Online Safety Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for engaging with the amendment in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, in Committee, to ensure parity between the regulation of online and offline pornography. We did not table it for Report because of the welcome news of the Government’s review. At this point, I would like to give my backing to all that my noble friend Lord Bethell said and would like to thank him for his great encouragement and enthusiasm on our long journey, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I would particularly like to mention the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, who, as my noble friend Lord Bethell mentioned, must be very frustrated today at not being able to stand up and benefit us with her passion on this subject, which has kept a lot of us going.

I have some questions and comments about the review, but first I want to stand back and state why this review is so necessary. Our society must ask how pornography was able to proliferate so freely, despite all the warnings of the danger and consequences of this happening when the internet was in its infancy. Human appetites, the profit motive and the ideology of cyberlibertarianism flourished freely in a zeitgeist where notions of right and wrong had become deeply unfashionable. Pre-internet, pornography was mainly on top shelves, in poky and rather sordid sex shops, or in specialist cinemas. There was recognition that exposure to intimate sex acts should never be accidental but always the result of very deliberate decisions made by adults—hence the travesty of leaving children exposed to the danger of stumbling across graphic, violent and frequently misogynistic pornography by not bringing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 into force.

I have talked previously in this House about sociology professor Christie Davies’ demoralisation of society thesis: what happens when religiously reinforced moralism, with its totemic notion of free will, is ditched along with God. Notions of right and wrong become subjective, individually determined, and a kind of blindness sets in; how else can we explain why legislators ignored the all-too-predictable effects of unrestrained access to pornography on societal well-being, including but not limited to harms to children? For this Bill to be an inflection point in history, this review, birthed out of it, must unashamedly call out the immorality of what has gone before. How should we define morality? Well, society simply does not work if it is governed by self-gratification and expressive individualism. Relationships—the soil of society—including intimate sexual relationships, are only healthy if they are self-giving, rather than self-gratifying. These values did not emerge from the Enlightenment but from the much deeper seam of our Judeo-Christian foundations. Pornography is antithetical to these values.

I turn to the review’s terms of reference. Can the Minister confirm that the lack of parity between online and offline regulation will be included in the legal gaps it will address? Can he also confirm that the review will address gaps in evidence? As I said in Committee, a deep seam of academic research already exists on the harmful effects of the ubiquity of pornography. The associations with greater mental ill health, especially among teenagers, are completely unsurprising; developing brains are being saturated with dark depictions of child sexual abuse, incest, trafficking, torture, rape, violence and coercion. As I mentioned earlier, research shows that adults whose sexual arousal is utterly dependent on pornography can be catastrophically impaired in their ability to form relationships with flesh-and-blood human beings, let alone engage in intimate physical sex.

Will the review also plug gaps in areas that remain underresearched and controversial and where vested interests are bound? On that point, whoever chairs this review will have to be ready, willing and able to take on powerful, ideologically motivated and profit-driven lobbies.

Inter alia, we need to establish through research the extent to which some young women are driven to change their gender because of hyper-sexualised, porn-depicted female stereotypes. Anecdotally, some individuals have described their complete inability to relate to their natal sex. It can be dangerous and distasteful to be a woman in a world of pornified relationships which expects them to embrace strangulation, degradation and sexual violence. One girl who transitioned described finding such porn as a child: “I am ashamed that I was fascinated by it and would seek it out. Despite this interest in watching it, I hated the idea of myself actually being in the position of the women. For a while, I even thought I was asexual. Sex is still scary to me, complicated”.

Finally, the Government’s announcement mentioned several government departments but does not make it clear that they will also draw in the work of DfE and DHSC—the departments for children’s and adult mental health—for reasons I have already touched on. Can the Minister confirm that the remit will include whatever areas of government responsibility are needed so that the review is genuinely broad enough to look across society at how to protect not just children but adults?

