Freedom of Speech

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, as a young child I had an operation that meant I was unable to speak for a year. I arrived at secondary school, aged 11, complete with a horn to attract attention, like Harpo Marx, and attached to my waist a pen and paper on which I could ask or answer questions. It was embarrassing, alienating and occasionally hilarious, but from my silence I noticed who spoke, who listened and who got ignored. Even at that young age, I understood that having a voice requires the circumstances in which to be heard, as well as the freedom to speak.

I declare my interests as set out in the register, particular as chair of 5Rights Foundation and a member of the Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill. I am really sorry if I disappoint noble Lords by failing to offer spoilers; I am far too frightened of the chair, Damian Collins MP. I hope my words speak to the urgency of our recommendations.

Earlier this year, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that just 12 accounts were responsible for 65% of Covid misinformation across 800,000 posts subsequently seen by 59 million people. In 2016, a Facebook internal review found that 64% of people who joined an extremist group did so only because the company’s algorithm recommended it. This year thousands of people, including many children, have undertaken TikTok challenges that have resulted in hospitalisations, fires, dangerous driving and the death of a 10 year-old girl from accidental asphyxiation. After 6 January, the assault on the Capitol, Twitter removed 70,000 accounts known for sharing QAnon content and thereby reduced the amount of QAnon content on its platform by 70% to 80%. If it had been done a little earlier, it may have changed those very same events. The penalty shoot-out in England’s best European Championship performance for decades meant that the young men who should have been national heroes were instead subject to sustained abuse.

In each case, speech that might in other contexts be ill-informed, frustrating, foolish or full-on hateful—but totally manageable—was supercharged and spread to epidemic proportions online. As it spreads, it mutates: disappointment turns to rage, uncertainty and suspicion; difference turns into dispute; the marginal turns into the mainstream; and the digital turns into injury and death.

I am neither a technophobe nor a tech pessimist. On the contrary, it is still possible to do anything. The digital world is synthetic, entirely human-engineered and eye-wateringly well resourced; it can set its sights on any outcome. But it is optimised for three holy grails: growth, engagement and time spent, which simply means keeping as many people online, engaging as often as possible for as long as possible. This engagement drives the value and revenue of a sector now responsible for 25% of the world’s GDP, and it has made giants of those who, often in the name of freedom of speech, have built personal fortunes by controlling what we see, read and hear from the relative safety of Silicon Valley.

When she gave evidence to the Joint Committee, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, said that

“engagement-based ranking does two things. One, it prioritises and amplifies divisive polarising and extreme content and, two, it concentrates it … It does not matter if you are on the left or on the right … Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook … The … system is biased towards bad actors and biased towards those who push people to the extremes.”

Those extremes become our new normal, in which children who look for exercise videos end up with material that valorises eating disorders, in which Covid misinformation is more prevalent than advice from the WHO and in which whole peoples are set against each other in tribal or religious conflict, such as those in Ethiopia and Myanmar, in both of which Facebook has played a role. Perhaps most ironic of all, they create a new normal in which girls, women, people of colour, minorities and the oppressed can be silenced by algorithmically fuelled abuse and hate in the name of other people’s freedom to speak but, perhaps more truthfully, in the company’s freedom to monetise and whip up difference.

It is frequently said that the digital world offers great opportunities but brings terrible harms. This framing is a false binary. A car with no brakes is not an opportunity, and neither is a supermarket with a poisonous product hidden on every other shelf. They are, respectively, a case for product recall and shutting up shop. But both, with some judicious redesign, would be rather useful.

Not all the harms of the world can be attributed to one sector, however powerful, but our freedoms are being exploited by a system that allows any amount of algorithmic distortion but holds no liability. Our discourse is undermined by the monetisation of engagement, and children are being denied a childhood for profit. Three weeks ago, in this Chamber, I set the Government a series of challenges that they have yet to answer. In short—and, believe me, it was not in short on that occasion—I asked why the Government did not act immediately to introduce privacy-preserving age assurance online to give children the protections that they so desperately need. And I say it here again. Children also have the right to participate, speak and assemble online, but they also have a right to protections from violent and sexual commercial exploitation.

This is not the theoretical plaything of a debating club that pits freedoms against protections but rather a matter of life and death. This is not about undermining our freedom but about finding our voice. I do not wish to be standing here in the new year reporting to the Minister more compelling evidence or a new tragedy for which his department will bear some responsibility. I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for bringing this debate forward, and I urge the House, as we go forward to the online safety Bill, the data Bill and multiple trade Bills, not to sacrifice our freedoms or those of our children on the altar of Silicon Valley. Instead, I urge that we find our voice and, with it, the circumstances in which others can both speak and be heard.