Social Media Ban for Under-16s

Debate between Baroness Lloyd of Effra and Baroness Keeley

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The onus will be on the social media companies to age verify. The specific point I referred to is that the Secretary of State has written to Ofcom to look at options for highly effective age assurance for 16 and 17 year-olds, as the current regime applies to those over 18 years old, for which there is already guidance. That is the specific question. We expect there to be further developments in this area to provide effective age assurance.

[Baroness Keeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I join my noble friend the Minister in praising the bereaved families, who have campaigned so powerfully on online safety. I welcome the harms-reduction approach that the Government have taken. As my noble friend has outlined, we know that there is much more to do. It is right that the Government act, because the tech companies have shown that they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. The ban is a welcome start, but not sufficient in itself. Can my noble friend the Minister assure me that, once the regulations have passed—the Communications and Digital Committee looks forward to seeing the regulations —the regulator, Ofcom, will take the strongest possible line in enforcing them, including substantial fines for any firm that does not comply in reducing harms?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for the work of her committee, and for the scrutiny, ideas and suggestions that it has provided over the years. I stress again the importance of ensuring that these regulations are implemented. I will just say one other thing: one of the other benefits of the consultation is that there has been a national conversation and there is a very clear public expectation of how social media firms should operate. Therefore, in addition to the importance of Ofcom having the capabilities for its role, the Secretary of State has insisted that we look at making sure that Ofcom is properly funded. So the whole of society is moving to institute this new norm.

Digital Safety: Children

Debate between Baroness Lloyd of Effra and Baroness Keeley

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right to highlight the importance of the effectiveness of any regime; that is the central focus of what we are trying to do to keep children safe online. We need a regime that can be implemented, that can be navigated well by young people and their parents, and that is able to be communicated. That is one of the reasons we continue to support parents in having conversations with young people. The question about Ofcom’s enforcement powers is very important. We have made clear to Ofcom that it has the backing of the Government to take action. We have funded Ofcom so that it can take action and it has already launched 100 investigations and issued many millions of pounds in fines. That is the kind of regime we need. We need a regime that is effective and enforced.

[Baroness Keeley (Lab)]

My Lords, our debates around the issue of child safety in your Lordships’ House tend to highlight a lack of confidence that the big tech companies will do the right thing. They could make their products safe by design but they do not. If legislation is required after three months, can my noble friend the Minister assure the House that the legislation will be drafted and ready to go if, as many of us suspect, the companies do not act in the way that we want them to?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

My noble friend is right to highlight the high expectations we have for this to be rolled out. We have made it very clear that, if those high expectations for the rollout at scale of this nudity-detection technology for children’s devices does not happen, we will legislate. The Minister for Online Safety yesterday confirmed to the other place that he is working closely with the Home Office to draw up this legislation in parallel, so that we can act should that be necessary.

Social Media: Non-consensual Sexual Deepfakes

Debate between Baroness Lloyd of Effra and Baroness Keeley

Wednesday 14th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

These are serious offences and the noble Lord is right that there is consensus on this. The decisions on prosecution and sentencing are for the police and courts. They should know that, as we have said, they have our support in taking that action.

[Baroness Keeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s announcement that they are bringing legislation into force this week to tackle this issue, and I welcome the news that Ofcom has launched a formal investigation to determine whether X has complied with its duties under the Online Safety Act. Ofcom should act urgently on this. I also support the Government’s intention to act on gaps identified in our online safety legislation, such as the fact that not all chatbots are covered.

I commend my noble friend Lady Owen of Alderley Edge for her work on banning deepfakes through amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill, and her excellent continuing work on this issue. There is an issue about the lack of transparency in how chatbots such as Grok are trained. As I understand it, if an image or multimodal model can generate non-consensual sexual imagery or deepfake pornography, it is certain that the model was trained on large, uncurated web scrapes where such material is common. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that this gives new impetus to the Government tackling the issue of transparency in the training of AI models, which is a matter we are looking at on the Communications and Digital Select Committee in terms of the transparency needed to deal with issues of AI copyright? This is a new and very pressing part of that issue.

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

My noble friend raises good questions about training and testing. As she will also know, we are bringing forward measures in the Crime and Policing Bill that will allow testing in certain narrow circumstances, so that developers can make sure that the models they bring forward are not able to disseminate these kinds of awful images or CSAM. These are very important things and we are working very carefully with others to find the right regime for these models.