Online Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Moylan and Baroness Buscombe

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am going to endeavour to be relatively brief. I rise to move Amendment 38 and to speak to Amendments 39, 139 and 140 in this group, which are in my name. All are supported by my noble friend Lord Vaizey of Didcot, to whom I am grateful.

Amendments 38 and 39 relate to Clause 12. They remove subsections (6) and (7) from the Bill; that is, the duty to filter out non-verified users. Noble Lords will understand that this is different from the debate we have just had, which was about content. This is about users and verification of the users, rather than the harm or otherwise of the content. I am sure I did not need to say that, but perhaps it helps to clarify my own thinking to do so. Amendments 139 and 140 are essentially consequential but make it clear that my amendments do not prohibit category 1 services from offering this facility. They make it a choice, not a duty.

I want to make one point only in relation to these amendments. It has been well said elsewhere that this is a Twitter-shaped Bill, but it is trying to apply itself to a much broader part of the internet than Twitter, or things like it. In particular, community-led services like Wikipedia, to which I have made reference before, operate on a totally different basis. The Bill seeks to create a facility whereby members of the public like you and me can, first, say that we want the provider to offer a facility for verifying those who might use their service, and secondly, for us, as members of the public, to be able to say we want to see material from only those verified accounts. However, the contributors to Wikipedia are not verified, because Wikipedia has no system to verify them, and therefore it would be impossible for Wikipedia, as a category 1 service, to be able to comply with this condition on its current model, which is a non-commercial, non-profit one, as noble Lords know from previous comments. It would not be able to operate this clause; it would have to say that either it is going to require every contributing editor to Wikipedia to be verified first in order to do so, which would be extremely onerous; or it would have to make it optional, which would be difficult, but lead to the bizarre conclusion that you could open an article on Wikipedia and find that some of its words or sentences were blocked, and you could not read them because those amendments to the article had been made by someone who had not been verified. Of course, putting a system in place to allow that absurd outcome would itself be an impossible burden on Wikipedia.

My complaint—as always, in a sense—about the Bill is that it misfires. Every time you touch it, it misfires in some way because it has not been properly thought through. It is perhaps trying to do too much across too broad a front, when it is clear that the concern of the Committee is much narrower than trying to bowdlerize Wikipedia articles. That is not the objective of anybody here, but it is what the Bill is tending to do.

I will conclude by saying—I invite my noble friend to comment on this if he wishes; I think he will have to comment on it at some stage—that in reply to an earlier Committee debate, I heard him say somewhat tentatively that he did not think that Wikipedia would qualify as a category 1 service. I am not an advocate for Wikipedia; I am just a user. But we need to know what the Government’s view is on the question of Wikipedia and services like it. Wikipedia is the only community-led service, I think, of such a scale that it would potentially qualify as category 1 because of its size and reach.

If the Minister’s view is that Wikipedia would not qualify as a category 1 service—in which case, my amendments are irrelevant because it would not be caught by this clause—then he needs to say so. More than that, he needs to say on what basis it would not qualify as a category 1 service. Would it be on the face of the Bill? If not, would it be in the directions given by the Secretary of State to the regulator? Would it be a question of the regulator deciding whether it was a category 1 service? Obviously, if you are trying to run an operation such as Wikipedia with a future, you need to know which of those things it is. Do you have legal security against being determined as a category 1 provider or is it merely at the whim—that is not the right word; the decision—of the regulator in circumstances that may legitimately change? The regulator may have a good or bad reason for changing that determination later. You cannot run a business not knowing these things.

I put it to noble Lords that this clause needs very careful thinking through. If it is to apply to community-led services such as Wikipedia, it is an absurdity. If it is not to apply to them because what I think I heard my noble friend say pertains and they are not, in his view, a category 1 service, why are they not a category 1 service? What security do they have in knowing either way? I beg to move.

[Baroness Buscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 106 in my name and the names of my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier and the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham. This is one of five amendments focused on the need to address the issue of activist-motivated online bullying and harassment and thereby better safeguard the mental health and general well-being of potential victims.

