Counter-Disinformation Unit: Israel and Palestine

Lord Leigh of Hurley Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

I will have to write to the noble Lord to confirm the Counter-Disinformation Unit’s use of logically.ai. Where the unit identifies disinformation being deployed at scale, it would first engage with the relevant ministry to allow it to respond. On occasion, it will engage directly with social media companies, if the content it is seeing either is illegal or runs contrary to the terms of service declared by that company.

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

My Lords, there has been a huge rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on social media, much of it due to disinformation. What steps are His Majesty’s Government taking to educate the public to spot disinformation and stop them forwarding and repeating it?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

My noble friend makes an important point. In the escalating battle between those pushing disinformation at us and our attempts to limit it, media literacy is key. Under the terms of the Online Safety Bill, which is due to become law in just a few days, Ofcom is obliged to produce a media literacy strategy to generate awareness of and resilience to misinformation and disinformation. It is obliged also to create an expert advisory committee on misinformation and disinformation online. In addition, there is now a media literacy programme fund that awards up to £700,000 of grant funding for media literacy programmes. All this is dependent on platforms setting out clearly their terms of service, so that users can access them in the full knowledge of the kind of information that they can expect to see.