Online Safety Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

23: Clause 11, page 10, line 9, at beginning insert “eliminate,”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require user to user services to eliminate identified risks to children from their platforms in addition to mitigating and managing them.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, this large group of 33 amendments is concerned with preventing harm to children, by creating a legal requirement to design the sites and services that children will access in a way that will put their safety first and foremost. I thank my co-sponsors, the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Harding, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight. First of all, I wish to do the most important thing I will do today: to wish the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, a very happy birthday.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My co-sponsors will deal with some of the more detailed elements of the 30 amendments that we are dealing with. These will include safety duties, functionality and harm, and codes of practice. I am sure that the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Knight, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford will speak to their own amendments.

I will provide a brief overview of why we are so convinced of the paramount need for a safety by design approach to protect children and remind digital companies and platforms, forcibly and legally, of their obligation to include the interests and safety of children as a paramount element within their business strategies and operating models. These sites and services are artificial environments. They were designed artificially and can be redesigned artificially.

In her testimony to the US Senate in July 2021, the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen put her finger on it rather uncomfortably when talking about her erstwhile employer:

“Facebook know that they are leading young users to anorexia content … Facebook’s internal research is aware that there are a variety of problems facing children on Instagram … they know that severe harm is happening to children”.


She was talking about, probably, three years ago.

On the first day of Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Allan, who is not with us today, used the analogy of the legally mandated and regulated safe design of aeroplanes and automobiles and the different regimes that cover their usage to illustrate some of our choices in dealing with regulation. We know why aeroplanes and cars have to be designed safely; we also know that either form of transportation could be used recklessly and dangerously, which is why we do not allow children to fly or drive them.

First, let us listen to the designers of these platforms and services through some research done by the 5Rights Foundation in July 2021. These are three direct quotes from the designers:

“Companies make their money from attention. Reducing attention will reduce revenue. If you are a designer working in an attention business, you will design for attention … Senior stakeholders like simple KPIs. Not complex arguments about user needs and human values … If a senior person gives a directive, say increase reach, then that’s what designers design for without necessarily thinking about the consequences”.


Companies know exactly what they need to do to grow and to drive profitability. However, they mostly choose not to consider, mitigate and prioritise to avoid some of the potentially harmful consequences. What they design and prioritise are strategies to maximise consumption, activity and profitability. They are very good at it.

Let us hear what the children say, remembering that some recent research indicates that 42% of five to 12 year-olds in this country use social media. The Pathways research project I referred to earlier worked closely with 21 children aged 12 to 18, who said: “We spend more time online than we feel we should, but it’s tough to stop or cut down”. “If we’re not on social media, we feel excluded”. “We like and value the affirmations and validations we receive”. “We create lots of visual content, much of it about ourselves, and we share it widely”. “Many of us are contacted by unknown adults”. “Many of us recognise that, through using social media, we have experienced body image and relationships problems”.

To test whether the children in this research project were accurately reporting their experiences, the project decided to place a series of child avatars—ghost children, in effect—on the internet, whose profiles very clearly stated that they were children. It did this to test whether these experiences were true.

They found—in many cases within a matter of hours of the profiles going online—proactive contacting by strangers and rapid recommendations to engage more and more. If searches were conducted for eating disorders or self-harm, the avatars were quickly able to access content irrespective of their stated ages and clearly evident status as children. At the same time they were being sent harmful or inappropriate content, they also received age-relevant advertising for school revision and for toys—the social media companies knew that these accounts were registered as children.

This research was done two years ago. Has anything improved since then? It just so happens that 5Rights has produced another piece of research which is about to be released, and which used the exact same technique—creating avatars to see what they would experience online. They used 10 avatars based on real children aged between 10 and 16, so what happened? For an 11 year-old avatar, Instagram was recommending images of knives with the caption “This is what I use to self-harm”; design features were leading children from innocent searches to harmful content very quickly.

I think any grandparents in the Chamber will be aware of an interesting substance known as “Slime”—a form of particularly tactile playdough which one’s grandchildren seem to enjoy. Typing in “Slime” on Reddit was one search, and one click, away from pornography; exactly the same thing happened on Reddit when the avatar typed in “Minecraft”, another very popular game with our children or grandchildren. A 15 year-old female avatar was private-messaged on Instagram by a user that she did not follow—an unknown adult who encouraged her to link on to pornographic content on Telegram, another instant messaging service. On the basis of this evidence, it appears that little or nothing has changed; it may have even got slightly worse.