Schedule 4, which defines Ofcom’s objectives in setting out codes of practice for regulated user-to-user services, should be extended to require the regulator to consider the protection of individuals from communications offences committed by anonymous users. The Government clearly recognise that there is a threat of abuse from anonymous accounts and have taken steps in the Bill to address that, but we are concerned that their approach is insufficient and may be counterproductive.

I will explain. The Government’s approach is to require large social media platforms to make provision for users to have their identity verified, and to have the option of turning off the ability to see content shared by accounts whose owners have not done this. However, all this would mean is that people could not see abuse being levelled at them. It would not stop the abuse happening. Crucially, it would not stop other people seeing it, or the damage to his or her reputation or business that the victim may suffer as a result. If I am a victim of online bullying and harassment, I do not want to see it, but I do not want it to be happening at all. The only means I have of stopping it is to report it to the platform and then hope that it takes the right action. Worse still, if I have turned off the ability to see content posted by unverified—that is, anonymous—accounts, I will not be able to complain to the platform as I will not have seen it. It is only when my business goes bust or I am shunned in the street that I realise that something is wrong.

The approach of the Bill seems to be that, for the innocent victim—who may, for example, breed livestock for consumption—it is up that breeder to be proactive to correct harm already done by someone who does not approve of eating meat. This is making a nonsense of the law. This is not how we make laws in this country —until now, it seems. Practically speaking, the worst that is likely to happen is that the platform might ban their account. However, if their victims have had no opportunity to read the abuse or report it, even that fairly low-impact sanction could not be levelled against them. In short, the Bill’s current approach, I am sorry to say, would increase the sense of impunity, not lessen it.

One could argue that, if a potential abuser believes that their victim will not read their abuse, they will not bother issuing it. Unfortunately, this misunderstands the psyche of the online troll. Many of them are content to howl into the void, satisfied that other people who have not turned on the option to filter out content from unverified accounts will still be able to read it. The troll’s objective of harming the victim may be partially fulfilled as a result.

There is also the question of how much uptake there will be of the option to verify one’s identity, and numerous questions about the factors that this will depend on. Will it be attractive? Will there be a cost? How quick and efficient will the process be? Will platforms have the capacity to implement it at scale? Will it have to be done separately for every platform?

If uptake of verification is low, most people simply will not use the option to filter content of unverified accounts, even if it means that they remain more susceptible to abuse, since they would be cutting themselves off from most of their users. Clearly, that is not an option for anyone using social media for any promotional purpose. Even those who use it for purely social reasons will find that they have friends who do not want to be verified. Fundamentally, people use social media because other people use it. Carving oneself off from most of them defeats the purpose of the exercise.

It is not clear what specific measures the Bill could take to address the issue. Conceivably, it could simply ban online platforms from maintaining user accounts whose owners have not had their identities verified. However, this would be truly draconian and most likely lead to major platforms exiting the UK market, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, has rightly argued in respect of other possible measures. It would also be unenforceable, since users could simply turn on a VPN, pretend to be from some other country where the rules do not apply and register an account as though they were in that country.

There are numerous underlying issues that the Bill recognises as problems but does not attempt to prescribe solutions for. Its general approach is to delegate responsibility to Ofcom to frame its codes of practice for operators to follow in order to effectively tackle these problems. Specifically, it sets out a list of objectives that Ofcom, in drawing up its codes of practice, will be expected to meet. The protection of users from abuse, specifically by unverified or anonymous users, would seem to be an ideal candidate for inclusion in this list of amendments. If required to do so, Ofcom could study the issue closely and develop more effective solutions over time.

I was pleased to see, in last week’s Telegraph, an article that gave an all too common example of where the livelihood of a chef running a pub in Cornwall has suffered what amounts to vicious abuse online from a vegan who obviously does not approve of the menu, and who is damaging the business’s reputation and putting the chef’s livelihood at risk. This is just one tiny example, if I can put it that way, of the many thousands that are happening all the time. Some 584 readers left comments, and just about everyone wrote in support of the need to do something to support that chef and tackle this vicious abuse.

I return to a point I made in a previous debate: livelihoods, which we are deeply concerned about, are at stake here. I am talking not about big business but about individuals and small and family businesses that are suffering—beyond abuse—loss of livelihood, financial harm and/or reputational damage to business, and the knock-on effects of that.