Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Viscount Colville of Culross and Baroness Kidron

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th January 2024 Grand Committee

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

If “indispensable” and purely “benefit” are the same, why was the change made on Report in the Commons?

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I was really interested in the introduction of the word “unknown”. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, set out all the different stages and interactions. Does it not incentivise the companies to call back information to this very last stage, and the whole need-for-speed issue then comes into play?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

I will revert first to the questions about the word “indispensable”. As I have said, the Government consulted very widely, and one of the findings of the consultation was that, for a variety of stakeholders, the word “indispensable” reduced the clarity of the legislation.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Viscount Colville of Culross and Baroness Kidron

Committee stage
Thursday 11th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I had the great privilege of serving as a member of this House’s Fraud Act 2006 and Digital Fraud Committee under the excellent chairing of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. She has already told us of the ghastly effects that fraud has on individuals and indeed its adverse effects on businesses. We heard really dramatic statistics, such as when Action Fraud told us that 80% of fraud is cyber enabled.

Many of us here will have been victims of fraud—I have been a victim—or know people who have been victims of fraud. I was therefore very pleased when the Government introduced the fraudulent advertising provisions into the Bill, which will go some way to reducing the prevalence of online fraud. It seems to me that it requires special attention, which is what these amendments should do.

We heard in our inquiry about the problems that category 1 companies had in taking down fraudulent advertisements quickly. Philip Milton, the public policy manager at Meta, told us that it takes between 24 and 48 hours to review possibly harmful content after it has been flagged to the company. He recognised that, due to the deceptive nature of fraudulent advertising, Meta’s systems do not always recognise that advertising is fraudulent and, therefore, take-down rates would be variable. That is one of the most sophisticated tech platforms—if it has difficulties, just imagine the difficulty that other companies have in both recognising and taking down fraudulent advertising.

Again and again, the Bill recognises the difficulties that platforms have in systematising the protections provided in the Bill. Fraud has an ever-changing nature and is massively increasing—particularly so for fraudulent advertising. It is absolutely essential that the highest possible levels of transparency are placed upon the tech companies to report their response to fraudulent advertising. Both Ofcom and users need to be assured that not only do the companies have the most effective reporting systems but, just as importantly, they have the most effective transparency to check how well they are performing.

To do this, the obligations on platforms must go beyond the transparency reporting requirements in the Bill. These amendments would ensure that they include obligations to provide information on incidence of fraud advertising, in line with other types of priority illegal content. These increased obligations are part of checking the effectiveness of the Bill when it comes to being implemented.

The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, told us on the fifth day of Committee, when taking about the risk-assessment amendments she had tabled:

“They are about ensuring transparency to give all users confidence”.—[Official Report, 9/5/23; col. 1755.]


Across the Bill, noble Lords have repeatedly stated that there needs to be a range of ways to judge how effectively the protections provided are working. I suggest to noble Lords that these amendments are important attempts to help make the Bill more accountable and provide the data to future-proof the harms it is trying to deal with. As we said in the committee report:

“Without sufficient futureproofing, technology will most likely continue to create new opportunities for fraudsters to target victims”.


I ask the Minister to at least look at some of these amendments favourably.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I shall say very briefly in support of these amendments that in 2017, the 5Rights Foundation, of which I am the chair, published the Digital Childhood report, which in a way was the thing that put the organisation on the map. The report looked at the evolving capacity of children through childhood, what technology they were using, what happened to them and what the impact was. We are about to release the report again, in an updated version, and one of the things that is most striking is the introduction of fraud into children’s lives. At the point at which they are evolving into autonomous people, when they want to buy presents for their friends and parents on their own, they are experiencing what the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, expressed as embarrassment, loss of trust and a sense of deserting confidence—I think that is probably the phrase. So I just want to put on the record that this is a problem for children also.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Viscount Colville of Culross and Baroness Kidron

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I support Amendment 44. I am pleased that, as part of the new triple shield, the Government have introduced Clause 12 on “User empowerment duties”, which allow users to protect themselves, not just from abusive posts from other users but from whole areas of content. In the Communications and Digital Committee’s inquiry, we had plenty of evidence from organisations representing minorities and people with special characteristics who are unable adequately to protect themselves from the hate they receive online. I am glad that subsections (10) to (12) recognise specific content and users with special characteristics who are targets of abuse and need to be able to protect themselves, but subsection (3) requests that these features should be

“designed to effectively … reduce the likelihood of the user encountering content”

they want to avoid. I am concerned that “effectively” will be interpreted subjectively by platforms in scope and that each will interpret it differently.

