Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Burt of Solihull and Baroness Harding of Winscombe

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, this is my first contribution to the Bill, and I feel I need to apologise in advance for my lack of knowledge and expertise in this whole field. In her initial remarks, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, was saying “Don’t worry, because you don’t need to be a lawyer”. Unfortunately, I do not have any expertise in the field of the internet and social media and all of that as well, so I will be very brief in all of my remarks on the Bill. But I feel that I cannot allow the Bill to go past without at least making a few remarks, as equalities spokesperson for the Lib Dems. The issues are of passionate importance to me, and of course to victims of online abuse, and it is those victims for whom I speak today.

In this group, I will address my remarks to Amendments 34 and 35, in which we have discussed content deemed to be harmful—suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and abuse and hate content—under the triple shield approach, although this content discussion has strayed somewhat during the course of the debate.

Much harmful material, as we have heard, initially comes to the user uninvited. I do not pretend to understand how these algorithms work, but my understanding is that if you open one, they literally click into action, increasing more and more of this kind of content being fed to you in your feed. The suicide of young Molly Russell is a typical example of the devastating consequences of how much damage these algorithms can contribute. I am glad that the Bill will go further to protect children, but it still leaves adults—some young and vulnerable—without some protection and with the same amount of automatic exposure to harmful content, which algorithms can increase with engagement, which could have overwhelming impacts on their mental health, as my noble friend Lady Parminter so movingly and eloquently described.

So this amendment means a user would have to make an active, conscious choice to be exposed to such content: an opt out rather than an opt in. This has been discussed at length by noble Lords a great deal more versed in the subject than me. But surely the only persons or organisations who would not support this would be the ones who do not have the best interests of the vulnerable users we have been talking about this afternoon at heart. I hope the Minister will confirm in his remarks that the Government do.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak in this debate because I now need to declare an unusual interest, in that Amendment 38A has been widely supported outside this Chamber by my husband, the Member of Parliament for Weston-super-Mare. I am not intending to speak on that amendment but, none the less, I mention it just in case.

I rise to speak because I have been so moved by the speeches, not least the right reverend Prelate’s speech. I would like just to briefly address the “default on” amendments and add my support. Like others, on balance I favour the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, but would willingly throw my support behind my noble friend Lady Morgan were that the preferred choice in the Chamber.

I would like to simply add two additional reasons why I ask my noble friend the Minister to really reflect hard on this debate. The first is that children become teenagers, who become young adults, and it is a gradual transition—goodness, do I feel it as the mother of a 16 year-old and a 17 year-old. The idea that on one day all the protections just disappear completely and we require our 18 year-olds to immediately reconfigure their use of all digital tools just does not seem a sensible transition to adulthood to me, whereas the ability to switch off user empowerment tools as you mature as an adult seems a very sensible transition.

Secondly, I respect very much the free speech arguments that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made but I do not think this is a debate about the importance of free speech. It is actually about how effective the user empowerment tools are. If they are so hard for non-vulnerable adults to turn off, what hope have vulnerable adults to be able to turn them on? For the triple shield to work and the three-legged stool to be effective, the onus needs to be on the tech companies to make these user empowerment tools really easy to turn on and turn off. Then “default on” is not a restriction on freedom of speech at all; it is simply a means of protecting our most vulnerable.