Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Bethell

Committee stage
Wednesday 18th December 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendment 198 in my name and register my support for the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, to which I have added my name. Independent research access is a very welcome addition to the Bill by the Government. It was a key recommendation of the pre-legislative scrutiny committee on the Online Safety Bill in 2021 and I know that I speak for many colleagues in the academic field, as well as many civil society organisations, who are delighted by its swift and definitive inclusion in the Bill.

The objective of these amendments is not to derail the Government’s plans, but rather to ensure that they happen and to make the regime work for children and the UK’s world-class academic institutions and stellar civil society organisations, ensuring that we can all do high-quality research about emergent threats to children and society more broadly.

Amendment 197 would ensure that the provisions in Clause 123 are acted on by removing the Government’s discretion as to whether or not they introduce regulations. It would also impose a deadline of 12 months for the Government to do so. I have said this before, but I have learnt the hard way that good intentions and warm words from the Dispatch Box are a poor substitute for clear provisions in law. A quick search of the Bill reveals that there are 119 uses of the word “must” and 262 uses of the word “may”. Clearly, they are being used to create different obligations or expectations. The Minister may say that this amendment is not needed and that, for all intents and purposes, we can take the word “may” as a “must” or a “will”, but I would prefer to see it in black and white. In fact, if the Government have reserved discretion on this point, I would like to understand exactly what that means for research.

Amendment 198 seeks to ensure that the regulations will enable independent researchers to research how online risks and harms impact different groups, especially vulnerable users including children. We have already discussed the fact that online harms are not experienced equally by users: those who are most vulnerable offline are often the most vulnerable online. In an earlier debate, I talked about the frustrations experienced when tech companies do not report data according to age groups. In failing to do so, it is possible to hide the reality that children are disproportionately impacted by certain risks and harms. This amendment would ensure that children and other vulnerable groups can be studied in isolation, rather than leaving independent researchers to pick through generalised datasets to uncover where harm is amplified and for whom.

I will leave the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, to explain his amendments, but I will just say why it is so important that we have a clear path to researcher access. It is fundamental to the success of the online safety regime.

Many will remember Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, who revealed the extent to which Meta knew, through its own detailed internal research, how harmful their platforms actually are to young people. Meta’s own research showed that:

“We make body image issues worse for one in three girls”.


Some 32% of teen girls said that, when they have felt bad about their bodies, Instagram has made them feel worse. Were it not for a whistleblower, this research would never have been made public.

After a series of evidence disclosures to US courts as a result of the legal action by attorneys-general at state level, we have heard whistleblowers suggest, in evidence given to the EU, that there will be a new culture in some Silicon Valley firms—no research and no emails. If you have something to say, you will have to say it in person so that it cannot be used against them in court. The irony of that is palpable given the struggle that we are having about user privacy, but it points to the need for our research regime to be water- tight. If the companies are not looking at the impact of their own services, we must. I hope that the Government continue their leadership on this issue and accept the amendments in the spirit that they are being put forward.

I have another point that I want the Minister to clarify. I apologise, because I raised this in a private meeting but I have forgotten the answer. Given the number of regulatory investigations, proceedings and civil litigations in which tech companies are engaged, I would like some comfort about the legal exemption in these clauses. I want to understand whether it applies only to advice from and between lawyers or exempts data that may negatively impact companies’ defence or surface evidence of safety failures or deficiencies. The best way that I have of explaining my concern is: if it is habitual for tech companies to cc a lawyer in all their communications on product safety, trust and safety, and so on, would that give them legal privilege?

Finally, I support the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in his desire for a definition of independent researchers. I would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say on that. I beg to move.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 198A and 198C to 198F. I also support Amendments 197, 198 and 198B, to which I have added my name, all of which address the issue of data for researchers.

