Online Safety Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

23: Clause 11, page 10, line 9, at beginning insert “eliminate,”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require user to user services to eliminate identified risks to children from their platforms in addition to mitigating and managing them.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, this large group of 33 amendments is concerned with preventing harm to children, by creating a legal requirement to design the sites and services that children will access in a way that will put their safety first and foremost. I thank my co-sponsors, the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Harding, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight. First of all, I wish to do the most important thing I will do today: to wish the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, a very happy birthday.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My co-sponsors will deal with some of the more detailed elements of the 30 amendments that we are dealing with. These will include safety duties, functionality and harm, and codes of practice. I am sure that the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Knight, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford will speak to their own amendments.

I will provide a brief overview of why we are so convinced of the paramount need for a safety by design approach to protect children and remind digital companies and platforms, forcibly and legally, of their obligation to include the interests and safety of children as a paramount element within their business strategies and operating models. These sites and services are artificial environments. They were designed artificially and can be redesigned artificially.

In her testimony to the US Senate in July 2021, the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen put her finger on it rather uncomfortably when talking about her erstwhile employer:

“Facebook know that they are leading young users to anorexia content … Facebook’s internal research is aware that there are a variety of problems facing children on Instagram … they know that severe harm is happening to children”.


She was talking about, probably, three years ago.

On the first day of Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Allan, who is not with us today, used the analogy of the legally mandated and regulated safe design of aeroplanes and automobiles and the different regimes that cover their usage to illustrate some of our choices in dealing with regulation. We know why aeroplanes and cars have to be designed safely; we also know that either form of transportation could be used recklessly and dangerously, which is why we do not allow children to fly or drive them.

First, let us listen to the designers of these platforms and services through some research done by the 5Rights Foundation in July 2021. These are three direct quotes from the designers:

“Companies make their money from attention. Reducing attention will reduce revenue. If you are a designer working in an attention business, you will design for attention … Senior stakeholders like simple KPIs. Not complex arguments about user needs and human values … If a senior person gives a directive, say increase reach, then that’s what designers design for without necessarily thinking about the consequences”.


Companies know exactly what they need to do to grow and to drive profitability. However, they mostly choose not to consider, mitigate and prioritise to avoid some of the potentially harmful consequences. What they design and prioritise are strategies to maximise consumption, activity and profitability. They are very good at it.

Let us hear what the children say, remembering that some recent research indicates that 42% of five to 12 year-olds in this country use social media. The Pathways research project I referred to earlier worked closely with 21 children aged 12 to 18, who said: “We spend more time online than we feel we should, but it’s tough to stop or cut down”. “If we’re not on social media, we feel excluded”. “We like and value the affirmations and validations we receive”. “We create lots of visual content, much of it about ourselves, and we share it widely”. “Many of us are contacted by unknown adults”. “Many of us recognise that, through using social media, we have experienced body image and relationships problems”.

To test whether the children in this research project were accurately reporting their experiences, the project decided to place a series of child avatars—ghost children, in effect—on the internet, whose profiles very clearly stated that they were children. It did this to test whether these experiences were true.

They found—in many cases within a matter of hours of the profiles going online—proactive contacting by strangers and rapid recommendations to engage more and more. If searches were conducted for eating disorders or self-harm, the avatars were quickly able to access content irrespective of their stated ages and clearly evident status as children. At the same time they were being sent harmful or inappropriate content, they also received age-relevant advertising for school revision and for toys—the social media companies knew that these accounts were registered as children.

This research was done two years ago. Has anything improved since then? It just so happens that 5Rights has produced another piece of research which is about to be released, and which used the exact same technique—creating avatars to see what they would experience online. They used 10 avatars based on real children aged between 10 and 16, so what happened? For an 11 year-old avatar, Instagram was recommending images of knives with the caption “This is what I use to self-harm”; design features were leading children from innocent searches to harmful content very quickly.

I think any grandparents in the Chamber will be aware of an interesting substance known as “Slime”—a form of particularly tactile playdough which one’s grandchildren seem to enjoy. Typing in “Slime” on Reddit was one search, and one click, away from pornography; exactly the same thing happened on Reddit when the avatar typed in “Minecraft”, another very popular game with our children or grandchildren. A 15 year-old female avatar was private-messaged on Instagram by a user that she did not follow—an unknown adult who encouraged her to link on to pornographic content on Telegram, another instant messaging service. On the basis of this evidence, it appears that little or nothing has changed; it may have even got slightly worse.

By an uncomfortable coincidence, last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, published better than expected results and saw its market value increase by more than $50 billion in after-hours trading. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta, proudly announced that Meta is pouring investment into artificial intelligence tools to make its platform more engaging and its advertising more effective. Of particular interest and concern given the evidence of the avatars was his announcement that since the introduction of Reels, a short-term video feed designed specifically to respond to competition from TikTok, its AI-driven recommendations had boosted the average time people spend on Instagram by 24%.

To return to the analogy of planes and cars used by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, we are dealing here with planes and cars in the shape of platforms and applications which we know are flawed in their design. They are not adequately designed for safety, and we know that they can put users, particularly children and young people, in the way of great harm, as many grieving families can testify.

In conclusion, our amendments propose that companies must design digital services that cater for the vulnerabilities, needs, and rights of children and young people by default; children’s safety cannot and must not be an afterthought or a casualty of their business models. We are asking for safety by design to protect children to become the mandatory standard. What we have today is unsafe design by default, driven by commercial strategies which can lead to children becoming collateral damage.

Given that it is the noble Baroness’s birthday, I am sure we can feel confident that the Minister will have a positive tone when he replies. I beg to move.

