’s safety. The protections of the Act were too hard won, and are simply too important, to turn our back on.
The conflation of regulating pornographic content with censoring legitimate information is neither accurate nor helpful, but we must remain vigilant against mission creep. As Victoria Collins MP and I have highlighted in our recent letter to the Secretary of State, supporting the Act’s core mission does not mean we should ignore legitimate concerns about its implementation. Parliament must retain its vital role in scrutinising how this legislation is being rolled out to ensure it achieves its intended purpose without unintended consequences.
As we have highlighted, there are significant issues emerging that Parliament must address:
Age Assurance Challenges:
The concern that children may use VPNs to sidestep age verification systems is real, though it should not invalidate the protection provided to the majority who do not circumvent these measures. We need robust oversight to ensure age assurance measures are both effective and proportionate.
Overreach in Content Moderation:
The age-gating of political content and categorisation of educational resources like Wikipedia represents a concerning drift from the Act’s original intent. The legislation was designed to protect children from harmful content, not to restrict access to legitimate political discourse or educational materials. Wikimedia’s legal challenge regarding its categorisation illustrates this. While Wikipedia’s concerns about volunteer safety and editorial integrity are legitimate, their challenge does not oppose the Online Safety Act as a whole, but rather seeks clarity about how its unique structure should be treated under the regulations.
Protecting vulnerable communities:
When important forums dealing with LGBTQ+ rights, sexual health, or other sensitive support topics are inappropriately age-gated, we risk cutting off vital lifelines for young people who need them most. This contradicts the Act’s protective purpose.
Privacy and Data Protection:
While the Act contains explicit privacy safeguards, ongoing vigilance is needed to ensure age assurance systems truly operate on privacy-preserving principles with robust data minimisation and security measures.
The solution to these implementation challenges is not repeal, but proper parliamentary oversight. Parliament needs the opportunity to review the Act’s implementation through post-legislative scrutiny and the chance to examine whether Ofcom is interpreting the legislation in line with its original intent and whether further legislative refinements may be necessary.
A cross-party Committee from both Houses, would provide the essential scrutiny needed to ensure the Act fulfils its central aim of keeping children safe online without unintended consequences.
Fundamentally and importantly, this approach aligns with core liberal principles. John Stuart Mill’s harm principle explicitly recognises that individual liberty must be constrained when it causes harm to others.
Editor’s Note: the text of Tim and Victoria Collins MP is below:
Re: Implementation of the Online Safety Act
Dear Secretary of State,
I am writing to you regarding the ongoing implementation of the Online Safety Act.
My party was fully supportive of the aims of the Act during its passage in 2022 and 2023. We recognised just how vital it is to keep children safe online. For far too long, the online world was a wild west, where children were subject to a torrent of harmful content, from pornography to suicide promotion.
That was wrong, and remains wrong. The threats posed to children’s mental and physical health are very well documented. Protecting children from harm is imperative.
The Act contains vital safeguards against priority illegal content, requiring online platforms to tackle material depicting offences including child sexual abuse, intimate image abuse and sexual exploitation.
For these reasons, to repeal the Online Safety Act would be a massive own-goal and a win for Elon Musk and the other tech giants who care nothing for our children’s safety.
The protections of the Act were too hard won, and are simply too important, to turn our back.
However, there remain significant concerns about how the legislation is currently being implemented, including concerns that:
age-assurance measures may prove ineffective, as children and young people may use
VPNs to sidestep the systems,
political content is being age-gated on social media,
educational sites like Wikipedia will be designated as Category 1 services, requiring
them to age verify moderators,
important forums dealing with LGBTQ+ rights, sexual health or other potentially
sensitive topics have been age-gated, and that
age assurance systems may pose a data protection or privacy threat to users.
The implementation of the Act must be flexible, and respond to these emerging concerns. The intention behind this legislation was never to limit access to political or educational content, or to important support relied on by young people.
It was intended to keep children safe, and we must ensure that it is implemented in a way that does that as effectively as possible.
In light of the above wide-ranging concerns, it is right that MPs have, in the coming weeks and months, the opportunity to review the implementation of the Act, through post-legislative scrutiny.
Parliament needs the chance to look again at the Act’s provisions and review whether further legislative change may be necessary. We need the opportunity and the powers to scrutinise the work of Ofcom in implementing the Act and to ensure that the rollout of the Act fulfils the central policy aims of keeping users, particularly children, safe online.
