Online Safety Regulation & Private Online Communications: The State of Play and Ways Ahead

Schwieter and Tuck's February 2025 ISD report — produced for the Digital Policy Lab working group — examines one of the most genuinely difficult tensions in information environment governance: end-to-end encryption's role in both protecting privacy and enabling coordinated disinformation and extremist content to evade detection and moderation. The report maps the evolving regulatory landscape across the EU, UK, Netherlands, Slovakia, and the US, assessing how different jurisdictions are attempting to balance privacy and security in their treatment of encrypted services.

The tension between privacy and security in encrypted communications is not resolvable by policy preference — it involves genuine trade-offs between values that are both legitimate. Schwieter and Tuck's contribution is to map these trade-offs with analytical precision rather than advocating a predetermined position. For practitioners and policymakers working on DSA implementation — particularly its treatment of encrypted services and their use in coordinating disinformation and extremist content — this is the most current available assessment of where regulatory thinking stands across major democratic jurisdictions.