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.

Covid-19: Arts Sector

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood, talked about the 100,000 freelancers in the creative industry who fall outside the SEISS. I am especially concerned about new graduates who have been recruited into these industries. Those in last year’s intake to the industries were not covered and they have now been joined by another year’s intake who are similarly not covered. Do the Government have any specific plans to help these people?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I can reassure the noble Viscount that we are looking in detail, with HMRC and the Treasury, at a range of reasons why self-employed people may be ineligible. That work is under way and I am assuming that graduates form part of it.

Public Service Broadcasting Online

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I think that the Government are concerned, and my colleagues in the department are working closely with the industry to understand what a sustainable funding model looks like.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

The Ofcom report on prominence recommends that there may need to be new obligations to ensure the continued availability of PSB on-demand content to viewers equivalent to the existing “must offer” and “must carry” rules for PSBs’ traditional channels. What plans are there for the PSBs to be available on a wide range of platforms?

Covid-19: Creative Industries

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am very happy to take back the noble Lord’s point and ensure that this is looked at carefully, as he suggests.

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

Diverse talent going into the creative industry depends so much on educational support. Can the Minister inform the House what percentage of schools have restarted their dance, drama and music classes since they went back earlier this month?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I think I will have to write to the noble Viscount on that point.

Covid-19: Television Licences

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran]

I have the great honour of being the Minister for Loneliness—the only one, I think, in the world. We have recently launched a new campaign trying to address stigma around talking about loneliness. We have announced dedicated funding to combat loneliness both for smaller organisations and for those with a national reach. We have created a new Tackling Loneliness Network, which we hope will bring a real energy to this important issue; we will shortly meet its stakeholders across business, the voluntary sector and the public sector.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

The inexorable rise of the streaming giants and the sharp reduction in the payment of licence fees means that the new funding arrangement for the BBC needs to be publicly discussed. Will the Government reconsider their rejection of the Communications and Digital Select Committee’s recommendation of setting up a BBC funding commission, which would allow this to happen and make the whole process of the future funding of the BBC more transparent?

[Baroness Barran]

The noble Viscount raises an important point about the transparency and suitability of both the funding arrangement and the regulatory framework. The Government are open to considering all these points and look forward to doing so in more detail when we receive Ofcom’s upcoming report, but there is currently no plan to set up a funding commission, as he suggests.

BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a series producer at Raw TV making content for CNN.

PSBs in the UK are under threat as never before.

“The power of British television has essentially moved”


to Los Angeles. Those were the words of Andy Harries, CEO of the makers of “The Crown”, when he gave evidence to the Communications and Digital Committee, of which I am proud to be a member. It is a series made by Netflix, one of the winners in the new world of subscription giants. American broadcasting channels and platforms are pouring money into UK-made content. It is a boom time for the creative industry in this country, but if we want public service broadcasters that reflect the UK back to itself and concentrate on UK news and current affairs, and defy the labour market by moving creative jobs from London to the regions and nations, we have to fight hard to protect them.

They have all been under attack—especially the BBC—from all sides of the political divide for biased programming and reporting. The Culture Secretary said today that the BBC has a “narrow urban outlook” and is “slow to pick up” on recent trends, implicitly questioning its impartiality. Public service broadcasters are empowered by their impartiality. In a digital world in which almost everything is editorialised and social media creates filter bubbles of content to reinforce users’ political view of the world, we need to emphasise the value of mandated impartiality. It means that public service broadcasters are regulated to be transparent and accountable, a powerful bulwark against the continued polarisation subsuming our political discourse.

I too was very glad that Mr Dowden today said that

“the BBC is an institution to be cherished”.

Yet it has been lambasted by the Government. Its financial security is questioned by significant sources threatening to turn it, or at least parts of it, into a subscription service. PSBs have the new BritBox as a small subscription service for archive and there is even talk in the press of them coming together to create a non-subscription UK PSB platform as a one-stop shop for digital audiences, which would be a very good idea. However, for the PSBs to launch themselves against what will soon be 12 US subscription services in the UK at least will be financial and cultural folly. These US-based giants are global, mostly supported by either massive deficit funding or very generous parent companies that can outspend any home-grown rival.

