Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Moylan

3rd reading
Wednesday 6th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I want to thank the Minister and other noble colleagues for such kind words. I really appreciate it.

I want to say very little. It has been an absolute privilege to work with people across both Houses on this. It is not every day that one keeps the faith in the system, but this has been a great pleasure. In these few moments that I am standing, I want to pay tribute to the bereaved parents, the children’s coalition, the NSPCC, my colleagues at 5Rights, Barnardo’s, and the other people out there who listen and care passionately that we get this right. I am not going to go through what we got right and wrong, but I think we got more right than we got wrong, and I invite the Minister to sit with me on Monday in the Gallery to make sure that those last little bits go right—because I will be there. I also remind the House that we have some work in the data Bill vis-à-vis the bereaved parents.

In all the thanks—and I really feel that I have had such tremendous support on my area of this Bill—I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin. She was there before many people were and suffered cruelly in the legislative system. Our big job now is to support Ofcom, hold it to account and help it in its task, because that is Herculean. I really thank everyone who has supported me through this.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure that your Lordships would not want the Bill to pass without hearing some squeak of protest and dissent from those of us who have spent so many days and weeks arguing for the interests of privacy and free speech, to which the Bill remains a very serious and major threat.

Before I come to those remarks, I associate myself with what other noble Lords have said about what a privilege it has been, for me personally and for many of us, to participate over so many days and weeks in what has been the House of Lords at its deliberative best. I almost wrote down that we have conducted ourselves like an academic seminar, but when you think about what most academic seminars are like—with endless PowerPoint slides and people shuttling around, and no spontaneity whatever—we exceeded that by far. The conversational tone that we had in the discussions, and the way in which people who did not agree were able to engage—indeed, friendships were made—meant that the whole thing was done with a great deal of respect, even for those of us who were in the small minority. At this point, I should perhaps say on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, who participated fully in all stages of the Bill, that she deeply regrets that she cannot be in her place today.

I am not going to single out anybody except for one person. I made the rather frivolous proposal in Committee that all our debates should begin with the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam; we learned so much from every contribution he made that he really should have kicked them all off. We would all have been a great deal more intelligent about what we were saying, and understood it better, had we heard what he had to say. I certainly have learned a great deal from him, and that was very good.

I will raise two issues only that remain outstanding and are not assuaged by the very odd remarks made by my noble friend as he moved the Third Reading. The first concerns encryption. The fact of the matter is that everybody knows that you cannot do what Ofcom is empowered by the Bill to do without breaching end-to-end encryption. It is as simple as that. My noble friend may say that that is not the Government’s intention and that it cannot be forced to do it if the technology is not there. None of that is in the Bill, by the way. He may say that at the Dispatch Box but it does not address the fact that end-to-end encryption will be breached if Ofcom finds a way of doing what the Bill empowers it to do, so why have we empowered it to do that? How do we envisage that Ofcom will reconcile those circumstances where platforms say that they have given their best endeavours to doing something and Ofcom simply does not believe that they have? Of course, it might end up in the courts, but the crucial point is that that decision, which affects so many people—and so many people nowadays regard it as a right to have privacy in their communications—might be made by Ofcom or by the courts but will not be made in this Parliament. We have given it away to an unaccountable process and democracy has been taken out of it. In my view, that is a great shame.

I come back to my second issue—I will not be very long. I constantly ask about Wikipedia. Is Wikipedia in scope of the Bill? If it is, is it going to have to do prior checking of what is posted? That would destroy its business model and make many minority language sites—I instanced Welsh—totally unviable. My noble friend said at the Dispatch Box that, in his opinion, Wikipedia was not going to be in scope of the Bill. But when I asked why we could not put that in the Bill, he said it was not for him to decide whether it was in scope and that the Government had set up this wonderful structure whereby Ofcom will tell us whether it is—almost without appeal, and again without any real democratic scrutiny. Oh yes, and we might have a Select Committee, which might write a very good, highly regarded report, which might be debated some time within the ensuing 12 months on the Floor of your Lordships’ House. However, we will have no say in that matter; we have given it away.

I said at an earlier stage of the Bill that, for privacy and censorship, this represents the closest thing to a move back to the Lord Chamberlain and Lady Chatterley’s Lover that you could imagine but applied to the internet. That is bad, but what is almost worse is this bizarre governance structure where decisions of crucial political sensitivity are being outsourced to an unaccountable regulator. I am very sad to say that I think that, at first contact with reality, a large part of this is going to collapse, and with it a lot of good will be lost.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Moylan

Report stage
Thursday 6th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendment 174 in my name and then more broadly to this group—I note that the Minister got his defence in early.

