Combating Disinformation: Freedom of Expression

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Tuesday 13th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

The unit comprises civil servants who sit within DSIT, and it occasionally makes use of external consulting services. It adjusts its size and membership from within the DSIT team according to the nature of the threat at any given moment.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, on transparency: we would not know about the Counter Disinformation Unit if it was not for Big Brother Watch, which we owe great thanks for its service on that. The Minister seems to know what disinformation is. Can the Government tell us how they identify what is to be labelled as disinformation? Who checks the fact checkers? For example, BBC Verify seems keen to expose everybody else’s disinformation but seems blind to its own egregious examples of inaccurate information.

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

Well, the Government are clear, as is NSOIT, that disinformation refers to the deliberate attempt to mislead by placing falsehoods into the information environment. As part of the Civil Service, NSOIT would have robust internal measures to verify and check its own work, and indeed it reports regularly across government and to Ministers.

King’s Speech

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, in a lacklustre King’s Speech, with thin pickings for those of us committed to expanding freedom, I am glad to have something positive to say at the start of my speech. I too congratulate the Government on the proposed repeal of Section 40 in the Media Bill. This always was an outrageous attempt at financially strong-arming the press into signing up to a state regulator. Dumping this draconian measure is a rare victory for free speech.

I also want to probe proposals to modernise the mission of public service broadcasting to keep up with new technological changes. It is fine to ensure that viewers and listeners have easy access to public service TV and radio content on connected devices, online platforms and smart TVs, but I am concerned that there is a complacency that assumes that simply making PSB content available will deliver what the gracious Speech calls a trusted source of impartial news. My question is: will it?

This ignores the ongoing problems of partiality in PSB news output. Also, public service broadcasters themselves now often use web and online platforms that can mean one-sided material, even misinformation, being available for ever longer. I will give a couple of examples.

Recently, the grass-roots anti-racism campaign group Don’t Divide Us made a formal complaint about a BBC “Newsround” web article published in 2020 entitled “White Privilege: What is it and How Can it be Used to Help Others?” This was no impartial primer. Aimed at children and teenagers, material was presented by Professor Kehinde Andrews, an openly partisan activist and advocate of critical race theory. A highly contested, unscientific and politically divisive concept—white privilege—is presented as a self-evident truth with no counterview—and that was by the BBC. As DDU director Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert explains, this controversial ideology impugns

“the majority of the British public who happen to be white”

for alleged privilege based on their skin colour while

“patronising Britain’s non-white citizens”

as perpetual victims. This politicised narrative is presented as trustworthy fact on a BBC website. How did the BBC respond to concerns? It was a bit jobsworth-like, I am afraid. It explained that content currently published on a BBC website must be complained about within 30 working days of it being published. So, this partisan material, labelled as PSB for youth, remains online and nothing can be done.

Here is another example. In a very fine speech in this House on Israel and Gaza, the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, noted that the BBC “uncritically” repeated Hamas officials’ claims

“that Israel had struck the Al-Ahli hospital”—[Official Report, 24/10/23; col. 592.]

in Gaza, and that the claims were presented as fact. When it was clarified that, actually, it was an Islamic Jihad rocket, the defamatory report remained on the BBC website, unaltered. It was viewed by millions and was cited as verified fact by too many at the start of what has become an ever-growing climate of anti-Semitic hatred on our streets.

Mind you, if you watch PSB news, you may not see the scale of this anti-Semitic problem. In coverage of the Armistice demo at the weekend, I got the sense that some journalists from the likes of, for example, Channel 4, were almost relieved to spot familiar bigots in the guise of Tommy Robinson and friends; these were the dangerous thugs that all bien pensants in the media recognise and denounce. However, they somehow managed to miss the racist bigotry aimed at Jews: protesters dressed up as Hamas terrorists; placards featuring swastikas in the Star of David; and those caught on film shouting, “Kill all Jews”, or, “Hitler knew how to deal with these people”. None of this featured in the mainstream news at all, so I am grateful to those citizen journalists and freelancers such as Inc.Monocle—we should all follow him—for filming and photographing so comprehensively that we have material we all need to see. I note that the Met Police is using that material as evidence for its post-event, Wild West-style “Wanted” posters. My question is: why was more of this not on PSB channels?

