Online Safety Act 2023 (Category 1, Category 2A and Category 2B Threshold Conditions) Regulations 2025

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, this is a regret amendment, and the conduct of Ofcom and the Government on this matter is surely deeply regrettable, for all the reasons that have been given by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan and Lady Kidron. The treatment of small but high-risk services in these regulations simply frustrates the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, to Schedule 11, which was approved by this House and accepted by the Government in the Commons. It contradicts what the Minister, Mr Scully, said in the Commons when he accepted the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, approved by this House, and it fails to address the mischief in this context, which the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and others have clearly identified. I, too, would like to see or even to understand what possible legal advice has led to this lamentable position. The impact of the service does not—it cannot—depend only on the number of users. That was the whole point of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan.

The Minister suggested two arguments, as I understood her, but it is not good enough for her to say—if I may respectfully say so—that small services are still unable to act in an illegal manner. The Act is, of course, designed to provide further regulation—especially so because the criminal law is, regrettably, a blunt and slow instrument. Nor am I persuaded by the Minister’s suggestion that it is simply too difficult to draft regulations to address small but high-risk services. I simply do not accept that the expertise of the department and parliamentary counsel cannot come up with an appropriate regulation to address this mischief.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in relation to Wikipedia in particular. Noble Lords who took part in Committee on the Bill will recall that on several occasions I asked the Minister at the time—now my noble friend sitting on the opposition Front Bench—whether Wikipedia would be in scope of the regulation and, if so, whether it would have consequences which would make it impossible for Wikipedia, a charity, to continue with its existing model. My noble friend was unable at the time to say that; he said it would be a matter for the regulations and, indeed, for the regulator. Now here we are, nearly two years later, and we have some regulations, and I have the same question to put to the Minister on the Front Bench today. It appears to me—I must say that I have no interest to declare other than that I am an inveterate user of Wikipedia—and as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, that we are still left in a state of confusion about this. Regulation 3 says that for large sites—those with more than 34 million users—two criteria have to be met. One is that it has that number of users or more, and the other is that it

“uses a content recommender system”.

In paragraph (2), a content recommender system is broadly defined; for example, it says that it is not simply algorithms by means of machine learning but algorithms by machine learning or “other techniques”. The verb is not simply “determines” but

“determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service”.

Wikipedia indeed uses techniques for sending people articles and information that relate to what they have shown an interest in in the past. Would it be caught or not? What are the consequences of Wikipedia being caught? There are many, but I would like to test one out on noble Lords. I do not claim that this is definitive law, because, I suspect, much of the Act will need to be determined in the courts before we know what the definitive interpretation is.

Let us take as an example the case of some loathsome foreign dictator or other such character whose article on Wikipedia is less flattering than he might wish it to appear and he has a complaint about this. Wikipedia will consider it and then probably throw it in the waste-paper basket. If he seeks by some means to change the content of the article, of course, the editors of Wikipedia, who are a distributed network largely of volunteers, will intervene to change it back and try to ensure that it still reflects what is known to be reality. But under Section 64 of the Online Safety Act, one may apply to become a verified user. Obviously, I do not expect the loathsome person himself to apply to become a verified user; there will be some stooge, some student, some trainee or some character somewhere willing to register on their behalf who could then change the article, but because they are a verified user, under Section 15(10)(a) of the Act, they would acquire immunity to peer review. What they wrote on Wikipedia could not then be changed by the editors, because they were a verified user and had that protection.

I offer that as a genuine possibility. Noble Lords know that I am not a lawyer. This could be tested in the courts and found otherwise but, on the face of it, it appears that this sort of consequence would accrue. So I come back to the same question that I have been asking to no real effect now for two years. Perhaps when she comes to reply, the Minister can give me a definitive answer. Is Wikipedia in scope of this regulation? Is it covered by Section 3 or not? We would like to know.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, often in this House one is tempted to wander down memory lane and is filled with wonderful memories of good times and shared experiences, but none so present as the one that was referred to by the noble Baroness when she spoke earlier about the Online Safety Bill. I felt resonances up and down my back as I remembered the moment at which I decided that there was no point in reading my speech at Second Reading, which was full of sound and fury, full of anger, full of things that I was determined to see in the Bill, but realised that we all agreed about it and that the best thing was to say simply that we would work together to get the best Bill that we could out of the resources available across the House—and they are significant. As we have heard today, that worked—or it did until today.

I am very sad that I feel I will have to support the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in only my second appearance against my party. I felt very strongly that we had an agreement in the last Parliament, signed, sealed and signified by both Houses and agreed to by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, who is in his place. It bound any successor Government to operate within the terms of that Act. I find it egregious that the Government are seeking a way of not doing that, for reasons that I can only guess at but seem to be more about winning friends in strange places across the Atlantic than seeing the best for our people, particularly our children, in the United Kingdom.

There is an irony in that there would have been a way of avoiding this. I do not want to embarrass the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, again, but we adopted towards the end of the Bill what I called the Parkinson rule, and rightly so because I felt that he was brave in proposing it. It was not the convention of the time, nor a structure or system that fit well within our current procedures in this House. The intention was to recognise the complexity and difficulty in the Online Safety Bill, now Act, and to invite the Government to share with the Select Committees of both Houses —the SIT Committee in the Commons and the Communications and Digital Committee in the Lords—draft material relating to the Online Safety Bill because we had a hunch that there would be issues that would need to be hammered out more clearly and more effectively than the arrangements for dealing with secondary legislation in this House currently allow. That might change, but until it does there is no way in which we can debate and discuss except through a regret amendment—or, as one might have been tempted to do on this occasion, through a fatal Motion—to an instrument which clearly has come out wrong, does not reflect the wishes of the House and may do damage which ultimately will end up in people’s lives. The responsibility will lie with the Government if they do not listen to what we are saying today.

The Parkinson rule was accepted by the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson. I quote from Hansard, although not entirely because there are some reservations which I want to skip over, though I am sure that they can be checked out. He said that the Government would

“ensure that the relevant committees have every chance to play a part in that consultation by informing them that the process is open”—

which is good—and that they would

“where possible, share draft statutory instruments directly with the relevant committees ahead of the formal laying process … on a case-by-case basis, considering what is appropriate and reasonably practical”.—[Official Report, 19/7/23; cols. 2351-52.]

That system has not been implemented by the Government.

I wrote to my noble friend the Minister while she was ill, and she has very kindly responded to me. She says she feels that the spirit of the agreement has been carried out in how the Government told both committees that there were statutory instruments on the way and that this was sufficient to meet the implications of the Parkinson rule. Given that three days’ notice was given before they were laid, that does not meet the requirement.