By an uncomfortable coincidence, last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, published better than expected results and saw its market value increase by more than $50 billion in after-hours trading. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta, proudly announced that Meta is pouring investment into artificial intelligence tools to make its platform more engaging and its advertising more effective. Of particular interest and concern given the evidence of the avatars was his announcement that since the introduction of Reels, a short-term video feed designed specifically to respond to competition from TikTok, its AI-driven recommendations had boosted the average time people spend on Instagram by 24%.

To return to the analogy of planes and cars used by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, we are dealing here with planes and cars in the shape of platforms and applications which we know are flawed in their design. They are not adequately designed for safety, and we know that they can put users, particularly children and young people, in the way of great harm, as many grieving families can testify.

In conclusion, our amendments propose that companies must design digital services that cater for the vulnerabilities, needs, and rights of children and young people by default; children’s safety cannot and must not be an afterthought or a casualty of their business models. We are asking for safety by design to protect children to become the mandatory standard. What we have today is unsafe design by default, driven by commercial strategies which can lead to children becoming collateral damage.

Given that it is the noble Baroness’s birthday, I am sure we can feel confident that the Minister will have a positive tone when he replies. I beg to move.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak on this group, but I was provoked into offering some reflections on the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, especially his opening remarks about cars and planes, which he said were designed to be safe. He did not mention trains, about which I know something as well, and which are also designed to be safe. These are a few initial reflective points. They are designed in very different ways. An aeroplane is designed never to fail; a train is designed so that if it fails, it will come to a stop. They are two totally different approaches to safety. Simply saying that something must be designed to be safe does not answer questions; it opens questions about what we actually mean by that. The noble Lord went on to say that we do not allow children to drive cars and fly planes. That is absolutely true, but the thrust of his amendment is that we should design the internet so that it can be driven by children and used by children— so that it is designed for them, not for adults. That is my problem with the general thrust of many of these amendments.

A further reflection that came to mind as the noble Lord spoke was on a book of great interest that I recommend to noble Lords. It is a book by the name of Risk written in 1995 by Professor John Adams, then professor of geography at University College London. He is still an emeritus professor of geography there. It was a most interesting work on risk. First, it reflected how little we actually know of many of the things of which we are trying to assess risk.

More importantly, he went on to say that people have an appetite for risk. That appetite for risk—that risk budget, so to speak—changes over the course of one’s life: one has much less appetite for risk when one gets to a certain age than perhaps one had when one was young. I have never bungee jumped in my life, and I think I can assure noble Lords that the time has come when I can say I never shall, but there might have been a time when I was younger when I might have flung myself off a cliff, attached to a rubber band and so forth—noble Lords may have done so. One has an appetite for risk.

The interesting thing that he went on to develop from that was the notion of risk compensation: that if you have an appetite for risk and your opportunities to take risks are taken away, all you do is compensate by taking risks elsewhere. So a country such as New Zealand, which has some of the strictest cycling safety laws, also has a very high incidence of bungee jumping among the young; as they cannot take risks on their bicycles, they will find ways to go and do it elsewhere.

Although these reflections are not directly germane to the amendments, they are important as we try to understand what we are seeking to achieve here, which is a sort of hermetically sealed absence of risk for children. I do not think it will work. I said at Second Reading that I thought the flavour of the debate was somewhat similar to a late medieval conclave of clerics trying to work out how to mitigate the harmful effects of the invention of movable type. That did not work either, and I think we are in a very similar position today as we discuss this.

There is also the question of harm and what it means. While the examples being given by noble Lords are very specific and no doubt genuinely harmful, and are the sorts of things that we should like to stop, the drafting of the amendments, using very vague words such as “harm”, is dangerous overreach in the Bill. To give just one example, for the sake of speed, when I was young, administering the cane periodically was thought good for a child in certain circumstances. The mantra was, “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, though I never heard it said. Nowadays, we would not think it morally or psychologically good to do physical harm to a child. We would regard it as an unmitigated harm and, although not necessarily banned or illegal, it is something that—

