Fact check: the US Judiciary Committee and the OSA

This post provides fact checks on some of the claims relating to the Online Safety Act 2023 during the US Judiciary Committee hearing with Nigel Farage on 3 September 2025.

The Committee’s hearing summary included the claim that the Online Safety Act “is a censorship law”

The Online Safety Act is not a censorship law. Section 1 of the Act sets out its purpose: it provides for a “new regulatory framework which has the general purpose of making the use of internet services regulated by this Act safer for individuals in the United Kingdom”. It is a civil regulatory regime and implementation focuses on trying to encourage compliance rather than to penalise non-compliance. Our 12-point guide to what the Act does is here.

In his testimony, Nigel Farage acknowledged that parents were concerned about content seen by their children online but said: “We’re not finding the right solutions .. hardware might be one of the solutions. Laptops and handsets could be programmed so many many apps and services simply aren’t available. What we’ve done is go down the legislative route.”

To impose requirements on manufacturers of laptops and handsets to ban particular apps and services would also require legislation.

Nigel Farage said “The Online Safety Act was put in place by the last Conservative government. I don’t doubt for a moment their good intentions but sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We are now where we are. We have a couple of famous cases”

Farage then referred to the imprisonment of Lucy Connolly and the arrest of Graham Linehan. Neither of these cases are the result of the implementation of the Online Safety Act, as we set out below.

The Lucy Connolly case

Lucy Connolly was arrested and charged with incitement of racial hatred, which is a criminal offence under the Public Order Act 1986, after posting on X that hotels housing asylum seekers should be burnt down. She pled guilty to the offence and was sentenced to jail. Here’s the Crown Prosecution Service’s press statement at the time of her sentencing. The College of Policing notes that all allegations of hatred must be referred to a specialist unit within the CPS and do need the consent of the Attorney General to proceed to court. The CPS general guidance on public order offences specifically refers prosecutors, when making charging decisions, to the need to take into account the right to protest peacefully.

Incitement of hate and other “stirring up” offences are included in the Online Safety Act (Schedule 7) as priority offences under the illegal harms duties. (See below) At the time Connolly was charged, the duties with regard to illegal content were not in force.

Graham Linehan’s arrest
The Met Police have told the media that Linehan’s arrest yesterday (2 September) was under suspicion of inciting violence; a further statement was issued by Met Police Chief Sir Mark Rowley, reported by the BBC here. Linehan has not yet been charged with an offence. As with the Lucy Connolly case, the offence of inciting violence is a Public Order Act offence, not an offence under the Online Safety Act. Users who post online content that may be criminal or illegal can be subject to prosecution, as they would be for similar offences committed offline. Whether they are found guilty or not is a matter for the courts.

As a separate issue, the public order offences are identified as priority offences for the purposes of triggering the Online Safety Act regulatory regime. The regulatory regime puts obligations on social media companies with regard to content that may be associated with certain criminal offences.

The Committee Chair, Jim Jordan, referred to a figure of 12,183 arrests for “offensive posts” in the UK.

This figure, for arrests in 2023, came from a report in the Times in April 2025 based on an analysis of police custody data. The arrests were for offences under the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988, before the Online Safety Act 2023 came into force. The House of Lords Library produced a briefing paper on these findings.

The OSA updated the Communications Offences, introducing a revised False Communications Offence and a new threatening Communications Offence. The earlier threatening communications offence in the Malicious Communications Act 1988 was repealed, as were the provisions relating to false communications in the Communications Act 2003. These changes followed suggestions from the Law Commission.

The then Conservative Government Minister Chris Philp, when accepting the Law Commission’s recommendation said the following to Parliament:

“These new offences will help ensure that the criminal law is focused on the most harmful behaviour whilst protecting freedom of expression. The current offences are sufficiently broad in scope that they could constitute a disproportionate interference in the right to freedom of expression. The new offences will protect freedom of expression and, in the case of the harm-based offence by increasing the threshold of harm to serious distress, will ensure that communications which individuals find offensive, such as the expression of a view they do not like or agree with, will not be caught. In addition, the court cannot find someone guilty of the harm-based offence or false communications offence if they have a reasonable excuse. A reasonable excuse would include if the communication was or was intended as a contribution to the public interest.”

The CPS guidance on these new offences is here - the charging decisions on these offences are subject to extra oversight as these offences should be referred to the Chief Crown Prosecutor (CCP) or Head of Division (HoD) for approval. Again, as part of the charging process, the CPS should consider any resulting interference with suspects’ rights, notably freedom of expression and proceed only where “the need for any restrictions upon the right to be necessary, proportionate and established convincingly.” This is assessed with reference to "contemporary standards… the standards of an open and just multi-racial society" (DPP v Collins [2006] UKHL 40). Only if the freedom of expression considerations have been duly assessed can the prosecution be deemed to be in the public interest - a threshold test for any prosecution.

Nigel Farage said “the Act gives Ofcom extraordinary and arbitrary powers” and "establishes an elite police force unit to monitor what is said online”.

The Act gives Ofcom powers to enforce a civil regulatory regime designed to improve the safety of UK users online and reduce the risk of harm. The scope of the Act had cross-party Parliamentary support and the regime's details underwent years of scrutiny in the UK.

The regulator has no power to remove individual posts nor to instruct regulated services to remove individual posts nor to find them in breach of their obligations under the Act in relation to individual posts.

No “elite police force unit” has been established by the OSA.

The Online Safety Act and illegal harms

Social media companies and other regulated services have obligations under the OSA in relation to content that is associated with a criminal offence. In particular, they need to have systems and processes in place to ensure that illegal content is identified swiftly and taken down. For content associated with priority content, services need to have mechanisms in place seeking to prevent individuals from encountering such content and also to minimise the time that such content is present (see s 10 OSA). Ofcom can enforce against these duties but does not have powers to act on individual pieces of content, nor does social media companies’ compliance with the regime depend on individual decisions on individual posts.

Note, that in carrying out these duties, services must also have regard to users’ freedom of expression and privacy rights (s 22 OSA), and the OSA specifically provides that users must have rights to appeal decisions (s 21 OSA). In its recent consultation, Ofcom has noted that where automated systems are used, services should be on the watch for excessive false positives. The OSA is a civil regulatory regime, and implementation focuses on trying to encourage compliance rather than to penalise non-compliance. See our explainer here.

4Chan’s claims that Ofcom “will violate” Americans’ freedom of speech

4Chan has filed a lawsuit against Ofcom in the US to “restrain Ofcom’s conduct and its continuing egregious violations of Americans’ civil rights, including, without limitation to the right to freedom of speech”. The OSA does not apply to the operations of US companies in the US, nor does it impact on the civil rights of American citizens or their activities on online platforms in the US. It is a UK law that applies to the operations of US companies within the UK. Every national government has the right to develop regulations to protect their citizens and appoint regulators to enforce them. These regulations are specific to that country: food standards in the UK are in many cases stricter than those in the US, but that does not stop US food manufacturers selling their products in the UK, as long as they comply with those rules, nor does it force American consumers to eat food that meets UK standards. Arguably, 4Chan’s position - challenging another country’s Government on its laws in relation to its own territory - is an example of overreach.