Rachel has condemned Nigel Farage’s remarks that misogynist influencer Andrew Tate – who has been charged with rape and human trafficking – is an “important voice for men” and said Reform have no plan to keep people safe online. Nigel Farage has said Reform would scrap the Online Safety Act that protects children from extreme pornography online and forces social media companies to take down “revenge porn”, while admitting Reform did not have a plan for how to protect people from harmful and illegal online content.
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Speaking to Times Radio, Rachel said:
If you want to abolish the Online Safety Act then you are clearly on the side of predators and abusers. It is as simple as that. We sat through hours of evidence-gathering [on the Women and Equalities parliamentary Select Committee] about the impact of intimate image abuse on the women and men who’ve suffered from it. Their images being taken and spread across the internet without their consent and the impact that that has had on them in their everyday lives and at work – it’s just absolutely horrendous.
And for someone in Nigel Farage’s position to say that he would remove any safeguards in the Online Safety Act would just mean that tech companies have no requirement – no legal responsibility – to take down this content, which was the one thing that women told us they wanted to happen.
What we’re trying to protect against here is illegal pornography that would be illegal elsewhere, and somehow it’s not illegal if it’s online. We must protect people from online abuse.
[Nigel Farage] doesn’t have an alternative. He gets angry about a lot of things, and speaks as if he’s got some plan to solve it. But every time you try and pin down what his plan is, he doesn’t have a plan. He does not have a plan for keeping women and children safe from online harm. And until he comes up with a plan, then he really doesn’t have a right to be spouting the kind of dangerous stuff that he is without it being called out.
To sort of align yourself with Andrew Tate, who’s been charged with rape, with human trafficking… and for the Labour Party to make that clear to people by making it absolutely apparent that these are comments Nigel Farage has made, and to highlight the risk that people like Andrew Tate pose to young men and young boys in our country – of radicalising them. I think it is our responsibility to make that absolutely clear.