Online Safety Bill

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th May 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes]

34: Clause 12, page 12, line 9, leave out “if they wish to increase their control over” and insert “to control”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, and another in the name of Baroness Morgan, would require Category 1 providers to ensure that the default options are the safest for users in regard to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and the abuse and hate content already determined to be harmful as part of the Government’s “triple shield” approach.

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to speak to this group of amendments. As it is the first time I have spoken at this stage of the Bill’s proceedings, I declare my interest as a trustee and founder of the mental health charity the Loughborough Wellbeing Centre, which is relevant to this group. If it is lawyers’ confession time, then I am also going to confess to being a non-practising solicitor. But I can assure those Members of the House who are not lawyers that they do not need to be lawyers or ex-lawyers to understand the very simple proposition at the heart of this group of amendments.

Amendments 34 and 35 are in my name, along with those of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port. I am very grateful to them for their support for these amendments, which are also supported by the Football Association, Kick It Out, Beat, YoungMinds, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society, Mind, the Mental Health Network, the NHS Confederation, Rethink Mental Illness and Mental Health UK. I thank particularly the Mental Health Foundation for its support with making the points that we will cover in this group.

As we have already heard, and rightly, it is difficult with a Bill of this complexity to debate just one topic in a particular group. Although I have not spoken, it has been a great privilege to listen to your Lordships on earlier groups. We have already talked this afternoon and previously about the Government’s triple-shield approach and the replacement of that for the “legal but harmful” provisions that were taken out of the Bill. We have heard that the triple shield consists of the removal of illegal content, the takedown of material in breach of own terms of service—we have just been talking about that—and the provision to adults of greater choice over the content that they see online using these platforms. What we are talking about in this group of amendments is that third leg—I had put “limb” but have changed it because of what my noble friend Lady Fraser said—of the triple-shield categories, so that user empowerment tools should be on by default.

The change suggested by this proposal would require users on these platforms to flip a switch and choose whether to opt in to some of the most dangerous content available online, rather than receiving it by default. This adopts the Government’s existing approach of giving users choice over what they see but ensures that the default is that they will not be served this kind of material unless they actively choose to see it. The new offence on encouragement to serious self-harm, which the Government have committed to introducing, might form part of the solution here. But we cannot criminalise all the legal content that treads the line between glorification and outright encouragement, and no similar power is proposed to address eating disorder content. I know that others will talk about that, and I pay tribute to the work of Vicky Ford MP in relation to eating disorders; she has been brave enough to share her own experiences of those disorders.

During the Bill’s journey through Parliament, we have heard how vulnerable users often internalise the harmful and hateful content that they see online, which in turn can lead to users deliberately seeking out harmful content in an attempt to normalise self-destructive thoughts and behaviours. We have heard how Molly Russell, for example, viewed tweets which normalised her thoughts on self-harm and suicide; we have also heard how people with eating disorders often get what is called “inspiration” on platforms such as Tumblr, Instagram and TikTok.

We know from various studies that viewing this content has a negative effect on people’s mental well-being. A study carried out by the University of Oxford found that viewing images of self-harm often encouraged individuals to start self-harming, and concluded:

“Young people who self-harm are likely to use the internet in ways that increases their risk”.


Research by the Samaritans provided similar results, with 77% of respondents answering that they sometimes or often self-harmed in the same or similar ways after viewing self-harm imagery.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

We will discuss this when it comes to the definition of content in the Bill, which covers features. I was struck by the speech by the right reverend Prelate about the difference between what people encounter online, and the analogy used by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, about a bookshop. Social media is of a different scale and has different features which make that analogy not a clean or easy one. We will debate in other groups the accumulated threat of features such as algorithms, if the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, will allow me to go into greater detail then, but I certainly take the points made by both the right reverend Prelate and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in their contributions.

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend very much indeed, and thank all noble Lords who have taken part. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, this has been an important debate—they are all important, of course—but I think this has really got to the heart of parts of the Bill, parts of why it has been proposed in the first place, and some choices the Government made in their drafting and the changes they have made to the Bill. The right reverend Prelate reminded us, as Bishops always do, of the bigger picture, and he was quite right to do so. There is no equality of arms, as he put it, between most of us as internet users and these enormous companies that are changing, and have changed, our society. My noble friend was right—and I was going to pick up on it too—that the bookshop example given by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is, I am afraid, totally misguided. I love bookshops; the point is that I can choose to walk into one or not. If I do not walk into a bookshop, I do not see the books promoting some of the content we have discussed today. If they spill out on to the street where I trip over them, I cannot ignore them. This would be even harder if I were a vulnerable person, as we are going to discuss.

Noble Lords said that this is not a debate about content or freedom of expression, but that it is about features; I think that is right. However, it is a debate about choice, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said. I am grateful to each of those noble Lords who supported my amendments; we have had a good debate on both sets of amendments, which are similar. But as the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, said, some of the content we are discussing, particularly in subsection (10), relating to suicide, pro-self-harm and pro-anorexia content, has literal life or death repercussions. To those noble Lords, and those outside this House, who seem to think we should not worry and should allow a total free-for-all, I say that we are doing so, in that the Government, in choosing not to adopt such amendments, are making an active choice. I am afraid the Government are condoning the serving up of insidious, deliberately harmful and deliberately dangerous content to our society, to younger people and vulnerable adults. The Minister and the Government would be better off if they said, “That is the choice that we have made”. I find it a really troubling choice because, as many noble Lords will know, I was involved in this Bill a number of years ago—there has been a certain turnover of Culture Secretaries in the last couple of years, and I was one of them. I find the Government’s choice troubling, but it has been made. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, we are treating children differently from how we are treating adults. As drafted, there is a cliff edge at the age of 18. As a society, we should say that there are vulnerabilities among adults, as we do in many walks of life; and exactly as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, so powerfully said, there are times when we as a House, as a Parliament, as a society and as a state, should say we want to protect people. There is an offer here in both sets of amendments—I am not precious about which ones we choose—to have that protection.

I will of course withdraw the amendment today, because that is the convention of the House, but I ask my noble friend to reflect on the strength of feeling expressed by the House on this today; I think the Whip on the Bench will report as well. I am certain we will return to this on Report, probably with a unified set of amendments. In the algorithmic debate we will return to, the Government will have to explain, in words of one syllable, to those outside this House who worry about the vulnerable they work with or look after, about the choice that the Government have made in not offering protections when they could have done, in relation to these enormously powerful platforms and the insidious content they serve up repeatedly.