School of Social & Political Sciences

While the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke would understand the motivations behind the UK government’s latest attempts to regulate the internet, he would also warn of the dangers of rationalist “over-reach” and the unintended consequences that might flow from such top-down interventionism.

Elon Musk’s scathing criticisms that the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) risks “seriously infringing” on free speech and embodies a “suppression of the people”  reignites the age-old question of liberty against regulation. But for the founder of conservatism, Edmund Burke, the question is far more complex. Burke, writing around the time of the French Revolution, would likely sympathise with the OSA's ambition to preserve social order, yet recoil from its method as an embodiment of the kind of rationalist overreach that he spent his career warning against. So, how would Burke respond to digital governance?

Introduced in 2022 and achieving royal assent in 2023, the OSA had been hailed a “landmark law” which would be a “historic moment… for decades to come”. The Act, including its later amendments and iterations, tackles the immense growth in concerns over illegal and harmful content including misinformation, sexual images, exploitation, and hate speech focussed on protecting young people. It places OFCOM as the regulator of online sites, empowered to fine companies that fail to meet strict age‑verification and monitoring requirements. However, the bill raised salient questions over privacy, as users must give their ID to private, unaccountable companies for access. This raises large concerns over data mining, but also anonymity and free speech . So, what would a Burkean conservative say about this?

“Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed”

While a liberal, such as Locke, would likely challenge any infringement on individual liberty, a Burkean conservative takes a more nuanced approach: for liberty to be safe and enjoyable, it must be restrained by law, morality, and social order. Lifted from his 1777 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, Burke penned the famous line “Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed”. So, what does this mean? For Burke, freedom cannot be an absolute chaotic state, but rather an ordered liberty to prevent degeneration into ‘licence’ (unchecked freedom) which threatens the social fabric. By 'social fabric', Burke refers to webs of relationships, customs, institutions, and inherited norms (family structures, religious communities, associations, professional bodies) binding individuals together forming a functioning society  In light of the French revolution, Burke warns that this fabric is deeply fragile, and is easily torn by unchecked freedom and radicalism. Preserving the social fabric is vastly more important than liberty and can legitimately prompt state intervention when threatened. Freedoms thus may be limited to preserve what is 'good' in society, not as an act of tyranny, but an act of conservation.

This raises the ever-important question of what is ‘good’ in society? And how do ideas of social harmony translate to digital life? While Burke, of course, did not write about phenomena such as children’s exposure to pornography or circulation of violent content, his moral concern with civic virtue and society provide a framework through which we can extrapolate these issues. As such, Burke would likely view the normalisation and circulation of harmful materials as corrosive to individual beliefs and communal civil values which decay fragile communal bonds. From this perspective, regulation of harmful materials is a legitimate attempt to defend the moral preconditions of ‘good’ society, thus justifies restrictions on liberty.

Weaving in the Online Safety Act, the foundational evidence that informed the legislation was a government-commissioned review, which found “substantial evidence” of the association between pornography consumption and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours including coercion and aggression towards women. Moreover, unfiltered accessibility to explicit content via both dedicated platforms and social media such as X has been shown to reproduce violence and abuse while reinforcing racist and sexist attitudes. Through a Burkean lens, this epidemic is deeply concerning, signalling degradation of the societal moral environment through which norms are learned, shared, and reproduced, threatening future generations. Regulation, within this reading, can be defended as a conservative effort to buttress fragile cultural conditions that foster respect and civility through social harmony. Thus, attempting to regulate the internet is a conservative effort to maintain social order, rather than giving people absolute freedom to morally degrade.

"A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."

So, Burke would agree something needs to be done to preserve the social order. So why would he likely reject the Online Safety Act? The answer to this seemingly contradictory question lies in how regulation is pursued. The conservative ‘ideology’ does not seek to solve issues through social architecture or revolution, but instead champions inherited wisdom, institutions and continuities. Burkean conservatism is deeply rooted in the concept of organicism: society is not a machine to be redesigned, but a historically evolved set of practices, institutions, and relationships that embody accumulated wisdom. Burke sees society as a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn, so durable reform should emerge gradually through existing practices rather than imposed by abstract idealism. Thus, while regulating the online space is a conservative effort to maintain social order, it should embody change to conserve by happening as naturally as possible – organically.

