Is overblocking defamatory?

[ewx]

If a user of an ISP tries to visit a website controlled by an identifiable legal person, which does not contain any pornography, but the ISP instead serves them a block page informing them that the website does contain pornography, has the person controlling the website been libeled by the ISP? (All three parties located in the UK.)

(If you think Cameron's latest wheeze won't lead to overblocking then you haven't been paying attention to the existing implementations.)

Comments

[armb.livejournal.com]

My guess: "no, but only because the government will introduce a clause saying it doesn't count so long as the ISPs are acting in good faith to comply with legislation".
(But the block page will probably hedge saying something like "our filter system indicates the page is likely to contain pornography" rather than "does contain", with a link to fine print explaining that false positives are inevitable . Or maybe you will just get a connection failure.)

But child pornography is already blocked, and I would be surprised if wrongfully accusing someone of hosting child pornography wasn't libel. I assume the much smaller volume means overblocking isn't currently a problem there. (And looking at the IWF FAQ, they don't block UK sites (they get them taken down).)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I think the IWF usually have a human in the loop, too, so the risk of overblocking is much lower anyway.

[armb.livejournal.com]

I think they always have a human in the loop, but that won't scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_Wikipedia is the only incident of IWF overblocking I've heard of, but it's not something I've been looking out for.

Presumably any new system will be more similar to the existing mobile internet blocks:
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2011/how-does-mobile-internet-filtering-work
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/382633/mobile-web-blocking-what-it-reveals-about-porn-filtering-plans

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Government are planning to legislate, just to bully the big ISPs into complying.

(S)