The UK Online Safety Bill Is Harmful to Wikipedia — Everywhere
On 6 September 2023, the final day of debate in the House of Lords, news headlines focused on government statements about a controversial clause related to the scanning of encrypted messages. Concerns about the Bill’s impact on Wikipedia have also featured prominently throughout the House of Lords debates. It is not too late to prevent unintended harms that its enforcement processes are poised to inflict on public interest platforms such as Wikipedia.
Written by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President of Global Advocacy.
“[…] [W]e are extremely worried — and remain so — that the Bill creates a framework that will trap Wikipedia and services like it, without that being our primary intention.”
– Lord Allan of Hallam, discussing the UK’s Online Safety Bill in the House of Lords, July 2023
The United Kingdom’s controversial Online Safety Bill (OSB) is approaching the final stages of the parliamentary process and is expected to become law in a matter of weeks.
In recent months, government ministers and child safety advocates have said in public debates that Wikipedia is not a direct target of this legislation. They have acknowledged that the Wikimedia projects, along with the broader free knowledge movement, bring great value to UK society. Yet despite a recent call from UK civil society to exempt public interest platforms like Wikipedia from the Bill, the House of Lords failed to pass amendments championed by our supporters.
If the bill remains largely unchanged before Royal Assent, the result will be harmful to the free knowledge movement — not just in the UK, but also globally.
As the nonprofit host of Wikipedia and other volunteer-run free knowledge projects, the Wikimedia Foundation has made clear that we cannot verify users’ ages without breaking our commitment to defending the privacy of volunteer contributors and readers. We cannot comply with the requirement to “prevent encounters” with content that may be illegal in the UK without disrupting volunteers’ processes of decentralized content governance, thereby destroying Wikipedia’s whole system for maintaining encyclopedic integrity.
Wikimedia UK, the national charity that supports open and free knowledge activities in the UK, has warned that the OSB as currently drafted would harm communities across the UK that contribute to and use Wikimedia projects in multiple languages.
Wikipedia and the OSB, According to the House of Lords
During the House of Lords debate stage for the OSB between 6–19 July and on 6 September, 2023, the fate of Wikipedia has been mentioned repeatedly. Peers from across the political spectrum raised questions about the OSB’s scope — and potential unintended consequences. Lord Allan of Hallam (Lib Dem) proposed an amendment that would exempt Wikipedia from the bill, and urged his fellow peers to ensure that “the regulator is focused on things that are high risk to the citizen and not wasting time on services that are very low risk.”
Lord Moylan (Conservative) proposed an amendment that sought to exempt public interest platforms, including Wikipedia, more broadly. He warned that, while English Wikipedia would survive even if it becomes inaccessible in the UK, the government should be concerned “whether Welsh Wikipedia, the largest Welsh-language website in the world, will survive the consequences.”
Baroness Kidron (Crossbench), founder of the 5Rights Foundation and prominent childrens’ safety advocate, pointed out that the goal is not to “age-gate” Wikipedia and other “services that are inherently in a child’s best interest.” Rather, business models that amplify and perpetuate harm are the target. “It is not that we all love Wikipedia adoringly,” she said. “It is that it does not pursue a system of design for commercial purposes that entraps people within its grasp. Those are the harms we are trying to get at.”
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Labour) agreed that Wikipedia “should not be threatened by having to conform with a structure and a system which we think is capable of dealing with some of the biggest and most egregious companies that are pushing stuff at us.”
Nonetheless, members of the UK Government made clear that neither Wikimedia projects nor any other not-for-profit websites established by communities in support of the public interest will be exempt from the Bill. However, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Conservative), a peer and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Arts and Heritage, pointed out that after the OSB becomes law, much more work will need to be done before it is actually enforced by the regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom). The government, he said, will need to pass secondary legislation setting forth how services should be categorized, and “the Secretary of State can create additional exemptions for further categories of services if she sees fit.”
Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative), a former digital minister, described the situation as follows: “This legislation is simply going to be the end of the beginning. Ofcom will have to find its way forward in how it exercises the powers that Parliament gives it, and I suspect it will have its own list of priorities in how it approaches these issues, who it decides to hold to account and who it decides to enforce against.” He explained that much will depend on the relationship between Ofcom and the platforms it is seeking to regulate.
