Online Safety Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

I support these amendments. I hope the Minister can give us some indication that we are all heading in the same direction as he is or that he is heading in the same direction as us. That would be enormously helpful.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, as we have heard, this is a small group of amendments concerned with preventing size and lack of capacity being used as a reasonable excuse for allowing children to be unsafe. Part of the problem is the complexity of the Bill and the way it has been put together.

For example, Clause 11, around user-to-user services, is the pertinent clause and it is headed “Safety duties protecting children”. Clause 11(2) is preceded in italics with the wording “All services” so anyone reading it would think that what follows applies to all user-to-user services regardless of size. Clause 11(3) imposes a duty on providers

“to operate a service using proportionate systems and processes”

to protect children from harm. That implies that there will be judgment around what different providers can be expected to do to protect children; for example, by not having to use a particular unaffordable technical solution on age assurance if they can show the right outcome by doing things differently. That starts to fudge things a little.

The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, who introduced this debate so well with Amendment 39, supported by my noble friend Lady Ritchie, wants to be really sure that the size of the provider can never be used to argue that preventing all children from accessing porn is disproportionate and that a few children slipping through the net might just be okay.

The clarity of Clause 11 unravels even further at the end of the clause, where in subsection (12)(b) it reads that

“the size and capacity of the provider of a service”

is relevant

“in determining what is proportionate”.

The clause starts to fall apart at that point quite thoroughly in terms of anyone reading it being clear about what is supposed to happen.

Amendment 43 seeks to take that paragraph out, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and would do the same for search in Amendment 87. I have added my name to these amendments because I fear that the ambiguity in the wording of this clause will give small and niche platforms an easy get out from ensuring that children are safe by design.

I use the phrase “by design” deliberately. We need to make a choice with this Bill even at this late stage. Is the starting point in the Bill children’s safety by design? Or is the starting point one where we do not want to overly disrupt the way providers operate their business first—which is to an extent how the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Allan, may have been heard—and then overlay children’s safety on top of that?

Yesterday, I was reading about how children access inappropriate and pornographic content, not just on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest but on Spotify and “Grand Theft Auto”—the latter being a game with an age advisory of “over 17” but which is routinely played by teenaged children. Wherever we tolerate children being online, there are dangers which must be tackled. Listening to the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, took me to where a big chunk of my day job in education goes to—children’s safeguarding. I regularly have to take training in safeguarding because of the governance responsibilities that I have. Individual childminders looking after one or two children have an assessment and an inspection around their safeguarding. In the real world we do not tolerate a lack of safety for children in this context. We should not tolerate it in the online world either.

The speech from the noble Lord, Lord Russell, reminded me of the breadcrumbing from big platforms into niche platforms that is part of that incel insight that he referenced. Content that is harmful to children can also be what some children are looking for, which keeps them engaged. Small, emergent services aggressively seeking growth could set algorithms accordingly. They must not be allowed to believe that engaging harmful content is okay until they get to the size that they need to be to afford the age-assurance technology which we might envisage in the Bill. I hope that the Minister shares our concerns and can help us with this problem.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, short debates can be helpful and useful. I am grateful to noble Lords who have spoken on this group.

I will start with Amendment 39, tabled by my noble friend Lord Bethell. Under the new duty at Clause 11(3)(a), providers which allow pornography or other forms of primary priority content under their terms of service will need to use highly effective age verification or age estimation to prevent children encountering it where they identify such content on their service, regardless of their size or capacity. While the size and capacity of providers is included as part of a consideration of proportionality, this does not mean that smaller providers or those with less capacity can evade the strengthened new duty to protect children from online pornography. In response to the questions raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick and Lady Kidron, and others, no matter how much pornographic content is on a service, where providers do not prohibit this content they would still need to meet the strengthened duty to use age verification or age estimation.

Proportionality remains relevant for the purposes of providers in scope of the new duty at Clause 11(3)(a) only in terms of the age-verification or age-estimation measures that they choose to use. A smaller provider with less capacity may choose to go for a less costly but still highly effective measure. For instance, a smaller provider with less capacity might seek a third-party solution, whereas a larger provider with greater capacity might develop their own solution. Any measures that providers use will need to meet the new high bar of being “highly effective”. If a provider does not comply with the new duties and fails to use measures which are highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child, Ofcom can take tough enforcement action.

The other amendments in this group seek to remove references to the size and capacity of providers in provisions relating to proportionality. The principle of proportionate, risk-based regulation is fundamental to the Bill’s regulatory framework, and we consider that the Bill as drafted already strikes the correct balance. The Bill ultimately will regulate a large number of services, ranging from some of the biggest companies in the world to smaller, voluntary organisations, as we discussed in our earlier debate on exemptions for public interest services.

The provisions regarding size and capacity recognise that what it is proportionate to require of companies of various sizes and business models will be different. Removing this provision would risk setting a lowest common denominator standard which does not create incentives for larger technology companies to do more to protect their users than smaller organisations. For example, it would not be proportionate for a large multinational company which employs thousands of content moderators and which invests in significant safety technologies to argue that it is required to take only the same steps to comply as a smaller provider which might have only a handful of employees and a few thousand UK users.

While the size and capacity of providers is included as part of a consideration of proportionality, let me be clear that this does not mean that smaller providers or those with less capacity do not need to meet the child safety duties and other duties in the Bill, such as the illegal content safety duties. These duties set out clear requirements for providers. If providers do not meet these duties, they will face enforcement action.

I hope that is reassuring to my noble friend Lord Bethell and to the other noble Lords with amendments in this group. I urge my noble friend to withdraw his amendment.