The Online Safety Act.

FFS. Long-standing committed Mods & Admin team who have kept this forum safe and running for about twenty years are apparently in need of some moral support and perhaps advice, and your response is to accuse them of wasting member's time and suggesting that closing the board might be an equally valid option to finding a way forward. As a motivational technique, that scores about minus five on a scale of one to ten.

You may have other and more glamorous RAF bolt-holes to whence you can disappear. Many of us don't, and the help that is generously offered to beginning (and more experienced) researchers here continues to astound me. It is of course your privilege not to give a flying f*ck about it, and us, but unless there is a reason for the vindictiveness, perhaps the decent thing might be to withdraw from the discussion.

 

Neither the false claim of supposed "vindictiveness" nor the ripe personal insults help solve the problem of ensuring the Board meets its compliance obligation under the Act, now and in the future.

 

Only board I can see in the Online Services Act.

153 Functions of the Content Board
(1) Section 13 of the Communications Act (functions of the Content Board) is amended
as follows.
(2) At the beginning of subsection (2), insert “Subject to subsection (3A),”.
(3) After subsection (3) insert—
“(3A) OFCOM may, but need not, confer on the Content Board functions in relation
to matters that concern the nature or kind of online content in relation to which
OFCOM have functions under the Online Safety Act 2023 (see Parts 3 and
5 of that Act).”
(4) After subsection (7) insert—
“(8) In this section references to “matters mentioned in subsection (2)” do

 

Board or just bored with the pompous grandstanding?

 

The Act has one reference to "service provider" as a term of art, otherwise it is "provider of services" or "provision, etc., & c. On the other hand, OFCOM guidance refers to "service provider". There is no indication as to how a service provider should reach decisions and communicate such as are required by and to OFCOM, or whether there should be any meetings. A service provider could be a sole individual. The duty to make risk assessments is a requirement by an initial date and thereafter to be under continuous assessment. OFCOM are liable to issue further guidance: the service provider is to look out for such.

The Courts have ruled against OFCOM recently: see GB News Limited, R (on the application of) v The Office of Communications ('Ofcom') - Find Case Law - The National Archives

The case was about TV but this phrase is of concern : ( para 116 of the judgment: )

"Cases falling within Rule 5.3 are subject to a prohibition with an exceptional reverse-burden defence of editorial justification. All other cases require the due impartiality test to be applied on a fully contextual basis."

 

Just possibly, positively engaging with those who have to make the decisions might be enough to help things over the line.

Blaming victims and slagging heroes appear to be increasingly common phenomena. You are J.D. Vance and I claim my five pounds !

 

[Grams ON: fruity tones of Eton.]
Quite agree, quite agree!
Best way to get help!
Personal attack, misrepresent, insult.
Keep it up! Keep it up!
[Grams OFF}

Posters aren't obligated to agree.
Repeated personal attacks on the other hand:
See Forum Guidelines/Rules.

The board has an obligation to meet the Act provisions.
I have nil experience in UK administrative law.
All I can do is draw attention, tersely, to the pointless drift into hyperbole and insult, v the work needed to ensure the Board and its members know how to comply with the UK Act passed by your elected Parliament.

All references to heroes, STASI, thought police and the like are irrelevant and unhelpful, as are all personal insults and misrepresenting any poster's post content, intent or motive.


Still, the behaviour of any Board under a little pressure is worth being aware of.

 

An ounce of perception, a pound of obscure. Surely there must be professional help available ?

 

Interlude

 

Is Observer39 prepared to become Participant39, put his nuts on the line and assume responsibility for other people's illegal and 'non-crime' actions under a vague, vindictive and probably variable piece of legislation?

No? There's a surprise.

The 'board' you keep harping on about is a group of unpaid, everyman enthusiasts who've kept this place going for decades. If there was a simple solution, I’m sure they’d have worked it out or found it out by now. As they haven't, perhaps there isn't.

Regarding your other point, there is no obligation to meet the Act's provisions - they can just say 'fuck it' and stop providing the service. Any chance you could be a little more unhelpful in bringing that about? Thanks.

I think that says far more about you than it does about them, and it's not particularly positive.

 

I have been a member of another (non-military) discussion forum for twenty-three years now and have moderated there for more than a decade.

That forum is also hosted on U.S. servers; we moved several years back after seeing the way the wind was blowing in Europe. That doesn't seem to offer much protection against the new OSA, however, unless we block UK connections and ask all members to use VPNs to join us. Many wouldn't and some of the older members likely don't possess the technical know-how to set up, maintain and troubleshoot the software.

