The
United Kingdom's
Online Safety Act has come into effect today, granting the
Office of Communications (
Ofcom) extraordinary regulatory powers ostensibly in the name of protecting children online, including but not limited to:
- A requirement that sites complete a risk assessment on their actions with respect to illegal material,
- Imposing fines on companies of up to £18 million (US$23.3 million) or 10% of worldwide revenue,
- Criminal action for failure to fulfil information requests,
- Banning Internet providers and companies from working with non-compliant companies,
- Cracking down on 'misinformation', 'terrorist content' and AI deepfakes.
The stated targets of these regulations are larger social media sites such as 𝕏 and Facebook due to their recent reduction in content moderation, but numerous smaller websites, such as lemmy.zip, a Reddit-like link sharing forum, have blocked UK users for their own safety, and several UK based websites such as the Hamster Forum ("Home of all things hamstery"), Bike Radar, for local cycling enthusiasts, and Green Living Forum, a pro-environmental lifestyle site, have simply shut down, unwilling to incur fines.
Ofcom, for it's part, has stated the costs of complying “are likely to be negligible or in the small thousands at most”.
https://kiwifarms.st/threads/hamste...bsites-shut-down-by-new-internet-laws.214906/ | Posted by
@chiobu
Edit: Amended to say that The Hamster Forum ("Home of all things hamstery") was also shut down (memberships were wiped).
Come speculate! 
