Online Safety Bill

Andrew Percy Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I, too, regret the short time we have to debate this important Bill this evening. This is much-needed legislation and I agree with many of the comments already made.

These platforms have been warned over the years to take action yet have failed to do so. Their online platforms have remained a safe space for racism, holocaust denial, homophobia, conspiracy theories and general bullying. One of the best things I ever did for my mental health was to leave Twitter, but for many young people that is not an option as it cuts them off from access to their friends and much of what is their society. So I am proud that the Government are taking action on this but, as the Minister knows from my meetings with him alongside the Antisemitism Policy Trust, there are ways in which I think the Bill can be improved.

First, on small, high-harm platforms, I pay tribute to the Antisemitism Policy Trust, which has been leading the charge. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) said, everybody knows Facebook, Twitter and YouTube but few people are aware of a lot of the smaller platforms such as BitChute, 8kun—previously 8chan—or Minds. These small platforms are a haven for white supremacists, incels, conspiracy theorists and antisemites; it is where they gather, converse and share and spew their hate.

An example of that is a post from the so-called anti-Jewish meme repository on the platform Gab which showed a picture of goblins, in this instance the usual grotesque representation of those age-old Jewish physical stereotypes, alongside the phrase, “Are you ready to die in another Jewish war, Goyim?” That is the sort of stuff that is on these small platforms, and it is not rare; we see it all over. Indeed, many of these small platforms exist purely to spew such hate, but at present, despite the many measures in the Bill that I support, these sites will be sifted by Ofcom into two major categories based on their size and functionality. I met the Minister to discuss this point recently.

The Government have not so far been enthusiastic about risk being a determinant factor for fear that too many of the small platforms would be drawn into scope. That is why I hope that as this Bill progresses the Minister will consider a small amendment to enable Ofcom to have powers to draw the small but high-harm platforms, based on its assessments—the so-called super-complaints that we have heard about or other means— into the category 1 status. That would add a regulatory oversight and burden on those platforms. This is all about putting pressure on them—requiring them to go through more hurdles to frustrate their business model of hate, and making it as uncomfortable as possible for them. I hope the Minister will look at that as the Bill progresses.

I am very short of time but I also want to raise the issue of search, which the Minister knows I have raised previously. We in the all-party group against antisemitism found examples in Alexa and other voice-activated search platforms where the responses that come back are deeply offensive and racist. I understand that the relationship with the user in entering into a search is different from having an account with a particular social media platform, but these search engines are providing access to all sorts of grotesque racist and misogynistic content and I hope we can look at that as the Bill progresses.

Online Safety Bill

Andrew Percy Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Commons Chamber

I must put on record my support for amendments 11 and 12, tabled by the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright). In Committee, we heard multiple examples of racist, extremist and other harmful publishers, from holocaust deniers to white supremacists, who would stand to benefit from the recognised news publisher exemption as it stands, either overnight or by making minor administrative changes. As long as the exemption protects antisemites and extremists, it is not fit for purpose. That much should be clear to all of us. In Committee, in response to an amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater), the then Minister promised a concession so that Russia Today would be excluded from the recognised news publisher exemption. I welcome the Minister’s comments at the Dispatch Box today to confirm that. I am pleased that the Government have promised to exclude sanctioned news bodies such as Russia Today, but their approach does not go far enough. Disinformation outlets rarely have the profile of Russia Today.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

While the shadow Minister is on the subject of exemptions for antisemites, will she say where the Opposition are on the issue of search? Search platforms and search engines provide some of the most appalling racist, Islamophobic and antisemitic content.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, who is absolutely right. In Committee, we debated at length the impact search engines have, and they should be included in the Bill’s categorisation of difficult issues. In one recent example on a search engine, the imagery that comes up when we search for desk ornaments is utterly appalling and needs to be challenged and changed. If we are to truly tackle antisemitism, racism and extremist content online, then the provisions need to be included in the Bill, and journalistic exemptions should not apply to this type of content. Often, they operate more discretely and are less likely to attract sanctions. Furthermore, any amendment will provide no answer to the many extremist publishers who seek to exploit the terms of the exemption. For those reasons, we need to go further.

The amendments are not a perfect or complete solution. Deficiencies remain, and the amendments do not address the fact that the exemption continues to exclude dozens of independent local newspapers around the country on the arbitrary basis that they have no fixed address. The Independent Media Association, which represents news publishers, describes the news publisher criteria as

“punishing quality journalism with high standards”.

I hope the Minister will reflect further on that point. As a priority, we need to ensure that the exemption cannot be exploited by bad actors. We must not give a free pass to those propagating racist, misogynistic or antisemitic harm and abuse. By requiring some standards of accountability for news providers, however modest, the amendments are an improvement on the Bill as drafted. In the interests of national security and the welfare of the public, we must support the amendments.

