Wikipedia’s parent organization lost a challenge to the UK Online Safety Act but can bring another case if the government tries to force it to verify the identity of Wikipedia users.
The High Court of Justice in London dismissed claims from the Wikimedia Foundation, which challenged the lawfulness of the categorization system used to determine which sites must comply with obligations. But Justice Jeremy Johnson stressed “that this does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations.”
The Online Safety Act has forced social media sites like Reddit to verify UK users’ ages before letting them view adult content. The Wikimedia Foundation is worried that it will be classified as a “Category 1” operator later this summer and criticized the categorization regulations as “especially broad and vague.”
If the collaborative encyclopedia “is designated as Category 1, the Wikimedia Foundation will need to verify the identity of Wikipedia users,” the foundation said. “That rule does not itself force every user to undergo verification—but under a linked rule (s.15(10)(a)), the Foundation would also need to allow other (potentially malicious) users to block all unverified users from fixing or removing any content they post. 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.”
This would be burdensome to users and “could expose users to data breaches, stalking, vexatious lawsuits or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes,” the foundation said. Wikipedia estimates it has 26 million monthly users in the UK, exceeding the 7 million figure identified in government regulations.
Rules intended for social media
The Wikipedia operator argued in court that the government’s criteria are logically flawed. While the rules are “intended to capture large profitable social media companies where anonymous content can ‘go viral,'” the criteria were “drawn too broadly with the result that Wikipedia is likely to qualify as a Category 1 service even though that was never the policy intention,” the High Court said in a summary of the foundation’s argument.