However, the Government are right to question the BBC’s universal licence fee. It has served the corporation well, but it is decreasingly able to fund the organisation properly. Some 37,000 fewer licences were purchased last year and the forecast is for the reduction to continue. As we approach the licence fee interim settlement talks in 2022, it is a good time to start discussing alternative funding models. I am in favour of a progressive household tax, as there is in Germany. It reflects the differing wealth of households and maintains the universality of the BBC’s funding, which is so crucial in allowing it to commission programmes for underserved audiences. Will this model be considered by the Government in their funding talks with the BBC?

The Government are right to recognise that the future of PSBs is online, but it is becoming ever more difficult for online viewers to discover PSB content on digital platforms. Ofcom, in its recent report on PSB prominence, said that changing viewer behaviour in this new era means that without new regulatory safeguards to maintain the prominence of these channels online, audiences will be lost. This will happen quickly and will be costly to reverse. The Government have said they are committed to these recommendations. The fast- changing market means that it is a matter of urgency that this new legislation is brought before Parliament soon, so when might this happen?

I ask the Minister to fully support UK PSBs. Without them, our world-class broadcasting services will be subsumed by the inexorable growth and world march of US streaming giants.

Regulating in a Digital World (Communications Committee Report)

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, for his heroic chairing of this lengthy and complicated inquiry. I also thank the clerk, Theo Pembroke, and the specialist adviser, Professor Murray, for gathering a distinguished array of witnesses and shaping this report, of which I and other members of the committee are justifiably proud.

I want to concentrate my comments tonight on chapter 3, on ethical technology. The committee put some energy into understanding the role of algorithms in the digital world and the problems that might arise from unregulated artificial intelligence. I have been particularly struck by the evidence given by witnesses such as Professor John Naughton, who told us that the wider community, including government and industry, were dazzled by technology. He warned:

“We always have to be prepared to apply to it the standard levels of human scepticism that we apply to everything”.


In the report, we raised the awareness of the many concerns surrounding AI decision-making. The committee responded with recommendation 6, calling on the Information Commissioner’s Office to set out rules for the use of algorithms in accordance with the principles laid out in chapter 2. We also recommended that the ICO publish a code of practice on the use of algorithms.

The GDPR is supposed to ensure that any data processing is transparent, fair, avoids bias and discrimination. The Data Protection Act, passed last year in May, enacts these requirements in English law. Yet, despite the DPA, recent surveys show that people are still concerned about the use of algorithms. They are worried by what kind of data is selected to influence the algorithmic decision, the accuracy of the algorithms being used and whether they are fair and not affected by bias and discrimination.

The ICO’s interim report, Project ExplAIn, published last week, attempts to lay the basis for ethical guidelines in AI decision-making. It explains that there is a distrust by many digital organisations of transparency in AI decisions. They fear it may lead to breaching commercial sensitivities, infringing third-party data and their programmes being gamed by users. However, these concerns need to be set against individuals’ requirements for organisations to give appropriate detailed explanations of AI decision-making. The report suggests that there is space to help bridge this divide and help organisations to foster a culture of informed and responsible approaches to innovation in AI technologies.

This work sounds like a good basis for the ICO to publish draft guidelines on ethical designs in July, with final publication in October. These will go a long way to ensuring that there is improvement in the accountability of AI decision-making. I encourage the Government to ensure that these guidelines are in line with the principles set out in the report. Even so, they will be only guidelines. However well thought out they might be, I fear the digital world will always harbour organisations and individuals who do not want to abide by them.

The GDPR is limited. Article 22 of the GDPR and Section 14 of the Data Protection Act adopt suitable measures to safeguard individuals when using solely automated decisions. This allows data subjects to appeal against an AI decision only when it is fully automated and there is no human involved. However, once human involvement in this decision is determined, the data subject cannot appeal. As many AI decisions are augmented by human intervention, this seems to be a loophole. Do the Government plan to plug this loophole and ensure that relevant legislation is brought forward to deal with any potential problem arising from this?

Ethical design is also relevant to my other great concern, raised in the report in paragraph 82, under the heading “Capturing attention”. It points out that digital companies are driven by the commercial imperative to seek and retain users’ attention. The EU Competition Commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, warns that this can lead to a form of addiction. On Monday, Barnardo’s issued a report expressing concern that children’s early access to electronic devices could lead to both addiction and a loss of key social skills as families spend less time talking to each other. This could cause the children problems with mental health and emotional well-being. The committee’s report anticipates these concerns and recommends that digital service providers, including entertainment and games platforms, record time spent using their service and give users reminders of extended use through pop-up notices.

