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(CN) — Wikipedia sued the British government on Tuesday, arguing a law designed to protect people from online trolls and anonymous attacks will end up hurting the free digital encyclopedia’s collaborators, many of whom wish to remain anonymous.
Wikipedia said it resorted to legal action after failing to convince the British government to amend the Online Safety Act, a sweeping October 2023 law that seeks to crack down on sexual abuse, racism, bullying, fraud and other harmful material on the internet.
The law’s primary aim is to rein in harmful content on major social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and X, but Wikipedia also falls under the law’s toughest rules because of its huge volume of monthly users.
The High Court of Justice in London heard the challenge Tuesday and hearings were scheduled to continue Wednesday. The court was expected to issue a decision in the coming months.
Wikipedia Foundation, a nonprofit that runs Wikipedia and associated projects, brought the lawsuit. Wikipedia was not immediately able to respond to a query from Courthouse News.
Saying it should not be lumped in with the big commercial social media platforms, Wikipedia wants to be shielded from some of the law’s requirements, most importantly the need to verify the identities of Wikipedia contributors.
Barbora Bukovská, a law and policy director at Article 19, a London-based free speech advocacy group, said in an email that “public interest, volunteer-driven platforms like Wikipedia” should be exempted from rules designed to rein in the “truly high-risk commercial platforms” of the Big Tech giants.
About 260,000 people around the world curate some 65 million entries on Wikipedia, but the platform has a policy of collecting minimal personal data from volunteers. Worldwide, Wikipedia says its articles are viewed more than 15 billion times per month.
Wikipedia’s lawyers warn the law threatens to “undermine the privacy and safety of Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors” and “expose the encyclopedia to manipulation and vandalism.”
Wikipedia said forcing contributors to verify their identities could expose them to “data breaches, stalking, lawsuits, or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes.”
Under the law, Wikipedia said it might be forced to allow anonymous users to block Wikipedia collaborators from fixing or removing content unless it complies with the verification provisions.
“These volunteers set and enforce policies to ensure that information on the platform is fact-based, neutral and attributed to reliable sources,” Wikipedia said in a recent statement. “Over the last 25 years, this human-centered content moderation model has established Wikipedia as an unparalleled resource for reliable information in over 300 languages.”
Stephen LaPorte, a Wikipedia lawyer, said the high court can “set a global precedent” for protecting online projects like Wikipedia that are in the public interest.
“Wikipedia is the backbone of knowledge on the internet,” he said recently. “We trust the court will protect Wikipedia — a vital encyclopedic resource — from rules crafted for the internet’s riskiest commercial sites and, in doing so, safeguard the open internet for everyone.”
Bukovská said compelling verification “undermines the privacy that keeps the site’s volunteers safe.”
“Anonymity online is sometimes viewed negatively — but we need to keep in mind that in many countries, if editors express certain views (in sensitive or political issues), this could put them at risk of reprisal,” Bukovská wrote to Courthouse News. “The lack of anonymity could scare people off from contributing, which would be a huge loss for free and open knowledge.”
She added that Wikipedia’s complaint underscored how problematic the Online Safety Act was and the threat “it poses to human rights online, particularly freedom of expression and privacy.”
“We see the OSA as an extremely complex and incoherent piece of legislation that poses a serious threat to human rights online,” she wrote.
Britain’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the government’s legal department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Courthouse News on Tuesday.
Wikipedia said one of its longtime contributors based in the United Kingdom, someone identified only as “Zzuuzz,” was also a plaintiff in the case.
The suit was novel because it was the first challenge to the Online Safety Act’s provisions related to large platforms, Wikipedia said.
Wikipedia, which is a crowdsourced platform, faces potentially huge fines for breaching the Online Safety Act. Violators can be fined 18 million pounds (about $24.3 million) or 10% of a company’s global turnover, whichever is greater. The law also allows a platform to be blocked in extreme cases.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
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