In practice, this means the local cycling forum that fostered trust, friendship, and even mental health support is at risk of vanishing, while the megacorps sail on without a scratch. Ironically, a measure allegedly designed to rein in “Big Tech” ends up discouraging small, independent communities and pushing users toward the same large platforms the legislation was supposedly targeting.
It’s discouraging to watch governments double down on complex, top-down solutions that ignore the cultural and social value of these smaller spaces. We need policy that recognises genuine community-led forums as a public good, encourages sustainable moderation practices, and holds bad actors accountable without strangling the grassroots projects that make the internet more human. Instead, this act risks hollowing out our online diversity, leaving behind a more homogenised, corporate-dominated landscape.
Authoritarians don't want people to be able to talk (and organize) in private. What better way to discourage them than some "think of the children" nonsense? That's how they attacked (repeatedly) encryption.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter all could have lobbied against this stuff and shut it down, hard. They didn't.
That speaks volumes, and my theory is that they feel shutting down these forums will push people onto their centralized platforms, increasing ad revenues - and the government is happy because it's much easier to find out all the things someone is discussing online.
It's honestly super weird. Now of course they are just proposing to tax the tech companies if they don't pay money to our local media orgs for something the tech companies neither want nor care about.
That wasn't the one I was thinking of, to be honest.
I'd have thought you would be mentioning the latest ball of WTF: "Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024".
According to the bill, HN needs to identify all Australian users to prevent under-16's from using it.
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...
But yes, I'm confused as to whether it applies to online gaming, or sites such as wikipedia as well
As sad as it may be, their imagination is correct. The small spaces, summed up all together, are lost in the rounding errors.
As written, it should. Which is ridiculous, and it's a ridiculous law in the first place. I'm loathe to discuss politics, but by god both Labor and the LNP are woeful when it comes to tech policy.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
So, I fully understand why someone would rather shut down their site rather than potentially deal with the legal fallout. Even if the end result is "just getting shut down", that will come after a significant amount of legal troubles, and likely money spent dealing with them.
The fear some have is not misunderstandings, but disgruntled types (the sort of people who blow up over a perfectly reasonable moderation decision) and common garden variety griefers reporting things to cause inconvenience. I know people who have in the past run forums and had to put up with spurious reports to their ISP/host or even on one occasion local law enforcement. If someone did this it would likely go nowhere in the end but not before causing much stress and perhaps cost via paying for legal advice.
> I don't get preemptively doing it other than giving up after a long duty of almost 30 years and using this as excuse.
Having been involved less directly with that sort of admin & moderation work I can see this change being the final straw after putting up with the people of the internet for years. Calling it “just an excuse” seems rather harsh.
> At least pass them to someone else that won't care about the liability.
Depending on the terms people agreed to when signing up and posting, passing on the reigns might not be nearly as legally/morally clear-cut as several in these comments are assuming.