The Online Safety Act (BODS): Laws, penalties, and fines for companies that don’t enforce the Wikimedia Foundation’s principles
Companies, from Big Tech down to smaller platforms and messaging apps, will need to comply with a long list of new requirements, starting with age verification for their users. (Wikipedia, the eighth-most-visited website in the UK, has said it won’t be able to comply with the rule because it violates the Wikimedia Foundation’s principles on collecting data about its users.) Platforms will have to prevent younger users from seeing age-inappropriate content, such as pornography, cyberbullying, and harassment; release risk assessments on potential dangers to children on their services; and give parents easy pathways to report concerns. Sending threats of violence, including rape, online will now be illegal, as will assisting or encouraging self-harm online or transmitting deepfake pornography, and companies will need to quickly act to remove them from their platforms, along with scam adverts.
Failure to comply with the act could lead to fines of up to £18 million or 10 percent of a company’s global turnover, with their bosses facing prison.
Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation has said that the bill’s strict obligations for protecting children from inappropriate content could create issues for a service like Wikipedia, which chooses to collect minimal data on its users, including their ages.
Child safety advocates are positive about the act. “Having an Online Safety Act on the statute book is a watershed moment and will mean that children up and down the UK are fundamentally safer in their everyday lives,” the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children chief executive, Peter Wanless, said in a statement. Tech companies will have to protect children from sexual abuse.
Enforcement of the act will be left to the UK’s telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, which said in June that it would begin consultations with industry after royal assent was granted. It’s unlikely that enforcement will begin immediately, but the law will apply to any platform with a significant number of users in the UK. Companies that fail to comply with the new rules face fines of up to £18 million ($21.9 million) or 10 percent of their annual revenue, whichever is larger.