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 184 in my name—

Online Safety Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Lords Chamber

I conclude by saying that we are well aware of the dangers that online pornography poses and, while age verification on pornographic websites is an important step forward, we must utilise this opportunity to ensure that the age verification processes are robust and able to function in such a way as to prevent children and young people being exposed to pornography. This change should be brought in as soon as possible and consistently across the Bill.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, in bringing the need for consistent regulation of pornographic content to your Lordships’ attention and have added my name in support of Amendment 185. I also support Amendments 123A, 142, 161, 183, 184 and 306 in this group.

There should not be separate regimes for how pornographic content is regulated in this country. I remember discussions about this on Report of the Digital Economy Bill around six years ago. The argument for not making rules for the online world consistent with those for the offline world was that the CPS was no longer enforcing laws on offline use anyway. Then as now, this seems simply to be geared towards letting adults continue to have unrestricted access to an internet awash with pornographic material that depicts and/or promotes child sexual abuse, incest, trafficking, torture, and violent or otherwise harmful sexual acts: adult freedoms trumping all else, including the integrity of the legal process. In the offline world, this material is illegal or prohibited for very good reason.

The reason I am back here, arguing again for parity, is that, since 2017, an even deeper seam of academic research has developed which fatally undermines the case for untrammelled cyber-libertarianism. It has laid bare the far-reaching negative impacts that online pornography has had on individuals and relationships. One obvious area is the sharp rise in mental ill-health, especially among teenagers. Research from CEASE, the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation, found that over 80% of the public would support new laws to limit free and easy access.

Before they get ensnared—and some patients of the Laurel Centre, a private pornography addiction clinic, watch up to 14 hours of pornography a day—few would have been aware that sexual arousal chained to pornography can make intimate physical sex impossible to achieve. Many experience pornography-induced erectile dysfunction and Psychology Today reports that

“anywhere from 17% to 58% of men who self-identify as heavy/compulsive/addicted users of porn struggle with some form of sexual dysfunction”.

As vice-chair of the APPG on Issues Affecting Men and Boys, I am profoundly concerned that very many men and boys are brutalised by depictions of rape, incest, violence and coercion, which are not niche footage on the dark web but mainstream content freely available on every pornography platform that can be accessed online with just a few clicks.

The harms to their growing sons, which include an inability to relate respectfully to girls, should concern all parents enough to dial down drastically their own appetite for porn. There is enormous peer pressure on teenage boys and young men to consume it, and its addictive nature means that children and young people, with their developing brains, are particularly susceptible. One survey of 14 to 18 year-olds found almost a third of boys who used porn said it had become a habit or addiction and a third had enacted it. Another found that the more boys watched porn and were sexually coercive, the less respect they had for girls.

Today’s headlines exposed the neurotoxins in some vaping products used by underage young people. There are neurotoxins in all the porn that would be caught by subsection 368E(2) of the Communications Act 2003, if it was offline—hence the need for parity and, just like the vapes, children as well as adults will continue to be exposed. Trustworthy age verification will stop children stumbling across it or finding it in searches, but adults who are negligent, or determined to despoil children’s innocence, will facilitate their viewing it if it remains available online. This Bill will not make the UK the safest place in the world for children online if we continue to allow content that should be prohibited, for good reason, to flood into our homes.

Helen Rumbelow, writing in the Times earlier this month, said the public debate—the backdrop to our own discussions in this Bill—is “spectacularly ill-informed” because we only talk about porn’s side-effects and not what is enacted. So here goes. Looking at the most popular pages of the day on Pornhub, she found that 12 out of 32 showed men physically abusing women. One-third of these showed what is known as “facial abuse”, where a woman’s airway is blocked by a penis: a porn version of waterboarding torture. She described how

“in one a woman is immobilised and bound by four straps and a collar tightened around her neck. She ends up looking like a dead body found in the boot of a car. In another a young girl, dressed to look even younger in a pair of bunny ears and pastel socks, is held down by an enormous man pushing his hand on her neck while she is penetrated. The sounds that came from my computer were those you might expect from a battle hospital: cries of pain, suction and “no, no, no”. I won’t tell you the worst video I saw as you may want to stop reading now. I started to have to take breaks to go outside and look at the sky and remember kindness”.

