Wikipedia Launches Legal Challenge Against Online Safety Act – Guido Fawkes

Wikipedia Launches Legal Challenge Against Online Safety Act

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The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, has today announced it is suing the government over the Online Safety Act. It has initiated a legal challenge to the Categorisation Regulations through judicial review. These impose onerous restrictions on “risky” sites and social media platforms…

It explains:

“If enforced on Wikipedia, Category 1 duties would undermine the privacy and safety of Wikipedia volunteer users, expose the encyclopedia to manipulation and vandalism, and divert essential resources from protecting and improving Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia Projects. After years of dialogue with UK regulators and policymakers — and even stark warnings from the UK Parliament and civil society — these issues remain unaddressed. The categorization rules are now in force, and the first categorization decisions from the UK’s online safety regulator, Ofcom, are expected this summer. The solutions we proposed — including clarifying the new rules — were not accepted.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is not bringing a general challenge to the act as a whole. It sets out that Category 1’s verification rules will ruin the successful crowd-sourced fact-making model of the platform. Wikipedia, being moderated by a community of millions of volunteers, would have to verify volunteer contributors. Unverified users could be blocked – maliciously – from contributing. “This could mean significant amounts of vandalism, disinformation or abuse going unchecked on Wikipedia, unless volunteers of all ages, all over the world, undergo identity verification… Worse still, it could expose users to data breaches, stalking, vexatious lawsuits or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes.” Top job from Ofcom…

Wikipedia notes that “Ofcom is already demanding that we provide the information it needs to make a preliminary Category 1 assessment for Wikipedia. It is in the interest of UK society for laws that threaten human rights to be challenged as early as possible.” The online safety dominoes are starting to fall…