What is the meaning of "illegal content" given in the OSA? What will social media platforms be forced to censor (, remove, ..) ... let's take a look:<p>Table 1.1: Priority offences by category
( <a href="https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/online-safety/information-for-industry/illegal-harms/overview-of-illegal-harms.pdf?v=390985" rel="nofollow">https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli...</a> )<p>Disucssion of offenses related to: prostitution, drugs, abuse & insults, suicide, "stiring up of racial/religious hatred", fraud and "foreign interference".<p>So one imagines a university student discussing, say: earning money as a prostitute. Events/memories related to drug taking. Insulting their coursemates. Ridiculing the iconography of a religion. And, the worst crime of all, "repeating russian propaganda" (eg., the terms of a peace deal) -- which russians said it, and if it is true are -- of course -- questions never asked nor answered.<p>This free-thinking university student's entire online life seems to have been criminalised in <i>mere discussion</i> by the OSA, there may have been zero actual actions involved (consider, though, a majority of UK students have taken class-A drugs at most prominent universities).<p>This seems as draconian, censorious, illiberal, repressive and "moral panic"y as the highs of repressive christian moralism in the mid 20th C.
Related post with a large discussion from someone who said:<p>"<i>Lfgss shutting down 16th March 2025 (day before Online Safety Act is enforced)<p>[...] I run just over 300 forums, for a monthly audience of 275k active users. most of this is on Linode instances and Hetzner instances, a couple of the larger fora go via Cloudflare, but the rest just hits the server.<p>and it's all being shut down [...]</i>"<p>For the same reasons.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044</a>
Anyone* would be crazy to run a UK-based or somewhat UK-centric forum today. Whether it be for a hobby, profession, or just social interaction. The government doesn’t perceive these sites as having any value (they don't employ people or generate corporation tax).<p>[*] Unless you are a multibillion $ company with an army of moderators, compliance people, lawyers.
HEXUS stopped publishing in 2021, and the company no longer exists. The forums were kept because they don't take much work to keep online. Now, there's a lot of work to do, like reading hundreds of pages of documents and submitting risk assessments. There's nobody to do that work now, so the idea was it could go into read only mode. The problem with that was, some users may want their data deleted if it becomes read only. Therefore, the only option is to delete it.
Summary: The UK has some Online Safety Act, any websites that let users interact with other users has to police illegal content on its site and must implement strong age verification checks. The law applies to any site that targets UK citizens or has a substantial number of UK users, where "substantial number" is not defined.<p>I'm going to guess this forum is UK-based just based on all the blimey's. Also the forum seems to have been locked from new users for some time, so it was already in its sunset era.<p>The admin could just make it read only except to users who manually reach out somehow to verify their age, but at the same time, what an oppressive law for small UK forums. Maybe that's the point.
Rather than shut it down, would it be possible to sell the forum to someone in the US for a little bit of money, like $20 or something?<p>Idea being the US-based owner migrates the DB with posts and user logins to servers hosted on US soil, then if the UK government comes knocking the former owners in the UK can say "Sorry it doesn't belong to us anymore, we sold it, here's the Paypal receipt." (Ideally they'd sell the domain too, but as long as you still have the DB you could always host the forum at a different domain.)<p>Any forum admins here willing to add another forum to their portfolio?
It's awkward.<p>It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away!<p>But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere.<p>At some level, I think it's reasonable that online spaces take some responsibility for staying clear of eg hate speech. But I'm not sure how you match that with the fundamental freedom of the Internet.
I sympathize with the operators of these forums of course -- the UK Online Safety Act is poorly conceived.<p>HOWEVER.<p>Deleting their forums?
"The act will require a vast amount of work to be done on behalf of the Forums and there is no-one left with the availability to do it." [1]<p>This is a false dichotomy. Put Cloudflare in front of the site, block UK traffic [2], and you're done. 5 minute job.<p>[1] <a href="https://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/426608-looks-like-end-hexus-forums.html#post4316908" rel="nofollow">https://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/426608-looks-like-end-he...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/custom-rules/use-cases/block-traffic-from-specific-countries/" rel="nofollow">https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/custom-rules/use-cases...</a>
Wow, UK has these crazy laws too? The German hate speech laws made headlines a week or so ago (<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-prosecution-60-minutes/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros...</a>). They'll confiscate your electronics if you insult someone and they actively monitor the Internet for prohibited speech.
So sites will geoblock the uk and users will use VPN software. Ugh. More software layers, more waste. Also a problem that is solved by a layer of indirection.
Fear/risk is at work here. Government by clear guidance, not
guesswork is needed. The word "unlikely" is doing too much lifting in
the guidance. OFCOM need to hard clarity with the kind of detail to
satisfy lawyers. OSB is sound in its aims, a fumbled hot potato in its
long-long discussion, a hash of an implementation, and the
explication/communication is a regurgitated dogs dinner. Normally our
gov communication is very good. Why can't OFCOM write? I guess we all
know any forum with more than a few members likely already has
software and some basic policy settings to do this. Unclear guidance
is making operators jumpy and afraid.<p>An opportunity for anyone with a transformer from "UK.GOV Hand-waving"
-> forum_settings.json
Headline: 2.6M posts<p>Reality: the forum has negative 358 posts in the last month. The forum has negative ~2k posts over the last 12 months. The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them. 8 people have created accounts in the last year.<p>The forum has been long dead.
I've been working with OFCOM on implementing the requirements of this act. They seem reasonable, and what they are looking for is mostly table stakes. That said, I wouldn't want to live in or run a UGC business in the UK right now.
The State of Utopia has published this report on the source of funding of Ofcom, the U.K. statutory regulator responsible for enforcing the Online Safety Act:<p><a href="https://medium.com/@rviragh/ofcom-and-the-online-safety-act-funding-and-contracts-ff198fb4b320" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@rviragh/ofcom-and-the-online-safety-act-...</a><p>(In short it is funded by the regulated tech companies, which must pay fees to it.)
Could someone please shed any light on why simply geoblocking the UK in its entirety would not be sufficient for an average forum to avoid having to deal with the Act?<p>A lot of US websites initially geoblocked EU to avoid dealing with GDPR, for example.
This is a major blow to non-profit communities. Which also means that only for profit will make sense of maintaining such platforms, which in itself is contradictory to what the proposal of the this act is.
I would ordinarily be upset about this but in this case it is probably for the best as there is unfortunately a lot of islamophobic content on the site
actual question, why bother? if they are domiciled in the UK, sell it to someone outside it or move the company elsewhere. let the britons kick and scream; the fun thing about the internet is they can't really do anything about it.
Forgive me if I’m being dense…<p>I just read through the entire HN discussion about lobste.rs and continued down that rabbit hole to other discussions of forum, deletions, and the safety act, etc.<p>The part I don’t understand is: Why aren’t these operators placing the forum into a corporate or partnership entity, without personal liability, that would be the target of some eventual enforcement?<p>These very small forums Are almost certainly not going to be targeted for enforcement… The issue is simply the risk…<p>… So why not just incorporate, go on your merry way, and if enforcement goes very differently than we all assume then you walk away from a corporate entity And continue to vacation in London without fear of arrest.<p>What am I missing here?
Some kinda online safety law is probably needed (download button is just up there if you must :/) but there should be a carve out for small operations. Set a revenue minimum or something.
Couldn't it be held in trust in the US or something?<p>"Just shut it down" is the lazy thing to do. Should take tips from dissidents in other totalitarian shitholes - they just move it abroad to relatively free countries.