In the debate on the online harms White Paper on April 30, I said that I was concerned that this problem was not being taken seriously by the Government. The White Paper says that the CMO’s review, which covered online gaming and internet addiction, did not find evidence of a causal relationship between screen-based activities and mental health problems. The White Paper shockingly concludes that the evidence did not support the need for parental guidelines or requirements for companies to behave responsibly in this area.

This lack of action is made particularly serious by the failure to confront the growing problem of gaming addiction, which affects so many young people, especially young men. Policymakers and psychologists across the developed world see this as an issue that needs to be addressed now. However, the White Paper almost ignores it.

In his reply to my April speech, the Minister said:

“I completely agree with what was said about the resistance of the gaming sector, in particular, to engage with this issue”.—[Official Report, 30/4/19; col. 933.]


He gave me his support, for which I was very grateful. It is now six weeks later. Can the Minister give me some assurance that the Government are working to ensure that the gaming industry’s resistance to dealing with gaming addiction will be seriously addressed? Failure to confront this issue quickly and comprehensively will lay the foundations of social and mental problems for generations to come.

Online Harms White Paper

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 30th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I declare an interest as a series producer at Raw TV making content for CNN. I support many of the suggestions in the White Paper, particularly the need to give a duty of care to tech companies to prevent the harms that appear on their platforms. The Communications Committee’s recent report on regulating the internet stated:

“Given the urgency of the need to address online harms, we believe that in the first instance the remit of Ofcom should be expanded to include responsibility for enforcing the duty of care. Ofcom has experience of surveying digital literacy and … experience in assessing inappropriate content”,


and balancing it against free speech. The new regulator recommended in the White Paper is an exciting idea I fully support, but it will take some time to create and action needs to be taken now.

I was reassured by the Minister’s assurances on free speech at the beginning of the debate but I would still like to draw his attention to the wide range of organisations covered by the regulator under the White Paper. Paragraph 4.2 looks at types of online activity, including “hosting”, “sharing” and “discovery of user-generated content”. My concern is that this definition is so widely drawn that it will cover much user-generated content on the websites of broadcasters and newspapers. As the Minister pointed out, these are already regulated by Ofcom, IMPRESS or IPSO. Some of the UGC is also regulated on these publishers’ websites, particularly those that have gone through a process of editorial control. However, a lot of the other comments and UGC on these websites is not covered and is not being looked at under the regime suggested by the White Paper. I suggest that it should be dealt with by extending the remit of the existing regulators, rather than being duplicated by a new regulator.

I am also concerned by some of the definitions of online harms set out in table one in paragraph 2.2—the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, talked about them—particularly those under the column entitled “harms with a less clear definition”. I am worried that unless their definition is carefully focused, they will have a chilling effect on free speech by leaving media companies vulnerable to allegations of breaching their duty of care. One such harm is “disinformation”, which we are all against when it covers the dissemination of lies. I fear that, despite the Government’s laudable intention, a wide definition would allow interest groups and individuals being investigated by reporters to disrupt research and undermine the credibility of news organisations with allegations of fake news. For example, we have seen super-complaints against media outlets reporting on the pharmaceutical industry and exposing the side-effects or addictive qualities of certain drugs. The threat of a digital regulator questioning the original journalism and comments from users, who report the side-effects of these drugs, could stop these investigations taking place.

Another term that worries me is “violent content”, which also comes under the column entitled “less clear definition”. This definition must also be drawn very carefully so that it does not censor reports on demonstrations or terrorism. Even if these reports have been carefully edited, there could still be complaints of incitement to or encouragement of violence. For instance, reporting from the Catalan independence referendum showed many shots of the police violently tackling voters to prevent the banned vote going ahead. In this case, a wide definition of “violent content” could be interpreted to cover these images of extreme police action because they incite violence; they might therefore be taken down. I ask the Minister to draw these definitions carefully so as not to chill free speech. It would be ironic if the legislation coming from this White Paper managed to quash valid and important free speech when it should be stopping a much greater harm.

