How will the "Online Safety Bill" affect RailUK?

[itfcfan]

The "Online Safety Bill" is at report stage in parliament. It will introduce new compliance obligations on websites/apps that allow content to be shared and/or people to communicate with each other.

A tech policy specialist, Heather Burns, has published a thought provoking article on this today:

I want to help you understand what the UK’s draft Online Safety Bill will mean for you and your work on the open web. This post is my attempt to explain the compliance obligations, as they’ve been drafted, and how they will hit you.

By “you”, I mean anyone working in a company or a project which will fall in scope of the Bill, whether that’s your paid work, your software community, or your personal hobby.

And by “you”, I mean a company which is Not Big Tech, or as I’ll call it for the purposes of this post, NBT. They have their compliance departments, legal teams, and policy specialists. You don’t.

Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill; or, welcome to hell – Hi, I'm Heather Burns

As the article suggests, large organisations like Facebook and Twitter will have the resource to work through the compliance and implement the monitoring mandated by the legislation. What will be the impact on forums like RailUK that permit online discussion?

 

[Freightmaster]

What will be the impact on forums like RailUK that permit online discussion?

I run an online rail forum(albeit rather smaller in scope than this one!), and I for one
will be doing precisely nothing; if 'they' want to chase random hobby website owners
like me, they are more than welcome to try...

...but they won't get anywhere because (as the article correctly points out), small websites
like mine do not have anyone on staff who is qualified to deal with spurious compliance issues
in the first place.






MARK

 

[Mike395]

Even assuming the Bill gets through Parliament in its current form (which there's no guarantee of, and I'd go as far as to say that that's relatively unlikely as it's not yet touched the Lords), I suspect in reality most 'hobby' internet forums, of all sizes, will carry on exactly as they are - sites like ours aren't really a target of Government ire, despite the union debates that pop up here from time to time.

 

[najaB]

...but they won't get anywhere because (as the article correctly points out), small websites like mine do not have anyone on staff who is qualified to deal with spurious compliance issues in the first place.

That's the problem though - you don't have anyone to do the necessary compliance that will allow you to prove that your site isn't a hotbed of child abuse image sharing or a terrorist recruitment site.

 

[dgl]

Just claim it's a news site and you can post what you like