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[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak on this group, but I was provoked into offering some reflections on the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, especially his opening remarks about cars and planes, which he said were designed to be safe. He did not mention trains, about which I know something as well, and which are also designed to be safe. These are a few initial reflective points. They are designed in very different ways. An aeroplane is designed never to fail; a train is designed so that if it fails, it will come to a stop. They are two totally different approaches to safety. Simply saying that something must be designed to be safe does not answer questions; it opens questions about what we actually mean by that. The noble Lord went on to say that we do not allow children to drive cars and fly planes. That is absolutely true, but the thrust of his amendment is that we should design the internet so that it can be driven by children and used by children— so that it is designed for them, not for adults. That is my problem with the general thrust of many of these amendments.

A further reflection that came to mind as the noble Lord spoke was on a book of great interest that I recommend to noble Lords. It is a book by the name of Risk written in 1995 by Professor John Adams, then professor of geography at University College London. He is still an emeritus professor of geography there. It was a most interesting work on risk. First, it reflected how little we actually know of many of the things of which we are trying to assess risk.

More importantly, he went on to say that people have an appetite for risk. That appetite for risk—that risk budget, so to speak—changes over the course of one’s life: one has much less appetite for risk when one gets to a certain age than perhaps one had when one was young. I have never bungee jumped in my life, and I think I can assure noble Lords that the time has come when I can say I never shall, but there might have been a time when I was younger when I might have flung myself off a cliff, attached to a rubber band and so forth—noble Lords may have done so. One has an appetite for risk.

The interesting thing that he went on to develop from that was the notion of risk compensation: that if you have an appetite for risk and your opportunities to take risks are taken away, all you do is compensate by taking risks elsewhere. So a country such as New Zealand, which has some of the strictest cycling safety laws, also has a very high incidence of bungee jumping among the young; as they cannot take risks on their bicycles, they will find ways to go and do it elsewhere.

Although these reflections are not directly germane to the amendments, they are important as we try to understand what we are seeking to achieve here, which is a sort of hermetically sealed absence of risk for children. I do not think it will work. I said at Second Reading that I thought the flavour of the debate was somewhat similar to a late medieval conclave of clerics trying to work out how to mitigate the harmful effects of the invention of movable type. That did not work either, and I think we are in a very similar position today as we discuss this.

There is also the question of harm and what it means. While the examples being given by noble Lords are very specific and no doubt genuinely harmful, and are the sorts of things that we should like to stop, the drafting of the amendments, using very vague words such as “harm”, is dangerous overreach in the Bill. To give just one example, for the sake of speed, when I was young, administering the cane periodically was thought good for a child in certain circumstances. The mantra was, “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, though I never heard it said. Nowadays, we would not think it morally or psychologically good to do physical harm to a child. We would regard it as an unmitigated harm and, although not necessarily banned or illegal, it is something that—

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I respond to the noble Lord in two ways. First, I ask him to reflect on how the parents of the children who have died through what the parents would undoubtedly view as serious and unbearable harm would feel about his philosophical ruminations. Secondly, as somebody who has the privilege of being a Deputy Speaker in your Lordships’ House, it is incumbent and germane for us all to focus on the amendment in question and stay on it, to save time and get through the business.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Well, I must regard myself as doubly rebuked, and unfairly, because my reflections are very relevant to the amendments, and I have developed them in that direction. In respect of the parents, they have suffered very cruelly and wrongly, but although it may sound harsh, as I have said in this House before on other matters, hard cases make bad law. We are in the business of trying to make good law that applies to the whole population, so I do not think that these are wholly—

--- Later in debate ---

The points raised in these amendments are covered already in the Bill in the places I have set out. I will consult the official record of this debate to see whether there are any areas which I have not followed up, but I invite noble Lords not to press their amendments in this group.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response. I think the entire Chamber will be thankful that I do not intend to respond in any great detail to almost one hour and three-quarters of debate on this series of amendments—I will just make a few points and suggestions.

The point that the noble Baroness made at the beginning about understanding the design and architecture of the systems and processes is fundamental, both for understanding why they are causing the sorts of harm that they are at the moment and for trying to ensure that they are designed better in future than they have been to date. Clearly, they are seriously remiss in the harms that they are inflicting on a generation of young people.

On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, about trying to make Ofcom’s job easier— I can see the noble Lord, Lord Grade, in the corner— I would hope and anticipate that anything we could suggest that would lead the Government to make Ofcom’s job slightly easier and clearer would be very welcome. The noble Lord appears to be making an affirmatory gesture, so I will take that as a yes.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that I fully understand the importance of waving the flag of liberty and free speech, and I acknowledge its importance. I also acknowledge the always-incipient danger of unintentionally preventing things from happening that can and should happen when you are trying to make things safer and prevent harm. Trying to get the right balance is extraordinarily difficult, but I applaud the noble Lord for standing up and saying what he said. If one were to judge the balance of the contributions here as a very rough opinion poll, the noble Lord might find himself in the minority, but that does not necessarily mean that he is wrong, so I would encourage him to keep contributing.

I sympathise with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in trying to find the right balance; it is something that we are all struggling to do. One of the great privileges we have in this House is that we have the time to do it in a manner which is actively discouraged in the other place. Even if we go on a bit, we are talking about matters which are very important—in particular, the pre-legislative scrutiny committee was able to cover them in greater detail than the House of Commons was able to do.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, was right. In the same way as they say, “Follow the money”, in this case it is “follow the algorithms”, because it is the algorithms which drive the business model.

On the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, regarding the New York Times article about Geoffrey Hinton, one of the architects of AI in Google, I would recommend that all your Lordships read it to see somebody who has been at the forefront of developing artificial intelligence. Rather like a character in a Jules Verne novel suddenly being slightly aghast at what they have created—Frankenstein comes to mind—it makes one pause for thought. Even as we are talking about these things, AI is racing ahead like a greyhound in pursuit of a very fast rabbit, and there is no way that we will be able to catch up.

