Thanks to discussions elsewhere I have become aware of problems with the UK’s new Online Safety Act. In theory this legislation is designed to protect children from unsafe material on the internet. It does things like require social media companies to actually enforce their age limits, and to have active moderation policies. In practice it is a poorly-thought-out piece of legislation that will catch a lot of innocent people in its net.

People who run various fora and bulletin boards for volunteer and hobbyist groups have already started taking their sites offline because they cannot afford to comply with the legislation, and can’t afford to ignore it. (You can be fined up to £18m if found in breach of the act.)

My guess is that, much like HMRC puts a lot of effort into prosecuting individuals who might have made a mistake in their tax return, while letting the wealthy and corporations get away with massive tax evasion, the force of this law will fall mainly on private individuals and small companies. There have been suggestions that SWATing-like tactics will be used by internet trolls whereby they seek to place dubious content on sites they have taken against, and then report those sites to the authorities.

In theory, blogs like this are exempt from the law on the grounds that they are not bulletin boards, but rather simply people commenting on things the blog owner has said. However, when the Act was drafted, it did not occur to anyone that it is possible for people to reply to other people’s comments on a blog. And that makes it functionally more like a bulletin board. There is no means in WordPress to prevent that from happening without closing comments altogether. As people hardly ever comment here these days anyway, I have taken the decision to close them entirely. Should things change in the future I can always open them up again. In the meantime, you can always reply to posts via social media.

Of course it would not surprise me if, sometime soon, the UK government decides that all discussion of trans issues is “pornographic” and therefore must be behind an 18+ screen. The Online Safety Act will be the vehicle through which they attack online discussion of trans rights. But I’ll deal with that as and when we get there.