Accordingly, we're going to do our best to continue as we have been for all that time (without any incident of pornography, cyber-bullying, 'epilepsy trolling', dangerous dogs, backward satanic messages or video nasties), but the line in the sand I have drawn is that if I am required to submit personally identifying information about myself to any kind of authority, I will stop all involvement.

Moderators here will no doubt have a variety of views on this matter, all of which I respect

Our hope there—and here—is that either a) enforcement is much lighter that the written word would suggest, or (in the longer term) b) a legal challenge finds the law as it stands in violation of our right to free speech under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

As I suggested upthread, the software we have here allows for a lot of control—it needn't be set to 'constant use', but there are technical solutions when it comes to making sure bad stuff does not appear; the problem is they might involve more work for moderators and would to some extent slow our ability to contribute.

This is because this law is the equivalent of ill-planned orders from people who do not understand the terrain and what is reasonably practicable.

I'd suggest that the first step is increased vigilance of who comes through the door and what posting privileges they have at what stage.

A second might be to do something about pruning the membership roster and shutting down (not deleting or removing content from) the mass of inactive accounts that have not logged in for many years. It's a security risk. If an old member wishes to return, it take only a few seconds to merge any new account with their old and/or reactivate the old account with a new password.

The staff here do a very good job, but we're going to see more A.I. controlled spambots, possibly with more malicious intent than selling us fake viagra.

A large number of members of Mumsnet (not a haunt of mine but a huge forum) recently got exposed to child pornography via deliberately posted links; the management there, I'm told, is agonising over the changes required to minimise the chance of a recurrence—because such changes would fundamentally change the way they have always operated.

 

I thank member Charley Fortnum for making that most informative and completely civil post on what is a difficult issue.

May you farewell

 

The Online Safety Bill Joint Committee report is here ( published in December 2021 ) : ( 1 MB download )

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/8206/documents/84092/default/

This contribution found in evidence to the Joint Committee is relevant:

" 2. Imposing stringent legal requirements with no regard for platform size will harm the diversity and innovation that drives the tech sector. Stringent legal requirements will disproportionately impact smaller tech companies with fewer resources to support compliance, whereas larger tech platforms will be able to allocate the resources necessary to comply with the Bill."

The written evidence of "Tech Against Terrorism" which included that extract is here:

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/39162/html/

The original chart is in shades of blue but is here:



Total number of employees : 0 would seem to define this forum = "Micro".

Example of OFCOM printing:



The footnote says this:

"[29] All services have a duty to assess each 17 kind of priority illegal content separately in their risk assessment.

Some services may find it appropriate to further separate the kind of illegal content into subsets relating to
specific offences, categories or manifestations of that harm on their service.

An example may be highlighting evidence of specific types of fraud that disproportionately affect your service under the ‘Fraud and Financial services’ kind of illegal harm."

"Some services" without employees would find that difficult.

 

I've got to page 78 out of 84 of the Risks guidance. The more I read through it - which is very hard, because of the typesetting quirks, the more it seems that our moderators can take this in their stride. It's not as if they haven't been coping with all sorts, unseen and unheard, over the years.

Changes to the site will be coming, no doubt.

The Risks Guidance has been written for a huge variety of different platforms. OFCOM ( as spelt in the Act ) or Ofcom, as Ofcom calls themselves, refer to many things that could go wrong but the main thing is assessing the risk and demonstrating that there is constant thought, and recording of decisions, of things that could go bump in the night.

In many ways the Mods could be experts for Ofcom to consult upon their hard-won experience.

 

Very encouraging news!!

 

This is such a well-run and inherently well-behaved group. If this one goes down, then it's back to papyrus basically.

 

OFCOM "risks" rated as high, medium, low, negligible. Risks of seeing bad things.

The thing is they don't seem to mind a "high", a conclusion I gain from the examples given in the main Risk Guidance. It has to be honest.

Under OFCOM guidance of risks a "URL" or "Uniform Resource Locator" could lead to unpleasant external sites, but I give a URL here.

The Record Keeping guidance is fairly short. It gives an idea of what is involved.

{ Where you see an underlining of words in colour that is likely to be a URL as used in OFCOM typography ]

The annoying thing is the incorporation of further guidance - it's not a document that can be read quickly, because OFCOM chuck in a lot of other material from URLs - and I haven't read through all of those.

See section 2 and section 3 of Record Keeeping for what has to be done and in what format. URL here:

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets...cord-keeping-and-review-guidance.pdf?v=391926