Nadine Dorries, who as Culture Secretary introduced the Online Safety Bill that became the Online Safety Act, has published a Daily Mail column calling for that same act to be repealed – explaining that “the principle at its core, to protect children and young people has been abused and used for political advantage.” X’s Community Notes system responded within hours. Chris Bryant responded in four words. The internet has been having the time of its life ever since.
Dorries, who has since defected to Reform UK, posted on X: “The Online Safety Act should be repealed. The principle at its core, to protect children and young people has been abused and used for political advantage.”
X’s Community Notes – the platform’s crowdsourced fact-checking function – attached a clarification that will not have surprised anyone who has been following Dorries’s political journey: “Nadine Dorries was the MP who introduced the Online Safety Act.”
Why she wants to repeal her own law
The specific prompt for Dorries’s conversion appears to be that Reform deputy leader Zia Yusuf’s anti-immigration post was labelled “hate speech” on TikTok. The principle of protecting children and young people online, which Dorries championed as Culture Secretary and which she is now describing as having been “abused,” appears to have been reconsidered following this development.
As we reported in our piece on Zia Yusuf’s Reform detention centre announcement, Yusuf has been one of the more prominent architects of Reform’s harder-edge immigration policy platform. His TikTok content on immigration being flagged as hate speech by the platform’s moderation systems – systems that exist to enforce the Online Safety Act’s provisions – is apparently sufficient reason to repeal the Act entirely.
The logic, compressed to its essentials, was captured by X user Mike Holden: “Yes it’s to protect children online – but MY BOSS CAN’T SPREAD HATE SPEECH SO FUCK PROTECTING THEM.”
The rap
The Community Notes context about who introduced the Act would have been sufficiently damaging on its own. But the internet had more to offer.
A clip resurfaced on Tuesday from when Dorries, as Culture Secretary, had rapped on TikTok in support of the Online Harms Act – the earlier iteration of what became the Online Safety Act. @MorgothsReview posted it with the caption: “Good morning, here’s Nadine Dorries rapping on TikTok in support of the Online Harms Act, which she now wants to abolish because it censored her new party, Reform UK.”
The clip received 1,000 likes within hours.
The responses
The internet’s verdict was swift, accurate and, in one case, literary.
Chris Bryant, the Culture Secretary, posted in response to Dorries’s original tweet, quoting Jane Eyre: “Reader, she wrote it.”
Four words. 15,800 likes. 81 replies.
Jessica Marshall, @jessica_m1997, added: “Nadine Dorries demanding the repeal of a law she wrote is peak Nadine Dorries I’m afraid.”
An account posting a meme of a man in a hot dog costume above the caption “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” may have been the most accurate visual summary.
The broader pattern
Dorries’s call to repeal her own legislation is unusual even by the standards of a political moment that has produced the Health Secretary resigning to challenge his own prime minister, the deputy prime minister refusing five times to say whether the UK should rejoin the EU he spent years trying to make Britain rejoin and a man who spent decades as a Tory grandee now accusing former Conservative colleagues of being “arch-Thatcherites.”
As we explored in our analysis of post-Brexit political addiction to drama, the specific feature of current British politics that James O’Brien identified is the permission, granted since 2016, to believe what you want regardless of the evidence. Dorries wanting to repeal a law because it applied to her new party’s content is a retail-level expression of exactly that logic: the principle was fine when it served my purposes, and it is wrong now that it doesn’t.
The Community Notes system that attached the corrective context to her tweet is, incidentally, a feature of the online moderation ecosystem she helped create. It is operating exactly as intended.
