The Coffee Shop, online safety and the Online Safety Act

[whole diary]

[grahame]

An article in The Guardian, and an item on the BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page), have highlighted the Online Safety Act  over the weekend. Thank you to members who have asked whether it might relate to the Coffee Shop forum, especially in following up the article in the Guardian in which one operator of multiple small online communities with very different specialities is planning/threatening to pull the plug on her communities.

Management Summary:

The Great Western Coffee Shop Passenger Forum carries on through the updates / additions to online safety laws.  The safety of our members, guests and the wider community has always been paramount and that commitment does not change. 

More detail:

Our moderator and admin team and webmaster are reviewing the implications of the new legal position. We believe that we already meet the user safety requirements (in 17 areas) that the law is intended to address. Yes - we have read and circulate the 17 around our team. You may see minor updates in places to conform to the letter in addition to the spirit of the law.

GDPR, Cookies, Accessibility, Safety - the law as to what is and isn't allowed online and what is required of sites ans providers has changed over the years, with new jigsaw pieces coming into play in what started off as a new, and unregulated, environment. Web sites such as the Coffee Shop forum are minnows compared to the big fish that the various laws look to address, but never the less we must take them into account and act appropriately.  In some cases - and the current new legal position is a good example - the complexity and volume of information provided to meet a vast range of cases feels overwhelming, and also questions arise as to whether the new law / legal position takes away freedoms or imposes overburdening regulation.  Against that framework, here is a summary of what is required of us ...

The illegal content safety duties, and those relating to reporting and complaints, focus on keeping people safe online. It’s about making sure you have the right measures in place to protect people from harm that could take place on your service.

If you are the provider of a user-to-user service, it means you will need to:
* take proportionate steps to prevent your users encountering illegal content
* mitigate and manage the risk of offences taking place through your service
* mitigate and manage the risks identified in your illegal content risk assessment
* swiftly remove illegal content when you become aware of it, and minimise the time it is present on your service
* explain how you’ll do this in your terms of service
* allow people to easily report illegal content and operate a complaints procedure

If you are the provider of a search service, it means you'll need to:
* take proportionate steps to minimise the risk of your users encountering illegal content via search results
* mitigate and manage the risks identified in your illegal content risk assessment
* explain how you’ll do this in a publicly available statement
* allow people to easily report illegal content and operate a complaints procedure

Our systems / procedures / moderator team already do most of this.  The quoted summary says "will" but we already do. 

There are a couple of elements where - thinking "worst case" - we could add a few lines of preventative code to have the forum flag automatically something that has never happened. That is rather than occasional manual checks I have made in the past. It is worth updating the required public statements, reporting and complaint procedures all in a single obvious-to-find container (there are links on the bottom of every page anyway!)

Perhaps worth my while to add - what you will NOT see. You will not see any switch towards a more interventionist moderation as a result of these law changes. You will continue to see the Coffee Shop maintained as a safe place. And also a place where your views and thoughts remain welcome and help fertilise conversation, even if those views are not aligned with those of our team who help keep the place safe.

[grahame]

Bumping an old topic here because I was reminded of this with the news of such as "The head of the Metropolitan Police has called on the government to "change or clarify" the law following the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan over posts he made online" from The BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page).

This is so far removed from content that gets posted on the Coffee Shop that you may ask "should we even be concerned?".  Yes, we need to be, because a single incident of something that's fuzzy according to the law could be very hot water for the poster and for the forum should we fail to watch and act if someone slips up - even if (as I'm pretty sure would be the case) that slip up wasn't intentional.  But I am re-assured that the moderator and admin team, together with members letting us know of any concerns, will quickly highlight and allows us to act on anything that's at all of risk.