At the moment, it will not be possible for Ofcom to assess how thoroughly the platforms have been providing these empowerment tools of protection for users. If the features are to work, there must be an overview of how effective they are being and how well they are working. When the former Secretary of State, Michelle Donelan, was asked about this, she said that there was nothing in this clause to pin an assessment on. It seems to me that the lists in Clause 12 create plenty of criteria on which to hang an assessment.

The new duties in Clause 12 provide for control tools for users against very specific content that is abusive or incites hatred on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sex, gender reassignment or sexual orientation. However, this list is not exhaustive. There will inevitably be areas of content for which users have not been given blocking tools, including pornography, violent material and other material that is subject to control in the offline world.

Not only will the present list for such tools need to be assessed for its thoroughness in allowing users to protect themselves from specific harms, but surely the types of harm from which they need to protect themselves will change over time. Ofcom will need regularly to assess where these harms are and make sure that service providers regularly update their content-blocking tools. Without such an assessment, it will be hard for Ofcom and civil society to understand what the upcoming concerns are with the tools.

The amendment would provide a transparency obligation, which would demand that service providers inform users of the risks present on the platform. Surely this is crucial when users are deciding what to protect themselves from.

The assessment should also look for unintended restrictions on freedom of expression created by the new tools. If the tools are overprotective, they could surely create a bubble and limit users’ access to information that they might find useful. For example, the user might want to block material about eating disorders, but the algorithm might interpret that to mean limiting the user’s access to content on healthy lifestyles or nutrition content. We are also told that the algorithms do not understand irony and humour. When the filters are used to stop content that is abusive or incites hatred on the basis of users’ particular characteristics, they might also remove artistic, humorous or satirical content.

Repeatedly, we are told that the internet creates echo chambers, where users read only like-minded opinions. These bubbles can create an atmosphere where freedom of expression is severely limited and democracy suffers. A freedom of expression element to the assessment would also, in these circumstances, be critical. We are told that the tech platforms often do not know what their algorithms do and, not surprisingly, they often evolve beyond their original intentions. Assessments on the tools demanded by Clause 12 need to be carefully investigated to ensure that they are keeping up to date with the trends of abuse on the internet but also for the unintended consequences they might create, curbing freedom of expression.

Throughout the Bill, there is a balancing act between freedom of expression and protection from abuse. The user empowerment tools are potentially very powerful, and neither the service providers, the regulators nor the Government know what their effects will be. It is beholden upon the Government to introduce an assessment to check regularly how the user empowerment duties are working; otherwise, how can they be updated, and how can Ofcom discover what content is being unintentionally controlled? I urge the Minister, in the name of common sense, to ensure that these powerful tools unleashed by the Bill will not be misused or become outdated in a fast-changing digital world.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for his words—I thought I was experiencing time travel there—and am sympathetic to many of the issues that he has raised, although I think that some of the other amendments in the group tackle those issues in a slightly different way.

I support Amendments 44 and 158 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford. Requiring a post-rollout assessment to ensure that the triple shield acts as we are told it will seems to be a classic part of any regulatory regime that is fit for purpose: it needs to assess whether the system is indeed working. The triple shield is an entirely new concept, and none of the burgeoning regulatory systems around the world is taking this approach, so I hope that both the Government and Ofcom welcome this very targeted and important addition to the Bill.

I will also say a few words about Amendments 154 and 218. It seems to me that, in moving away from legal but harmful—which as a member of the pre-legislative committee I supported, under certain conditionality that has not been met, but none the less I did support it—not enough time and thought have been given to the implications of that. I do not understand, and would be grateful to the Minister if he could help me understand, how Ofcom is to determine whether a company has met its own terms and conditions—and by any means, not only by the means of a risk assessment.

I want to make a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Healy, made the other day—but I want to make it again. Taking legal but harmful out and having no assessment of whether a company has met its general safety duties leaves the child safety duties as an island. They used to be something that was added on to a general system of safety; now they are the first and only port of call. Again, because of the way that legal but harmful fell out of the Bill, I am not sure whether we have totally understood how the child risk assessments sit without a generally cleaned up or risk-assessed digital environment.

Finally, I will speak in support of Amendment 160, which would have Ofcom say what “adequate and appropriate” terms are. To a large degree, that is my approach to the problem that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, spoke about: let Parliament and the regulator determine what we want to see—as was said on the data protection system, that is how it is—and let us have minimum standards that we can rightly expect, based on UK law, as the noble Lord suggested.

I am not against the triple shield per se, but it radically replaced an entire regime of assessment, enforcement and review. I think that some of the provisions in this group really beg the Government’s attention, in order to make sure that there are no gaping holes in the regime.