While I thank the noble Minister for his reply, as when we debated some of the amendments last week where the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, spoke about the train journey she took when she was trying to interrogate and interpret the different parts of the Bill and was trying to follow the trail and understand what was going on to the extent that she became so involved that she missed her station, I think there is a real point here about the fact that this Bill is very complex to follow and understand. Indeed, the way in which the Minster had to point to all the different points of the compass—so to speak—both within the Bill and without it in many of the answers that he gave to some of the amendments indicates to me that the Bill team is finding it challenging to respond to some of them. It is like filling in one of those diagrams where you join the dots, and you cannot quite see what it is until you have nearly finished. I find it slightly disturbing if the Bill team and some of the officials appear to be having a challenging time in trying to interpret, understand and explain some of the points we are raising; I would hope and expect that that could be done much more simply.

One of the pleas from all of us in a whole variety of these amendments is to get the balance right between legislating what it is that we want to legislate and making it simple enough to be understandable. At the moment, a criticism of this Bill is that it is extraordinary difficult to understand in many parts. I will not go through all the points, but there are some germane areas where it would be extremely helpful to pursue with the Minister and the Bill team some of the points we are trying to make. Many of them are raised by a variety of outside bodies which know infinitely more about it than I do, and which have genuine concerns. We have the time between Committee and Report to put some of those to bed or at least to understand them better than we do at the moment. We will probably be happy and satisfied with some of the responses that we receive from the department once we feel that we understand them, and perhaps more importantly, once we feel that the department and the Bill team themselves fully understand them. It is fair to say that at the moment we are not completely comfortable that they do. I do not blame the Minister for that. If I were in his shoes, I would be on a very long holiday and I would not be returning any time soon. However, we will request meetings—for one meeting, it would be too much, so we will try to put this into bit-size units and then try to dig into the detail in a manageable way without taking too much time to make sure that we understand each other.

With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 23 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

25: Clause 11, page 10, line 13, at end insert—
“(c) uphold children’s rights per the United Kingdom’s obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), with reference to General Comment No. 25 (2021) from the Committee on the Rights of the Child on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would mean regulated services would have to have regard for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to ensure children are treated according to their evolving capacities, in their best interests, in consideration of their wellbeing and are not locked out of spaces that they have a right to participate in and to access.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry that it is me again—a bit like a worn 78. In moving Amendment 25, I will speak also to Amendments 78, 187 and 196, all of which speak to the principle of children’s rights as set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and, more specifically, how those rights are applied to the digital world as covered in the United Nations’ general comment No. 25, which was produced in 2021 and ratified by the UK Government. What we are suggesting and asking for is that the principles in this general comment are reflected in the Bill. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Harding, Lady Kennedy and Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton—who is not with us—for adding their names to these amendments and for their support.

The general comment No. 25 that I mentioned recognises that children’s rights are applicable in the digital world as well as the real world. These amendments try to establish in the Bill the rights of children. Believe it or not, in this rather lengthy Bill there is not a single reference—as far as we can discern—specifically to children’s rights. There are a lot of other words, but that specific phrase is not used, amazingly enough. These amendments are an attempt to get children’s rights specifically into the Bill. Amendments 30 and 105 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Knight, also seek to preserve the well-being of children. Our aims are very similar, but we will try to argue that the convention would achieve them in a particularly effective and concise way.

The online world is not optional for children, given what we know—not least from some of the detailed and harrowing experiences related by various of your Lordships in the course of the Bill. The fact that the online world is not optional for children may be worrying to some adults. We have all heard about parents, grandparents and others who have direct experience of their beloved coming to harm. By contrast, it is also fascinating to note how many senior executives, and indeed founders, of digital companies forbid their own children from possessing and using mobile phones, typically until they are 12 or 14. That is telling us something. If they themselves do not allow their children to have access to some of the online world we are talking about so much, that should give us pause for reflection.

Despite the many harms online, there is undoubted good that all children can benefit from, including in terms of their cognitive and skills development, social development and relationships. There are some brilliant things which come from being online. It is also beneficial because having age-appropriate experiences when they are online is part of their fundamental rights. That, essentially, is what these amendments are about.

Throughout the many years that the Bill has been in gestation, we have heard a lot about freedom of speech and how it must be preserved. Indeed, in contrast to children’s rights not being mentioned once in the Bill, “freedom of expression” appears no less than 49 times. I venture to suggest to your Lordships that there is a degree of imbalance there which should cause us to pause and reflect on whether we have that balance quite right.

I will not go into detail, but the UNCRC is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, and it is legally binding on the states which are party to it. The UK is a signatory to this convention, yet if we do not get this right in the Bill, we are in danger of falling behind some of our global counterparts. Although I recognise that saying the name of this organisation may bring some members of the governing party out in a rather painful rash, the EU is incorporating the UNCRC into its forthcoming AI Act. Sweden has already incorporated it into law at a different level, and Canada, New Zealand and South Africa are all doing the same. It is not anything to be worried about. Even Wales incorporated it into its domestic law in 2004, and Scotland did so in 2021. This appears to be something that the English have a particular problem with.

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[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I will start in the optimistic spirit of the debate we have just had. There are many benefits to young people from the internet: social, educational and many other ways that noble Lords have mentioned today. That is why the Government’s top priority for this legislation has always been to protect children and to ensure that they can enjoy those benefits by going online safely.

Once again, I find myself sympathetic to these amendments, but in a position of seeking to reassure your Lordships that the Bill already delivers on their objectives. Amendments 25, 78, 187 and 196 seek to add references to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and general comment 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment to the duties on providers and Ofcom in the Bill.

