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How are you dealing with the UK's Online Safety Act, that comes into effect this March? (futurology.today)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"Companies will have three months from when the guidance is finalised to carry out risk assessments and make relevant changes to safeguard users.........."Platforms are supposed to remove illegal content like promoting or facilitating suicide, self-harm, and child sexual abuse."

This is already impacting futurology.today - one of the Mods is British, and because of this law doesn't feel comfortable continuing. As they have back-end expertise with hosting, if they go, we may have to shut down the whole site.

How easy is it to block British IP addresses? Would that be enough to circumvent any legal issues, if no one else involved in running the site is British and it is hosted somewhere else in the world?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

that's the thing. You don't have to be a company or resident of the UK.

If you have a community (classic forum, lemmy, masto etc) that caters to a "significant part" to UK users, you are target of the act.

And depending on where you live, extraditions to the UK for criminal charges exist.

Will anyone bother doing that? We'll see

Edit: In case people want to read the law themselves: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/4

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I don't believe it would target any of the fediverse currently. No instances have significant volumes of users or target markets. This is designed to target facebooks, tik-toks, and twitters. Services that do influence populations. Essentially, making these services actually responsible for their algorithmic output and akin to publishers in the UK

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

intended target and possible target are different things.

The law, as it exists, targets any and all communities with "a significant number of United Kingdom users". There is no minimum size requirement.

It might be possible that the law turns a blind eye on smaller communities. But it might not. They are in their right to go against a 20 user fediverse instance the same way as they are against facebook

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

So with british law, the intent of the law is as important as the written texts. Listen to the debates which can and are used by judges from the commons and the lords to decide upon intent. It's not for tiny forums, but I'm also not a lawyer. Significant most likely relates to not just user count, but also other reporting from other media, it's significance of significant users, anonymity, and ability to break bigger stories. Try codifying any of that (and more!) in a law