Finally, I come to a topic that I have spoken about passionately in this place on a number of occasions and that is extremely close to my heart: violence against women and girls. Put simply, in their approach to the Bill the Government are completely failing and falling short in their responsibilities to keep women and girls safe online. Labour has been calling for better protections for some time now, yet still the Government are failing to see the extent of the problem. They have only just published an initial indicative list of priority harms to adults, in a written statement that many colleagues may have missed. While it is claimed that this will add to scrutiny and debate, the final list of harms will not be on the face of the Bill but will included in secondary legislation after the Bill has received Royal Assent. Non-designated content that is harmful will not require action on the part of service providers, even though by definition it is still extremely harmful. How can that be acceptable?

Many campaigners have made the case that protections for women and girls are not included in the draft Bill at all, a concern supported by the Petitions Committee in its report on online abuse. Schedule 7 includes a list of sexual offences and aggravated offences, but the Government have so far made no concessions here and the wider context of violence against women and girls has not been addressed. That is why I urge the Minister to carefully consider our new clause 3, which seeks to finally name violence against women and girls as a priority harm. The Minister’s predecessor said in Committee that women and girls receive “disproportionate” levels of abuse online. The Minister in his new role will likely be well briefed on the evidence, and I know this is an issue he cares passionately about. The case has been put forward strongly by hon. Members on all sides of the House, and the message is crystal clear: women and girls must be protected online, and we see this important new clause as the first step.

Later on, we hope to see the Government move further and acknowledge that there must be a code of practice on tackling violence against women and girls content online.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Fletcher (Don Valley) (Con)]

I rise to speak on amendments 50, 51 and 55, and I share the free speech concerns that I think lie behind amendment 151. As I said in Committee to the previous Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), who knew this Bill inside out—it was amazing to watch him do it—I have deep concerns about how the duty on “legal but harmful” content will affect freedom of speech. I do not want people to be prevented from saying what they think. I am known for saying what I think, and I believe others should be allowed the same freedom, offline and online. What is harmful can be a subjective question, and many of us in this House might have different answers. When we start talking about restricting content that is perfectly legal, we should be very careful.

This Bill is very complex and detailed, as I know full well, having been on the Committee. I support the Bill—it is needed—but when it comes to legal but harmful content, we need to make sure that free speech is given enough protection. We have to get the right balance, but clause 19 does not do that. It says only that social media companies have

“a duty to have regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law.”

There is no duty to do anything about freedom of speech; it just says, “You have to think about the importance of it”. That is not enough.

I know that the Bill does not state that social media companies have to restrict content—I understand that—but in the real world that is what will happen. If the Government define certain content as harmful, no social media company will want to be associated with it. The likes of Meta will want to be seen to get tough on legally defined harmful content, so of course it will be taken down or restricted. We have to counterbalance that instinct by putting stronger free speech duties in the Bill if we insist on it covering legal but harmful.

The Government have said that we cannot have stronger free speech obligations on private companies, and, in general, I agree with that. However, this Bill puts all sorts of other obligations on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, because they are not like other private companies. These companies and their chief executive officers are household words all around the world, and their power and influence is incredible. In 2021, Facebook’s revenue was $117 billion, which is higher than the GDP—

[Andrew Percy]

Is that not exactly why there has to be action on legal but harmful content? The cross-boundary, cross-national powers of these organisations mean that we have to insist that they take action against harm, whether lawful or unlawful. We are simply asking those organisations to risk assess and ensure that appropriate warnings are provided, just as they are in respect of lots of harms in society; the Government require corporations and individuals to risk assess those harms and warn about them. The fact that these organisations are so transnational and huge is absolutely why we must require them to risk assess legal but harmful content.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Percy]

This has been an interesting debate on a Bill I have followed closely. I have been particularly struck by some of the arguments that claim the Bill is an attack on freedom of speech. I always listen intently to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and to the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), but I think they are wrong in the conclusions they have reached about legal but harmful content. Indeed, many of the criticisms that the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West made of the various platforms were criticisms of the present situation, and that is exactly why I think this legislation will improve the position. However, those Members raised important points that I am sure will be responded to. I have also been a strong advocate of the inclusion of small but high-harm platforms, as the Minister and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), both know—we have all had those discussions.

In the time I have, I want to focus principally on the issue of search and on new clauses 9 and 10, which stand in my name. As the shadow Minister has highlighted, last week we were—like many people in this place, perhaps—sent the most remarkable online prompt, which was to simply search Google for the words “desk ornament”. The top images displayed in response to that very mundane and boring search were of swastikas, SS bolts and other Nazi memorabilia presented as desk ornaments. Despite there having been awareness of that fact since, I believe, the previous weekend, and even though Google is making millions of pounds in seconds from advertising, images promoting Nazism were still available for all to see as a result of those searches.

