Keir Starmer is risking damage to our democracy (Image: Getty)

Britain was on fire over the summer as race riots raged so hot they threatened to burn free speech as collateral damage. In the recent past, social media has been a bulwark against censorship and anti-free speech policies, but if Keir Starmer gets his way, they, too, will be lost to the blaze.

Riots broke out in July after three girls were fatally stabbed and 10 other people, including eight children, were injured in Southport. Disinformation and false news quickly spread on social media regarding the suspect’s identity. This led to widespread race riots across the north of England. The police, along with many social and political elites, including some tech experts, blamed social media companies for the chaos.

In August, fuelled by the popular outrage, Starmer announced that he wants to strengthen the Online Safety Act (OSA), conflating individuals’ social media comments and censoring hate speech. The Act has already been approved in Parliament and sections come into force now and in early 2025.

Before Starmer’s intervention, Free Speech campaigners were already concerned about the approved Act’s definitions of “legal but harmful” speech, “malicious communication” and speech “stirring up hatred.” They now could quite reasonably fear an expansion of the content covered within those categories.

Given the failure of social media companies to accurately police and judge every instance of speech, according to these inflated definitions, they will likely censor by default in fear of the heavy sanctions that could be imposed on them — up to 10 percent of global revenue. This will lead companies to err on the side of caution and censor individual users’ comments, opinions and views on their platforms.

And Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, could also lose some level of independence. Ofcom will issue regulatory codes to manage the OSA’s regulation. These codes are secondary legislation and therefore received very little parliamentary scrutiny. Toby Young, of the Free Speech Union, warns it’s a safe bet Starmer will give the Secretary of State the power to revise these codes, giving the any Government huge influence on online regulation of speech for individual users.

This level of regulation, by which the Government tries to influence how private social media companies censor speech, would set a dangerous precedent. In the future, there might be no distinction between “hate speech” and speech the current or future Government just doesn’t like.

In pursuit of political righteousness, Keir Starmer may just destroy social media. Every topic worth discussing between individual users is divisive and contentious, and it’s for that very reason that we must encourage lively debate online, not silence voices and ideas that could offend someone or stir up conflict. Starmer risks neutering a person’s ability to talk and debate about current issues.

This will not only reduce the likelihood of resolving some of these issues or coming to a common understanding, but it will also detract from the original attractiveness of social media apps like X (formerly Twitter), WhatsApp, Signal, and even Facebook. Individual users unable to talk about even the most vanilla political or social issues without being censored by moderators who have been whipped into a censoring frenzy by the fear of Keir, customers will most likely abandon these platforms entirely, seeking alternatives, even on the black market, where the discourse tends to be even more radical.

Social media companies need to stand up against this overreaching government interference. They should threaten to remove their services from the UK market, much like Signal, which protested against the same bill for undermining encryption, one of its key selling points. Other examples include Apple protecting billions of its users’ privacy from the FBI, bravely standing by its principles of user privacy, and against indelicate government interference.

Starmer’s heavy-handed approach to the challenge of social media misinformation poses a serious threat to freedom of expression of individual users and the very survival of many social media companies. Many of these social media companies that see freedom of expression as one of their key values need to protest this regulation as a matter of principle and for their very survival.