The Forthcoming Online Safety Act

[Drago]

Ignoring the politics behind it - because I simply ain't interested - there seems to be a possibility of the Online Safety Act having an impact on community forums such ad this resplendent establishment.

A recent quote from the owner of A.N.Other forum...

The long answer: it's almost impossible to tell exactly what the problems are going to be. The Online Safety Act, and its enforcement, depends entirely on documents that have not yet been published. Ofcom says that it will publish its definition of "Illegal Harms" in December 2024...and it still hasn't emerged, with a week to go before everybody buggers off on their Christmas break. It also relies on "secondary legislation" which still hasn't been published, and probably won't get through Parliament before the Act comes into force.

As for what it means for this site...there will have to be some significant changes. Off the top of my head...

1 - Private messages will no longer be private; as the owner of the site, I'll have a duty to (at the very least) scan all of them for harassment/hate speech/etc.

2 - Politics & Economics will have to go, and probably all of the off-topic areas too, given the number of times people have claimed racism/sexism/etc - it only takes one of those to be reported to Ofcom by a disgruntled member, and I'm bankrupt for the rest of my life. Of course, includes Friends in Need, which is core to the sense of community here and has been of enormous help to so many people.
3 - I'll have to find some way to automate the scanning of every single word posted on here for potential violations, which means some form of AI. And somehow, I'll have to do that at almost zero cost.

Basically, the site will no longer be a community. The effect of this legislation will be to push all communities towards Facebook or Discord, which is hardly an improvement.

The net result of all this is that, unless something drastically changes in the legislation and Ofcom's approach to enforcement, this website will go read-only the day that the legislation comes into force, and that will only change if the law changes. I love this site, but ultimately I'm not willing to destroy the rest of my life to keep it going.

It's an extremely poorly-drafted law, but only from the perspective of the individual. From the government's perspective, it's f***ing wonderful - there's a great write-up here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17577632.2024.2361524#d1e388

Basically, Ofcom are expecting service providers to bypass the law entirely by over-moderating - proactively preventing the posting of any content which looks like it even might be illegal under the Online Safety Act.

On top of all that, there's the age-verification requirement, which means there would have to be integration with some sort of identity verification service for every single user, thus entirely removing any anonymity on the Internet for users of UK services.

So what do the wise minds, and Accy, of CycleChat , make of this?

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Unless there is a part of the site I’m not seeing, I don’t think illegal harms is a major concern for the content posted here. Though you might have to stop posting pictures of your Yfronts. I think there will need to be a review of terms and conditions, that everyone will need to accept, to continue using the site. Private messages have never been private on anything other than end to end encrypted services such as Signal. Google have been scanning the content of every Gmail messages since inception for instance.

As for illegal or harmful content, it’s as much what you do about it, when you become aware of it. If you allow it to the remain, or multiply…

This site remains open and visible to search engines, GCHQ, the public. I’d think the Government agencies would be more concerned with sites that try to remain private, hidden, which is where I’d think the harmful / illegal content is being shared.

 

[Dogtrousers]

Thanks for giving me some Christmas reading.

 

[a.twiddler]

My first thought was that the owner of A.N. Other site might be catastrophising somewhat. If for the present, the real answer to the questions about the proposed legislation is that Nobody Knows, it might just be a case of Wait and See.

Thats not to say that the law of unintended consequences from any well intentioned and poorly thought out piece of legislation won't be perfectly capable of messing things up for posters on forums such as this one. God knows, we've seen plenty of those. I wouldn't be surprised that this, and other such forums, might be sucked into the vacuum that is Facebook if anything occurs to upset the present equilibrium. I fervently hope that won't happen, as I make great efforts to stay off Facebook, What'sApp, Google et al. I've enjoyed my time on here, and would like to see it continue.

 

[Alex321]

Until we see the finalised OFCOM guidance, it is going to be very difficult.

The listings of what constitutes "priority illegal content" at Schedule 7 are fairly wide ranging, and the duty of care regarding that is not particularly well defined.

 

[gbb]

I havnt had or got the time ATM to digest but it seems like social media is disappearing up its own a55.
My kneejerk reaction is it will stymie and block freedom of speech ...but I need to sit down and read yo get a fuller idea

 

[Psamathe]

I've not read detailed legislation but does the country the website is hosted in have any impact? Can the UK make and enforce laws where a site is outside the UK?

I can see how the UK can make and enforce laws where the site operator has subsidiaries or servers in the UK. Good example recently with Xitter and Brazil.

Many hosting providers offer servers in many different countries eg my personal website is hosted in the Netherlands rather than the UK (though I could move it to other countries without changing hosting provider.

Ian

 

[wiggydiggy]

Forums are to me the last bastion of a decent conversation online, I don't know how many other CC users use alternative platforms like Reddit, Discord or Facebook but its extremely hard to have a meaningful conversation with people that are for all intents and purposes strangers.

 

[Drago]

Forums are to me the last bastion of a decent conversation online....

Amen to that.

 

[Profpointy]

Forums are to me the last bastion of a decent conversation online, I don't know how many other CC users use alternative platforms like Reddit, Discord or Facebook but its extremely hard to have a meaningful conversation with people that are for all intents and purposes strangers.

I agree!. I was spending lot of time on Quora, which was originally envisaged as a question and answer site, but I got increasingly disilusioned with the inane trolling. Worryingly a lot of it possibly wasn't trolling given it was a US site, but I have recenlty left deleting all my content, not as a flounce, but just as an increasingly poisonous place I didn't want to waste any more effort on or be associated with. I realise my mistake responding to racist or creationist posts results in me getting fed more of the same, and the only escape is to leave. It didn't help that blocking troll questions was far harder than it should have been as you had to scroll past tens or hundreds of answers to get to the question proper

 

[fossyant]

The owner of LFGSS is pretty worried about potential fines and various requirements. Hence likely closure.

 

[markemark]

I was going to say to the forum owners to suck it and see. But sadly the Suck It And See forum I go to will be closed down due to the online safety act.

 

[wafter]

ffs

While I'd not given it a lot of conscious thought, I've been aware of the slow destruction of anything of value on the net thanks to increasingly over-zealous oversight / regulation by our overlords - either in the name of nanny-state, free-speech-curtailing rubbish and / or thinly-veiled attempts to further the surveillance state.

I've been active for many years on various small, interest-focused forums such as CC and agree wholly with @wiggydiggy's position. While such forums have largely remained constant (if perhaps in the face of declining traffic) in the face of the "new breed" of social media, sites like facebook, instagram, tiktok etc seem to have mutated from decent, legitimate platforms that simply allowed you to stay in touch with friends / those with shared interests into warped, toxic, exploititive, ad-driven rubbish.

Unfortunately it seems that as usual, the few decent interest-driven forums are being swept towards the collective internet cesspit on the tidal wave of effluent that is the "social media".
While sad it's hardly surprising since this is the way the net has been trending since its inception; imagined initially as a borderless, libertarian platform to allow free communication, it's increasingly been destroyed by the insatiable human need for profit, surveillance and control.

Naievely I'd sort of assumed that the humble forum might be immune to / slip under the radar of such nastiness; but of course I should have known they'd try to get us somehow.

I can see that all this will achieve - like most other acts of control and prohibition - is to drive stuff underground... does all this shite still apply if the forums aren't publicly-visible?

 

[wafter]

Forums are to me the last bastion of a decent conversation online, I don't know how many other CC users use alternative platforms like Reddit, Discord or Facebook but its extremely hard to have a meaningful conversation with people that are for all intents and purposes strangers.

Totally agree with this; Reddit's OK for some stuff but I find the layout weird, there's no sense of community and it all seems so fleeting / transient.

While FB literally used to be 100% content generated by friends, now (presumably in the face of falling traffic and efforts to monetise it) my time on there is mostly spent inanely browsing the random crap served to me on Marketplace, wasting my time pointlessly "liking" random content pushed in my direction, or getting drawn in by rage-bait and exposing myself to unnecessary grief by arguing with knuckle-dragging imbeciles.

It's been a very slow, subtle bait-and-switch, but FB really is 90% a massive, toxic waste of time now.

 

[Drago]

...and exposing myself to unnecessary grief by arguing with knuckle-dragging imbeciles.

But I'm not on Facebook.