As I have said many times before, children’s rights are at the heart of this legislation, even if the phrase itself is not mentioned in terms. The Bill already reflects the principles of the UN convention and the general comment. Clause 207, for instance, is clear that a “child” means a person under the age of 18, which is in line with the convention. All providers in scope of the Bill need to take robust steps to protect users, including children, from illegal content or activity on their services and to protect children from content which is harmful to them. They will need to ensure that children have a safe, age-appropriate experience on services designed for them.

Both Ofcom and service providers will also have duties in relation to users’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy. The safety objectives will require Ofcom to ensure that services protect children to a higher standard than adults, while also making sure that these services account for the different needs of children at different ages, among other things. Ofcom must also consult bodies with expertise in equality and human rights, including those representing the interests of children, for instance the Children’s Commissioner. While the Government fully support the UN convention and its continued implementation in the UK, it would not be appropriate to place obligations on regulated services to uphold an international treaty between state parties. We agree with the reservations that were expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme, in his speech, and his noble friend Lady Foster.

The convention’s implementation is a matter for the Government, not for private businesses or voluntary organisations. Similarly, the general comment acts as guidance for state parties and it would not be appropriate to refer to that in relation to private entities. The general comment is not binding and it is for individual states to determine how to implement the convention. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, will feel reassured that children’s rights are baked into the Bill in more ways than a first glance may suggest, and that he will be content to withdraw his amendment.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in his Amendments 30 and 105, seeks to require platforms and Ofcom to consider a service’s benefits to children’s rights and well-being when considering what is proportionate to fulfil the child safety duties of the Bill. They also add children’s rights and well-being to the online safety objectives for user-to-user services. The Bill as drafted is focused on reducing the risk of harm to children precisely so that they can better enjoy the many benefits of being online. It already requires companies to take a risk-based and proportionate approach to delivering the child safety duties. Providers will need to address only content that poses a risk of harm to children, not that which is beneficial or neutral. The Bill does not require providers to exclude children or restrict access to content or services that may be beneficial for them.

Children’s rights and well-being are already a central feature of the existing safety objectives for user-to-user services in Schedule 4 to the Bill. These require Ofcom to ensure that services protect children to a higher standard than adults, while making sure that these services account for the different needs of children at different ages, among other things. On this basis, while I am sympathetic to the aims of the amendments the noble Lord has brought forward, I respectfully say that I do not think they are needed.

More pertinently, Amendment 30 could have unintended consequences. By introducing a broad balancing exercise between the harms and benefits that children may experience online, it would make it more difficult for Ofcom to follow up instances of non-compliance. For example, service providers could take less effective safety measures to protect children, arguing that, as their service is broadly beneficial to children’s well-being or rights, the extent to which they need to protect children from harm is reduced. This could mean that children are more exposed to more harmful content, which would reduce the benefits of going online. I hope that this reassures the noble Lord, Lord Russell, of the work the Bill does in the areas he has highlighted, and that it explains why I cannot accept his amendments. I invite him to withdraw Amendment 25.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for taking part in this discussion. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Weir, although I would say to him that his third point—that, in his experience, the UNCRC is open to different interpretations by different departments—is my experience of normal government. Name me something that has not been interpreted differently by different departments, as it suits them.

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

I entirely take that point. I was making the slightly wider point—not specifically with regard to the UNCRC—that, whenever legislative provision has been made that a particular department has to have due regard to something, while there is case law, “due regard” has tended to be treated very differently by different departments. So, if even departments within the same Government treat that differently, how much more differently would private companies treat it?

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I would simply make the point that it would probably be more accurate to say that the departments treat it with “due disregard”;

This has been a wide ranging debate and I am not going to go through all the different bits and pieces. I recommend that noble Lords read United Nations general comment 25 as it goes, in great detail, right to the heart of the issues we are talking about. For example —this is very pertinent to the next group of amendments—it explicitly protects children from pornography, so I absolutely recommend that it be mentioned in the next group of amendments.

As I expected, the Minister said, “We are very sympathetic but this is not really necessary”. He said that children’s rights are effectively baked into the Bill already. But what is baked into something that children—for whom this is particularly relevant—or even adults might decide to consume is not always immediately obvious. There are problems with an approach whereby one says, “It’s fine because, if you really understood this rather complicated legislation, it would become completely clear to you what it means”. That is a very accurate and compelling demonstration of exactly why some of us have concerns about this well-intentioned Bill. We fear that it will become a sort of feast, enabling company lawyers and regulators to engage in occasionally rather arcane discourse at great expense, demonstrating that what the Government claim is clearly baked in is not so clearly baked in.

Online Safety Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I completely understand that; I was making the point that there will be disagreements in judgments. In that instance, it was resolved by a court, but we are talking about a situation where I am not sure how the judgment is made.

In these amendments, there are lists of particular harms—a variety are named, including self-harm—and I wanted to provide some counterexamples of what I consider to be harms. I have been inundated by algorithmic adverts for “Naked Education” on Channel 4, maybe because of the algorithms I am on. I think that the programme is irresponsible; I say that having watched it, rather than just having read a headline. Channel 4 is posing this programme with naked adults and children as educational by saying that it is introducing children to the naked body. I think it is harmful for children and that it should not be on the television, but it is advertised on social media—I have seen quite a lot of it.

The greatest example of self-harm we encounter at present is when gender dysphoric teenagers—as well as some younger than teenagers; they are predominately young women—are affirmed by adults, as a kind of social contagion, into taking body-changing and body-damaging hormones and performing self-mutilation, whether by breast binding or double mastectomies, which is advertised and praised by adults. That is incredibly harmful for young people, and it is reflected online at lot, because much of this is discussed, advertised or promoted online.

