UK will not change online safety law as part of US trade negotiations
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-wont-change-online-safety-law-part-us-trade-negotiations-2025-04-09/
Posted by Wonderful_Welder_796
UK will not change online safety law as part of US trade negotiations
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-wont-change-online-safety-law-part-us-trade-negotiations-2025-04-09/
Posted by Wonderful_Welder_796
18 Comments
Was ready to f***** lose it with Labour but well done for them.
Sad thing is that the claim they are was able to run everywhere before it was shut down…
It’s an awful law for UK companies and the UK tech industries.
Small UK based forums have had to close. Forums about bikes, cars and hobbies. They can’t afford to comply with the requirements. So have just shut down.
UK should change the law because it’s a shit law, if they can appear to do that to appease trump it’s killing 3 turds with one tweet…..
We should not do anything to placate the fascist dystopia. We should be doing more to try and bring them down.
If it hurts meta, apple, etc.
…I have no fucks to give.
Giving away the Chagos islands and invading your privacy. Two things HMG are absolutely set on.
Bummer. thought this would at least mean this shitheap of a law gets canned.
Like everything U.K. politicians touch in relation to Online Governance the online safety law is a complete dogs breakfast. In an attempt to legitimately protect children from the issues of social media they’ve created massive problems for small well run charities like photography societies, cycling clubs you name it who have a small website just to keep members updated. It’s the usual suspects of Civil Servants being completely clueless of their unintended consequences and activists saying I’d rather a 1000 innocent websites suffer if it means 1 hate site gets taken down. My position is it’s better to expose the one hate site to the disinfectant of sunlight and protect the 1000 innocent websites but Labour seems to have forgotten the principles behind the film 12 Angry Men.
Literally all the law does in practice is force legal UK based forums to shut down because they can’t afford the massive fees (offcom themselves suggested it would cost something like 30k a year for a website to implement all their bullshit requirements), and non UK based forums will just ban traffic from the UK because losing UK traffic will be less of an inconvenience than the time and hassle dealing with it will take.
Theres hamster and cycling forums closed down over this.
Holding a isp responsible for something someone said on a forum they don’t own from a country they don’t operate from is ludicrous.
The companies it supposedly targets are the ones big enough to afford lawyers and not care.
The presumption the UK government can tell companies in every other country in the world what they are or aren’t allowed to do is preposterous to begin with.
We don’t own the Internet. The idea Ofcom can can tell an American that what they are saying on a website is illegal and we’re going to enforce criminal proceedings upon them and the equally American site they said it on is so arrogant and out of touch with reality it’s insane.
All the things it’s dressed up as preventing are already illegal and will not even be inconvenienced by this.
Goodbye to literally any Internet based companies operating out of the UK and the jobs and money involved with them.
Hello, segregated Internet for the UK.
It’s the one thing they should change because it’s an utter garbage law that should never have been made.
Smh. The govt and the OP clearly don’t understand how the internet works. Ditto encryption. The whole argument of those who support this ridiculous bill is basically Helen Lovejoy from the Simpsons repeatedly exclaiming “won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?!”
Which is it? Yesterday I saw they would change it if the US wanted for a trade negotiations.
Changing it to suit the US is bad, because the US will just want it to be a Nazism free-for-all.
But it does need changing – it’s far too restrictive and currently only large companies can handle complying with it, which means it actively supports monopolies (of large American companies) and doesn’t encourage competition.
> Plans to tackle harmful but legal content, such as misinformation, were dropped before the act became law after critics said they posed a risk to free speech.
While this is *technically* correct for adults, the bill absolutely does require service providers to restrict access to such “harmful but legal” content to over 18s.
But also, this wording is a bit misleading because the bill does specifically create an offense for certain misinformation – which technically does mean such content isn’t “harmful but legal”, the bill makes it illegal instead.
The offense is for “sending false information intended to cause non-trivial harm”.
If anyone is interested to see the kind of work involved for small business and website owners, here is a link to the 84 page risk assessment document from Ofcom (who will be enforcing online safety) https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/online-safety/information-for-industry/illegal-harms/risk-assessment-guidance-and-risk-profiles.pdf?v=390984
Uk has no freedom of speech. If you disagree, you go to jail
New policy, sorry 😞
We live in a country that who’s government seems to be in favour at every turn to fuck over 99% in order to get that juicy 1%. This applies to all sorts of contemporary issues. It’s wild. Save the children and all that, yes, yes.