On the question of misinformation and disinformation, I recognise what he said and I suppose that, in my delight at hearing the words “misinformation and disinformation”, I misunderstood to some degree what he was offering at the Dispatch Box, but I make the point that this poses an enormous risk to children. As an example, children are the fastest-growing group of far-right believers/activists online, and there are many areas in which we are going to see an exponential growth in misinformation and disinformation as large language models become the norm. So I ask him, in a tentative manner, to look at that.

On the other issue, I have to push back at the Minister’s explanation. Content classification around sexual content is a well-established norm. The BBFC does it and has done it for a very long time. There is an absolute understanding that what is suitable for a U, a PG, a 12 or a 12A are different things, and that as children’s capacities evolve, as they get older, there are things that are more suitable for older children, including, indeed, stronger portrayals of sexual behaviour as the age category rises. So I cannot accept that this opens a new can of worms: this is something that we have been doing for many, many years.

I think it is a bit wrongheaded to imagine that if we “solve” the porn problem, we have solved the problem—because there is still sexualisation and the commercialisation of sex. Now, if you say something about feet to a child, they start to giggle uproariously because, in internet language, you get paid for taking pictures of feet and giving them to strange people. There are such detailed and different areas that companies should be looking at. This amendment in my name and the names of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, should be taken very seriously. It is not new ground, so I would ask the Minister to reconsider it.

More broadly, the Minister will have noticed that I liberally added my name to the amendments he has brought forward to meet some of the issues we raised in Committee, and I have not added my name to the schedule of harms. I want to be nuanced about this and say I am grateful to the Government for putting them in the Bill, I am grateful that the content harms have been discussed in this Chamber and not left for secondary legislation, and I am grateful for all the conversations around this. However, harm cannot be defined only as content, and the last grouping got to the core of the issue in the House. Even when the Minister was setting out this amendment, he acknowledged that the increase in harm to users may be systemic and by design. In his explanation, he used the word “harm”; in the Bill, it always manifests as “harmful content”.

While the systemic risk of increasing the presence of harmful content is consistently within the Bill, which is excellent, the concept that the design of service may in and of itself be harmful is absent. In failing to do that, the Government, and therefore the Bill, have missed the bull’s-eye. The bull’s-eye is what is particular about this method of communication that creates harm—and what is particular are the features, functionalities and design. I draw noble Lords back to the debate about Wikipedia. It is not that we all love Wikipedia adoringly; it is that it does not pursue a system of design for commercial purposes that entraps people within its grasp. Those are the harms we are trying to get at. I am grateful for the conversations I have had, and I look forward to some more. I have laid down some other amendments for Monday and beyond that would, I hope, deal with this—but until that time, I am afraid this is an incomplete picture.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I have a comment about Amendment 174 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I have no objection to the insertion of subsection (9B), but I am concerned about (9A), which deals with misinformation and disinformation. It is far too broad and political, and if we start at this late stage to try to run off into these essentially political categories, we are going to capsize the Bill altogether. So I took some heart from the fact that my noble friend on the Front Bench appeared disinclined to accept at least that limb of the amendment.

I did want to ask briefly some more detailed questions about Amendment 172 and new subsection (2) in particular. This arises from the danger of having clauses added at late stages of the Bill that have not had the benefit of proper discussion and scrutiny in Committee. I think we are all going to recognise the characteristics that are listed in new subsection (2) as mapping on to the Equality Act, which appears to be their source. I note in passing that it refers in that regard to gender reassignment. I would also note that most of the platforms, in their terms and conditions, refer not to gender reassignment but to various other things such as gender identity, which are really very different, or at least different in detail, and I would be interested to ask my noble friend how effectively he expects it to be enforced that the words used in English statute are actually applied by these foreign platforms—I am going to come back to this in a further amendment later—or how the words used in English statute are applied by what are, essentially, foreign platforms when they are operating for an audience in the United Kingdom.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

With respect, it does not say “directed at children”. Of course, I am safe in expressing that abuse in this forum, but if I were to do it, it came to the attention of children and it were abusive—because I do wish to be abusive about that practice—would I have created “priority harmful content”, about which action would have to be taken?

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I will leap to the Minister’s defence on this occasion. I remind noble colleagues that this is not about individual pieces of content; there would have to be a consistent flow of such information being proffered to children before Ofcom would ask for a change.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, these words have obviously appeared in the Bill in one of those unverified sections; I have clicked the wrong button, so I cannot see them. Where does it say in Amendment 172 that it has to be a consistent flow?

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Moylan

Committee stage
Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is genuinely difficult to summarise such a wide-ranging debate, which was of a very high standard. Only one genuinely bright idea has emerged from the whole thing: as we go through Committee, each group of amendments should be introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, because it is only after I have heard his contribution on each occasion that I have begun to understand the full complexity of what I have been saying. I suspect I am not alone in that and that we could all benefit from hearing the noble Lord before getting to our feet. That is not meant to sound the slightest bit arch; it is absolutely genuine.

