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Everything the right - and the left – are getting wrong about the Online Safety Act
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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UK Politics
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I mean, if small forums are having to shut down, it isn't a big tech issue. It's an overreach of regulation issue.
I agree. But I suspect most small forums are still exempt reading this article and the law. If you don't have potential to cause harm (no porn essentially) you don't need to do anything. But this has yet to be tested in a court to set any case law yet and so forums are understandably being very cautious
I wouldnt be so confident in that. The wikimedia foundation are already in legal proceedings arguing against the act being drawn so widely that they would be included with the likes of instagram and twitter as a large scale social media company just due to their talk pages.
An interesting test case. Wikipedia contains vast amounts of information about harmful items, and children will use it. Ultimately libraries don't restrict lending and so I suspect the article here illustrates that they shall emerge victorious
The OSA should have been explicitly worded to exclude organisations like the Wikimedia Foundation from its scope. Clearly the intent of the law was not to clamp down on the Wikimedia Foundation, so the law should have been written such that the Wikimedia Foundation fell clearly outside of its scope. It's just very poorly drafted.
User to user communication is considered a risk - so any forum falls under this law.
Small sites are not exempted (see reply for petition to remove this legislation).
No leg to stand on there - it's a solid unworkable overreach.
And yet, if you read act: there is a reasonable argument within the legislation. And the article posted mentions it too, from the architect. So you are correct in the fact the size of the site matters not. But if you are reasonably not about questionable matetial, you are likely exempt. Which is essentially what wikipedia are testing. So call it an overreach all you want; but this is yet to be proven
I've read the act and it's not clear at all. There is a legal risk if you run a small site about a legal subject with a comment section or forum now that didn't exist before, which was not the stated intent of the law, and which results from the legislation being poorly drafted.