UK Online Safety Regulations and impact on Forums

Here in Australia we just have to worry about age limits.
It doesn't say if it's gender based or not.
If it does then the idea would be to wait for the actual report to come out of Ofcom. You can't always believe everything from the media.
I'd wait and see if they actually ask you personally to do one.
It's a legal requirement for everyone with a forum to review and update the risk assessment in line with current legal requirements. As @chillibear said, I think the 9 points about women and girls have to be incorporated in the existing references to priority harms. Or something like that.
 
A bit late in the day the ICO has discovered the outdated notion of parental responsibility.


Parents should teach children online privacy as an essential life skill in the same way as stranger danger or road safety, the UK's data watchdog has said.

The warning comes after research by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) found three in four parents feared their child could not make safe online privacy choices.

The ICO has launched a campaign urging families to have simple conversations with their children about protecting personal information after its study found privacy was one of the least discussed online safety topics.
 
Whilst not quite what you're after Ofcom did publish a report into the risk assessments they reviewed - https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets...e-safety-risk-assessments-report-year-one.pdf which outlines what they feel people got wrong and so forth, generally not enough evidence in the assessments. Might help in doing your year two. Annoyingly much of it seems to go against the example they put in their guidance, so it's not left me with a lot more clarity.

I assumed we'd take year one and duplicate it and make some modifications/changes to reflect the changes in guidance an so forth such as the nine points in the new https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets...e-a-safer-life-online-for-women-and-girls.pdf stuff which is aimed at protecting women and girls online.

So more reading ...
Re the women and girls requirements. The document mentions four main harms covered:
Online misogyny
Pile-ons and online harrassment
Online domestic abuse
Image-based sexual abuse.

I think this is quite easy to cover. For me I can just add those caterogies to the AI content moderator and say that in the risk assessment.

Just means adding them to the list - stalking is already in there.

AICM.webp
 
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It's a legal requirement for everyone with a forum to review and update the risk assessment in line with current legal requirements. As @chillibear said, I think the 9 points about women and girls have to be incorporated in the existing references to priority harms. Or something like that.
It might be worth making a new thread about the report and pop the link up so that you are on the same page as the report.
As i mentioned before Australia has a social media ban for people who are under the age of 16.
This ban isn't as thorough as what the UK have it.
All us Aussies need to do is have a thread up about the social media u/16 ban.
 
Nothing has really changed on my site so I was planning to just do a short document saying the risk assessment had been reviewed and no changes. However, there are now apparently two/three new illegal harms you have to do the risk assessment for as well. So I'm thinking of just doing those separately.

The two new ones are "cyberflashing" and "encouraging or assisting serious self harm" - the third one is "other illegal content" (whatever that means - it doesn't tell you what other illegal content they're talking about). So there are now 19 instead of 17 "priority offence categories" plus "other illegal harms".

I'm having PTSD just remembering it all from last year 🤪

Link below is for 2026 guidance - this year


I got ClaudeAI to read the 2026 guidance then revisit all our documentation and if necessary improve it. It did a great job.
 
I got ClaudeAI to read the 2026 guidance then revisit all our documentation and if necessary improve it. It did a great job.
So did you put in the 2026 guidance and put in your current risk assessment and get ClaudeAI to revise it? And did you then have to read through it all to check ClaudeAI got it right? (Just trying to work out if it would take longer to check than to do :-))
 
Yes, but not too thoroughly. If I was worried about it, I might look closer, but I did note it made a much better job of assessing risk than I did.
Well Chat GPT just wrote me a 2026 addendum covering the Women and Girls risks and the two new priority harms. So seems to cover it! I'm trying Claude as well and see which one I prefer.

Edit: Amazing. The Claude AI one was extremely thorough and comprehensive. Just the odd bit needs tweaking.

Chat GPT one was a pretty basic 3 page document which probably covers it, although not as thoroughly, but does look more like I did it myself. Claude one is professional format with tables and all kinds of extras that looks like someone else did it. But the information was all correctly used (the info I gave at the start). Just a bit of editing and tweaking and checking.

Tip - I told claude all the mitigations - no DM's except to admin, AI content moderator, crowd moderation, spam filtering, first post moderation. Then told it the size and topic of the forum and that I'd used Ofcom's record keeping document for last year's RA. And that I wanted an addendum document confirming review of 2025 RA and adding the two new priority risks and the four gender based risks. It pulled all the relevant legislation and ofcom documents and put the whole thing together added a risks table and not much editing needed. I read the guidance documents as well though just to be sure.

Big thanks to @JamesBrown
 
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