The debate expressed a very wide range of concerns. Concerns about gang grooming and recruiting were expressed on behalf of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby and my noble friend Lady Buscombe expressed concerns about trolling of country businesses. However, I think it is fair to say that most speakers focused on the following issues. The first was the definition of legality, which was so well explicated by the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam. The second was the judgment bar that providers have to pass to establish whether something should be taken down. The third was the legislative mandating of private foreign companies to censor free speech rights that are so hard-won here in this country. These are the things that mainly concern us.

I was delighted that I found myself agreeing so much with what the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, even though she was speaking in another voice or on behalf of another person. If her own sentiments coincide with the sentiments of the noble Viscount—

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I am sorry to intrude, but I must say now on the record that I was speaking on my own behalf. The complication of measuring and those particular things are terribly important to establish, so I am once again happy to agree with the noble Lord.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I am delighted to hear the noble Baroness say that, and it shows that that pool of common ground we share is widening every time we get to our feet. However, the pool is not particularly widening, I am afraid to say—at least in respect of myself; other noble Lords may have been greatly reassured—as regards my noble friend the Minister who, I am afraid, has not in any sense addressed the issues about free speech that I and many other noble Lords raised. On some issues we in the Committee are finding a consensus that is drifting away from the Minister. We probably need to put our heads together more closely on some of these issues with the passage of time in Committee.

My noble friend also did not say anything that satisfied me in respect of the practical operation of these obligations for smaller sites. He speaks smoothly and persuasively of risk-based proactive approaches without saying that, for a large number of sites, this legislation will mean a complete re-engineering of their business model. For example, where Wikipedia operates in a minority language, such as in Welsh Wikipedia, which is the largest Welsh language website in the world, if its model is to involve monitoring what is put out by the community and correcting it as it goes along, rather than having a model in advance that is designed to prevent things being put there in the first place, then it is very likely to close down. If that is one of the consequences of this Bill the Government will soon hear about it.

Finally, although I remain concerned about public order offences, I have to say to the Minister that if he is so concerned about the dissemination of alarm among the population under the provisions of the Public Order Act, what does he think that His Majesty’s Government were doing on Sunday at 3 pm? I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Kidron and Lord Moylan

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this slightly disjointed debate. I fully accept that there will be further opportunities to discuss age verification and related matters, so I shall say no more about that. I am grateful, in particular, to the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, for supplying the deficiency in my opening remarks about the importance of Amendments 10 and 11, and for explaining just how important that is too. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. It was good of him to say, in the open approach he took on the question of age, that there are issues still to be addressed. I do not think anybody feels that we have yet got this right and I think we are going to have to be very open in that discussion, when we get to it. That is also true about what the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, said: we have not yet got clarity as to where the age boundary is—I like his expression—for the public space. Where is the point at which, if checks are needed, those checks are to be applied? These are all matters to discuss and I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I do not address each individual contribution separately.

I would like to say something, I hope not unfairly or out of scope, about what was said by the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay of Llandaff and Lady Kidron, when they used, for the first time this afternoon, the phrase “zero tolerance”, and, at the same time, talked about a risk-based approach. I have, from my own local government experience, a lot of experience of risk-based approaches taken in relation to things—very different, of course, from the internet—such as food safety, where local authorities grade restaurants and food shops and take enforcement action and supervisory action according to their assessment of the risk that those premises present. That is partly to do with their assessment of the management and partly to do with their experience of things that have gone wrong in the past. If you have been found with mouse droppings and you have had to clean up the shop, then you will be examined a great deal more frequently until the enforcement officers are happy; whereas if you are always very well run, you will get an inspection visit maybe only once a year. That is what a risk-based assessment consists of. The important thing to say is that it does not produce zero tolerance or zero outcomes.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I just want to make the point that I was talking about zero tolerance at the end of a ladder of tolerance, just to be clear. Letting a seven-year-old child into an 18-plus dating app or pornographic website is where the zero tolerance is—everything else is a ladder up to that.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I beg the noble Baroness’s pardon; I took that for granted. There are certain things—access to pornography, material encouraging self-harm and things of that sort—where one has to have zero tolerance, but not everything. I am sorry I took that for granted, so I fully accept that I should have made that more explicit in my remarks. Not everything is to be zero-toleranced, so to speak, but certain things are. However, that does not mean that they will not happen. One has to accept that there will be leakage around all this, just as some of the best-run restaurants that have been managed superbly for years will turn out, on occasion, to be the source of food poisoning. One has to accept that this is never going to be as tight as some of the advocates wanted, but with that, I hope I will be given leave to withdraw—