Turning briefly to the other amendments, I thank my noble friend Lord Bethell for his persistence in raising the need for the highest standard of age verification for pornography. I also commend the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for her continued commitment to protecting children from harmful online content and for representing so well the parents who have lost children, in the most awful of circumstances, because of online harms. I therefore fully support the package of amendments in this group tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and my noble friend Lord Bethell.

This Bill should be an inflection point in history and future generations will judge us on the decisions we make now. It is highly like they will say “Shame on them”. To argue that we cannot put the genie back in the bottle is defeatist and condemns many of our children and grandchildren to the certainty of a dystopic relational future. I say “certain” because it is the current reality of so many addicted adults who wish they could turn back the clock. Therefore, it is humane and responsible, not quaint or retrogressive, to insist that this Government act decisively to make online and offline laws consistent and reset the dial.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 232, as well as addressing issues raised more broadly by this group of amendments. I want to indicate support from these Benches for the broader package of amendments spoken to so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I see my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones has returned to check that I am following instructions during my temporary occupation of the Front Bench.

The comments I will make are going to focus on an aspect which I think we have not talked about so much in the debate, which is age assurance in the context of general purpose, user-to-user and search services, so-called Part 3, because we like to use confusing language in this Bill, rather than the dedicated pornography sites about which other noble Lords have spoken so powerfully. We have heard a number of contributions on that, and we have real expertise in this House, not least from my noble friend Lady Benjamin.

In the context of age assurance more generally, I start with a pair of propositions that I hope will be agreed to by all participants in the debate and build on what I thought was a very balanced and highly informative introduction from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. The first proposition is that knowledge about the age of users can help all online platforms develop safer services than they could absent that information—a point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford earlier. The second is that there are always some costs to establishing age, including to the privacy of users and through some of the friction they encounter when they wish to use a service. The task before us is to create mechanisms for establishing age that maximise the safety benefits to users while minimising the privacy and other costs. That is what I see laid out in the amendment that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has put before us.

My proposed new clause seeks to inform the way that we construct that balance by tasking Ofcom with carrying out regular studies into a broad range of approaches to age assurance. This is exactly the type of thinking that is complementary to that in Amendment 142; it is not an alternative but complementary to it. We may end up with varying views on exactly where that balance should be struck. Again, I am talking about general purpose services, many of which seek to prohibit pornography—whether they do so 100%, it is a different set of arguments from those that apply to services which are explicitly dedicated to pornography. We may come to different views about where we eventually strike the balance but I think we probably have a good, shared understanding of the factors that should be in play. I certainly appreciate the conversations I have had with the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and others about that, and think we have a common understanding of what we should be considering.

If we can get this formulation right, age assurance may be one of the most significant measures in the Bill in advancing online safety, but if we get it wrong, I fear we may create a cookie banner scenario, such as the one I warned about at Second Reading. This is my shorthand for a regulatory measure that brings significant costs without delivering its intended benefits. However keen we are to press ahead, we must always keep in mind that we do not want to create legislation that is well-intended but does not have the beneficial effect that we all in this Committee want.

Earlier, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, talked about the different roles that we play. I think mine is to try to think about what will actually work, and whether the Bill will work as intended, and to try to tease out any grit in it that may get in the way. I want in these remarks to flag what I think are four key considerations that may help us to deliver something that is actually useful and avoid that cookie banner outcome, in the context of these general purpose, Part 3 services.

