Internet-based Media Companies

Debate between Rushanara Ali and Fiona Mactaggart

Wednesday 31st October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to appear in this Chamber in front of you, Mr Owen. I feel as though I have spent most of the day here. I am pleased to have been able to secure this debate, for which I have been pressing for some weeks.

Politicians and companies alike have failed to address the new challenges that the internet brings. I am not at this point arguing that the state needs to do more right now, although it might need to in future. Companies that use the internet need to have robust policies to protect vulnerable users. They need to take responsibility for the impact of what they do from the start of their operations.

Children and young people are a substantial and persistent body of internet users. A report published in September 2012 by McAfee suggested that 82% of five-year-olds

“have access to a computer, smartphone, tablet or other way of getting online.”

Nine out of 10 of those aged between 12 and 15 live in homes with internet access. In schools, use of the internet is now more or less universal. Increasingly, it is being integrated into lesson plans to make use of richer content, and it is often a regular part of how schools communicate with parents.

The internet is used at home to enable children to do their homework. It is a major linchpin or communications hub in huge numbers of children’s social lives. Indeed, not having access to the internet can mark someone out as odd, or as coming from a disadvantaged family.

With the rise of smartphones and other internet-enabled portable devices such as games consoles, and the emergence of large-scale public wi-fi, internet access is also pretty ubiquitous, or soon will be in all our major cities. Thus the notion that parents could in any meaningful sense provide constant support or supervision of their children’s use of the internet is becoming impossible to sustain. I make these points in part to underline a core element of my argument about industry’s responsibility, which I will come to later.

First, I will say a word about the industry. In fact, there is no such thing as the internet industry. At one point there was: back in the 1980s and early ’90s. Computers and networking had been well-established for years, so the then new internet industry essentially consisted solely of internet service providers and geeks who wrote software. It was all very neat and tidy, and easy to identify and deal with.

Today almost every business of any size has some sort of stake in the internet. All of them have a responsibility of some sort to people who go online, especially to children. Many of them make great efforts to discharge that responsibility with great care and attention, but I am afraid that it is also quite plain that many do not. It is the many that we need to focus on.

The internet is not a sort of social service, or an extension of the classroom with knobs on, like social networking sites. Just as money is said to make the world go round, it most certainly makes the internet go round, and children are right in the middle of it. In 2006, children and young people in the UK up to the age of 19 spent £12 billion from their pocket money, or from earnings derived from part-time jobs. Of that, £1.53 billion went on clothes, and £1 billion on food and drink; music and computer-related projects took another £1 billion. In the same year, when account is taken of the amounts spent by parents on their children or in the home—spending over which children and young people often have influence—the total value of the market increased to almost £100 billion.

One of the largest of the virtual worlds aimed expressly at young children is Club Penguin. When Disney acquired the business in 2007, it was reported to have paid $700 million. According to the Financial Times, in June 2011, the UK-based children’s site, Moshi Monsters, was reported to be valued at £125 million. Children and young people are therefore major economic actors, both in their own right and through the influence that they exert on patterns of consumption within the wider family.

The size of the market helps to explain why so many different companies are interested in children and young people. It is not just about cash tomorrow; it is very much about cash today. Moreover, the sums indicated suggest that this market matters not only to the individual firms that may be competing for parts of it, but for the national economy.

Children’s and young people’s online spending is also growing. A report published in December 2010 suggested that British kids between the ages of 7 and 16 spent £448 million, with eight out of 10 using their parents’ cards, online accounts, or PayPal. Apparently, £64 million was spent without parents’ knowledge.

The emergence of the internet as a major force in commerce, particularly in retailing, has created a number of anomalies in policy, as well as market distortions that discriminate against companies that trade solely or principally on the high street, but some of those anomalies are connected to wider risks to children and young people. Many of the rules established to protect children and young people from unfair or age-inappropriate commercial practices in the real world do not yet seem to have been fully translated into the virtual space, or to have found an online equivalent or proxy. There is a tendency for firms to say that what children do when they go online is entirely the responsibility of the parents or carers. While no one would dispute that parents and carers have a role to play, what we need to clarify is the extent of the obligations placed on companies and on every part of the internet value chain.

Can manufacturers of internet-enabled devices, perhaps especially portable devices, simply wash their hands of any and all liability for anything and everything that happens to children and young people when they use them? What about the companies engaged in providing access to the internet, whether via a fixed-line connection or via wi-fi? Then there are the online service providers, such as Google and Facebook, and online vendors such as Amazon and Tesco. What parameters are applicable to them? Where are the boundaries? This whole area has been largely neglected by scholars and the legal profession, and, I am ashamed to say, politicians.

No doubt companies have considered their position, but if they have, they have been slow to publicise their legal advisers’ views. Even if they did, it is likely that such views would take a very particular perspective.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

One of my constituents came to see me after being sexually harassed for years on Facebook. Her identity was stolen and her Facebook pages were photoshopped to damage her reputation. It took her a great deal of time to get any attention from the police or the organisation concerned—in this case, Facebook. Does my hon. Friend think that there should be greater clarity and transparency about what the process and principles should be, and what citizens and consumers can expect from the suppliers such as Facebook, and from the police? Only when a death threat was made against my constituent did the police feel that they could take action. Until that point, they had to advise her to complain to Facebook.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

The case that my hon. Friend cites is an example of exactly why I called for this debate. In that case, Facebook was not taking proper responsibility. It did not have a transparent complaints process that my hon. Friend’s constituent was able to use. It did not have a mechanism for remedying the harm that she had experienced and, frankly, the police are not up to date enough with the online world. That is not true of the whole of the police service—for example, when it comes to child abuse images, the police have quite well-developed policing strategies—but in the case of online bullying, I think they are behind the game.

The fundamental responsibility, in that case, belongs to Facebook, but the police must take more seriously the fact that things happen in the virtual world that they would not tolerate in the real world, and they must ensure that their policies and procedures function appropriately in both. We have not grown up, as it were, and ensured that we have modernised our systems, including those of the police. My big argument is with companies such as Facebook. If they were to take their responsibilities more seriously, my hon. Friend’s constituent would have been much safer, and the problem would perhaps not have got as far as requiring police action.

Some new media companies seem persistently to fail to establish clear values and procedures for handling matters, such as the one that my hon. Friend raised, that can profoundly affect individuals and wider society. In the early days of the internet, that was perhaps understandable to a degree. They were learning; we were all learning. We are, however, no longer in the early days, and now such failure looks more like negligence or lack of concern. Too often, companies seem to struggle to recover a position, by which time a great deal of damage might have been done. I want to establish a new norm, whereby we expect companies, from very early on in their lives, to have an enforceable social responsibility code, which contains a publicly declared process for dealing with objectionable or illegal content.