This is related to the earlier contributions, because I am asking: should those be added to the list of obvious harms? Although not many noble Lords are in the House now, if there were many more here, they would object to what I am saying by stating, “That is not harmful at all. What is harmful is what you’re saying, Baroness Fox, because you’re causing psychological harm to all those young people by being transphobic”. I am raising these matters because we think we all agree that there is a consensus on what is harmful material online for young people, but it is not that straightforward.

The amendment states that the Bill should target any platform that posts

“links to, or … encourages child users to seek”

out “dangerous or illegal activity”. I understand “illegal activity”, but on “dangerous” activities, I assume that we do not mean extreme sports, mountain climbing and so on, which are dangerous—that comes to mind probably because I have spent too much time with young people who spend their whole time looking at those things. I worry about the unintended consequences of things being banned or misinterpreted in that way.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

To respond briefly to the noble Baroness, I shall give a specific example of how Amendment 93 would help. Let us go back to the coroner’s courtroom where the parents of Molly Russell were trying to get the coroner to understand what had happened to their daughter. The legal team from Meta was there, with combined salaries probably in seven figures, and the argument was about the detail of the content. At one point, I recall Ian Russell saying that one of the Meta lawyers said, “We are topic agnostic”. I put it to the noble Baroness that, had the provisions in Amendment 93 been in place, first, under “Content harms” in proposed new paragraph 3(c) and (d), Meta would have been at fault; under “Contact harms” in proposed new paragraph 4(b), Meta would have been at fault; under “Conduct harms” in proposed new paragraph 5(b), Meta would have been at fault; and under “Commercial harms” in proposed new paragraph 6(a) and (b), Meta would have been at fault. That would have made things a great deal simpler.

Online Safety Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, as I listen to the words echoing around the Chamber, I try to put myself in the shoes of parents or children who, in one way or another, have suffered as a result of exposure to things happening online. Essentially, the world that we are talking about has been allowed to grow like Topsy, largely unregulated, at a global level and at a furious pace, and that is still happening as we do this. The horses have not just bolted the stable; they are out of sight and across the ocean. We are talking about controlling and understanding an environment that is moving so quickly that, however fast we move, we will be behind it. Whatever mousetraps we put in place to try to protect children, we know there are going to be loopholes, not least because children individually are probably smarter than we are collectively at knowing how to get around well-meaning safeguards.

There are ways of testing what is happening. Certain organisations have used what they term avatars. Essentially, you create mythical profiles of children, which are clearly stated as being children, and effectively let them loose in the online world in various directions on various platforms and observe what happens. The tests that have been done on this—we will go into this in more detail on Thursday when we talk about safety by design—are pretty eye-watering. The speed with which these avatars, despite being openly stated as being profiles of children, are deluged by a variety of content that should be nowhere near children is dramatic and incredibly effective.

I put it to the Minister and the Bill team that one of the challenges for Ofcom will be not to be so far behind the curve that it is always trying to catch up. It is like being a surfer: if you are going to keep going then you have to keep on the front side of the wave. The minute you fall behind it, you are never going to catch up. I fear that, however well-intentioned so much of the Bill is, unless and until His Majesty’s Government and Ofcom recognise that we are probably already slightly behind the crest of the wave, whatever we try to do and whatever safeguards we put in place are not necessarily going to work.

One way we can try to make what we do more effective is the clever, forensic use of approaches such as avatars, not least because I suspect their efficacy will be dramatically increased by the advent and use of AI.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, put it very well:

“Kids are born digital, they’re digital kids now … And it is, I think, really important to set some hard rails around it”.


The truth is that in the area of app stores, Google and Apple, which, as we have heard, have a more than 95% share of the market, are just not voluntarily upholding their responsibilities in making the UK a safe place for children online. There is an air of exceptionalism about the way they behave that suggests they think the digital world is somehow different from the real world. I do not accept that, which is why I support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Harding and others—Amendments 19, 22, 298, 299 and other connected amendments.

There are major holes in the app stores’ child safety measures, which mean that young teens can access adult apps that offer dating, random chats, casual sex and gambling, even when Apple and Google emphatically know that the user is a minor. I will give an example. Using an Apple ID for a simulated 14 year-old, the Tech Transparency Project looked at 80 apps in the App Store that are theoretically limited to 17 and older. It found that underage users could very easily evade age restrictions in the vast majority of cases. There is a dating app that opens directly into pornography before ever asking the user’s age; adult chat apps filled with explicit images that never ask the user’s age, and a gambling app that lets the minor account deposit and withdraw money.

What kind of apps are we talking about here? We are talking about apps such as UberHoney; Eros, the hook-up and adult chat app; Hahanono—Chat & Get Naughty, and Cash Clash Games: Win Money. The investigation found that Apple and other apps essentially pass the buck to each other when it comes to blocking underage users, making it easy for young teens to slip through the system. My day-to-day experience as a parent of four children completely echoes that investigation, and it is clear to me that Apple and Google just do not share age data with the apps in their app stores, or else children would not be able to download those apps.

There is a wilful blindness to minors tweaking their age. Parental controls on mobile phones are, to put it politely, a joke. It takes a child a matter of minutes to circumvent them—I know from my experience—and I have wasted many hours fruitlessly trying to control these arrangements. That is just not good enough for any business. It is not good enough because so many teenagers have mobile phones, as we discussed—two-thirds of children have a smartphone by the age of 10. Moreover, it is not good enough because they are accessing huge amounts of filthy content, dodgy services and predatory adults, things that would never be allowed in the real world. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England revealed that one in 10 children had viewed pornography by the time they were nine years old. The impact on their lives is profound: just read the testimony on the recent Mumsnet forums about the awful impact of pornography on their children’s lives.

