Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Benjamin and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Tuesday 28th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Government for listening to the voices of concern, including those of the bereaved parents, for our children’s safety to be at the forefront of all our minds.

As we move forward to the next steps, it might be a bit late in the day to make this suggestion, but I have an idea to throw into the mix. It may sound radical, but it is for the tech companies and IT platforms to require a licence from Ofcom to operate in this country. It may sound like a crazy idea, but radio and TV companies need a licence, so why not tech companies and social media platforms? If they do not comply then their licence will be taken away from them or they will be fined huge sums. This is one way to get them to be focused. Are we bold or intrepid enough to do this? It could be the answer to keeping them focused and to keeping our children safe. Age assurance is the key which they need to operate to keep our children safe. As we move forward, I hope that everyone will make it their responsibility to do just that, in every way possible. Ofcom is vital to all this. I look forward to working with the Government on this important issue and to us keeping the focus of our minds on our children’s safety, happiness and contentment for the future.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, here we are again. It feels a bit like doomscrolling to keep returning to this subject. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and all those who have supported him for pushing water uphill successfully, defying gravity. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for appropriating, with her permission, the Motion moved yesterday by my noble friend Lady Kidron.

I thank the Minister for having moved. However, I take issue with her description of where we are today as a “landing point”. Rather than us being at a landing point, I hope that we all feel that we are at a launching point, because we need to go a great deal further. One of the things that one has learned throughout this process is that there is a body of knowledge on this issue among some people in both Houses of Parliament that is quite considerable. There is a very high level of knowledge of some of the issues, some of the potential solutions and the faults with some of those potential solutions. There is no perfect answer.

For many of us who have been quite closely involved with the genesis of the Online Safety Act and what has happened thereafter, there has been an apparent lack of interest and engagement from some in the current Government and the departments involved to co-operate and collaborate with those Members of both Houses who have extensive knowledge and to tap into that knowledge. There is a loose collection of those involved in this. We are called the “tech team”—a nice tautology. The members of that team want to help the Government and be behind or alongside them. We do not wish to be constantly harrying the Government and encouraging them to do more. Yesterday I was wearing a tie which had some acrobatic, leaping elephants, because it required a level of noise and drumbeats to get the Government’s attention. Today, I am wearing a tie which has a series of sheep jumping over a hurdle, because those of us on the tech team need to summon our inner sheepdogs to manoeuvre the Government in the right direction.

Motion A1 is not, as the Minister said, about creating restraint on the Government. It is about creating focus. What is contained in Motion A1 is a very clear description of what can and should be done at speed, without restraint, to get the ball rolling. I do not think that anything that comes out of the consultation will tell us anything that we did not know. If anything, it may get slightly more confusing because I suspect that it will be quite unfocused. I appeal to the Government to listen to those involved in this who perhaps have the most history, the most bruises, the most insight and the most knowledge about what is going on internationally, not just in this country, to work together for the benefit of children.

I will support the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, if he decides to test the opinion of the House—more in hope than in expectation of a great victory. However, I appeal to the Government to listen and to work with us and not, as it occasionally feels, against us.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Benjamin and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Monday 27th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, the Government are arguing that they need much more time to consider the evidence because of the given challenges of enforcement. But the bereaved parents who have lost their children through online harms do not agree. They want action now, not some time in the future.

Last week, I met again the bereaved parents who have written a letter to the Prime Minister. They desperately wanted to meet the Prime Minister personally to show their strength of feeling for having a social media ban for under-16s. To hear their harrowing, heartbreaking stories would make any morally minded person weep. The Prime Minister has met the tech companies: why not also with those who have suffered the tragic losses of their children? The bereaved parents felt so hurt by that. They are seeking change so that other families do not have to go through what they had to endure and still do every day since their loss.

Right now, as we debate at this moment, a child is being affected negatively by social media harms. How many more children will be harmed every day by the dangerous, addictive effects of social media before something is done to stop it as soon as possible? I urge the Prime Minister to meet the bereaved parents to give them hope and security; for the Government to accept the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for the sake of our children’s future happiness and mental well-being; and to give the nation’s thanks to all the bereaved parents who are fighting and campaigning for change. Let us not let them down. Let us act now. Remember, as I keep saying, childhood lasts a lifetime.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am sure that it will be source of huge disappointment to all noble Lords that I do not intend to give a valedictory speech.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Benjamin and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Report stage
Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak, in part, to two amendments with my name on them and which my noble friend Lady Kidron referred to: Amendments 46 and 90 on the importance of dissemination and not just content.

A more effective way of me saying the same thing differently is to personalise it by trying to give your Lordships an understanding of the experience taking place, day in, day out, for many young people. I address this not only to the Minister and the Bill team but, quite deliberately, to the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. I know full well that the Bill has been many years in gestation and, because the online world, technology and now AI are moving so fast, it is almost impossible for the Bill and its architecture to keep pace with them. But that is not a good reason for not listening to and accepting the force of the argument which my noble friend Lady Kidron and many others have put forward.

Last week, on the first day on Report, when we were speaking to a group of amendments, I spoke to your Lordships about a particular functionality called dark patterns, which are a variety of different features built into the design of these platforms to drive more and more volume and usage.

