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Comment by IanCal

7 months ago

> the real risk I see is that as it's written, and as Ofcom are communicating, there is now a digital version of a SWATing for disgruntled individuals.

I'm sorry, what precisely do you mean by this? The rules don't punish you for illegal content ending up on your site, so you can't have a user upload something then report it and you get in trouble.

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IanCal

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buro9  7 months ago

Yes you can https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli...

A forum that isn't proactively monitored (approval before publishing) is in the "Multi-Risk service" category (see page 77 of that link), and the "kinds of illegal harm" include things as obvious as "users encountering CSAM" and as nebulous as "users encountering Hate".

Does no-one recall Slashdot and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_Amer... trolls? Such activity would make the site owner liable under this law.

You might glibly reply that we should moderate, take it down, etc... but we, is me... a single individual who likes to go hiking off-grid for a vacation and to look at stars at night. There are enough times when I could not respond in the timely way to moderate things.

This is what I mean by the Act providing a weapon to disgruntled users, trolls, those who have been moderated... a service providing user generated content in a user to user environment can trivially be weaponised, and it will be a very short amount of time before it happens.

Forum invasions by 4chan and others make this extremely obvious.

  • IanCal  7 months ago

    > A forum that isn't proactively monitored (approval before publishing) is in the "Multi-Risk service" category (see page 77 of that link),

    That's not true, you'd need to conclude you're at a medium or high risk of things happening and consider the impact on people if they do.

    > and as nebulous as "users encountering Hate".

    But users posting public messages can easily fit into the low risk category for this, it's even one of their examples of low risk.