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I respond to the noble Lord in two ways. First, I ask him to reflect on how the parents of the children who have died through what the parents would undoubtedly view as serious and unbearable harm would feel about his philosophical ruminations. Secondly, as somebody who has the privilege of being a Deputy Speaker in your Lordships’ House, it is incumbent and germane for us all to focus on the amendment in question and stay on it, to save time and get through the business.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Well, I must regard myself as doubly rebuked, and unfairly, because my reflections are very relevant to the amendments, and I have developed them in that direction. In respect of the parents, they have suffered very cruelly and wrongly, but although it may sound harsh, as I have said in this House before on other matters, hard cases make bad law. We are in the business of trying to make good law that applies to the whole population, so I do not think that these are wholly—

--- Later in debate ---

The points raised in these amendments are covered already in the Bill in the places I have set out. I will consult the official record of this debate to see whether there are any areas which I have not followed up, but I invite noble Lords not to press their amendments in this group.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response. I think the entire Chamber will be thankful that I do not intend to respond in any great detail to almost one hour and three-quarters of debate on this series of amendments—I will just make a few points and suggestions.

The point that the noble Baroness made at the beginning about understanding the design and architecture of the systems and processes is fundamental, both for understanding why they are causing the sorts of harm that they are at the moment and for trying to ensure that they are designed better in future than they have been to date. Clearly, they are seriously remiss in the harms that they are inflicting on a generation of young people.

On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, about trying to make Ofcom’s job easier— I can see the noble Lord, Lord Grade, in the corner— I would hope and anticipate that anything we could suggest that would lead the Government to make Ofcom’s job slightly easier and clearer would be very welcome. The noble Lord appears to be making an affirmatory gesture, so I will take that as a yes.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that I fully understand the importance of waving the flag of liberty and free speech, and I acknowledge its importance. I also acknowledge the always-incipient danger of unintentionally preventing things from happening that can and should happen when you are trying to make things safer and prevent harm. Trying to get the right balance is extraordinarily difficult, but I applaud the noble Lord for standing up and saying what he said. If one were to judge the balance of the contributions here as a very rough opinion poll, the noble Lord might find himself in the minority, but that does not necessarily mean that he is wrong, so I would encourage him to keep contributing.

I sympathise with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in trying to find the right balance; it is something that we are all struggling to do. One of the great privileges we have in this House is that we have the time to do it in a manner which is actively discouraged in the other place. Even if we go on a bit, we are talking about matters which are very important—in particular, the pre-legislative scrutiny committee was able to cover them in greater detail than the House of Commons was able to do.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, was right. In the same way as they say, “Follow the money”, in this case it is “follow the algorithms”, because it is the algorithms which drive the business model.

On the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, regarding the New York Times article about Geoffrey Hinton, one of the architects of AI in Google, I would recommend that all your Lordships read it to see somebody who has been at the forefront of developing artificial intelligence. Rather like a character in a Jules Verne novel suddenly being slightly aghast at what they have created—Frankenstein comes to mind—it makes one pause for thought. Even as we are talking about these things, AI is racing ahead like a greyhound in pursuit of a very fast rabbit, and there is no way that we will be able to catch up.

While I thank the noble Minister for his reply, as when we debated some of the amendments last week where the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, spoke about the train journey she took when she was trying to interrogate and interpret the different parts of the Bill and was trying to follow the trail and understand what was going on to the extent that she became so involved that she missed her station, I think there is a real point here about the fact that this Bill is very complex to follow and understand. Indeed, the way in which the Minster had to point to all the different points of the compass—so to speak—both within the Bill and without it in many of the answers that he gave to some of the amendments indicates to me that the Bill team is finding it challenging to respond to some of them. It is like filling in one of those diagrams where you join the dots, and you cannot quite see what it is until you have nearly finished. I find it slightly disturbing if the Bill team and some of the officials appear to be having a challenging time in trying to interpret, understand and explain some of the points we are raising; I would hope and expect that that could be done much more simply.

One of the pleas from all of us in a whole variety of these amendments is to get the balance right between legislating what it is that we want to legislate and making it simple enough to be understandable. At the moment, a criticism of this Bill is that it is extraordinary difficult to understand in many parts. I will not go through all the points, but there are some germane areas where it would be extremely helpful to pursue with the Minister and the Bill team some of the points we are trying to make. Many of them are raised by a variety of outside bodies which know infinitely more about it than I do, and which have genuine concerns. We have the time between Committee and Report to put some of those to bed or at least to understand them better than we do at the moment. We will probably be happy and satisfied with some of the responses that we receive from the department once we feel that we understand them, and perhaps more importantly, once we feel that the department and the Bill team themselves fully understand them. It is fair to say that at the moment we are not completely comfortable that they do. I do not blame the Minister for that. If I were in his shoes, I would be on a very long holiday and I would not be returning any time soon. However, we will request meetings—for one meeting, it would be too much, so we will try to put this into bit-size units and then try to dig into the detail in a manageable way without taking too much time to make sure that we understand each other.