A completely different area of the White Paper, mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, worries me: the Government’s approach to internet addiction. Paragraph 1.19 of the White Paper states:

“The UK Chief Medical Officers (UK CMOs) commissioned … a systematic evidence review on the impact of social media use on children and young people’s mental health. The review covered … online gaming … and problematic internet use, which is also known as ‘internet addiction’”.


However, paragraph 1.20 states:

“Overall the research did not present evidence of a causal relationship between screen-based activities and mental health problems, but it did find some associations between screen-based activities and … increased risk of anxiety or depression”.


The White Paper concludes that the evidence does not support the need for,

“detailed guidelines for parents or requirements on companies”.

Box 15 suggests that,

“the regulator will continue to support research in this area … and, if necessary, set clear expectations for companies to prevent harm to their users”.

I suggest that the White Paper is kicking the can down the road. Millions of parents in this country will have stories of trying to limit their children’s screen time and the dreadful battles that ensue. Your Lordships only have to read a widely praised book by Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, to understand that addictiveness is built into many platforms, especially social media sites such as Facebook.

Chapter 8 does look at regulators working with tech companies to enforce safe design in the digital world, but I suggest that the Government should specifically ask the regulators to look at internet addiction more thoroughly and, if necessary, force tech companies to change their algorithms and coding so that this addictiveness is reduced. Obviously, tech companies want to encourage users to spend as much time on their platforms as possible, so it is only through direct intervention by the regulator that anything will be done to combat internet addiction.

There is one area of internet addiction that I am particularly concerned about: internet gaming disorder, a condition which at the moment affects many young people, especially young men. There is great concern among addiction specialists about this problem. It has been difficult comprehensively to diagnose the condition because so many different measures have been used, but next month the World Health Organization assembly will be discussing whether gaming disorder should be included in the International Classification of Diseases. Once that happens, doctors and psychologists are convinced that the terrible extent of this problem will become only too clear.

The Minister has only to talk to players of the game “Fortnite” to understand how very clever the company designers have been in making it addictive. Even when the player stops the game it carries on, and when they join there are endless incentives to keep playing. There have been many cases of young people being severely sleep deprived, refusing to leave their rooms and, in some cases, even becoming suicidal. Policymakers in China and South Korea, where this has been a particular problem, recognise that internet game disorder needs to be dealt with. They have started to combat it by working with parents and by engaging with the gaming companies to build in design that limits the amount of time played and, in some cases, cuts off play after a certain period. The White Paper needs to bring together stakeholders and the gaming industry to draw up new regulations right now to mitigate the problem of gaming addiction, along the lines of what is going on in the Far East. I ask the Minister to ensure that any further legislation takes this problem into account. Millions of parents across the country will be grateful and, in the long term, so will their children.

Broadcasting: Public Sector Content

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

As my noble friend knows well, editorial decisions are for the BBC, not the Government.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, the Sky Q box prioritises access to its services over PSB catch-up services. Many television manufacturers have partnered with Netflix to prioritise its services on their channel controllers. Is the Minister not concerned that the PSB digital channels, paid for with public money, are losing out in the battle for channel prominence to the video-on-demand giants?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, I recognise that most of what we have talked about today is for linear services. Of course, a change is taking place: people now have subscriptions for watching on-demand programmes on their internet browsers. This creates a number of challenges and we have agreed that, if Ofcom makes suggestions that take that into account, we will bring legislation forward when the time arises.

Ofcom: RT News Channel

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Monday 28th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

As I have said, RT is regulated by Ofcom, which is independent of government, and I know that it will do its job.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I declare an interest as a series producer for the Smithsonian Channel and CNN. A week after the ruling on RT, the personal details and photographs of journalists working in Russia for the BBC were leaked online. This action was publicly condoned by President Putin’s press office and was seen as an act—indeed, part of a pattern—of intimidation. At a time when the BBC’s Russian service had seen an annual increase of 20% in its audience, what are the Government doing to protect the BBC World Service and the Russian service within the Russian Federation?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The BBC’s charter was renewed for 10 years. Its job is to provide impartial news, and Ofcom regulates those services. It has been given the financial backing to do that—£3.8 million of licence-payers’ money. I believe that an extra £219 million has been provided over the next four years to increase the number of Russian language programmes that the BBC World Service can produce.