Individuals who run their own website could be held liable for, weirdly enough, off-topic visitor-posted comments that break the UK’s Online Safety Act.

According to Neil Brown, director of British law firm decoded.legal, it’s a possibility under the wording of the law, though clear direction has not been provided.

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“As with quite a lot of the Online Safety Act, even with Ofcom’s tomes of guidance, the answer to some of these most basic questions, particularly in the context of services provided by individuals, is, at this point at least, ‘sod knows,’” Brown told The Register via email.

Brown said he intends to put this question directly to Ofcom, though he doesn’t expect a straight answer.

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“I think there’s a reasonable interpretation of the words written by Parliament that, while a user-to-user service comprising posting comments relating to a blogpost is exempt, if a user-to-user service allows someone to comment on anything else, the exemption no longer applies, and the service is in scope of the Online Safety Act,” Brown explained.

Brown makes that case in more detail via a sample illegal content risk assessment for a hypothetical blog. His conclusion is that the exemption from liability applies only to the extent that third-party blog comments relate to the topic of the blog post. If off-topic posts appear, the exemption no longer applies, he suggests.

“There is an argument that 4(a) applies only to comments about Alice blog posts, and that, if a commenter comments on something else, the comment brings the whole services outside the scope of 4(a), and thus is no longer exempt,” Brown’s content assessment explains.

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After this story was filed, a spokesperson for Ofcom said: "Under Section 55 of the Online Safety Act, comments and reviews on provider content on user-to-user services are exempt from the safety duties (i.e. are excluded from the definition of ‘regulated user-generated content’). ‘Provider content’ means content published on the service by the provider of the service, or by a person acting on their behalf. The ‘provider’ refers to the entity or individual that has control over who can use the user-to-user part of the service (see Section 226 of the Act).

“So in practice, if a blog and the platform on which it is posted are controlled by the writer of the blog, then the blog constitutes provider content, and comments and reviews on the blog are exempt. This exemption also extends to any further comments on such comments or reviews.”

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In response to our request to clarify liability for off-topic content, Ofcom said, “Content will be exempt if it comprises comments or reviews ‘relating to’ provider content. The Act makes no mention of how closely connected to the provider content the comment or review must be to benefit from this exemption.”