First, we need to recognise that age assurance is useful for enabling as well as disabling access to content—a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, rightly made. We rightly focus on blocking access to bad content, but other things are also really important. For example, knowing that a user is very young might mean that the protocol for the reporting system gets to that user report within one hour, rather than 24 hours for a regular report. Knowing that a user is young and is being contacted by an older user may trigger what is known as a grooming protocol. Certainly at Facebook we had that: if we understood that an older user was regularly contacting younger users, that enabled us to trigger a review of those accounts to understand whether something problematic was happening—something that the then child exploitation and online protection unit in the UK encouraged us to implement. A range of different things can then be enabled. The provision of information in terms that a 13 year-old would understand can be triggered if you know the age of that user.

Equally, perfectly legitimate businesses, such as alcohol and online gambling businesses, can use age assurance to make sure that they exclude people who should not be part of that. We in this House are considering measures such as junk food advertising restrictions, which again depend on age being known to ensure that junk food which can be legitimately marketed to older people is not marketed to young people. In a sense, that enables those businesses to be online because, absent the age-gating, they would struggle to meet their regulatory obligations.

Secondly, we need to focus on outcomes, using the risk assessment and transparency measures that the Bill creates for the first time. We should not lose sight of those. User-to-user and search services will have to do risk assessments and share them with Ofcom, and Ofcom now has incredible powers to demand information from them. Rather than asking, “Have you put in an age assurance system?”, we can ask, “Can you tell us how many 11 year-olds or 15 year-olds you estimate access the wrong kind of content?”, and, “How much pornography do you think there is on your service despite the fact that you have banned it?” If the executives of those companies mislead Ofcom or refuse to answer, there are criminal sanctions in the Bill.

The package for user-to-user and search services enables us to really focus on those outcomes and drill down. In many cases, that will be more effective. I do not care whether they have age-assurance type A or type B; I care whether they are stopping 99.9% of 11 year-olds accessing the wrong kind of content. Now, using the framework in the Bill, Ofcom will be able to ask those questions and demand the answers, for the first time ever. I think that a focus on outcomes rather than inputs—the tools that they put in place—is going to be incredibly powerful.

Online Safety Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, like every noble Lord today I welcome the arrival of this Bill after such a long wait. Like many others, I will focus my remarks on pornography. Standing back and looking at what has shaped and is shaping our society, we cannot ignore the fact that never in the history of humankind have we been so deluged by pornography. Graphic sexual activity is accessed through the internet on the push of a button and is almost impossible not to stumble across.

What we have been missing up to recently is the data on what this deluge is doing to us all. We have heard a lot about the Children’s Commissioner and her report yesterday. Her research found that most young people have seen pornography on Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat. Moreover, online pornography is not the same as the blue magazines previously available only by reaching up to the top shelf of the newsagents for those who had the chutzpah in those days to do it.

The adult content accessible in our youth is, she says, “quaint” compared to today’s online pornography displays. Pouting page three-type nude stills have given way to video portrayals of degrading, sexually coercive, aggressive, violent, pain-inducing and exploitative acts being perpetrated particularly against teenage girls and, of course, younger children. The title of her report published this week—'A Lot of it is Actually Just Abuse’—says it all. She highlights the dangers of the normalisation of sexual violence and the template this provides for children’s understanding and expectations of sex and relationships.

Her stats are a litany of innocence despoiled. Half of children have seen pornography by age 13; some 10% by age nine and more than a quarter by age 11. Some 79% see violent pornography before age 18 and frequent users are more likely to engage, as we have heard, in physically aggressive sex acts.

While I am most concerned about the impact of pornography on children and young people, we cannot ignore its prolific use by adults. International studies show high frequency of pornography use is associated with poor semen quality and reproductive hormone quantity, as well as erectile dysfunction with flesh-and-blood partners. Meta analyses show pornography use is never positively associated with relationship quality.

So, while the Bill has been much strengthened, I will support noble Lords, such as the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, who table amendments requiring that: first, all pornography websites and social media platforms implement third-party age verification; secondly, that there is a Bill-wide definition of pornographic content; thirdly, that online pornographic content is regulated in the same way as offline; and, fourthly, that all pornographic sites must ensure actors are genuinely over 18 so they are not facilitating child sex abuse.

