UK Online Safety Act

General IF Community Resources
41

LOL ! I’ll like to relate a story (for fully understanding it, I recommend reading Mario Soldati’s Racconti del Maresciallo )

I was getting the usual cup of coffee with a friend of mine (one must admit, an handsome one in his late 40s..) when a clueless girl, around 12, started flirting with my friend. He quickly winked, and I “disappear in the background”, watching the proceedings.
Said clueless girl continues its flirting until, long story short, my friend reveals his true colours, that is, black with red and silver trimming, with three silver bars, which in Italy command more respect than a general officier. that is, a Maresciallo (senior NCO) of the Carabinieri ! Her flight was the fastest I have witnessed. No need of chase, the lesson teached was much more than needed, case of the underage sexual predatrix closed and solved, with a simple law enforcement, without involving courts: she caused no more annoyance, well, until a lustrum or so after, of course. but then was no more concern for the Italian laws…

(for putting in context: In Italy, the social prestige of the Carabinieri command an absolute respect, unconceivable in countries where law enforcement people are seen as low lifes)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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42

This guide is quite readable and goes into detail about the various kinds of content. For pornographic content, it restates that text-only is excluded. It describes what kind of suicide content would fall inside the act (summary: if it encourages, promotes or provides instructions), and which would be excluded. And similar for the various other categories.

There’s also a potential get-out if the IF Archive or textadventures were deemed services not likely to be accessed by a significant number of UK children, though it seems best to err on the side of caution with this one.

This guide contains a bunch of recommended measures, which vary depending on the type of service being operated. It’s a bit harder to parse (I think they want you to go through their online tool instead), but it talks about content moderation, reporting and complaints procedures etc.

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43

That’s a useful guide and does clarify that the vast majority of content on the IF Archive probably does not need to be age-restricted (including many of the areas I’ve seen people worry about such as abuse survivorship stories). But as I said above, the Act imposes a regulatory burden nonetheless: for example, the Archive currently has no way for users to flag inappropriate content, or a process for removing or restricting it if it meets the criteria for “harmful to children”.

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44

Adam, and what are the criteria for content “harmful to children” ? and more important, who establish said criteria ? here the issue is the very same one that Cicero points back two millennia ago, qui custodet custodem !

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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45

They’re listed specifically in the text of the Act. I didn’t think it germane to list them all in the post, but it’s basically: anything which would already be illegal in the UK, plus anything that encourages or glorifies suicide, self-harm or eating disorders.

Since you’re asking about a specific law of the UK, the answer is “the Parliament of the UK”.

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46

I haven’t been able to access any games via Parchment for a few days now: is that anything to do with this, or a separate issue?

The error message I get is Error: Failed to fetch storyfile (possible CORS error)

47

That is the same issue. If you are in the UK, and you tell iplayif.com to load a game from the IF Archive, it runs into the directory block and reports an error.

It’s a confusing error because we’re still dealing with all the consequences of this sudden change. Eventually iplayif.com should be updated to report a more informative message.

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48

Thank you so much, that’s really helpful

49

On the other hand, self-declared tags like NSFW are voluntary and are used by authors as a signpost for their audience. That is a part of internet culture and has never been an imposition from any central authority.

Come to think of it, I seem to remember intfiction.org has a NSFW private group. So does that mean users of this forum must undergo age verification?

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50

Whether any part of the forum labels itself NSFW is irrelevant. Any web forum has to do one of two things:

  1. Have, and enforce, policies that prohibit any content the Act would consider harmful to children
  2. Ensure that any content which harmful to children cannot be accessed by children in the UK (by any means ranging from age verification to blocking the entire UK)
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51

The NYT Podcast Hard Fork talked about Age-gating today… One part I found particularly interesting was that people were using the video game Death Stranding to get past some age-gating tools…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/podcasts/hardfork-age-restrictions-cloudflare.html

52

I’m trying to break my thoughts up into several posts so I don’t drown out everyone else.

First of all, I’m not really concerned about the details of what content could merit these restrictions and what doesn’t (other people can debate that). Privacy (abuse of information by governments) is important but secondary to something more basic.

This is an issue of free access to the internet and information. The UK government says the law is intended to protect children, but that’s irrelevant — in practice, the obligations are on adults, because that’s the only way to enforce it.