To prevent minors from accessing adult-only apps, the most efficient measure would be, as my noble friend Lady Harding pointed out, to check users’ ages during the distribution step, which means directly in the app store or on the web browser, prior to the app store or the internet browser initiating the app or the platform download. This can be done without the developer knowing the user’s specific age. Developing a reliable age-verification regime applied at that “distribution layer” of the internet supply chain would significantly advance the UK’s objective of creating a safer online experience and set a precedent that Governments around the world could follow. It would apply real-world principles to the internet.

This would not absolve any developer, app or platform of their responsibilities under existing legislation—not at all: it would build on that. Instead, it would simply mandate that every player in the ecosystem, right from the app store distribution layer, was legally obliged to promote a safer experience online. That is completely consistent with the principles and aims of the Online Safety Bill.

These amendments would subject two of the biggest tech corporations to the same duties regarding their app stores as we do the wider digital ecosystem and the real world. It is all about age assurance and protecting children. To the noble Lord, Lord Allan, I say that I cannot understand why my corner shop requires proof of age to buy cigarettes, pornography or booze, but Apple and Google think it is okay to sell apps with inappropriate content and services without proper age-verification measures and with systems that are wilfully unreliable.

There is a tremendous amount that is very good about Tim Cook’s commitment to privacy and his objections to the data industrial complex; but in this matter of the app stores, the big tech companies have had a blind spot to child safety for decades and a feeling of exceptionalism that is just no longer relevant. These amendments are an important step in requiring that app store owners step up to their responsibilities and that we apply the same standards to shopkeepers in the digital world as we would to shopkeepers in the real world.

Online Safety Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leeds]

My Lords, first, I am relieved to hear that I am not the only thick person in this Committee, because I have struggled to understand and follow the detail and interconnectedness of everything in the Bill. The maxim that you need simplicity and clarity, especially if the Bill is going to be effective, is really important. That is why I think this amendment is a no-brainer: just set it out at the front.

Secondly, the amendment provides a guideline, or a lens through which we read the complexity of what follows. That might even lead us, as we go through some of the detail, to strip stuff out and make it simpler for everybody to understand. It does not have to grow the extent of the Bill. It might help us to be—I think this is the most important word I have heard—disciplined as we proceed. I support the amendment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I suggest, very briefly, that we look at this amendment in a slightly different way. Understandably, we have a tendency in Parliament to look at things through our own lens, and perhaps some of us are viewing this amendment as a reminder of what the Bill is about.

The noble Baroness, Lady Harding, made a very good point about clarity. I suggest we imagine that we are one of the companies that the Bill is designed to try to better manage. Imagine you are in the boardroom, or on the executive management team, and you are either already doing business in the United Kingdom or are considering entering the UK market. You know there is an enormous piece of legislation that is designed to try to bring some order to the area your business is in. At the moment, without this amendment, the Bill is a lawyer’s paradise, because it can be looked at in a multitude of ways. I put it to the Minister and the Bill team that it would be extremely helpful to have something in the Bill that makes it completely clear, to any business thinking of engaging in any online activities in the United Kingdom, what this legislation is about.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I am one of those who found the Bill extremely complicated, but I do not find this amendment extremely complicated. It is precise, simple, articulate and to the point, and I think it gives us a good beginning for debating what is an extremely complex Bill.

I support this amendment because I believe, and have done so for a very long time, that social media has done a great deal more harm than good, even though it is capable of doing great good. Whether advertently or inadvertently, the worst of all things it has done is to destroy childhood innocence. We are often reminded in this House that the prime duty of any Government is to protect the realm, and of course it is. But that is a very broad statement. We can protect the realm only if we protect those within it. Our greatest obligation is to protect children—to allow them to grow up, so far as possible, uncorrupted by the wicked ways of a wicked world and with standards and beliefs that they can measure actions against. Complex as it is, the Bill is a good beginning, and its prime purpose must be the protection and safeguarding of childhood innocence.

The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, spoke a few moments ago about the instructions he was given as a young preacher. I remember when I was training to be a lay reader in the Church of England, 60 or more years ago, being told that if you had been speaking for eight minutes and had not struck oil, stop boring. I think that too is a good maxim.

We have got to try to make the Bill comprehensible to those around the country whom it will affect. The worst thing we do, and I have mentioned this in connection with other Bills, is to produce laws that are unintelligible to the people in the country; that is why I was very sympathetic to the remarks of my noble friend Lord Inglewood. This amendment is a very good beginning. It is clear and precise. I think nearly all of us who have spoken so far would like to see it in the Bill. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, rising—does she wish to intervene?

Online Safety Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I shall attempt to be brief but, based on previous experience with other speakers, that may be difficult. At least it gives the Whip on the Front Bench the chance to do some agile body moves.

I welcome this overdue Bill. I think the Minister got it slightly wrong when he congratulated us on waiting patiently for it. Judging by every single contribution around the entire House today, patience has been rather wanting. We want to get on with it. Like many government Bills, this has grown like Topsy. It has grown sideways, downwards and upwards. We need to beware of going around in circles. Above all, we need to expedite this and get it on the statute book.

I will focus on three key areas. Unsurprisingly, the first will be children. Here I declare that I am a governor of Coram, the oldest children’s charity in the United Kingdom. I will certainly support amendments such as those that the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, was talking about to try to bring in proper age verification.

