Sites Being Impacted by Online Safety Act

In some ways, the government’s decision to press ahead with its Online Safety Act is admirable. After all, the main reason for introducing the bill in the first place is to try to protect young people as much as possible while they use the internet.

The problem is, the Act is causing some, hopefully, unintended consequences, which is a major issue for the websites that are being impacted.

It is also resulting in things being slightly less safe for some children than the MPs responsible for it might have hoped, which has led to nearly half a million people signing a petition to get it revoked.

What is the Act?

The Online Safety Act was actually introduced back in 2023, but many people are only seeing the impact of it now. The Act introduced a new set of laws that are aimed at making it safer for both children and adults to use the internet. Social media companies and other services have been presented with a set of duties that should, in theory at least, make them act in a more responsible manner when it comes to the safety of users online. This allows them to ensure that their services are not being used illegally, as well as gives them the right to remove illegal content when it appears.

The Act is in place for companies that offer search services, as well as any site that allows a user to post content online, or that gives people a platform to interact with one another. Even if the company that provides such a service is based outside of the United Kingdom, the Act still applies to them if they have anything linked to the UK, such as UK-based users or people in the UK being a target market. It has seen several new criminal offences introduced, which include the following:

• Cyberflashing
• Encouraging self-harm
• Abuse of intimate images
• Sending false information aimed at causing non-trivial harm
• Epilepsy trolling
• Threatening communications

Why it’s Causing Issues

As you might imagine, the aim of the Act is largely considered to be well-meaning. After all, you’ve got to have something wrong with you if you want to allow the sexual abuse of children or the facilitation of suicide. Part of the problem, though, is the fact that the Act doesn’t stop the kind of people that would be involved in such things from doing them, whilst having an impact on otherwise relatively ordinary website usage.

Because pornography is considered to be harmful to children, for example, anyone wanting to watch porn online will now have to prove their age in order to be able to do so.

The worst part of this online safety act is you can’t complain about it without being accused of a porn addict.

— RabToons (@RABtoons) July 26, 2025

Should someone who wants to masturbate really be expected to give their identity over to a website in order to prove their age? If someone wanted to share indecent images of children, they would be doing so on the dark web, not Pornhub.

Small sites with limited users, which do things like let people know ways to commit suicide, could easily slip under the eye of Ofcom, the organisation responsible for enforcing the Act. Meanwhile, sites like Wikipedia have launched legal action against the bill, given that it could fall foul of the toughest of the limits put on websites.

Will it Make a Difference?

Perhaps the biggest issue for the Online Safety Act is the overall feeling that it won’t actually make much of a difference. Young people are significantly more tech-savvy than the ministers putting together the Act.

Many have already discovered the free Virtual Private Networks that will allow them to circumvent any rules put in place by the Act. That alone can cause further unintended consequences. It won’t take long, for example, for criminal sorts to launch free VPNs that can harvest data from the users, even to the point that they can be used for the purpose of bribery.

Then there’s the fact that the Act threatens the privacy of all users, to say nothing of the risk of stopping free speech. Even if the current government believes that they will use it sensibly, what is to stop future governments from using the Act for far more nefarious means? If you send a message on BlueSky criticising the government for its handling of the situation in Gaza, might that be used against you in the future?

There are countless different issues with the Act that haven’t even begun to surface yet, with perhaps the biggest of them being that it doesn’t keep children safe in the manner intended.