Online Harms Consultation

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I understand the concerns raised by the noble Baroness and by the mother to whom she has spoken. There are not many parents in the land who have not had some of her concerns. We are focusing on user-generated content because we believe that will capture the vast majority of pornographic and inappropriate behaviour that children witness. However, as I said in response to an earlier question, we will keep it under review. Our ambition is to keep children safe. Ofcom has business disruption and ISP blocking within its powers, which would prevent children in this country seeing international content.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I too welcome the Government’s White Paper. However, I have two concerns. The first is that the proposed regime of duty of care puts the onus of responsibility for dealing with legal but harmful content on the platforms alone. There seem to be few sanctions on the individual user who creates the harmful content. Surely the new legislation should contain a requirement for the platform’s terms and conditions to contain a regime for it to suspend serial creators of harmful content. My other concern is that, once the platforms have deleted material, it disappears for ever. As a result, information from posts which are found to be criminal, once deleted, is subsequently unavailable for investigators and police who need to access crucial evidence to prosecute crimes. Will the Minister ensure that the legislation includes a requirement for a safe, secure, digital area to be created by platforms where illegal, deleted material can be stored for future legal use?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

In response to the noble Viscount’s second point, I will definitely take back to the department his suggestion about the retention of illegal content. He made a valid point about the duty of care, but companies will need to set out in their terms and conditions what the categories of content are and what acceptable behaviour is on their site. The regulator will expect them to take action against just the sort of people to whom the noble Viscount refers.