The OSA sits uneasily with organicism. It represents a landmark, system-wide intervention into the social domain premised on the belief that a single regulatory framework will provide adequate protections. This is an idealistic imposition, which was neither tried, nor tested. This reflects the rationalist faith in abstract system design that Burke feared. For Burke, the multiple amendments to the original OSA and early “troubleshootings” are symptomatic of a deeper concern: imposing large-scale, untested interventions into complex social systems tends to generate further problems. To give just one example, the surge in VPN usage used to circumvent age and content restrictions has raised concerns about privacy, enforceability, and data mining, prompting further corrective legislation. This cycle of intervention and repair illustrates the hubris of idealised policy that attempts to engineer social order through statute rather than working through existing institutions and norms.

One may look at the OSA and object along the following lines: it emerged through years of parliamentary debate and democratic deliberation. Does that not constitute an organic change? Burke would distinguish between political processes and prejudice (socially inherited generational practical wisdom). While the Act followed democratic procedures and took years to implement, it still embodies rationalist overconfidence: that legislators can design a comprehensive solution to social issues without prescription (long-standing practices developed and refined across generations). The internet is simply too new for prescriptive wisdom; we lack the accumulated knowledge essential for durable reforms. The digital realm offers no such inheritance of knowledge for accurate prejudice.

So, how can something like the digital space be regulated organically without large policy? A Burkean answer to regulating the online space would likely rest in his concept of ‘little platoons’ – the mediating institutions between individual and state. Rather than state-level intervention, Burkean intervention would ideally emerge through layered responses within the community: families and parental controls, teaching digital literacy in schools, and civil organisations establishing community standards. Consider how different this looks to the OSA. Rather than OFCOM’s centralised programme, Burkeans favour gradual experimentation through existing institutions, taking on an adaptive approach based on evidence that works for the community.

Does this mean companies, such as X or Pornhub, essentially get away with it and don’t need regulating? Not necessarily. In Reflections, Burke argued those who hold significant power over social life carry with them duties to the communities they inhabit; authority and responsibility are inseparable. Applied to platforms and companies, this suggests the answer to unaccountable corporate power is not direct government intervention, but cultivation of genuine social obligation. As Burke believed English institutions had earned their authority through centuries of responsible conduct, platforms would be expected to earn and maintain public trust or face reputational and commercial consequences. This is a far slower approach than the OSA and assumes, of course, that platforms act in good faith - a significant assumption given the commercial incentives driving data harvesting and engagement-maximising content essentially ‘selling sex’. Thus, where the OSA assumes legislators can design comprehensive protections top-down, the Burkean alternative trusts industries to develop their own moral grammar in a free market.

Critically, this is not libertarianism disguised as conservatism. Rather, Burke would support the government’s role in protecting the social fabric from digital harms, but one that sets broad principles to empower families, educators, and platforms to develop responses appropriate to the people and context. This is regulation that works within existing norms, not against established practices.

The uncomfortable truth – would a Burkean approach work?

Even a convinced Burkean conservative may see the glaring issue here. Burke’s organicism assumes institutions have centuries of wisdom to draw upon. But in the digital age, harms are spreading fast, and the consequences are emerging even faster. Children are being exposed to harmful content now, and we would be waiting for the ‘little platoons’ to evolve. Does Burkean conservatism offer anything beyond this paralysis? Perhaps this approach is unsuitable in the digital age.

Overall, Burke would see the OSA as a classic rationalist mistake: a well-intentioned attempt to solve a complex social problem through design, generating new problems faster than it resolves old ones. However, the alternative of trusting families, communities, and industries to develop their own moral grammar is slower and messier. Burke insisted that lasting change comes from below, not above, but the uncomfortable truth is that in the digital age, 'below' is too slow. Burke never had to watch a generation of children harmed while waiting for inherited wisdom to catch up. The question haunting a Burkean conservative looms large: if societies cannot be redesigned and change must happen organically, does this permit the social fabric to unravel in the meantime?

---

This blog is part of the SPS Student Academic Blog series. You can read more contributions from the series here.

First published: 20 May 2026