As was put very thoughtfully by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, platforms are not making decisions about their services with due regard to product safety or with independent oversight. Ofcom’s work enforcing the Online Safety Act will significantly shift towards accountability, in some part, but it makes no provision at the moment on researchers’ data access, despite civil society and academic researchers being at the forefront of highlighting online harms for a decade. The anecdotes that the noble Baroness just gave were a very powerful testimony to the importance of that. We are, in fact, flying completely blind, making policy and, in this Room, legislation without data, facts and insight about the performance and algorithms that we seek to address. Were it not for the whistleblowers, we would not have anything to go on and we cannot rely on whistleblowers to guide our hands.

Rectifying this admission is in the Bill, and I am enormously grateful to the Minister and to the role of my noble friend Lord Camrose for putting it in the Bill. It is particularly important, because the situation with data for researchers has deteriorated considerably, even in the last 18 months—with Meta shutting CrowdTangle and X restricting researchers’ access to its API. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, spoke about what the whistleblowers think, and they think that this is going to get a lot worse in the future.

I welcome the inclusion of these provisions in the Bill. They will be totally transformational to this sector, bringing a level of access to serious analysts and academics, so we can better understand the impact of the digital world, for both good and bad. A good example of the importance of robust research to inform policy-making was the Secretary of State’s recent announcement that the Government were launching a

“research project to explore the impact of social media on young people’s wellbeing and mental health”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/11/24; col. 250.]

That project will not be very effective if the researchers cannot access the data, so I very much hope that these provisions will be enforced before they start spending money on that.

To be effective and to have the desired effect, we need to ensure that the data for researchers regime, as described in the Bill, is truly effective and cannot be easily brushed off. That is why the Government need to accept the amendments in this group: to bring some clarity and to close loopholes in the scheme as it is outlined in the Bill.

I will briefly summarise the provisions in the amendments in my name. First, we need to make researcher access regulations enforceable in the same way as other requirements in the Online Safety Act. The enforcement provisions in that Act were strengthened considerably as it passed through this House, and I believe that the measures for data for researchers need to be given the same rocket boosters. Amendment 198D will mean that regulated services will be required to adhere to the regime and give Ofcom the power to levy proper remedial action if regulated services are obfuscating or non-compliant.

Secondly, we need to ensure that any contractual provision of use, such as a platform’s terms of service, is unenforceable if it would prevent

“research into online safety matters”,

as defined in the regulations. This is an important loophole that needs to be closed. It will protect UK researchers carrying out public interest research from nefarious litigation over terms of service violations as platforms seek to obfuscate access to data. We have seen this practice in other areas.

Thirdly, we need to clarify that researchers carrying out applicable research into online safety matters in the UK will be able to access information under the regime, regardless of where they are located. This is a basic point. Amendment 198E would bring the regime in line with the Digital Services Act of the EU and allow the world’s best researchers to study potential harm to UK users.

Ensuring robust researcher access to data contributes to a great ecosystem of investigation and scrutiny that will help to enforce an effective application of the law, while also guarding against overreach in terms of moderating speech. It is time to back UK civil society and academic researchers to ensure that policy-making and regulatory enforcement is as informed as possible. That is why I ask the Minister to support these measures.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Bethell

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, in her search to make it clear that we do not need to take a proportionate approach to pornography. I would be delighted if the Minister could indicate in his reply that the Government will accept the age-assurance amendments in group 22 that are coming shortly, which make it clear that porn on any regulated service, under Part 3 or Part 5, should be behind an age gate.

In making the case for that, I want to say very briefly that, after the second day of Committee, I received a call from a working barrister who represented 90 young men accused of serious sexual assault. Each was a student and many were in their first year. A large proportion of the incidents had taken place during freshers’ week. She rang to make sure that we understood that, while what each and every one of them had done was indefensible, these men were also victims. As children brought up on porn, they believed that their sexual violence was normal—indeed, they told her that they thought that was what young women enjoyed and wanted. On this issue there is no proportionality.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I also support Amendments 29, 83 and 103 from the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie. As currently drafted, the Bill makes frequent reference to Ofcom taking into account

“the size and capacity of … a service”

when it determines the extent of the measures a site should apply to protect children. We have discussed size on previous days; I am conscious that the point has been made in part, but I hope the Committee will forgive me if I repeat it clearly. When it comes to pornography and other harms to children, size does matter. As I have said many times recently, porn is porn no matter the size of the website or publisher involved with it. It does not matter whether it is run by a huge company such as MindGeek or out of a shed in London or Romania by a small gang of people. The harm of the content to children is still exactly the same.

