Taylor Lorenz, a prominent journalist who fled the Washington Post for Substack, looked on with horror as Britain’s promised crackdown on social media, the Online Safety Act, came into force last week:

Entire forums, websites, communities and essential journalism is being censored. People are being forced to scan their faces to use Spotify and YouTube is guessing ages and asking users for government IDs.

Like all of these terrible censorship bills, the Online Safety Act claims it’s about protecting children from the evils of pornographic and “adult” content. But immediately after it went into effect, platforms began classifying nearly all breaking news footage, war coverage, investigative journalism, political protest material and information about reproductive and public health as “explicit” or “harmful” content, thus blocking anyone from under 18 from accessing it.

Subreddits dedicated to covering war crimes in Ukraine and Gaza or crucial information on sex ed now requires age verification. As The Verge reported, “Effectively, web platforms must either set up an age verification system that poses potential privacy risks, default to blocking huge swaths of potentially questionable content, or entirely pull out of the UK. Residents are finding themselves locked out of anything from period-related subreddits to hobbyist forums”

“The UK’s censorship catastrophe is just the beginning,” August 1, 2025

The ultimate destination may be a government monopoly on information which, if it comes from government, will be ruled correct and safe by definition. Those who want non-government information will need VPNs.

But now, wait…

Interestingly, Lorenz herself has been reliably leftwing. At City Journal, Chris Rufo summarizes, after an interview with her: “Lorenz supported extreme coronavirus lockdowns, engaged in cancellation campaigns, and boosted the most radical ideas of the Black Lives Matter moment.”

But there is a crucial distinction between her and, say, Keir Starmer, Britain’s Labour Prime Minister. Lorenz is left wing in an American paradigm, where it often amounts to performance art: marches, riots, and rallies. Starmer is left wing in a European paradigm. On that view, the basic proposition regarding censorship is that George Orwell (1903–1950) got it wrong. Big Brother got it right.

Recall that, as we noted here in 2023, Orwell had considerable difficulty getting Animal Farm, his 1945 critique of communism, published in Britain because British intellectuals did not wish to air criticism of Stalin or his atrocities. Orwell, while a man of the left, was not a totalitarian. But many of them were and many still are.

Social media will provide an interesting test as to the extent to which government can control speech — and eventually thought — throughout society by policing social media.