To reiterate, the pornification of society is skewing our values and practices towards cruelty and selfish gratification in intimate relationships. It is undermining efforts to tackle abuse and violence, particularly against women and girls. Not bringing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 into force was a dereliction of duty. I was involved at Report stage, and strong forces were clearly at work to preclude hampering adult access to pornography—even to material that would have been illegal offline. The priority then seemed to be securing adults’ continued access to violent, misogynist, racist and degrading material and protecting their privacy.

Almost six years on, my and others’ plea is that we strike a better balance: introduce an age-verification regime at the speed befitting this public and mental health emergency. Third-party providers can give adults the privacy they crave and children the protection to which they are entitled in a civilised society. For too long, we have bowed a knee to cyber libertarian ideology that says internet regulation is impossible, unworkable and unwanted. This Bill must take big, bold, well-evidenced steps to reverse the decades of harm this ideology has caused.

Online Pornography: Digital Economy Act 2017

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for those questions. We must be clear about why the Digital Economy Act was criticised. It was originally criticised because it did not cover social media companies, which host a considerable quantity of pornographic material. There are also other sites that it did not consider. It also considered only ISPs as gatekeepers. A number of flaws have been identified in the Digital Economy Act and we will address those with a stronger Online Safety Bill, targeted more at children.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, to follow the powerful question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, parents are increasingly desperate for a legal bulwark against the tide of harmful and pornographic content that flows into their children’s minds from the internet. They are deeply unhappy that adult freedoms currently trump their children’s safety. In particular, the Government must be very clear about if and how the Online Safety Bill will prevent future deaths from potentially lethal challenges such as “blackout”, which killed Archie Battersbee. Could the Minister take this opportunity to bring clarity in this area of concern for many parents?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that question. It was a deeply saddening case and our thoughts are with Archie Battersbee’s family. We are focusing on doing everything that we can to prevent cases such as Archie’s happening again. That is why the strongest protections in the Online Safety Bill will be for children. It is important that we sort this out as soon as possible, while putting aside or looking at some of the debates on wider issues of freedom of speech. Clearly, free speech is not a defence for not protecting children. That is why we will focus on children. Tech firms will be forced to protect children from dangerous viral stunts and other illegal or harmful content that will cause significant harm. Where content depicting or promoting online challenges risks causing significant harm to a number of children, companies will have to take steps to protect children from this content on their services. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State, who has just been reappointed, is very clear: she wants to bring the Online Safety Bill back as quickly as possible and we aim to do that.

Loneliness Strategy

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

As the noble Baroness said, the pandemic has thrown into relief the importance of tackling loneliness. We were aware of it before the pandemic, and the pandemic made it more urgent. My honourable friend Nigel Huddleston, the Minister responsible, sees himself very much as the lead Minister, but not the only Minister, for it, because this is a cross-government effort. That is the reason for the cross-government strategy, and work has been done in all departments. Of course, we continue to evaluate the work to see how we can do it better.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, the strategy highlights family well-being as crucial in preventing loneliness and the need to support families. The Children’s Commissioner has just been tasked with reviewing family life, following the finding of the commission on race and ethnic disparities that high rates of family breakdown are a major risk factor in loneliness and are key to outcome disparities. Some 63% of black Caribbean children grow up in a lone-parent household. Will measures to prevent family breakdown be included in her remit?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend is right to point to the importance of family in tackling loneliness. Of course, family events such as bereavement, becoming a parent and moving house can have an impact. Research also suggests that people of colour are more likely to experience certain barriers, which can cause loneliness for them, including access to community services, harassment, discrimination and feeling disconnected from the community. I will discuss the point about the Children’s Commissioner’s review with my noble friend Lady Barran, who is responsible, as the Minister in the Department for Education, and who of course, as a previous lead Minister for Loneliness, has done so much herself to tackle awareness of this important issue.