Our particular concern is that, if the regulations from Ofcom are applied to the bigger companies, that will create a lot of space for smaller organisations which are not bending to the regulations to try to gain a competitive advantage over the larger players and occupy that space. That is the concern of the bigger players. They are very open to age verification; what concerns them is that they will face an unequal, unlevel playing field. It is a classic concern of bigger players facing regulation in the market: that bad actors will gain competitive advantage. We should be very cognisant of that when thinking about how the regulations on age verification for porn will be applied. Therefore, the measures should be applied in proportion to the risk of harm to children posed by a porn site, not in proportion to the site’s financial capacity or the impact on its revenues of basic protections for children.

In this, we are applying basic, real-world principles to the internet. We are denying its commonly held exceptionalism, which I think we are all a bit tired of. We are applying the same principles that you might apply in the real world, for instance, to a kindergarten, play centre, village church hall, local pub, corner shop or any other kind of business that brings itself in front of children. In other words, if a company cannot afford to implement or does not seem capable of implementing measures that protect children, it should not be permitted by law to have a face in front of the general public. That is the principle that we apply in the real world, and that is the principle we should be applying on the internet.

Allowing a dimension of proportionality to apply to pornography cases creates an enormous loophole in the legislation, which at best will delay enforcement for particular sites when it is litigated and at worst will disable regulatory action completely. That is why I support the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie.

Cairncross Review

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Bethell

Thursday 6th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking in response to The Cairncross Review: a sustainable future for journalism.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I gently remind the House of the three-minute time limit. This is a time-limited debate, and it would be helpful if Members could please stick to that limit.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, it has been a year since Dame Frances Cairncross published her review, A Sustainable Future for Journalism. Cairncross’s remit was

“to consider the sustainability of the production and distribution of high-quality journalism, and especially the future of the press”.

The review’s six chapters outline: the importance of high-quality journalism to democracy; the rapidly changing market; the plummeting revenues of publishers; the huge power of the online platforms; and the need to protect public interest news. Sadly, the Government’s response does not comprehensively answer Dame Frances’s nine recommendations, nor does it fully address the two intrinsically linked systemic points that she highlights—notably, the impact of platforms as mediators on the quality of the news and the asymmetry of power between platform and publishers when it comes to revenue.

I declare my interests as set out in the register, particularly as a member of the House of Lords’ digital democracy inquiry committee and as chair of the 5Rights Foundation.

The most urgent issue raised repeatedly by Cairncross is how new distribution models for high-quality journalism have eroded revenue. This is a sector being hollowed out before our eyes, with reduced resources to hold institutions to account, as the platform model drives down quality in pursuit of profit. In her introduction, Cairncross points out:

“People read more sources of news online, but spend less time reading it than they did in print. They increasingly skim, scroll or passively absorb news, much of it ‘pushed’ news”,

which is

“based on data analytics and algorithms, the operation of which are often opaque.”

Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube measure views, likes and retweets, not the quality of the news they share. Under the guise of being “user first”, they are focused on building algorithms to increase engagement and, with it, their revenues—not on people’s understanding of what is happening in the world around them.

A user journey with a diet of financial, entertainment, political and international news as readers made their way from front page to sports page, has been replaced by unbundled news: bite-sized snacks driven by an opaque list of inputs that optimise user engagement; it is often difficult for readers to know or recall the source. Disaggregated news driven by commercial concerns necessarily interferes with a user journey based on editorial or public interest values. This business model enables disinformation to masquerade as news. It is not without consequences: the victims are children who get measles, pensioners who give up their savings and individuals who vote on false promises.