In short: The UK government is sending the message that if the Wikimedia Foundation spends ample time and resources lobbying the regulator for favorable treatment, and if we devote staff time to cultivate a good relationship with Ofcom, then the outcome that nobody claims to want might be avoided.
On the final day of debate in the House of Lords, Lord Moylan, who had championed an amendment exempting public interest platforms including Wikipedia, decried such a “bizarre governance structure where decisions of crucial political sensitivity are being outsourced to an unaccountable regulator.” He went on to warn that “at first contact with reality, a large part of this is going to collapse, and with it a lot of good will be lost.”
The reality is that the Wikimedia Foundation, as a global nonprofit supported by charitable donations, has a very small legal team that is already stretched thin working on: complying with the EU Digital Services Act (DSA); navigating growing regulatory uncertainty in the United States, the jurisdiction where we are headquartered; and, trying to defend the volunteer community and their efforts from attacks by a range of governments hostile to free knowledge — to mention but a few major concerns. We do not have a single UK-based staff member whose job is specifically devoted to regulatory compliance or government relations there.
We have already spent significant time attempting to persuade the UK government and parliament that the OSB required significant changes in order to avoid harming public interest, free knowledge projects such as Wikipedia. We do not have further resources to hire dedicated staff to lobby the UK government to categorize us as low risk, and then cultivate a relationship with Ofcom as it determines how the 300-plus page law should apply to Wikipedia and 12 other Wikimedia projects that people in the UK can access in approximately 300 languages. Our small legal team is already overstretched in its efforts to support and protect Wikimedia projects and volunteers everywhere else in the world.
A Reflection on the Safety of Everyone, Particularly Children, Online
To be clear: The Wikimedia Foundation emphatically agrees that internet platforms have a duty to protect and respect children as part of a broader duty to protect and respect everyone’s human rights. We do not believe that nonprofit, community-run services should be exempt from such responsibilities. We are committed to holding ourselves accountable. We regularly publish transparency reports containing data about requests we receive to remove or alter content on the projects, or to provide nonpublic information about users. Last year we published an enterprise-level Human Rights Impact Assessment, and we will be publishing the results of our first Child Rights Impact Assessment, completed earlier this year.
We are complying with the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which aims to hold us appropriately accountable in a manner that (unlike the OSB) clearly aligns with universal human rights standards, and which also supports our ability to protect users’ freedom of expression and privacy. Unlike the OSB, the DSA makes a distinction between volunteer-led content governance and rules that are set and enforced by platforms directly. In complying with the DSA designation of Wikipedia as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP), we are carrying out required risk assessments and reporting to the European Commission on how we are working to mitigate risks that include child-specific ones. The DSA covers 27 countries and over 448 million people across the European Union. The Foundation does not have the capacity or ability to comply with related but separate regulations, each with different structure and scope, on a country-by-country basis across the world.
As peers from across the political spectrum have pointed out, Wikipedia poses little risk to children compared to the commercial platforms that the OSB was meant to target. Wikimedia free knowledge projects are important resources through which children across the UK exercise and access their rights by sharing knowledge and gaining media literacy in any number of languages, not only in English.
If the UK government is unwilling to exempt the Wikimedia projects from the OSB entirely, there is still time to clarify the Bill’s intended scope before it becomes law. Secondary legislation should avoid harming the free knowledge movement: Fair treatment of Wikipedia by Ofcom must not require an undue expenditure of precious resources — which are badly needed to support and protect the global volunteer contributor communities.
The UK may be an island, but it does not exist in a vacuum: To avoid inflicting collateral damage to public interest platforms, the UK government should take into account the considerable work we are already undertaking, in collaboration with volunteer communities, to identify and mitigate risks to children on the Wikimedia projects.
While the OSB has been designed to create disincentives for harmful content and behavior on the internet, the UK should not make it even more difficult for platforms that are acting in good faith to create a better world in which everyone — including children — can safely access and share free knowledge online.
