Did the most recent, July 2025 version of the 2023 U.K. Online Safety Act prohibit "all criticism" of unauthorized immigration on social media? No, that's not true: According to the full text of the law, what is considered an offense is assisting illegal immigration and human trafficking. No credible news outlets reported the purported news that people can't speak critically about unauthorized immigration on the internet in the U.K.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on July 29, 2025. It opened:
The UK's Online Safety Act bans all criticism of illegal immigration.
The post shared what appeared to be a screenshot that read:
The kinds of illegal content and activity that platforms need to protect users from are set out in the Act, and this includes content relating to:
• child sexual abuse
• controlling or coercive behaviour
• extreme sexual violence
• extreme pornography
• fraud
• racially or religiously aggravated public order offences
• inciting violence
• illegal immigration and people smuggling
• promoting or facilitating suicide
• intimate image abuse
This is what it looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of a Pirat_Natio's post on x.com)
The screenshot shared in a post came from the official government explainer (archived here) addressing different portions of the Act:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of the Online Safety Act: explainer on gov.uk)
While worded ambiguously, the fragment seen above did not explicitly say that what is being banned is criticism of what was described as illegal immigration.
The Act's full text (archived here) clarified that what counts as an offense is a very specific thing: "assisting unlawful immigration."
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of the most recent, July 2025, full version of the Online Safety Act on legislation.gov.uk)
Searches on Google (archived here) and Yahoo (archived here) across credible news reports did not show any news confirming the claim from the post reviewed in this fact check.
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