Online Hate Speech Debate
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Baroness Teather
Main Page: Baroness Teather (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Teather's debates with the Department for Business and Trade
Online Hate Speech
Baroness Teather Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
My noble friend is right to emphasise that there can be no justification for violence and disorder; there is no place for anti- semitism, either online or offline. As she also rightly noted, Ofcom launched a compliance programme to assess whether the biggest platforms have robust systems and processes to deal with illegal hate and terrorist material under the OSA. As she also pointed out, Ofcom also announced it had secured commitments from X on how quickly it will remove content.
Following the disorder in Belfast, Ofcom wrote to services to remind them of the duties, and the Secretary of State asked it to engage with those companies to understand what action they are taking. We will also take further action; shortly, we will be laying updates in Parliament to bring into effect Ofcom’s strengthened code of practice for crises. We will continue to monitor this, and have said to Ofcom many times that it has our backing to use its powers to enforce the duties that it is responsible for.
Baroness Teather (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that AI-driven recommender algorithms are not neutral channels but active amplifiers of hateful content? What assessment has been made of the systemic risk duties in the Online Safety Act to address algorithmic amplification specifically, rather than individual pieces of content?
Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
The noble Baroness raises important questions about how platforms operate in practice and the interaction between the online and offline worlds. The Government’s document Protecting What Matters looks across many different government departments and sets out what we can do to support cohesive communities. We have said that we need to explore further how to tackle the spread of hateful content online and that we will look at the way in which algorithms can increase the spread of harmful content. We will set out what we will do as a result of those considerations.