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Definitely feel like I'm in the minority on mastodon in feeling that, broadly, it's right that small sites with user-user interaction should have to do the kinds of risk assessments the OSA requires and have defined effective moderation / content removal measures etc.
The assessment guidance being awful, and the law having too many ambiguities, are things begging to be fixed... but the principles behind are not wrong to my mind.
A physical cycling club is going to e.g. have done safeguarding assessments, considered health annd safety, written down club rules etc. to protect its members.
I don't think it's unreasonable for risk assessments to be required of even a small online cycling community, or similar. But, it shouldn't be as costly or ambiguous as the fumbled introduction of this law makes it.
@dctrud I agree with you. However I also agree that the costs involved are rather off putting for small sites. If they could work out a cheaper way of doing it...
@missmelanieh yeah - there should have been considerable push back against it taking effect until such time as good tools were provided by OFCOM. And... efforts to make sure those tools happened so that the law could then take effect.
(she/her) @dctrud When I used to run bike rides I had £3M or so indemnity insurance via the CTC (as was) so I do feel like the struggles of smaller sites shows that we have quite stunted civic tech structures cf. IRL ones to help with risk assessment and so on.
@dctrud For sure, a cycling club would (I assume) have to assess e.g. its own choice of route for risk of physical injury to participants. But would it have to assess and take steps to prevent the risk of one participant assaulting another? That is the direct equivalent of the kind of duty placed on online forums, but for risk of user-to-user illegal speech (in its myriad forms) rather than physical assault. 1/3
@dctrud It’s a very different kind of duty, and (I would say) is the underlying reason why the OSA implementation has ended up being the mess that it is. See e.g. the section ‘Make it about safety’ in this post. https://www.cyberleagle.com/2022/08/reimagining-online-safety-bill.html 2/3
@dctrud and discussed at length in this submission to the 2019 White Paper consultation. https://www.cyberleagle.com/2019/06/speech-is-not-tripping-hazard-response.html 3/3
@cyberleagle @dctrud you're not entirely wrong but I'd challenge you to make a cycling term equivalent to "user-to-user service" that is so vague that it might/could cover a child's 18cm toy unicycle or an American 18 wheeler HGV.
And then slap an £18,000,000 fine on getting the understanding wrong ;)
@dctrud The days of throwing a forum, or masto site, online without thinking about user safety, etc.are behind us. It's not the lawless frontier anymore.