Will the Government commit to convening a cross-party Committee from both Houses of Parliament to do this vital work?
This moment remains a crucial opportunity to finally tackle the harmful content that has plagued the online world and put children at risk. It is essential that we get this right.
I and my party are willing to work with your Government in this area, but that will require giving Parliament the opportunity and power to properly scrutinise this law and its implementation.
We look forward to your reply.
Kind regards,
Victoria Collins MP
Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology
Lord Clement-Jones
Liberal Democrat Lords Spokesperson for Science, Innovation and Technology
.
* Tim Clement-Jones is Lib Dem Lords DSIT Spokesperson and former member of the Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill
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22 Comments
I have several concerns about the Online Safety Act, the most obvious being that it will be ineffective. You might say “so what?” – protecting children from extreme content is a noble aim, but it allows the Government to pretend that the problem of children accessing pornography has been dealt with when it hasn’t. Curious children will still find it trivially easy to view pornography via various methods, and I doubt that it will ever be possible to stop them by blocking access, without introducing some very draconian restrictions on internet access in the UK.
I know some opponents say that parental supervision is the answer, but the nature of the modern world is that most children will always be more tech-savvy than most parents, so that’s unlikely to work either. That leaves mitigating the effect of exposure to pornography with better sex and relationship education.
But the concerns around “mission creep” are real when we’ve seen the Government only too ready to stretch the definition of ‘terrorism’ to tackle inconvenient protestors causing criminal damage, as are concerns around sensitive data loss from the verification process.
Well said Tim. The opponents of this act offer no alternatives. Post legislative scrutiny and a government that listens and acts to sort out problems identified is what’s needed.
It’s one of those – we must be seen to be doing something – even if that something turns out to be worthless up to a degree.
Typical labour , another piece of legislation they’ve brought out that loses credibility from day one. That’s what you get with state middle management types. Put them in an SME and they’d crumble
@ Greg Norman. “Typical Labour”.
The Act was passed in 2023, Mr Norman. The Labour Party won the election in July, 2024.
Its clear many of us have learnt nothing from the post office horizon scandal and want MORE of our data in the hands of big tech – then claim this is a victory against them….???
How can they all be so obtuse?
Respectfully disagree. Quite aside from the fact that it simply doesn’t work (& never will – VPNs are just one of many options that exist today, let alone whatever comes next), banning things should be very much the last resort for Liberals. This feels rather like Prohibition in the US; a bad idea that made a problem far, far worse.
The Liberal answer in situations like this isn’t to try to wish (or legislate) things away but rather to address concerns about (potential) harm through education.
Let’s not take the same knee jerk approach as the authoritarian parties (Con & Lab) but set out our distinctive Liberal position instead.
While agreeing with the first part of Dominic’s post in general, I would simply point out that
The Liberal knee jerk answer in so many situations like this isn’t to try to wish (or legislate) things away but rather to wish they could address every problem through education.
Sadly, as we all know, Education is inevitably a long term solution at best and fails quite often for too many and in the meantime the problem will not go away and could get worse.
It’s not Big Tech that stands to lose out the most from overbroad tech regulation. The Big Tech companies can afford all the stuff they need to adapt — the technology and the armies of lawyers on the payroll. They may have to modify their business models and may well do so kicking and screaming in public, but they’ll be just fine. (The way they adapt will, of course, be in their interests and not those of the public.) It’s small-scale operators and non-profits that will go to the wall with the extra costs involved.
I wonder if the best approach to stopping children accessing pornography is simply to block the wave of free pornography that is available. Kate Lister in the i newspaper makes the following comments:
“Free sites are hugely popular, not only because they are free, but because they do not require a user’s credit card details, making users virtually anonymous.”
“Rather than forcing everyone to upload private information in order to access social media, we could openly and honestly talk about viewing adult content and the benefits of paying for it, instead of turning to the plethora of free smut the internet has to offer.”
Requiring a credit card payment to view porn would certainly deter most children, although one can imagine some parents allowing their children to use their credit cards for this purpose.
One of the impressive things over recent years is the development of a consistent Lib Dem brand and messaging to appeal to and win over the votes of moderate centrists in tory facing seats in the south of England. TCJ deserves praise for his constency with that goal.
The need to act was clear. This may only be a start but it sets the scene for future action
I agree that education is the only way to improve drastically but public condemnation of violence from authorities and individuals is crucial.
Respectfully disagree. The law needs scrapping. It won’t do a thing to help Children and will only put more adults at risk.
