Britain’s Online Safety Act has made small community forums too hard to run, a new report says. The civil liberties group Big Brother Watch published the findings in early September.
It also says police enforce speech laws unevenly. The group wants Prime Minister Andy Burnham to order an independent review of every law that limits speech.
Small forums face big paperwork
Parliament enacted the bill in 2023 to protect children from consuming harmful content online. The first major duties for forums began in March 2025. Age checks followed in July 2025.
Any forum with UK users must now weigh its own risks. Owners must judge the odds of illegal content and of harm to children. Ofcom, the UK media regulator, supplies templates for this work. Software compliance can also involve technical challenges, as shown when Microsoft fixed a Windows 11 Always On VPN bug caused by September updates.
Together they run nearly 100 pages before an owner types a word, the report says. The penalties could be £18 million or 10 percent of total income earned worldwide, whichever is greater.
Dee Kitchen, a London engineer, ran Microcosm. The platform hosted about 300 small forums. She shut it down in March 2025. Volunteer lawyers on her forums told her compliance could cost tens of thousands of pounds.
They also warned her about personal liability. Only two or three of the forums survived in close to their original form. Volunteers rescued one of them, a popular cycling forum called London Fixed Gear and Single Speed.
Other sites went dark too. Dads With Kids, a forum for single and separated fathers, closed that same month. It had about 2,600 members and 27,000 posts. Its administrators blamed the new law. Some members moved to Discord, but that group has only about 100 people.
Ofcom says it does not aim to punish small, low-risk sites that try to comply in good faith. Its first formal penalty, in May 2026, was a £950,000 fine against a suicide forum.
That site has links to more than 130 deaths in the UK, Ofcom says. Still, fear of fines pushed many hobby owners to quit. Meanwhile, one forum administrator wrote this year that Ofcom hasn’t targeted small community sites.
Age checks reach everyday posts
The group also studied eight large Reddit communities over the years up to late May 2026. It discovered innocent topics that prompted age verification. These include a post about a paper cut injury, a 1986 music video of the band ‘Moody Blues’ and war news stories.
According to the report, Reddit used its adult content label to implement UK age checks. So users must show ID or scan their face to open many ordinary threads. About 1 in 10 UK adults lack a passport or driver’s license, the report says. That is roughly 5 million people.
In May 2026, TikTok removed a Reform UK video on immigration and cited the act. It restored the clip after public backlash. The report warns of more to come. It says the government plans age limits for social media. Enforcing them would force all 68 million UK internet users to prove their age, the group argues.
A postcode lottery in speech cases
Police arrested at least 62,199 people over speech offenses from 2021 through 2025, the group says. The count covers three laws, including the Online Safety Act’s false messages offense. Officers charged 18,520 people. English courts convicted 12,292 in England and Wales. However, some police forces refused to provide data, which means the total was probably higher.
Rates differ sharply by place. Cumbria arrested 25.7 people per 10,000 residents, about 2.5 times the national average. Neighboring Northumbria arrested 1.9 per 10,000. That puts Cumbria’s rate near 14 times higher. The group argues that vague laws leave too much to local judgment.
Protests and the call for a review
The report also targets protest rules. Two laws, passed in 2022 and 2023, limit protest rights, it says. Police used new no-suspicion search powers 46 times in the year to March 2025. London’s Metropolitan Police appears to be the only force that used them. Officers found nothing relevant in 42 of those searches.
Thirty-nine took place at one Youth Demand protest over Gaza in July 2024. In January 2026, police also arrested campaigner Peter Tatchell over a placard reading “Globalise the intifada: Nonviolent resistance.” Police later dropped the case.
Dorries, now a Reform UK member, wrote the foreword. She was culture secretary from 2021 to 2022. Dorries says the act was meant to protect children but, in some cases, has limited free speech. She calls the overlapping laws “a dog’s dinner.” Still, she stresses that online harms to children are real.
Big Brother Watch is a campaign group, so the report reflects its advocacy. The Free Speech Union and Index on Censorship back its letter to Burnham. The government has not announced a review, based on reporting available on Oct. 20.
