SUMMARY
- UK media regulator Ofcom has forced X into a stricter Online Safety Act compliance regime, requiring 24-hour average review of reported “illegal terrorist and hate content.”
- Ofcom has also compelled X to formally engage with outside “expert organizations” – the professional disinformation and hate speech monitoring industry built up under the Biden Administration.
- Among the named “experts” is the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), whose leaked internal communications identified “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top strategic objective.
- The action closely mirrors the EU’s first Digital Services Act enforcement against X, backed by a $140 million fine and shaped by the same US-funded NGOs.
- UK lawmakers are simultaneously moving to expand the OSA through “Henry VIII” amendments that would let ministers rewrite the law without a vote of Parliament.
The United Kingdom’s media and internet regulator, Ofcom, has announced that it has forced Elon Musk’s X to adopt a more stringent content moderation regime under the Online Safety Act (OSA), folding the platform into a compliance arrangement shaped in part by the very “civil society” pressure groups that have publicly campaigned for its destruction.
According to Ofcom’s own announcement, X has now committed to fast-tracked reviews of so-called “hate content” reported by UK users, with strict average and maximum review times. Per the regulator:
X will review and assess UK suspected illegal terrorist and hate content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool on average within 24 hours of it being reported, to be calculated as a mean. As a backstop, it will review and assess at least 85% of UK suspected illegal terrorist and hate content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool within a maximum of 48 hours.
Crucially, Ofcom has also forced X to formally engage with an array of outside “experts” – in practice, the professional disinformation and hate speech monitoring industry that grew up under the Biden Administration and its European partners. Ofcom states:
Engaging with experts regarding reporting systems for illegal hate and terror content. This is in response to concerns by some organisations who told us they had alerted multiple pieces of suspected illegal hate and terrorism content to X but were unclear if such reports were being received or actioned.
In other words, the activist NGOs that have spent years lobbying governments to crack down on X’s speech policies are now being given a formal seat at the regulatory table, with Ofcom’s coercive power behind their complaints.
“Kill Musk’s Twitter” – a 2024 goal of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), stated in internal emails obtained by Racket and The Disinformation Chronicle in 2025. Ofcom worked with CCDH in its investigation of X.
Ofcom’s action mirrors the first major enforcement under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the Brussels twin of the UK’s Online Safety Act. That action, also targeted at X and backed by a $140 million fine, forced the company to reopen its data and ads repository to the same “disinformation researchers” who had themselves influenced the fine in the first place.
As FFO has previously reported, multiple organizations funded by the Biden Administration, as well as the Biden Administration’s office of international trade, helped to shape the EU’s digital censorship regime, on which the UK’s OSA was closely modeled. Among the organizations that took credit for that action was one that had quietly received support from the State Department:
A European nonprofit that was supported by American taxpayers via the Biden Administration’s office of Public Diplomacy at the State Department, credited civil society for convincing the European Commission to issue its $140 million fine against X, the first such penalty levied under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
“Civil society” is shorthand for the tangled global web of western nonprofits, research institutes, pressure groups, and grassroots organizations, often funded by national governments including the US. Though nominally independent of governments, in practice “civil society” plays a central role in advancing the aims of entrenched western bureaucratic regimes.
With hundreds of millions of dollars in backing from the US government from 2017-2024 to fight “disinformation,” these organizations were the tip of the spear creating a global pressure campaign targeted at governments, tech companies, advertisers and legacy media to create the conditions enabling the mass online censorship of American political speech.
The same US-funded censorship hubs that helped drive the EU’s war on American tech companies are now finding a willing partner in Ofcom’s implementation of the UK’s Online Safety Act.
CCDH – The UK-US Organization That Wants to ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’
Regulators are supposed to secure compliance with the law, not set out to destroy the companies they regulate. Yet in Ofcom’s own announcement, one of the “expert organizations” it cites as a partner – and, presumably, intends to force X to work with under the OSA – is a group that has explicitly pledged to “kill” Musk’s company.
