Online Safety Bill

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I too want to support this group of amendments, particularly Amendment 234, and will make just a couple of brief points.

First, one of the important qualities of the online safety regime is transparency, and this really speaks to that point. It is beyond clear that we are going to need all hands on deck, and again, this speaks to that need. I passionately agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, on this issue and ask, when does an independent researcher stop being independent? I have met quite a lot on my journey who suddenly find ways of contributing to the digital world other than their independent research. However, the route described here offers all the opportunities to put those balancing pieces in place.

Secondly, I am very much aware of the fear of the academics in our universities. I know that a number of them wrote to the Secretary of State last week saying that they were concerned that they would be left behind their colleagues in Europe. We do not want to put up barriers for academics in the UK. We want the UK to be at the forefront of governance of the digital world, this amendment speaks to that, and I see no reason for the Government to reject it.

Finally, I want to emphasise the importance of research. Revealing Reality did research for 5Rights called Pathways, in which it built avatars for real children and revealed the recommendation loops in action. We could see how children were being offered self-harm, suicide, extreme diets and livestream porn within moments of them arriving online. Frances Haugen has already been mentioned. She categorically proved what we have been asserting for years, namely that Instagram impacts negatively on teenage girls. As we put this regime in place, it is not adequate to rely on organisations that are willing to work in the grey areas of legality to get their research or on whistleblowers—on individual acts of courage—to make the world aware.

One of the conversations I remember happened nearly five years ago, when the then Secretary of State asked me what the most important thing about the Bill was. I said, “To bring a radical idea of transparency to the sector”. This amendment goes some way to doing just that.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, support Amendments 233 and 234, and Amendment 233A, from the noble Lord, Lord Allan. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, it has been made clear in the past 10 days of Committee that there is a role for every part of society to play to make sure that we see the benefits of the digital world but also mitigate the potential harms. The role that researchers and academics can play in helping us understand how the digital world operates is critical—and that is going to get ever more so as we enter a world of large language models and AI. Access to data in order to understand how digital systems and processes work will become even more important—next week, not just in 10 years’ time.

My noble friend Lord Bethell quite rightly pointed out the parallels with other regulators, such as the MHRA and the Bank of England. A number of people are now comparing the way in which the MHRA and other medical regulators regulate the development of drugs with how we ought to think about the emergence of regulation for AI. This is a very good read-across: we need to set the rules of the road for researchers and ensure, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said—nailing it, as usual—that we have the most transparent system possible, enabling people to conduct their research in the light, not in the grey zone.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, clearly, transparency is absolutely one of the crucial elements of the Bill. Indeed, it was another important aspect of the Joint Committee’s report. Like the noble Lord, Lord Knight—a fellow traveller on the committee—and many other noble Lords, I much prefer the reach of Amendments 233 and 234, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, to Amendment 230, the lead amendment in this group.

We strongly support amendments that aim to introduce a duty for regulated platforms to enable access by approved independent researchers to information and data from regulated services, under certain conditions. Of course, there are arguments for speeding up the process under Clause 146, but this is really important because companies themselves currently decide who accesses data, how much of it and for what purposes. Only the companies can see the full picture, and the effect of this is that it has taken years to build a really solid case for this Online Safety Bill. Without a greater level of insight, enabling quality research and harm analysis, policy-making and regulatory innovation will not move forward.

I was very much taken by what the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, had to say about the future in terms of the speeding up of technological developments in AI, which inevitably will make the opening up of data, and research into it, of greater and greater importance. Of course, I also take extremely seriously my noble friend’s points about the need for data protection. We are very cognisant of the lessons of Cambridge Analytica, as he mentioned.

It is always worth reading the columns of the noble Lord, Lord Hague. He highlighted this issue last December, in the Times. He said:

“Social media companies should be required to make anonymised data available to third-party researchers to study the effect of their policies. Crucially, the algorithms that determine what you see—the news you are fed, the videos you are shown, the people you meet on a website—should not only be revealed to regulators but the choices made in crafting them should then be open to public scrutiny and debate”.


Those were very wise words. The status quo leaves transparency in the hands of big tech companies with a vested interest in opacity. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, mentioned Twitter announcing in February that it would cease allowing free research access to its application programming interface. It is on a whim that a billionaire owner can decide to deny access to researchers.

I much prefer Amendment 233, which would enable Ofcom to appoint an approved independent researcher. The Ofcom code of practice proposed in Amendment 234 would be issued for researchers and platforms, setting out the procedures for enabling access to data. I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, about who should be an independent accredited researcher, but I hope that that is exactly the kind of thing that a code of practice would deal with.

Just as a little contrast, Article 40 of the EU’s Digital Services Act gives access to data to a broad range of researchers—this has been mentioned previously—including civil society and non-profit organisations dedicated to public interest research. The DSA sets out in detail the framework for vetting and access procedures, creating an explicit role for new independent supervisory authorities. This is an example that we could easily follow.

The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, mentioned the whole question of skilled persons. Like him, I do not believe that this measure is adequate as a substitute for what is contained in Amendments 233 and 234. It will be a useful tool for Ofcom to access external expertise on a case-by-case basis but it will not provide for what might be described as a wider ecosystem of inspection and analysis.

The noble Lord also mentioned the fact that internet companies should not regard themselves as an exception. Independent scrutiny is a cornerstone of the pharmaceutical, car, oil, gas and finance industries. They are open to scrutiny from research; we should expect that for social media as well. Independent researchers are already given access in many other circumstances.

The case for these amendments has been made extremely well. I very much hope to see the Government, with the much more open approach that they are demonstrating today, accept the value of these amendments.