This law breaks the internet, completely destroys people’s online privacy, kills independent websites, wrecks accessibility, trains users to use tools that will bypass government blocks of genuinely illegal content, and offers less protection to children than the tools that are already freely available from every major ISP.
I am not fool enough to believe for one minute that this crude legislation will in anyway protect my children from the challenges in navigating how technology has changed human interactions. The only way that I can help is by careful parenting and educating them how to make good choices. I also know from experience that limits and blocks are not very effective and that kids are very good at circumventing my attempts to control what they do and see online. So it will always come back to the very difficult task of educating my children about the risks and dangers that come with technology, which is just another aspect of adulting.
In short, there isn’t a simple solution in legislation, you cannot rely on the state to fix things for you. Rather it is just the rather boring, difficult and messy work of bringing up children.
“something must be done;
this is something;
this must be done!”
Come on all you grouses. What alternate do you propose?As Fidel once said, “when you issue a revolutionary statement from the barricades it all looks easy from afar. It is far more difficult making the revolution from the seat of power”
Please stop telling us what is wrong. Tell us how you will protect our children and grandchildren from the sordid depths of the internet.
@Mick Taylor: The onus is on the proponents of mandatory age verification on the Internet to explain how it will protect children from “the sordid depths of the internet” without also “protecting” people from other innocuous content or giving too much data to (probably foreign-hosted) third-party verification services. Not on opponents to suggest an alternative.
Online age verification is unworkable; it will not achieve its stated aims; it will put innocuous websites behind the age-verification gate because an AI system made a wrong decision about either the site or the user; it will create a new data harvesting industry; it will entrench existing tech monopolies because only they will be able to afford the technology to do all the checking required. If we ever want to see a real competitor to Facebook or X, then we should not be doing this. As I wrote earlier, Big Tech may be publicly opposing this sort of regulation but it will manage fine in the new environment; the problem is that very few other players will.
Well said Tim. The framing of this as a public health issue is absolutely right. The tech owners seem to prefer to do nothing and monetise whatever content they are able to – no matter the consequences to children in particular.
Glad to see a defence of this from inside the party. The reality is that many parents are completely oblivious to the dangers of the internet, so this acting as a first line of defence has value.
The primary benefit is the public discussion now being had, which hopefully focuses minds on the dangers and makes more parents aware of what they can and should be doing at home to keep their children safe. My personal view is that the right of adults to access pornography unidentified, does not balance favourably with the need to keep children safe.
Thank you Tim. I’m so sorry that so many of the responses to your post have expressed concern about civil liberties but no concern about the wellbeing of women and children.
Thank you Tim for your article on this issue.
The nature of this piece of legislation is that it’ll inevitably be something of a work in progress, as the technology changes moment by moment.
The intention was not to introduce a law that was full proof & covered every base, but to start a very very overdue process of intervening to prevent the hideous damage to children…
I see it as a reasonable start, with enhancements to follow…
Mick Taylor
Interesting you assume the default is government restriction and other need to justify not having government restrict activity. Ambiguity is the tool of the tyrant.
Firstly if there is a need to improve court or law enforcement communications with a website then it needs to be clear and simple and not stuck in a messy bill with weird justifications.
Effective communication between UK and foreign websites should be simple and transparent and not require a lengthy act. It needs to be simple and useable for those needing to rely upon the law not add friction for those who need to use it.
For the “protecting” element. Those being protected should be clear. Are all under 18s being treated as a child, or are there levels such as do we restrict more for under 11, under 16 and under 18? We do this in law more generally but “safetyism” has been compressing this, assuming children are suddenly less capable than previous generations.
If we want to stop children from accessing porn and self-harm content then be specific that those are the only intended purposes. The very expansive list that is included in guidance documents is very woolly.
The focus should be on UK ISPs, with a default password provided not applying a utility regulation model.
Mick Taylor,
I’m addressing this to you directly.
As a Cyber Security Consultant, I can say with confidence that the Online Safety Act is fundamentally flawed. Anyone with even a basic technical understanding can see that it is ineffective at its stated goals, dangerous for children in practice, and creates a clear path towards authoritarian overreach.
A far more effective and proportionate approach would be to require Internet Service Providers to have parental controls enabled by default, combined with stronger public awareness and education campaigns to ensure parents know how to set and manage these controls in the home.
This would target the real issue — protecting children — without exposing the entire UK population to unnecessary surveillance, data collection, and erosion of digital rights.