Children: Online Protection

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I am not sure that a national identity card scheme would be the right approach in this area. In the decade since, technology has moved on in a number of ways to enable both age verification and age assurance in a lighter touch way that affords the protections we need for children online while respecting the privacy of legitimate adult users.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, the Government’s announcement acknowledges that porn gives children unrealistic expectations about sex and relationships and encourages misogyny. However, it fails to mention the addictiveness of its consumption up the age range. Are the Government concerned about the effect on adults’ relationships, as is revealed by this worrying research? The Bill is urgently needed, and I join others in asking, because the Bill is urgently needed, when it will be introduced.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I thank my noble friend, too, for his welcome. He raises points about the further potential harms of pornography and, although the strongest protections in the Bill are for children, it looks at the harms that online content can pose to people of all ages. On the time- table: it remains our intention to introduce the updated Bill in the coming weeks and to respond formally to the Joint Committee and to the Select Committee in the other place at the same time as the Bill is published.

Online Sexual Harassment of Children

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Farmer]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they intend to take in response to the report by the Children’s Commissioner Talking to your child about online sexual harassment: A guide for parents, published on 16 December 2021, and in particular the finding that children are “stumbling across” commercial pornography.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay) (Con)]

My Lords, we warmly welcome this report, and the Children’s Commissioner’s support in protecting children online. The report’s findings underline the need for the measures that we are proposing in the online safety Bill, which will require a wide range of sites to take robust steps to prevent children accessing pornography online. We will include the Children’s Commissioner’s guidance in our online resources for parents and organisations to promote media literacy.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for his reply. The Joint Scrutiny Committee and today’s Select Committee report refer to harmful and addictive online porn, and children’s exposure to illegal and extreme content. While parents have a key role, guidance for them is a fairly puny tool with which to police the internet. Given that research is increasingly amassing about pornography’s harms, especially to young people, can the Minister advise why age verification is not on the face of the Bill?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend is right to point to the harms that pornography can do to people who are viewing it far too early in their lives. The online safety Bill aims to address this, and we are grateful to the Joint Committee and the Select Committee in another place for their views on that legislation. The online safety Bill will not mandate the use of specific technologies to comply with the new duties it contains because it is vital that the Bill remains future-proof and able to change as technology changes to prevent new threats. However, we expect companies to use age-verification technologies to prevent children accessing online pornography.

Sport: Transgender Inclusion

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Yes, as the guidance says, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach that covers every sport at every level in the country, and that is why it is right that the governing bodies look at what might be appropriate in their particular sport, so that they can balance, as far as they can, inclusion, safety and fairness.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, allegedly, the Ministry of Defence’s inclusive language guide, which quotes verbatim from Stonewall, advises staff to take care using “female”. The aim is to avoid erasing gender-nonconforming people and members of the trans community. As this risks erasing women instead, and cuts across the Defence Secretary’s drive for the military to become more female-friendly, is this an example of a lobbying group obstructing the policy of the elected Government?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I will leave colleagues in the Ministry of Defence to answer about their guide, but the sports councils’ guidance does not contain this wording or offer any advice on language. It aims to helps sports consider how to be inclusive without erasing anybody.

Video-sharing Platforms: BBFC Ratings

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We do not believe that we are running against the tide. The online harms legislation, which we have discussed extensively in this House and which I know we will debate in great detail in future, will make us a world leader in this regard.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, sensibly regulating the wild west of user-generated content on the internet is essential, but potentially a whack-a-mole exercise, given the risk that it simply displaces activity elsewhere. How will the DCMS work with Ofcom to ensure that its implementation of the video-sharing platform regime develops understanding of how to regulate online services, in advance of the online safety Bill coming into force?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My noble friend makes an important point. By the implementation of the video-sharing platform regime, as he suggests, Ofcom will build its experience in regulating harmful content while balancing freedom of expression. I understand that Ofcom is already preparing for its new responsibilities in relation to online harms by bringing in new technology and people with the right skills.