With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 23 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

25: Clause 11, page 10, line 13, at end insert—
“(c) uphold children’s rights per the United Kingdom’s obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), with reference to General Comment No. 25 (2021) from the Committee on the Rights of the Child on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would mean regulated services would have to have regard for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to ensure children are treated according to their evolving capacities, in their best interests, in consideration of their wellbeing and are not locked out of spaces that they have a right to participate in and to access.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry that it is me again—a bit like a worn 78. In moving Amendment 25, I will speak also to Amendments 78, 187 and 196, all of which speak to the principle of children’s rights as set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and, more specifically, how those rights are applied to the digital world as covered in the United Nations’ general comment No. 25, which was produced in 2021 and ratified by the UK Government. What we are suggesting and asking for is that the principles in this general comment are reflected in the Bill. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Harding, Lady Kennedy and Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton—who is not with us—for adding their names to these amendments and for their support.

The general comment No. 25 that I mentioned recognises that children’s rights are applicable in the digital world as well as the real world. These amendments try to establish in the Bill the rights of children. Believe it or not, in this rather lengthy Bill there is not a single reference—as far as we can discern—specifically to children’s rights. There are a lot of other words, but that specific phrase is not used, amazingly enough. These amendments are an attempt to get children’s rights specifically into the Bill. Amendments 30 and 105 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Knight, also seek to preserve the well-being of children. Our aims are very similar, but we will try to argue that the convention would achieve them in a particularly effective and concise way.

The online world is not optional for children, given what we know—not least from some of the detailed and harrowing experiences related by various of your Lordships in the course of the Bill. The fact that the online world is not optional for children may be worrying to some adults. We have all heard about parents, grandparents and others who have direct experience of their beloved coming to harm. By contrast, it is also fascinating to note how many senior executives, and indeed founders, of digital companies forbid their own children from possessing and using mobile phones, typically until they are 12 or 14. That is telling us something. If they themselves do not allow their children to have access to some of the online world we are talking about so much, that should give us pause for reflection.

Despite the many harms online, there is undoubted good that all children can benefit from, including in terms of their cognitive and skills development, social development and relationships. There are some brilliant things which come from being online. It is also beneficial because having age-appropriate experiences when they are online is part of their fundamental rights. That, essentially, is what these amendments are about.

Throughout the many years that the Bill has been in gestation, we have heard a lot about freedom of speech and how it must be preserved. Indeed, in contrast to children’s rights not being mentioned once in the Bill, “freedom of expression” appears no less than 49 times. I venture to suggest to your Lordships that there is a degree of imbalance there which should cause us to pause and reflect on whether we have that balance quite right.

I will not go into detail, but the UNCRC is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, and it is legally binding on the states which are party to it. The UK is a signatory to this convention, yet if we do not get this right in the Bill, we are in danger of falling behind some of our global counterparts. Although I recognise that saying the name of this organisation may bring some members of the governing party out in a rather painful rash, the EU is incorporating the UNCRC into its forthcoming AI Act. Sweden has already incorporated it into law at a different level, and Canada, New Zealand and South Africa are all doing the same. It is not anything to be worried about. Even Wales incorporated it into its domestic law in 2004, and Scotland did so in 2021. This appears to be something that the English have a particular problem with.

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[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I will start in the optimistic spirit of the debate we have just had. There are many benefits to young people from the internet: social, educational and many other ways that noble Lords have mentioned today. That is why the Government’s top priority for this legislation has always been to protect children and to ensure that they can enjoy those benefits by going online safely.

Once again, I find myself sympathetic to these amendments, but in a position of seeking to reassure your Lordships that the Bill already delivers on their objectives. Amendments 25, 78, 187 and 196 seek to add references to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and general comment 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment to the duties on providers and Ofcom in the Bill.

As I have said many times before, children’s rights are at the heart of this legislation, even if the phrase itself is not mentioned in terms. The Bill already reflects the principles of the UN convention and the general comment. Clause 207, for instance, is clear that a “child” means a person under the age of 18, which is in line with the convention. All providers in scope of the Bill need to take robust steps to protect users, including children, from illegal content or activity on their services and to protect children from content which is harmful to them. They will need to ensure that children have a safe, age-appropriate experience on services designed for them.