Per Ofcom:
We have worked with a range of organisations to gather evidence about suspected illegal terrorist content and illegal hate speech online, including antisemitic and anti-Muslim material. As part of this, we have received and independently reviewed evidence from a number of expert organisations including British Future, the Antisemitism Policy Trust, Center for Countering Digital Hate, Community Security Trust, Good Law Project, HOPE not hate, Tech Against Terrorism and Tell MAMA.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British-headquartered group with deep ties to the previous American administration, declared in internal communications obtained in 2024 that one of its top strategic objectives was to “kill Musk’s Twitter.” That is not a regulatory partner. That is a hostile actor with a stated business objective of dismantling the platform now placed under its informal oversight.
CCDH was also the author of the notorious “Disinformation Dozen” report, which the Biden Administration used to pressure tech companies to censor critics of its COVID-19 policies – including the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The federal government has since conceded that it violated the First Amendment when it pressured tech companies to censor another COVID-19 dissenter, journalist Alex Berenson.
That an organization with a documented record of First Amendment-violating pressure campaigns, and an internal mission to destroy a major American platform, is now embedded as a trusted “expert” in a UK regulatory action against that same platform is not an oversight. It is the structure of the censorship industrial complex working exactly as designed.
The Online Safety Act – an Instrument of Global Censorship
Ofcom is the body charged with enforcing the UK’s Online Safety Act, a law that affects far more than just British users. As FFO has previously documented, the OSA is already one of the most draconian online speech laws in the democratic world – and UK lawmakers are now moving to make it even more formidable.
That includes efforts to grant government ministers the power to amend the OSA without a vote of Parliament, through a legislative device known as a “Henry VIII” clause.
As FFO previously reported:
One amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill would allow any senior government minister to modify the Online Safety Act to address risks connected to illegal AI-generated content. The amendment states the changes could be made for the purpose of “minimizing or mitigating the risks of harm to individuals.”
A second amendment, attached to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, would empower ministers to alter primary legislation in order to restrict children’s access to certain internet services. Taken together, the amendments would allow a single government minister to rewrite Britain’s online speech rules by fiat, with little to no parliamentary oversight.
The OSA is already arguably even more expansive than the EU’s Digital Services Act. Under the OSA, government authorities can target not just a social media platform but also its commercial partners, such as payment processors, web hosts, and service providers. Even a platform that defies Ofcom may still be forced offline due to one of these partners folding to the pressure.
The extraterritorial ambitions of the regime are equally clear. Ofcom recently fined an American mental health forum more than $1.3 million on the grounds that, although it had geoblocked UK users, those users could still access it via VPN – something a website is essentially powerless to prevent. The implication is unmistakable: Ofcom’s ultimate objective is not merely to protect British users, but to force foreign websites to change their global content moderation policies to fit UK law, even when those sites have no intent to serve a UK audience.
Domestic political speech is being swept in as well. A video posted by Reform UK – the populist-right party that has led UK polling for months – was recently taken down by TikTok after being reported through its OSA-compliant reporting channel. TikTok later apologized and reinstated the video, but the takedown illustrates how the OSA’s reporting infrastructure can be weaponized against ordinary political messaging from major parties during live electoral cycles.
@ziayusufuk I am delighted to be Reform’s Shadow Home Secretary. Here’s my promise to the country. #ukpolitics #ziayusuf #news #immigration#fyp
The video that was censored under OSA rules before being reinstated by TikTok.
The X agreement should be read in that context. Ofcom is not simply asking a platform to take down genuinely illegal terrorist material. It is institutionalizing a structure in which foreign regulators, working hand in glove with US-funded NGOs that have openly campaigned to destroy the platforms they now help oversee, can dictate the speech rules that apply to American users and American political speech – with the UK acting as a regulatory chokepoint on the global internet.