The individual whose journey I will be describing is called Milly. Milly is online and she accepts an automatic suggestion that is on a search bar. Let us say it is about weight loss. She starts to watch videos that she would not otherwise have found. The videos she is watching are on something called infinite scroll, so one just follows another that follows another, potentially ad infinitum. To start off, she is seeing video after video of people sharing tips about dieting and showing how happy they are after losing weight. As she scrolls and interacts, the women she sees mysteriously seem to get thinner and thinner. The platform’s content dispersal strategy—if indeed it has one, because not all do—that tempers the power of the algorithm has not yet kicked in. The Bill does not address this because, individually, not a single one of the videos Milly has been watching violates the definition of primary priority content. Coding an algorithm to meet a child’s desire to view increasingly thin women is what they are doing.

The videos that Milly sees are captioned with a variety of hashtags such as #thinspo, #thighgap and #extremeweightloss. If she clicks on those, she will find more extreme videos and will start to click on the accounts that have posted the content. Suddenly, she is exposed to the lives of people who are presenting disordered eating not just as normal but as aspirational. Developmentally, Milly is at an age where she does not have the critical thinking skills to evaluate what she is seeing. She has entered a world that she is too young to understand and would never have found were it not for the design of the platform. Throughout her journey thus far, she has yet to see a single video that meets the threshold of primary priority harm content. This world is the result of cumulative design harms.

She follows some of the accounts that prompts the platform to recommend similar accounts. Many of the accounts recommended to her are even more extreme. They are managed by people who have active eating disorders but see what is known as their pro-ana status—that is, pro anorexia—as a lifestyle choice rather than a mental health issue. These accounts are very savvy about the platform’s community guidelines, so the videos and the language they use are coded specifically to avoid detection.

Every aspect of the way Milly is interacting with the platform has now been polluted. It is not just the videos she sees. It is the autocomplete suggestions she gets on searches. It is the algorithmically determined account recommendations. It is the design strategies that make it impossible for her to stop scrolling. It is the notifications she receives encouraging her back to the platform to watch yet another weight-loss video or follow yet another account. It is the filters and effects she is offered before she posts. It is the number of likes her videos get. It goes on and on, and the Bill as it is stands will fail Milly. This is why I am talking directly to the Minister and the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, because they need to sort this out.

Earlier on this afternoon, before we began this debate, I was talking to an associate professor in digital humanities at UCL, Dr Kaitlyn Regehr. We were talking about incels—involuntary celibates—and the strange world they live in, and she made a comment. This is a quote that I wrote down word for word because it struck me. She said:

“One off-day seeds the algorithm. The algorithm will focus on that and amplify that one off-day”—


that one moment when we click on something and suddenly it takes us into a world and in a direction that we had no idea existed but, more importantly, because of the way these are designed, we feel we have no control over. We really must do something about this.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendments in the names of the intrepid noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford. They fit hand in hand with the amendments that have just been debated in the previous group. Sadly, I was unable to take part in that debate because of a technical ruling, but I thank the Minister for his kind words and thank other noble Lords for what they have said. But my heart is broken, because they included age verification, for which I have campaigned for the past 12 years, and I wanted to thank the Government for finally accepting that children need to be protected from online harmful content, pornography being one example; it is the gateway to many other harms.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Benjamin and Lord Russell of Liverpool

Committee stage
Thursday 25th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly. I could disagree with much of what the noble Baroness just said, but I do not need to go there.

What particularly resonates with me today is that, since I first entered your Lordships’ House at the tender age of 28 in 1981, this is the first time I can ever remember us having to rein back what we are discussing because of the presence of young people in the Public Gallery. I reflect on that, because it brings home the gravity of what we are talking about and its prevalence; we cannot run away or hide from it.

I will ask the Minister about the International Regulatory Cooperation for a Global Britain: Government Response to the OECD Review of International Regulatory Cooperation of the UK, published 2 September 2020. He will not thank me for that, because I am sure that he is already familiar and word-perfect with this particular document, which was pulled together by his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. I raise this because, to think that we can in any way, shape or form, with this piece of legislation, stem the tide of what is happening in the online world—which is happening internationally on a global basis and at a global level—by trying to create regulatory and legal borders around our benighted island, is just for the fairies. It is not going to happen.

Can the Minister tell us about the degree to which, at an international level, we are proactively talking to, and learning from, other regulators in different jurisdictions, which are battling exactly the same things that we are? To concentrate the Minister’s mind, I will point out what the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, committed the Government to doing nearly three years ago. First, in relation to international regulatory co-operation, the Government committed to

“developing a whole-of-government IRC strategy, which sets out the policies, tools and respective roles of different departments and regulators in facilitating this; … developing specific tools and guidance to policy makers and regulators on how to conduct IRC; and … establishing networks to convene international policy professionals from across government and regulators to share experience and best practice on IRC”.

I am sure that, between now and when he responds, he will be given a detailed answer by the Bill team, so that he can tell us exactly where the Government, his department and Ofcom are in carrying out the commitments of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, although I arrived a little late, I will say, very briefly, that I support the amendments wholeheartedly. I support them because I see this as a child protection issue. People viewing AI, I believe, will lead to them going out to find real children to sexually abuse. I will not take up any more time, but I wholeheartedly agree with everything that has been said, apart from what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said. I hope that the Minister will look very seriously at the amendments and take them into consideration.