Even if the law does protect children from a harm, most people agreed until recently that the existing system (ie. various laws enforced only in the most severe cases & parents monitoring their kids) gave children a sufficient amount of protection.

Until recently, most people who use the internet agreed that a massive surveillance and verification system is a cure worse than any of the internet’s diseases.

Apart from the politicians and (presumably) lobbyists who made this happen, the strongest support for these laws comes from people above 65, who are not the main users of the internet. Here’s the age breakdown in the UK — it seems the survey had to center on restricting pornography as opposed to bullying, etc. to get those high support numbers).

Unfortunately, opposition to the law doesn’t really go above 30% in any age group.

Meanwhile, the petition to repeal the law has reached 470,000, in a matter of days and ticks up in real time every time I check it. That’s about 0.6% of the UK population so far. The petition only means a debate will be considered and is unlikely to be the end of the law on its own.

Basically, to succeed in overturning this, the minority will need to agitate instead of trying to get a referendum or any democratic process.

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53

It doesn’t make sense to us either.

Re. the main points of the thread. I’m very sorry to see you all going through sorting out this nonsense at the moment. Adding some sort of tags as you work through the games seems sensible to avoid doing everything again as there will be waves of similar legislation from other countries on the way, which are likely to have their own nuances.

Over the last six months or so, some of the retro community sites I frequent have been weighing up whether to continue running things like forums that involve user-generated content.

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54

For Italy, I’m pretty sure that similiar legislation will not for “protecting the children” but for “protecting the Election”, and I’m not joking; here we have already laws curtailing what can be put online (namely the results of opinion polling) during the electoral campaign

(I’m not joking: see Opinion polling for the 2022 Italian general election - Wikipedia )

which, I admit, makes sense in the current worldwide campaigning climate, where foreign-originating interference is increasing. So, I expect by the 2027 general elections an amendment of the "par condicio law, aimed toward blocking foreign interference during the electoral campaign.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

55

This sounds like a lot of extra work to comply with laws that don’t even exist yet, and runs the risk of falsely flagging more content than necessary as restricted (as in the situation with Itch, where anything with a vaguely adult content tag got delisted regardless of whether said content was actually inappropriate or not). My understanding is that the main priority with the OSA is having ways to readily report and restrict harmful content, rather than screening everything in advance. But I’m sure the IFTF (who have taken actual legal advice on this) are capable of coming up with the best realistic solution to the problem.

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56

There is an opt-in adult discussion group. To join the group, members must attest their birth date or age. We do not do any additional checking so it’s honor-system. The AIF discussion has extra rules similar to itch - no posting of photographic humans, no discussion of illegal activity, in general maintain sex positivity.

It’s not the party you would imagine; there aren’t a lot of people currently working on adult projects. The last thing we discussed briefly was Date Everything.[1]

  1. Date Everything is a professional commercially-released Visual Novel satire of harem dating sims which involves building relationships with the furniture in your house which comes to life magically. It’s rated PEGI-16 for adult language and humor and suggestiveness and occasional shirtless men. The double-entendre is heavy in this. There’s a built in “trigger warning” mode that allows you to individually skip any talk of mature themes. It’s all above board and tongue-in-cheek. The voice cast includes well-known VAs like Felicia Day. https://dateeverything.com ↩︎

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57

5 posts were split to a new topic: Apparently some sites are introducing age checks in non-UK regions

58

Bingo.

”Coming soon to a red state near you” — Don’t forget to include Florida too, since the nutjobs in charge there decided to do the same thing.

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”Coming soon to a red state near you” — Don’t forget to include Florida too, since the nutjobs in charge there decided to do the same thing.

At the risk of repeating myself and other people, this isn’t a partisan issue. Also, forget states’ individual attempts to pass these laws.

The U.S. version of OSA (which is KOSA) got virtually unanimous bipartisan support with only one Senate vote against it under the Biden administration in 2024. It’s now moving forward again under the Trump administration and will probably get virtually unanimous Senate support again.

(Hopefully this is on-topic enough and doesn’t merit another split. I don’t think we need separate threads for every region’s similar pending laws.)

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60

Yes, please relate discussion to games. Pure politics is off-topic and third rail.

If you wish to discuss political issues unrelated to games, we’ve established a specific topic.

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