When he gave evidence to the Bill Committee recently, Danny Stone, the Antisemitism Policy Trust’s very capable chief executive, pointed out that Amazon’s Alexa had used just one comment posted by one individual on Amazon’s website to inform potentially millions of users who cared to ask that George Soros was responsible for all of the world’s evils, and that Alexa had used a comment from another website to inform those who searched for it that the humanitarian group the White Helmets was an illicit operation founded by a British spy.

As we have seen throughout the covid pandemic, similar results come up in response to other searches, such as those around vaccines and covid. The Antisemitism Policy Trust has previously demonstrated that Microsoft Bing, the platform that lies behind Alexa, was directing users to hateful searches such as “Jews are bastards” through autocompletes, as well as pointing people to homophobic stories. We even had the sickening situation of Google’s image carousel highlighting Jewish baby strollers in response to people searching for portable barbecues.

Our own Alexa searches highlighted the issue some time ago. Users who asked Alexa “Do Jews control the media?” were responded to with a quote from a website called Jew Watch—that should tell Members all they need to know about the nature of the platform—saying that Jews control not only the media, but the financial system too. The same problem manifests itself across search platforms in other languages, as we highlighted not so long ago with Siri in Spanish. When asked, “Do the Jews control the media?” she responds with an article that states that Jews do indeed control international media. This goes on and on, irrespective of whether the search is voice or text-based.

The largest search companies in the world are falling at the first hurdle when it comes to risk assessing for harms on their platform. That is the key point when we ask for lawful but harmful content to be responded to. It is about risk assessment—requiring companies that do not respect borders, operate globally and are in many ways more powerful than Governments to risk assess and warn about lawful but deeply harmful content that all of us in the House would be disgusted by.

At present, large traditional search services including Google and Microsoft Bing, and voice search assistants including Alexa and Siri, will be exempted from having to risk assess their systems and address harm to adults, despite the fact that other large user-to-user services will have to do so. How can it be possible that Google does not have to act, when Meta—Facebook—and Twitter do? That does not seem consistent with the aims of the Bill.

There is a lot more that I would like to have said on the Bill. I welcome the written ministerial statement last week in relation to small but high-harm platforms. I hope that as the Bill progresses to the other place, we can look again at search. Some of the content generated is truly appalling, even though it may very well be considered lawful.

[Feryal Clark (Enfield North) (Lab)]

I join everyone else in the House in welcoming the Minister to his place.

I rise to speak in support of amendments 15 and 16. At the core of this issue is the first duty of any Government: to keep people safe. Too often in debates, which can become highly technical, we lose sight of that fact. We are not just talking about technology and regulation; we are talking about real lives and real people. It is therefore incumbent on all of us in this place to have that at the forefront of our minds when discussing such legislation.

Labelling social media as the wild west of today is hardly controversial—that is plain and obvious for all to see. There has been a total failure on the part of social media companies to make their platforms safe for everyone to use, and that needs to change. Regulation is not a dirty word, but a crucial part of ensuring that as the internet plays a bigger role in every generation’s lives, it meets the key duty of keeping people safe. It has been a decade since we first heard of this Bill, and almost four years since the Government committed to it, so I am afraid that there is nothing even slightly groundbreaking about the Bill as it is today. We have seen progress being made in this area around the world, and the UK is falling further and further behind.

Of particular concern to me is the impact on children and young people. As a mother, I worry for the world that my young daughter will grow up in, and I will do all I can in this place to ensure that children’s welfare is at the absolute forefront. I can see no other system or institution that children are allowed to engage with that has such a wanting lack of safeguards and regulation. If there was a faulty slide in a playground, it would be closed off and fixed. If a sports field was covered with glass or litter, that would be reported and dealt with. Whether we like it or not, social media has become the streets our children hang out in, the world they grow up in and the playground they use. It is about time we started treating it with the same care and attention.

There are far too many holes in the Bill that allow for the continued exploitation of children. Labour’s amendments 15 and 16 tackle the deeply troubling issue of “breadcrumbing”. That is where child abusers use social networks to lay trails to illegal content elsewhere online and share videos of abuse edited to fall within content moderation guidelines. The amendments would give the regulators powers to tackle that disgusting practice and ensure that there is a proactive response to it. They would bring into regulatory scope the millions of interactions with accounts that actively enable child abuse. Perhaps most importantly, they would ensure that social media companies tackled child abuse at the earliest possible stage.

