Would you trust online information posted by anonymous users? If you’ve ever used the “largest and most-read reference work in history”, the answer is probably yes. Wikipedia is collaboratively edited by users, most of whom are anonymous. But anonymity is under threat from the UK’s Online Safety Act, so the Wikimedia Foundation made a legal bid for judicial review into how its own operations might be affected. On Monday, the organization lost.

Wikipedia risks being designated a Category 1 service. According to Regulation 3 of the OSA, in force since 26 February, Category 1 is for services which provide user-to-user content to a large number of UK viewers. These services are obliged to offer adults the option of verification and allow them to opt out from seeing content produced by non-verified users. If Wikipedia fell into that category, this would put most of its content out of sight. Although, as the judge pointed out this week, that would be up to the reader to decide.

The ruling against the Wikimedia Foundation is essentially a technicality, stemming from the fact that the organization has not yet been placed in Category 1. Though the OSA is already in force, Ofcom is yet to draw up the official register of Category 1 services, which will actually designate the sites required to offer such protections. Until Ofcom releases its list, no site has been definitively required to comply. So the court did add a warning: the rule did not give the Technology Secretary or Ofcom “a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations”. Beyond the question of legality, there’s two reasons why the Government should heed this.

First, user anonymity is not always a bad thing. You might reasonably prefer to know who is telling you something, even on a site like Wikipedia. Critics have argued, for example, that Wikipedia’s celebrated neutrality actually slides towards certain political outlooks, and that the internal editing process facilitates groupthink. Nevertheless, much valuable information, reporting and opinion-sharing online would simply be impossible if every user were required to verify their real-world identity before posting.

Journalists are taught to protect sources by guarding their anonymity, even under pressure from authority, for good reason: if potential witnesses can’t trust reporters, they won’t speak up. In the age of “user-generated content”, that professional intermediary is often missing — but sources still need protection. From authoritarian regimes to cancel culture, many people have good reasons to stay anonymous online.

Second, the court case reveals the nebulous nature of the “harms” against which the OSA claims to protect us. Misinformation is a difficult problem to define, let alone legislate against. The desire to control “viral dissemination” in itself betrays the fear of uncontrolled mass communication embedded in the Act. Intervening into such significant websites for this poorly defined reason consequently appears to cover for more authoritarian aims.

Unfortunately, Wikimedia’s case was not based on this serious question. Instead, it simply sought to appear as one of the Good Guys: spreading not misinformation but reliable, neutral, crowd-sourced information. An example of this was the suspension of editing of a webpage about Southport killer Axel Rudakubana, to prevent the posting of speculative or unverified content. But this gets the wrong end of the stick: Wikipedia then applied just the kind of editorial control which OSA wants to itself impose. The problem with the OSA is not that websites can well apply these controls for themselves, but that such controls should not be mandatory in the first place.

The Online Safety Act is already being accused of censorship, as scenes of protests and speeches in Parliament are hidden from users who haven’t proved they are over 18. But, as the Wikipedia case shows, the potential for hiding content from adults goes much further. Making tech companies responsible for preventing the viral dissemination of content that might in some vague way be harmful is a limitless charter for online censorship.

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Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and How To Disagree. Her book, Technology is Not the Problem, is published by Harper Collins.

TimandraHarknes

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