Like many other noble Lords, on Monday I had the privilege of sitting in on the briefing that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, arranged. Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell, was present, together with one of her sisters. What we saw was truly shocking. In some ways it was particularly shocking to me because, as Ian shared some of his daughter’s diary—what she had actually written in the days and weeks before she died—I had a sudden jolt of recognition. What 14 year-old Molly was saying was almost identical to the transcript of the suicide note that my father wrote to my mother, which I have in my desk at home. It has the same self-loathing, the feeling of worthlessness and the belief—completely wrong—that you would better serve those you love and live with by departing from this life. My father was a Second World War veteran who had won the Military Cross. He was suffering from manic depression and was clearly in a depressed state, but I cannot even begin to imagine the effect it must have had on Molly to have the deluge of filthy, negative, awful, harmful content that she was deluged in 24 hours a day. Perversely, the more she looked at it, the more excited the algorithm got and the more she received.

Particularly disgraceful is that it took no less than five years for the family and their lawyer finally to get some of the platforms Molly had been watching to disgorge and show some of the content she had been viewing. Five years is wholly and utterly unacceptable.

I take the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, made about young people being involved. It would be a good idea for Ofcom in some way, shape or form to have access to young people advising it. I support in principle the idea of a Joint Committee of Parliament. Again, I think it would be very helpful to have young people advising that.

The second area is supporting the wonderful noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I declare quite openly that I am a Beebanite. I think there are quite a few of us in the House, and we will do everything we can to support the wonderful noble Baroness in everything she does.

Lastly, I come to the companies. I speak as somebody who was a head-hunter for 30 years. A large part of our business was in North America and—surprise, surprise—a lot of our most wonderful clients were some of these new tech giants. I know a lot because of that about what I would call the psychology of attraction and repulsion. I can tell the House that for many years, on going to a candidate and saying, “Would you like to join Facebook? Would you like to join one of these other companies?”, they would get pretty excited, because it is new technology, there is a lot of money, it is sexy, it is probably in California—what could be better?

We have to change the paradigm in which people look at potentially being employed by those companies. We have to create a frisson of fear and forethought that, if they do join forces with those companies, not only might their personal reputation suffer but the reputation of the company will suffer, shareholders will suffer, and those who provide services to that company, be they banks or lawyers, will also suffer. That is what we need to change. I will do everything I can, working with others who probably know rather more about this than I do, to concentrate on getting into the minds of those companies, which have huge resources, legal and financial, to resist whatever we do. We have to get inside their minds, find their weak points and go for the jugular.

Age Assurance (Minimum Standards) Bill [HL]

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for initiating this debate and putting the Bill before the House. I pay tribute to 5Rights and the fantastic work it is doing. I should put on record that I am a governor of Coram, which was founded in 1739 and is the oldest children’s charity in the UK—we have been fighting for children’s rights for rather a long time, and, thankfully, for rather a long time before the internet was dreamed up.

Yesterday, the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, and I had the pleasure of going to Wandsworth and spending three hours at a very large girls’ school there, called Burntwood School. It has about 1,800 pupils. It is incredibly diverse. Believe it or not, no fewer than 70 languages are spoken by the 1,800 pupils. Part of the visit was a question and answer session with around 100 of the girls. One of the questions they asked us was about internet safety and what we felt about it, so we were able to talk a bit about the online safety Bill and I was able to say that I would have the privilege of speaking in today’s debate.

Later on, we were talking with the teachers, who said that, during the pandemic, when everybody was in bubbles and the children were perhaps relying on social media more than usual, they decided that they needed to do a bit of homework. Somewhat to their surprise, they found that the legal age below which you are not meant to use WhatsApp is 13. It turns out that that is an unexpected negative Brexit dividend; if we were still in the EU or the European Economic Area, the minimum age would be 16, but one of the freedoms we have won in leaving the European Union is that the age has dropped to 13.

I thought I would use WhatsApp as an example because, although I know it is against the rules to ask noble Lords to put their hand up if they are on WhatsApp, I anticipate that it is probably the social media or communication app that most of us use—I am sure that most of us are in one or two groups.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Not me.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I understand that, in Lincolnshire, the reception is particularly bad. I am sure if the noble Lord asks the Government to do something about it they would improve it.

As we are all using WhatsApp, I thought it might be instructive to talk about what it does and, more to the point, the onus it puts on, in this case, the parents of children—first, to find out whether their children are using it, and, secondly, to find out whether they should be using it. If they decide that they should not be using it, the onus is entirely on the parents to contact WhatsApp with a variety of information, such as passports, to demonstrate that their child is underage. It may possibly respond, but it may not.

WhatsApp makes its money primarily through trying to get into the business world, and it makes money by selling emoticon stickers and online games. But it also plans to monetise the app by setting up a WhatsApp payment, rather like Apple Pay. You will see lots of people going on to the London Underground pointing their mobile phone as they enter, which is how they pay. So that is coming down the track.

WhatsApp has also announced a new privacy policy whereby, if users do not accept it, they will have to stop using the app. WhatsApp cannot do that in the EU, because it violates the GDPR, but in the rest of the world, it can. That is about to be rolled out this year, but I suspect very few of us know that.

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, has just changed its name to Meta. In the law of unexpected consequences, in Hebrew, “meta” means “dead”; in Urdu, it means “delete”; and in certain dialects in my wife’s native Italy, it stands for a “pyramid of dung”. I am sure Mr Zuckerberg was aware of that when he changed the name.

What a lot of people do not realise with WhatsApp is that user groups can go up to 250 users; in Burntwood School, virtually all the children are in quite large groups. People say that WhatsApp is safe because it is end-to-end encrypted. However, any of the 250 in a group could share the details of the group with an outside person, who would immediately have access to every person. A lot of videos and photographs are put on WhatsApp groups, and although, in theory, they cannot be shared outside the group, as I am sure all noble Lords who are very au fait with how mobile phones work will know, you can easily take a screenshot to capture what is on a phone and send that on elsewhere. So WhatsApp is not terribly secure.

