Now they’re censoring Reform’s policy announcements

We warned them. Zia Yusuf warned them. Anyone with a functioning understanding of how corporate compliance works in the face of punitive state regulation warned them. And now here we are.

TikTok has removed a video posted by Reform UK’s home-affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, in which he set out the party’s new immigration policy. It is an entirely legal, mainstream argument about the consequences of mass migration and the failure of successive governments to control it. The platform’s justification for blocking the video was ‘hate speech’ and ‘hateful behaviour’. The removal was triggered by a report made under the Online Safety Act.

Let that settle for a moment. A senior British politician, who is effectively shadow home secretary of the unofficial opposition, has had his political speech – policy announcement, not abuse or incitement – deleted from a major platform under legislation this government told us was about protecting children from pornography. Yusuf was also warned that further violations could result in his removal from TikTok altogether.

To be clear, this was not TikTok acting on its own instincts. Failing to comply with the Online Safety Act’s requirements can incur fines of up to £18million or 10 per cent of a firm’s global annual turnover, whichever is greater. When the penalty for inaction is that large, corporations do not sit and deliberate the merits of each complaint. They reach for delete. They err, always, on the side of caution – which is to say, on the side of whoever filed the report. GB News presenter Tom Harwood put it simply and correctly: regulation of this kind has a deadening effect on liberties, not because it commands censorship directly, but because it creates an incentive for corporations to censor first and think later. Companies do not need to knock on the door when it has already made the cost of opening it prohibitive.

Yusuf had predicted precisely this. Speaking last year, he pointed to section 179 of the Online Safety Act, which makes it illegal to say something false that causes ‘non-trivial psychological harm’, and warned that this would force social-media companies to ‘proactively censor’ speech. ‘It’s going to create an incentive structure for social-media companies to over-censor’, he said, ‘because that’s the rational thing to do’. He was right. He is now the living proof.

There is a rich and nauseating irony here that should be stated plainly. Yusuf noted that TikTok, which has just removed his immigration-policy video on the grounds that it is hate speech, happily hosts videos calling for the assassination of Nigel Farage. Fayaz Khan, an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan who threatened Farage’s life, stood before a camera in October 2024 and announced his murderous intentions on TikTok. While that video remained up (although Khan was jailed for five years in October for the threat), a video on Reform’s migration policy was taken down. You could not construct a clearer demonstration of where the algorithm’s political sympathies lie – or rather, where its risk calculations land.

Then there is the parallel case of Katie Lam. Last year, shortly after the Online Safety Act came into force, the Tory MP gave a speech in the House of Commons criticising Labour’s response to the grooming-gang crisis. While not removed altogether, the speech was age-restricted on X under the same legislation. Words spoken under the protection of parliamentary privilege, in the mother of all parliaments, were deemed unsuitable for general viewing. We have arrived somewhere genuinely dystopian.

Yusuf told me: ‘This is exactly what we said would happen as the law targets social-media companies in a punitive fashion.’ He is right. And the political class that passed this legislation in 2023 – with cross-party support, let it be remembered, the Conservatives as guilty as Labour – knew or should have known what its results would be. Section 44 allows the culture secretary to unilaterally force Ofcom to change the rules about what social-media companies must censor without an act of parliament, without a vote. A single minister, in private, can redraw the boundaries of acceptable political speech. That is not about ‘safety’ online. That is power without accountability, dressed in the language of child protection.

This is the precautionary principle in its most corrosive form, our worst European inheritance, transplanted into British law and handed to Whitehall to enforce. In medicine, in environmental regulation, in financial compliance, we have watched this principle devour common sense for 30 years. When in doubt, prohibit. When the cost of action is lower than the cost of inaction, act. The corporations have done their maths. They will keep doing it.

The Online Safety Act must be repealed. Not reformed, not adjusted at the margins, not reviewed after a suitable period. Repealed. What was sold as a shield for children has become a sword in the hands of whoever holds office. That was always the risk. It has now become the reality.

We said so. Now you have seen it.

Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK.