I am not sure if the UK Online Safety Act will apply to this forum, but there is a risk that it might...
If you are not sure what I am talking about, have a read of this https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/online_safety_act/
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Computers, GPS, 'Smart' 'Phones
UK Online Safety Act, threat to this forum?
(11 posts)-
Posted 4 days ago #
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according to law, regulator Ofcom could impose a fine of £18 million ($22 million) or 10 percent of their global revenue – whichever is greater – for failing to comply
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Not a problem then…
Though someone is already ‘targeting’ CCE!
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"Every single service will have to go through all 17 categories of priority illegal content and consider ‘non priority’ illegal content too. This is the case even if you're a small cycling based forum that only allows text based comments. That's just the way that Parliament designed the act. Unfortunately, that's not Ofcom's choice to do it that way," Packer said.
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Posted 4 days ago # -
My guess is that the
small cycling based forum that only allows text based comments
that is being referred to is LFGSS, where the person who runs it has already said that complying will be impossibly difficult for them and the forum will have to close. LFGSS may be small but it is way bigger than CCE!I'd not been aware of the bit about number of users before.
Posted 4 days ago # -
From the Register article that Kim linked to
Organizations with a smaller number of users will simply have to have the [risk assessment] document ready should Ofcom request it.
The person interviewed by the Register describes the risk assessment asquite a detailed and involved process
.
I guess the question is, are OFCOM going to come after small forums like this one? The LFGSS person is (IIRC) concerned about malicious reports to OFCOM.Posted 4 days ago # -
The draft bill is impossibly broad. Any forum worldwide in which UK users might take part would be in scope, with the risk diminished only by readership or existing controls. Overseas owned forums might opt to refuse UK members henceforth, that is if the owners are aware of the bill or its implications at all.
The Wikipedia entry for the bill notes that journalistic articles and comments thereto are out of scope. CCE is certainly often politically minded with vigorous discussion, but hard to argue it was journalism.
I wonder if this could also end Mastodon instances that are also often run by individuals.
Posted 4 days ago # -
This kind of stuff falls within the scope of my day job, so here's a couple of ruminations:
- Usually with this kind of legislation 'generator' or boilerplate-wizard tools spring up, so while tortuous to go through it will probably be possible to generate the compliance statement needed before the deadline without it being loads of work (happy to help, chris / chris and others);
- The main vectors for potential harm on this site would be through image/video posting, and through private messaging. The former, it would be very quickly reported by folks using the forum, and moderated out of existence; for private messaging, I have no concept of how frequently that feature is used here, and it might be a question of turning it off if it's not used much.
That might be a naïve reading of the situation but I reckon as we did with GDPR / Cookie Compliance, we'll see tools appear over the next couple of months that would make an audit and compliance an annoying but non-world-ending project?
Ofcom's 'Regulation Checker' says (based on six basic questions) that CCE is in scope for this. I've signed up for updates by email which assumedly will result in contact when they publish the tools they've mentioned in the article. At the moment, all they have published is a four steps for compliance summary.
Posted 4 days ago # -
Happy to help draft the required paperwork. Not that I'm super lazy or anything, but the first thing I would do is look for published risk assessments from larger online services that we could be "inspired" by.
Posted 4 days ago # -
Thanks M
Posted 4 days ago # -
All images and videos "posted" here are simply links to things hosted on 3rd-party sites, e.g. Flickr / Youtube
Surely the responsibility lies with those sites to take down harmful content? Or is it that forums are responsible for moderating links as well as the text?
Posted 4 days ago # -
84 page Ofcom guide on conducting risk assessments. Which includes links to a 14 page records keeping guide and references several other documents.
I've seen worse. Probably worth waiting for the Ofcom online tools before doing anything. If anyone does see an Online Safety Act risk assessment out in the wild it would be great if they could post a link here - always good to have something to work with.
Posted 4 days ago # -
Will keep an eye out!
@neddie - I'd expect the fact that embedding happens here makes it the platform the content is posted on, rather than the source of the file / embed being rendered. Certainly if someone posted something objectionable most people would first try and approach a CCE mod rather than Flickr or Youtube
Posted 4 days ago #
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