Also, as a follow-on to the endless arguments I had with Ministers on what is now the Online Safety Act, it is worth noting that those much-maligned platforms are often invaluable for publishing inconvenient truths and proof of why free speech online is so important. Censorship is never the answer to hate. Hamas despises freedom but, for democracies, it is our lifeblood. This is why I am not convinced by the Economic Activity of Public Bodies Bill, which tries to ban boycotts and divestment projects rather than democratically convincing public bodies against treating Israel as a pariah state and using censorious tactics to punish it, Israeli products, Israeli speakers, Jewish shops and so on.

This is also why we should all be anxious about one of the Secretaries of State associated with these debates, Michelle Donelan, calling on UK Research and Innovation—UKRI—to shut down its equality, diversity and inclusion committee on the grounds that some of its academic members put anti-Israel posts on social media. Although I disagree profoundly with the sentiments expressed by those academics—such as labelling Israel as an apartheid state guilty of genocide, which I find disgusting—I am also disgusted when a Government Minister interferes with academic freedom. Surely this makes a mockery of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act that we passed earlier this year and of which I was rather proud.

Talking of equality, diversity and inclusion, it is a sign of the times that, although I welcome confirmation of the construction of the Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, my first thought was, “They’ll need extra-heavy security because it could be attacked”. My second thought was, “Oh no, I hope the memorial project won’t have an EDI committee or activists might demand that it decolonise the content and rebrand Jewish victims of the Holocaust as colonisers”—a fashionable slander that is very popular in educational and cultural institutions as we speak.

To conclude: sadly, the arts are being poisoned by such intersectional identity politics—so much so that a new organisation, Freedom in the Arts, has just been launched. It was set up by the dancer and choreographer Rosie Kay and a former senior Arts Council officer, Denise Fahmy; both of them were personally cancelled for their gender-critical views. How sad that we need to campaign now, in 2023, for artistic freedom. I urge the Minister to meet them and I hope that DCMS will support their work.

As always, my theme is that free speech is crucial for the arts, innovation, research and democracy, as well as for the excellent maiden speeches that we have heard. We are about to hear another, so good luck to the next speaker. Using our free speech is crucial in arguing against and defeating bigotry in all its forms—something that I associate with the world of arts and culture.

Counter Disinformation Unit

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

As I say, the work of the CDU does not target any individual, and specifically it does not refer to any social media company the publications and writings of any Member of Parliament or any journalist. It does not go after political debate in any way. Inevitably, we are blessed in this House to have a number of prominent thinkers and writers, and their thinking and writing would end up in all kinds of departmental media summaries, as you would expect. Any subject access request would necessarily pick those up. That is not to suggest that the noble Baroness or any other Member of this House have been targeted individually by the CDU.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, is the Minister able to assure us that the Counter Disinformation Unit never pressurised anyone in big tech to censor by proxy? The public are owed that explanation, not just parliamentarians. Can the Minister comment on the danger of weaponising phrases such as misinformation and disinformation to discredit inconvenient truths and to silence dissent? These are serious concerns that members of the public have, and the Minister should answer the Freedom of Information requests when they are given to him, as requested.

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

I recognise the concern— I really do. I suggest that the greatest threat to our freedom of speech and freedom of expression is in fact disinformation itself, because however good or true a post might be, if nobody believes it, it is absolutely useless. To answer the first part of the noble Baroness’s question, the CDU does not place pressure on social media organisations and cannot oblige social media organisations of any kind to remove posts. What it can do is advise them that certain bits of content might or might not adhere to their terms of service.