This seems very plausible to me, given what they and other moderators have said about the lengths some people will go to online when they feel antagonised.
In the same way that you could be sued for anything, I'm sure you could also be dragged to court for things like that under this law... And probably under existing laws, too.
That doesn't mean you'll lose, though. It just means you're out some time and money and stress.
Heh, welcome to the internet where the perpetrator and the beneficiary can be in different jurisdictions that make enforcement on the original bad actors impossible.
For example, have a friend in China upload something terrible to a UK site and then 'drop the dime' to a regular in the UK. The UK state can easily come after you and find it nearly impossible to go after the international actor.
The UK has lots of regulatory bodies and they all work in broadly the same way. Provided you do the bare minimum to comply with the rules as defined in plain English by the regulator, you won't either be fined or personally liable. It's only companies that either repeatedly or maliciously fail to put basic measures in place that end up being prosecuted.
If someone starts maliciously uploading CSAM and reporting you, provided you can demonstrate you're taking whatever measures are recommended by Ofcom for the risk level of your business (e.g. deleting reported threads and reporting to police), you'll be absolutely fine. If anything, the regulators will likely prove to be quite toothless.
> provided you can demonstrate you're taking whatever measures are recommended by Ofcom
That level of moderation might not be remotely feasible for a sole operator. And yes, there's a legitimate social question here: Should we as a society permit sites/forums that cannot be moderated to that extent? But the point I'm trying to make is not whether the answer to that question is yes or no, it's that the consequences of this Act are that no sensible individual person or small group will now undertake the risk of running such a site.
The risk and cost imbalance is much more extreme than that of a lawsuit.
I'm confident that, were I sufficiently motivated, I could upload a swathe of incriminating material to a website and cover my tracks within a couple of hours, doing damage that potentially costs the site operator £18M with no risk to myself -- not even my identity would be revealed. OTOH, starting a lawsuit at the very least requires me to pay for a lawyer's time, my face to appear in the court -- and if the suit is thrown out, I'll need to pay their court costs, too.
The example of "medium risk" for CSAM urls is a site with 8M users that has actively had CSAM shared on it before multiple times, been told this by multiple international organisations and has no checking on the content. It's a medium risk of it happening again.