Online Safety Act 2023 and its impact on small businesses

We have today written to our MP about the impact of this Act on this forum. This is the text of that letter:

Dear Graham

I am a director of a small business in your constituency which runs a web site called WalkLakes that includes a forum where users discuss our site and walkers post reports of their walks and discuss walking. These posts include photographs taken on the walks. It's a very low volume forum with only a few posts a week. The typical user is an adult and in fact I'm not consciously aware that any child has ever posted on our forum. None of the posts are in any way either illegal or pose a threat to children and they are all checked by us. New users' posts are also embargoed from public view until we have checked them but we have never had any dubious posts other than typical forum advertising spam.

The Online Safety Act 2023 now expects us to police this forum in ways which are completely disproportionate to the risk to children. Ofcom is bombarding us with documents which I'm struggling to understand and still appear to be incomplete but appear to call for us to either stop children using the site or, at the very least, prove that children typically don't.

We are expected to do this by 16th April. I see no way for us to do either without significant cost, and also invasion of privacy for our users.

If we succeed we then also have to do annual audits, including repeatedly on whether the site is used by children.

This is just one of a number of measures which they appear to be imposing on us which are only described by Ofcom in the broadest terms in a confusing tangle of web pages which are clearly not aimed at our sort of site.

If we fail to do this we can be fined up to £18m and they can forceably remove our web site from the Internet.

This is causing significant alarm across the UK as many specialist forums are talking about whether to simply give up and walk away as the cost is prohibitive both in terms of compliance and penalties. I would highlight in particular the LFGSS (London Fixed Gear Single Speed) which attracted some press when it announced it was shutting up shop, but this is only the tip of the iceberg and I'm seeing many sites, including ours, talking about whether we can continue.

Your colleague Alex Easton MP has already submitted a written question on this on 15th January. It read:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether his Department is taking steps to (a) clarify (i) liability and (ii) enforcement thresholds under the Online Safety Act 2023 and (b) help tackle the unintended consequences of that Act for small, independent online community operators.

The response, on 23rd January, was:

All user-to-user and search services in scope of the Act must tackle illegal content and, where relevant, protect children from harm. Ofcom is the independent regulator for this regime and takes a proportionate and risk-based approach to regulation. Ofcom must ensure burdens on providers are proportionate to their risk factors, size, and capacity.

This response, and in particular the last sentence, does not reflect what Ofcom is actually doing. Their latest pronouncement is an invitation to a conference “The Online Safety Act Explained: How to Comply” which will take place over three half days which gives you some idea of how complicated they clearly think this is for us, and this is not "proportionate" at all for a small business like mine.

I would welcome any help you can give to pressure the Secretary of State to pause the introduction of this legislation until such time as it can be made both simple to understand and simple to implement for small businesses and volunteer run forums.

Thank you.

Kind regards

Paul Oldham

WalkLakes
https://www.walklakes.co.uk