Well, not quite, but distinctly possible.
El Reg has continued comment on the lunacies of the OSA I reported on in my last post. The Reg reports that one Neil Brown, a Director of a UK law firm, believes that individuals who run their own websites (so that would include me) could be held liable for off-topic visitor-posted comments that break the UK’s Online Safety Act.
The Reg reports that “Brown believes individuals running websites could be held accountable for posts by third-parties that are unrelated (off-topic) to the content on that site (eg, an AI-generated explicit image posted to a bike blog).”
In my time as a ‘net user I have seen a huge number of small sites which do not properly moderate user comments and thus leave themselves open to spam ‘bot posts, often pointing to the sort of sites that could not be classed as “child friendly”. If Brown is correct in his belief (and he may be unless Ofcom can provide definitive guidance to the contrary) then those sites will in future potentially be open to prosecution for breach of the law.
My own approach to comments here on trivia has always been one of very tight moderation – I do not allow any comment until I have seen it and agreed to its publication. Probably 99.99% of all attempted comments here are from spam ‘bots (lately mostly trying to get links to “binance” or other dodgy financial sites published). I routinely delete all such comments from my moderation queue. That is the reason you see so few comments here (well, that and the fact that not many real people comment……)
However, until such time as Ofcom can clarify the position on the OSA’s applicability to sites such as trivia, I am stopping comments altogether. It won’t make much difference to readers of trivia because they won’t see any change, but it will reduce my need to moderate the site and will certainly make me safer. If approached by Ofcom in future, I can then honestly say “I do not allow comment at all”.
I do worry though about the impact on small sites such as that run by the owner of my favourite bike forum.