Cairncross recommended:

“New codes of conduct to rebalance the relationship between publishers and online platforms”,


underpinned by a news quality obligation under regulatory oversight. While the government response has warm words about these codes, it is unclear whether they are to be put on a statutory footing, silent on who will have oversight and offers no timetable. The news quality obligation becomes a vague sense that platforms must

“help users identify the reliability and trustworthiness of news sources”,

with allusions to the online harms White Paper. I do not understand why the Government commissioned a review on such an urgent matter, only for us to wait a year to hear that we will wait several more. Can the Minister outline the steps government will take to introduce new, effective codes of conduct and when we will begin to see them enforced? Also, what obstacles does she see to introducing a news quality obligation in response to the review, rather than waiting for an online harms Bill whose effect may not be felt for another couple of years?

As classified and display ads have moved wholesale from publishers to platforms, particularly Google, where targeted advertising is king, the duopoly of Google and Facebook have become eye-wateringly rich and the news sector increasingly poor. Meanwhile, news producers remain at the mercy of news feed algorithms that can, at the whim of a platform, be changed for no transparent reason, giving platforms the power to literally bury the news. Cairncross’s observation that the opaque advertising supply chain is weighted against content creators is not new. It was central to the Communications Committee’s report, UK Advertising in a Digital Age; it has been the subject of much complaint by advertisers themselves; and it is well laid out in the interim review from the CMA.

This dysfunctional business model hits the local press the hardest. The Yorkshire Evening Post showed its societal value by having local reporters when it broke the story of a child being treated on an NHS hospital floor. The subsequent false discrediting of the story on social media showed the financial value in misinformation. The editor’s plea to the digital democracy committee was that the Post needed a fairer share of the value of the content it produces. Without it, it simply cannot continue to put reporters on the front line.

Cairncross recommends an innovation fund, VAT exemption to match offline publishing and allowing local papers charitable status. The first of these is being done by NESTA, the second is being looked at by the Treasury, and the last the Government rejected outright, but at the heart of her recommendations was that the CMA should use its powers to investigate the advertising supply chain to ensure that the market be fair and transparent. Given the unanimity of this view, and the disproportionate control of the platforms, will the Minister tell the House whether she would like to see—as many of us would —the CMA move to a full market investigation to clean up the advertising supply chain?

Cairncross urged the extension of the Local Democracy Reporting Service but this has been interpreted by the Government as an extension of the BBC local news partnerships, with no additional funding, This is not an adequate response to the crisis in local journalism, nor does it fulfil the Government’s own promise to advocate for voters outside the metropole, whose local interests may be too small to be of financial value in the attention economy of the multinationals. Leaving whole parts of the country out of sight is not sustainable for our democracy.

The review also called for an Ofcom inquiry into the impact of BBC News on the commercial sector. However, I would argue that of greater concern are the recent announcements of large-scale cuts to BBC News. Amid the crisis in the local press, it is simply not the right time to undermine the BBC. In an era of catastrophically low trust, BBC News is uniquely trusted by 79% of the population—a statistic that any platform or politician would beg for.

Finally, the commitment from the Government to support media literacy is hugely welcome. The ability to identify the trustworthiness of a source and to understand the platform’s algorithms, how they impact on what you see and who benefits from your interactions is vital. But I urge the noble Baroness to make clear in her answer that media literacy is no substitute for cleaning up the hostile environment in which the news now sits.

I asked Frances Cairncross to comment on the government response to her review. She said it was

“of particular regret that the government rejected out of hand the idea of an Institute of public interest journalism.”

On another occasion, one might underline further the responsibility of the press to uphold their own editorial standards to a greater extent and better fulfil their own public interest role but, for today, I wish to congratulate Dame Frances on categorically making the case for high-quality journalism as a crucial safeguard to democracy.

I look forward to hearing from many knowledgeable colleagues and thank them in advance for their contributions. Since The Cairncross Review was published, the news sector has become more fragile, while the platforms’ power has become entrenched. I hope that the Minister—delightfully making her maiden speech in this debate—finds a way of reassuring the House that the Government intend to tackle the systemic issues that Cairncross has identified with the seriousness and urgency they require. I beg to move.