Both Ofcom and service providers will also have duties in relation to users’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy. The safety objectives will require Ofcom to ensure that services protect children to a higher standard than adults, while also making sure that these services account for the different needs of children at different ages, among other things. Ofcom must also consult bodies with expertise in equality and human rights, including those representing the interests of children, for instance the Children’s Commissioner. While the Government fully support the UN convention and its continued implementation in the UK, it would not be appropriate to place obligations on regulated services to uphold an international treaty between state parties. We agree with the reservations that were expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme, in his speech, and his noble friend Lady Foster.

The convention’s implementation is a matter for the Government, not for private businesses or voluntary organisations. Similarly, the general comment acts as guidance for state parties and it would not be appropriate to refer to that in relation to private entities. The general comment is not binding and it is for individual states to determine how to implement the convention. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, will feel reassured that children’s rights are baked into the Bill in more ways than a first glance may suggest, and that he will be content to withdraw his amendment.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in his Amendments 30 and 105, seeks to require platforms and Ofcom to consider a service’s benefits to children’s rights and well-being when considering what is proportionate to fulfil the child safety duties of the Bill. They also add children’s rights and well-being to the online safety objectives for user-to-user services. The Bill as drafted is focused on reducing the risk of harm to children precisely so that they can better enjoy the many benefits of being online. It already requires companies to take a risk-based and proportionate approach to delivering the child safety duties. Providers will need to address only content that poses a risk of harm to children, not that which is beneficial or neutral. The Bill does not require providers to exclude children or restrict access to content or services that may be beneficial for them.

Children’s rights and well-being are already a central feature of the existing safety objectives for user-to-user services in Schedule 4 to the Bill. These require Ofcom to ensure that services protect children to a higher standard than adults, while making sure that these services account for the different needs of children at different ages, among other things. On this basis, while I am sympathetic to the aims of the amendments the noble Lord has brought forward, I respectfully say that I do not think they are needed.

More pertinently, Amendment 30 could have unintended consequences. By introducing a broad balancing exercise between the harms and benefits that children may experience online, it would make it more difficult for Ofcom to follow up instances of non-compliance. For example, service providers could take less effective safety measures to protect children, arguing that, as their service is broadly beneficial to children’s well-being or rights, the extent to which they need to protect children from harm is reduced. This could mean that children are more exposed to more harmful content, which would reduce the benefits of going online. I hope that this reassures the noble Lord, Lord Russell, of the work the Bill does in the areas he has highlighted, and that it explains why I cannot accept his amendments. I invite him to withdraw Amendment 25.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for taking part in this discussion. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Weir, although I would say to him that his third point—that, in his experience, the UNCRC is open to different interpretations by different departments—is my experience of normal government. Name me something that has not been interpreted differently by different departments, as it suits them.

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

I entirely take that point. I was making the slightly wider point—not specifically with regard to the UNCRC—that, whenever legislative provision has been made that a particular department has to have due regard to something, while there is case law, “due regard” has tended to be treated very differently by different departments. So, if even departments within the same Government treat that differently, how much more differently would private companies treat it?

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I would simply make the point that it would probably be more accurate to say that the departments treat it with “due disregard”;

This has been a wide ranging debate and I am not going to go through all the different bits and pieces. I recommend that noble Lords read United Nations general comment 25 as it goes, in great detail, right to the heart of the issues we are talking about. For example —this is very pertinent to the next group of amendments—it explicitly protects children from pornography, so I absolutely recommend that it be mentioned in the next group of amendments.

As I expected, the Minister said, “We are very sympathetic but this is not really necessary”. He said that children’s rights are effectively baked into the Bill already. But what is baked into something that children—for whom this is particularly relevant—or even adults might decide to consume is not always immediately obvious. There are problems with an approach whereby one says, “It’s fine because, if you really understood this rather complicated legislation, it would become completely clear to you what it means”. That is a very accurate and compelling demonstration of exactly why some of us have concerns about this well-intentioned Bill. We fear that it will become a sort of feast, enabling company lawyers and regulators to engage in occasionally rather arcane discourse at great expense, demonstrating that what the Government claim is clearly baked in is not so clearly baked in.