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Your opinions please

ended 10. December 2025

Doing a standalone story on this finding from Ofcom's Annual Nation report published overnight:

  • Fewer adults feel freer to be themselves online than offline this year (25%, down from 30% last year), and only 35% feel they can share opinions more easily online than offline.

What are your views on this? Is it a positive or a negative? And why is this happening?

8 responses from the Newspage community

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Mitali Deypurkaystha
AI Governance Strategist & CMO at AISensa
The internet was never meant to be where we live. It was built as a tool to help us live. A tool for faster information, global connection and democratised knowledge. But by handing so much power to a handful of tech giants, that tool has quietly become our environment. Their business model depends on keeping us online far beyond utility, and it’s reshaped how we communicate.

We’ve lost context. The body language, tone and facial cues humans relied on for millennia. Online, everything is stripped to black-and-white text, so misunderstanding is inevitable. And as more of our lives move online, debate collapses into posturing and taking sides.

People feel less free to be themselves because the digital world isn’t built for human communication. We need to reclaim the internet as a tool that supports life, not the place where life happens.
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Tony Robinson OBE
Chair at Yorkshire in Business Limited
The downward trend will continue until the platforms have created the new normal. Then the new normal will be that it is not good for your career or your business to use social media to campaign, share political opinions or criticise the government, the financial sector or the world's biggest brands, will be accepted by 80%+ of social media users.

From 2012, I used social media to support my campaigns on behalf of all #StartUps and 5 million micro business owners. We even founded movements and annual events to back up these campaigns. Mainstream media picked up our campaigns and events from social media.

This campaigning through social media to stop companies from using unfair 45 to 120 days payment terms (#PayIn30Days or less - my 30 years campaign), or to recognise the tragedy of 3.8 million self-employed people, freelancers, startups and micro business owners #ExcludedUK from income support during Covid, now get no support as people are scared to be associated with me.
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Scott Gallacher
Director at Rowley Turton
This is not surprising. Offline, we typically converse with friends and family. We can speak relatively freely, joke and poke fun at each other, and occasionally mispeak, all with limited consequences other than perhaps an apology if we go too far and upset someone.

Online, we are potentially shouting into the street, or more accurately, the whole world. Context and tone can easily be lost. With every word being recorded and potentially weaponised against you, even immediately or worse still, saved or resurrected at some later time, even by supposed friends.

This is something I constantly warn my children about. Banter amongst friends on a night out is rarely remembered, but that same banter on a 'private' group chat can come back to hurt people even years later.
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Michelle Lawson
Director at Lawson Financial
It has become divisive and too easy to vilify people unless they have the ‘right’ opinion. Too many keyboard warriors are there to criticise views, spelling, grammar etc. I’ve pulled pack from social media for thos reason. It has become a social battlefield where people type knowing that only a keyboard tissle will follow whereas if face to face could descend further. Personal interactions are more reactive and responsive and what us humans need and thrive on.
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Kate Allen
Owner at Finest Stays
It’s a bleak statistic, but not a surprising one. We spend huge portions of our lives online, yet many of us operate in stealth mode; guarded, curated, and cautious. I don’t want photos of my child circulating, opinions that could be weaponised, or a LinkedIn post that backfires. That instinct to protect ourselves is primal: the fear of judgement triggers the oldest part of the brain, built for tribal survival, not digital scrutiny.

At the same time, the anonymity of the internet emboldens others to unleash behaviour they’d never exhibit in real life. The gap between our physical selves and digital selves widens because tone and intent are so easily lost online, making emotional regulation harder and vulnerability riskier. This a reflection of an environment that amplifies judgement, dulls empathy, and rewards extremes.
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Ben Perks
Managing Director at Orchard Financial Advisers
They say opinions are like buttholes, in that everyone has one. Where they differ from buttholes is that people should check and monitor them more regularly.
So it’s great that people are now stopping and thinking about what they type, rather than spouting utter nonsense online. I’m all for free speech, but hopefully this will reduce online hate, and maybe Finfluencers will start to feel less free and start fact checking themselves prior to posting some of the utter garbage we see currently.
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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
Sir Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent the World Wide Web so two companies could own half your waking life. Yet Ofcom's data shows that's exactly where we've landed: Alphabet and Meta now control 50% of UK internet time. Not market share. Actual human attention.

His CERN colleague Dr Robert Cailliau's has warned about "feudal AI". When the same platforms that monopolise your search, video, messaging and social feeds also control the AI models deciding what you see, you're not a user anymore. You're a digital serf, farming attention on someone else's land.

The evidence is stark: trust in the internet down to 33%, people spending more time online but feeling worse about it, and AI overviews appearing in 30% of searches whether you want them or not. Thus is the enclosure of the digital commons by algorithmic landlords.
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Rohit Parmar-Mistry
Founder at Pattrn Data
I grew up on the 'old' internet. It wasn't perfect, but it was built on genuine community. What we are seeing now is the textbook definition of a Cyberpunk dystopia: we have allowed mega-corporations to privatise our digital lives, turning the 'public town square' into a corporate-owned franchise.

In true Cyberpunk fashion, these platforms act like feudal lords. They enforce heavy-handed 'government' mandates on the average user, creating a culture of silence where people are terrified to speak. Yet, the hypocrisy is glaring. While they police nuance to death, I see a tidal wave of 'acceptable' racism against Indians that goes completely unchecked.

Why? Because in a corporate dystopia, safety is a product, not a right. They sanitise the content that scares advertisers but ignore the hate that drives engagement. We aren't losing our freedom to a dictator; we are surrendering it to a Terms of Service agreement. We have become digital serfs in a walled garden.