In its current form, even with Government amendment 14, the Bill merely reinforces companies’ current focus only on material that explicitly reaches the criminal threshold. That is simply not good enough. Rather than acknowledging that issue, Government amendments 71 and 72 let social media companies off the hook. They remove the requirement for companies to apply their terms and conditions “consistently”. That was addressed very eloquently by the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) and the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who highlighted that Government amendment 14 simply does not go far enough.

Online Safety Bill

Andrew Percy Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I know how unpopular it can be at 9 o’clock at night to detain the House further. However, I did speak on previous stages of the Bill, and I want to speak about a couple of issues this evening.

I thank the Secretary of State for her meetings with me and members of some of our Jewish community groups about the change to “legal but harmful”. She knows we were not particularly happy when we heard the first iteration of what was proposed, but I think we have got to a position where Jewish community groups have been able to row in behind this Bill. It may be imperfect in some ways, but it is certainly a lot better than the starting point we were coming from. I also pay tribute to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), who has also worked very hard, particularly on the issue of antisemitism. As I say, I thank the Secretary of State for getting us into a position, through her hard work, where we and groups such as the Centre for Countering Digital Hate are very supportive of the Bill.

I and the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) were in Washington with the Antisemitism Policy Trust just before Christmas, when we met Members of Congress and Senators, who told us how much this piece of legislation was very much world-leading and very much an indicator for where they intend or would like to get to, although things are little bit more complicated there because of the constitutional issues. This is indeed a world-beating piece of legislation. As with all legislation, it is imperfect, but it is a piece of legislation of which we can still be very proud.

I am pleased that we have dispensed with some of the nonsense about free speech arguments, because some of those put forward were nonsense. There is a misunderstanding by some people—I have to say, sadly, on my side of politics—that free speech is presented as an ability to say anything without consequences, but that is not what free speech is. We should always remember that there are consequences to some of the things we say, and there should be consequences.

I want to speak briefly about the issue of conspiracy theories and this legislation, particularly antisemitic conspiracy theories. I am sorry to detain the House, but I do think this is an important issue at the moment, given that we have had a Member of this House in recent times promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. The juxtaposition of covid conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories with antisemitism is, I am afraid, one that we see all too often in the online space. The Bill will do something to address that, but we have to do more.

I want to give a couple of examples in the few minutes I have of what coronavirus conspiracy theories and antisemitism have looked like. We have had huge amounts of online material produced that suggests everything from “covid is not real and is a Jewish conspiracy” to “covid is real and was designed and spread by Jews”. We have had a celebration of Jewish deaths through conspiracy theories, and even the promotion of conspiracy theories around vaccines and the role of Jews. The Antisemitism Policy Trust, and the CST in its briefing “Covid, conspiracies & Jew-hate”, highlight the anti-vaccine element of antisemitism. We have seen gratuitous online content of Jews being presented as scientists holding syringes, and Jews who work as senior executives in various pharmaceutical companies have been targeted because of their faith. We have even seen the menorah presented with lots of syringes on it. All that is deeply antisemitic, conspiracy theory hate, based around the vaccine and the antivaxxer movement.

A colleague of ours recently found himself in trouble, quite rightly—I praise our Chief Whip for acting so swiftly on this—for promoting a tweet that likened the covid vaccine to the holocaust. Although that in and of itself is not necessarily antisemitic, we have seen anti-covid groups using gratuitous holocaust imagery in their campaign against the vaccines and the promotion of other covid conspiracies. It is not a very big step from promoting a holocaust image to entering into deep and dangerous antisemitism, and I am afraid that a lot of the anti-covid and anti-vaxxer movement find themselves in that space. It is vital that people in government and across this House call that nonsense out for what it is, which is dangerous, anti-science crap.

The Bill will go some way to addressing that, particularly the elements that are related to antisemitism and illegal content, but we need to do a lot more in the future. I am a big supporter of the Bill, and pay particular tribute to the Secretary of State, her officials and ministerial team for getting it to this point, but there will be a lot more to do. I am afraid this hate is there and is not going away. Since I called out what happened last week my inbox has exploded with all sorts of conspiracy theory nonsense, threats, and antisemitic emails and calls to the office. I know the Chief Whip has suffered the same. There is a lot more to do. I hope I have not detained the House for too long, and I support the Bill. It is a good start, it is world-leading, but we will have to come back to the issue as technology develops, because there will be more to do in this space. I end by associating myself with the calls with regards to advertising. The amount of advertising money in some of these hate sites is staggering and frightening, and we will have to do more on that.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

Ordered,

That Mrs Heather Wheeler be appointed to the Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, until the end of the present Parliament, in pursuance of paragraph 1(d) of Schedule 3 to the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009, as amended. —(Penny Mordaunt.)