Nigel Farage Wants to Kill Online Safety Law and Critics Say It Puts Kids in Danger

Nigel Farage has confirmed that he would scrap the Online Safety Act if Reform UK came to power, calling it a disaster for free speech. Reform UK’s chairman Zia Yusuf didn’t hold back, labelling the new law “the greatest assault on freedom of speech in our lifetimes”.

According to Yusuf, the legislation has already caused a spike in VPN downloads as people try to get around the restrictions, and he warned it’s actually pushing young people into riskier corners of the internet, including the dark web.

He argued that the Online Safety Act creates a “perverse set of incentives” by threatening hefty fines and even jail time for social media bosses if their platforms don’t follow the new rules. It’s this kind of pressure, he says, that’s making things worse rather than better, reported the Express.

“We’ve seen a few things. VPN providers are publishing their stats, increases in signups in the UK up thousands of per cent, evidence by the way that 13, 14, 15-year-olds know far more about how the internet works than the dinosaurs that drafted this legislation and voted it through,” Yusuf said.

He also claimed that online censorship is already becoming visible, pointing to what he described as suppression of posts about a protest in Leeds against illegal immigration. According to him, even platforms like X, formerly Twitter, which he says still fights to protect free speech, are being pressured.

Yusuf went on to mention a newly established police unit monitoring online content, especially related to immigration. “This elite police force has been set up to ‘monitor anti-migrant sentiment’, so I use the word dystopia advisedly,” he said. “If you look through history, the way countries slip into this sort of authoritarian regime it is through legislation that cloaks tyranny inside the warm fuzz of safety and security and hope nobody reads the small print. Well, we have read the small print.”

He said a Reform UK government led by Farage would scrap the Act in full. When asked what he would put in place instead, Farage admitted the goal of protecting children online was valid, but insisted the current approach was backfiring.

“Of course we want to find a way of protecting young people from not getting hold of harmful or dangerous content,” he said, “but if a result of what we’ve seen over the weekend is driving people off towards VPNs, potentially towards the dark web, we might find young people accessing even more dangerous content than they were before this legislation came in.”

He added: “Our belief is that those that drafted this act genuinely didn’t understand how the tech world works and have produced something with the very best of intentions but the result of which, frankly, does lead us towards a very dystopian place.”

Labour, unsurprisingly, hit back hard. A party spokesperson warned that scrapping the law would be reckless and would leave children exposed to damaging online material. “Farage would give children access to material on suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography. He is simply not serious,” they said. “Reform offers anger but no answers.”