The school is particularly worried about its use for cyberbullying. It is worried about the fact that, quite regularly, spyware is used, there are requests for money and its students receive fraudulent job opportunities, even though they are still in school. This is not good, and the fact that the internet companies are, frankly, avoiding the responsibility they have to all of us—most particularly to our children and grandchildren—is simply unacceptable. The Government must do something. They really have no alternative.

Amazon

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We are working across the piece to protect jobs in all parts of the economy and to clamp down on any abuses that we are aware of.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed.

Covid-19: Museums, Galleries and Historic Buildings

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a trustee of the Foundling Museum. I have three brief questions for the Minister. First, does she recognise that those arts organisations which have been the most successful at running themselves with little or no state support are, ironically, the organisations most at risk as a result of their income having come to a near standstill? They will thrive after this hiatus, and again they will require little or no support from the state, but in the interim their very survival is at risk. Are the Government confident that they are on top of the situation? I would like to put on the record my thanks to Arts Council England for yesterday providing a very welcome grant to help the Foundling Museum.

Secondly, can the Government, working with the Charity Commission, give crystal clear guidance about how to approach the use of often limited financial reserves in order not to breach charity law and governance guidelines in these exceptional circumstances?

Lastly, will the Government provide clear guidelines and recommendations on how museums can reopen in such a way that staff—including volunteers—and visitors can feel confident to proceed?

Brexit: Movement of People in the Cultural Sector (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow that peroration. I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and his committee for what the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, described as its incisive report. I was less impressed by the incisive government response, which consists of a grand total of three and a half pages of A4, two pages of which are taken up by detailing the report’s recommendations and barely one page with the Government’s responses, which they rather misleadingly describe as answers.

As I read and reread the government response, I was reminded of the last verse of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter”:

“‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,


‘You’ve had a pleasant run!

Shall we be trotting home again?’

But answer came there none—

And this was scarcely odd, because

They’d eaten every one”.

I will return to that later. As with so many aspects of the potential consequences of our intended departure from the EU, there is a mountain range of questions but a dusty and barren plain of broad and seemingly deliberately vague answers.

This report is about people: real people who work in what is a thriving and economically vital part of our economy. Some of the DCMS’s definitions of what is not in the cultural sector are somewhat puzzling, as these manage to exclude music, the performing and visual arts, film, TV, video, radio and photography. I can give the Minister the relevant departmental document if he wants to see it.

It is incontrovertible that, in 2017, the creative industries contributed more than £100 billion to the UK economy; included in that is the department’s definition of the “cultural sector”, which contributed just under £30 billion. The creative industries employ more than 3 million people, which represents about one in every 11 UK jobs—twice as many as financial services and more than manufacturing.

Although it is a source of great pride that this sector should be so successful and highly regarded internationally, one of the key elements of its success is the way in which it has become deeply intertwined with EU nationals and EU organisations. One of our challenges is to map and understand the nature of these interlinkages, and the consequences and challenges that will arise from them changing and, in some cases, unfortunately, being sundered. An obvious question is: how much does the sector rely on non-UK talent and why is this so? The first and most obvious answer is that being an EU member has made this easy and straightforward. The more important answer is that, in many cases, the demand for EU talent is the result of a lack of the necessary skills and experience, which causes an imbalance in supply. Our existing non-EU immigration struggles to supply the sector with the talent it seeks; there is real concern that the struggles will get significantly worse in a post-Brexit immigration system that lumps everybody together and where everybody will be equally badly done by.

What could the Government do to help the sector continue to grow and thrive? The answer is a variety of things, if they so wish. They could comprehensively review the ways in which creative and technical skills are taught in the UK. They could ensure that any future EU-UK agreement includes measures such as visa-free travel, reciprocal rights for short-term projects and same-day access to talent for businesses that need workers with immediate notice, as other noble Lords have mentioned. They could take steps to ensure that the tier 2 salary threshold is flexible enough to meet the needs of creative enterprises. They could introduce a special visa category to take account of the fact that, as other noble Lords have said, one-third of UK creative industry workers are self-employed, typically working for multiple employers. They could expand and regularly review the shortage occupation list to ensure that it is appropriate and completely up to date; the same is true of reviewing and updating the standard occupational codes and appropriate rates. The current visa processing system, which is not digital—that is not necessarily one of Her Majesty’s Government’s great strengths—requires individuals to hand over their passports, which is hardly user-friendly for internationally touring acts.

Finally, a specific case study requires me to declare a personal interest since the organisation in question—The Place, also known as the London Contemporary Dance School—was founded by my uncle, Robin Howard, in 1969. It has just celebrated its 50th birthday and is one of Europe’s leading centres for performing and teaching contemporary dance. It is hard to develop and maintain an international reputation if an organisation is not genuinely international. The Place speaks from direct experience when it declares that,

“dance artists from the EU drive up the quality of UK dance”.

More than a third of its casual and freelance staff are EU nationals whose individual incomes rarely go anywhere near £30,000—they should be so lucky.

Touring in Europe is very effective advertising for the United Kingdom but it is also a fundamental part of artistic development. It would be a tragedy if the UK dance sector took the risk of becoming more isolated and inward-looking. Participation in initiatives such as Creative Europe has been hugely beneficial. Since these sources of funding are rapidly drying up, can the Minister tell us what plans the Government have to promote and encourage a vibrant UK creative sector, and to mitigate people’s understandable and frighteningly real concerns about the potential unintended consequences of our departure from the EU?

I think I look forward to the Minister’s reply. I pray that he has not demolished all his oysters before he rises to his feet, perhaps to give us some answers or, at the very least, to demonstrate that the Government have genuinely taken the sector’s concerns on board.