Tell your MP to attend the debate on the Online Safety Act

Over 550,000 people have petitioned Parliament to repeal the Online Safety Act (OSA), making it one of the largest public expressions of concern about a UK digital law in recent history. An even greater number of people would support reform of the Act.

Parliament will debate this critical issue on 15th of December 2025. It's time to make them understand what is at stake.

The Online Safety Act will always be limited in its ability to tackle online harms, because it focuses on removing illegal and harmful content rather than tackling the underlying economic and structural dominance of major platforms.

It leaves the monopolistic business models, algorithmic prioritisation, and lack of interoperability which drive misinformation, polarisation, and loss of user control, largely untouched.

Instead, it has enabled a wave of questionable age-assurance providers, restricted free expression by wrongly censoring lawful content, and made it harder for communities to run their own small websites.

Write to your MP to tell them to attend the debate and why it is important for you.

It's time to speak up before it's too late!

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I'm writing to urge you to attend the critical debate on the Online Safety Act taking place on December 15th.

This matters enormously to me and to the 550,000 people who have petitioned Parliament to repeal the act. Likely an even greater number would support reforming the act. It’s important these concerns are heard are in Parliament.

These are my concerns:

1) We are being forced to use unregulated age verification for all sorts of content

The OSA does not define when age verification is genuinely required. This gap is already leading to over-use of intrusive age checks for ordinary site features and legal content unrelated to pornography.¹

In addition, the OSA does not define the minimum privacy or security safeguards that age verification providers must apply and users are not given a choice over age assurance methods. This means that we are forced to use unregulated age verification providers and hope that they comply with data protection law. This is very concerning, particularly as the ICO has a poor track record of enforcing the data protection laws we already have. 
       
2) Content that is perfectly lawful and not harmful to children is getting wrongly flagged due the act.

The OSA’s structure encourages platforms to pro-actively remove content “just in case,” and most moderation is automated. The are strict fines for non-compliance and only a weakly worded duty to ‘have particular regard to freedom of expression’.  This results in legitimate speech being taken down and prior restraint censorship of content before it is published. AI-based moderation is error-prone, biased, and lacks transparency. Some MPs share these concerns with an EDM being tabled on the issue.²
       
3) The act is hurting small community websites and projects
Global platforms might be able to cope with the OSA's requirements. But the same rules also apply to small businesses, community forums, open-source projects, federated platforms (eg, Mastodon instances) and public-interest services like Wikipedia.

Many cannot meet the Act’s compliance demands, especially around risk assessments, moderation requirements, and age assurance. The result is predictable: they geoblock UK users or shut down entirely. Wikimedia has warned it might have to introduce a cap on UK users if forced to comply with regulations designed for large social media platforms³

The Act in its current form is not only failing to prevent children accessing inappropriate content online, but it’s impacting our free speech and privacy.

As your constituent, I'd like you to attend the debate on December 15th and engage with Open Rights Group on this critical issue. They have published a briefing on the issues with the Online Safety Act that I encourage you to read here: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/briefing-online-safety-act-parliamentary-petition-debate/.

(1) Some Gaza and Ukraine posts blocked under new age checks’ BBC News August 2025 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj3l0e4vr0ko
(2) Oversight of automated moderation by social media companies - EDM (Early Day Motion) 1858 - https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/64262
(3) Wikipedia threatens to limit UK access to website
 - Telegraph, July 2025 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/07/23/wikipedia-threatens-limit-access-website-britain/

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