Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I begin with a brief refection on my 26 years or thereabouts on the internet, which saw me hand-coding my first website in 1999 and sees me now, I believe, as one of the few Members of your Lordships’ House with a TikTok account. I have had a lot of good times on the internet; I have learned a lot, made a lot of friends and built political communities that stretch around the world in ways that were entirely impossible before it arrived. That tells you, perhaps, that I think we should be careful in this debate about the diagnosis of the source of undoubted issues that the Bill seeks to address. It appears that some would like to wave a magic wand and shut it all down if they could—to return to some imagined golden age of the past, perhaps when your Lordships’ House was harrumphing loudly about the damaging effects of this new-fangled television.

While we are talking about young people, I have serious questions about the capacity of this House to engage with this debate. Yes, we did well in getting online during lockdown, even if we sometimes caught a glimpse of the grandchildren or great-grandchildren pressing the buttons so that their elders could speak in the House. They are the same generation; we are looking to take control over what they are doing right now. I invite noble Lords to keep that in mind as this debate proceeds.

I put it very seriously to your Lordships’ House that before we proceed further, we should invite a youth parliament into this very Chamber. We should listen to that debate on this Bill very carefully. On few subjects is the obvious need for votes at 16, or even younger, more obvious—the need for the experts by experience to be heard. They have the capacity to be the agents and to shape their own world, if their elders get out of the road.

I have no doubt that those young people would tell us that they suffer harm on the internet, with awful violent pornography and dangerous encouragements to self-harm and suicide. There need to be protections, while acknowledging that young people cannot be walled off into a little garden of their own. But I am sure young people would also say we need to address much wider issues, to build resilience and provide an education that encourages critical thinking rather than polished regurgitation of the facts. I would associate myself with the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, among others, about the need for media education. But how do we encourage critical thinking about the media when we are also encouraging regurgitation of the right results for the exam—that you have to repeat these 10 points? The two things do not fit together.

In a stairwell discussion with a Member of your Lordships’ House who is not a digital native—and I point out that nobody in this debate is a digital native—but is certainly someone with much experience over decades, they reflected on the early hopes of the internet for democracy, for access to information and for community. They suggested it was inevitably a lost age; I do not agree. Political decisions and choices allowed a handful of multinational companies—mostly tax dodging, unaccountable to shareholders, now immensely rich—to dominate. That is not unique to the internet; that is what the political decisions of neoliberalism over the past decades have done to our food supplies, our retailing systems, our energy, our medicines and, increasingly, our education system. Far right, misogynistic, racist, homophobic and transphobic voices have been allowed to take hold and operate without challenge in our mainstream media, our communities, our politics and on the internet.

Financial fraud is a huge problem on the internet and, hopefully, this Bill might address it; but financial fraud and corruption is a huge problem across our financial sector, as indeed is the all-pervading one of gambling. The internet is a mirror to our society, as well as a theatre of interaction. The idea that we can fix our societies by fixing the internet is a fallacy; for many with commercial and political interests, it is a comfortable one that deflects political challenges they would rather not face.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord for the intervention. For those noble Lords who are not following the numbers, Amendment 285, which I support, would prevent general monitoring. Apart from anything else, I am worried about equivalence and other issues in relation to general monitoring. Apart from a principled position against it, I think to be explicit is helpful.

Ofcom needs to be very careful, and that is what Amendment 190 sets out. It asks whether the alternatives have been thought about, whether the conditions have been thought about, and whether the potential impact has been thought about. That series of questions is essential. I am probably closer to the community that wants to see more powers and more interventions, but I would like that to be in a very monitored and regulated form.

I thank the noble Lord for his contribution. Some of these amendments must be supported because it is worrying for us as a country to have—what did the noble Lord call it?—ambiguity about whether something is possible. I do not think that is a useful ambiguity.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendment 203 in this group, along with those of the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones, Lord Strathcarron and Lord Moylan. I shall speak in general terms about the nature of the group, because it is most usefully addressed through the fundamental issues that arise. I sincerely thank the noble Lord, Lord Allan, for his careful and comprehensive introduction to the group, which gave us a strong foundation. I have crossed out large amounts of what I had written down and will try not to repeat, but rather pick up some points and angles that I think need to be raised.

As was alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, this debate and the range of these amendments shows that the Bill is currently extremely deficient and unclear in this area. It falls to this Committee to get some clarity and cut-through to see where we could end up and change where we are now.

I start by referring to a briefing, which I am sure many noble Lords have received, from a wide range of organisations, including Liberty, Big Brother Watch, the Open Rights Group, Article 19, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reset and Fair Vote. It is quite a range of organisations but very much in the human rights space, particularly the digital human rights space. The introduction of the briefing includes a sentence that gets to the heart of why many of us have received so many emails about this element of the Bill:

“None of us want to feel as though someone is looking over our shoulder when we are communicating”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am glad I gave the noble Baroness the opportunity for that intervention. I have a reasonable level of technical knowledge—I hand-coded my first website in 1999, so I go back some way—but given the structures we are dealing with, I question the capacity and whether it is possible to create the tools and say they will be used only in a certain way. If you break the door open, anyone can walk through the door—that is the situation we are in.

As the noble Lord, Lord Allan, said, this is a crucial part of the Bill that was not properly examined and worked through in the other place. I will conclude by saying that it is vital we have a full and proper debate in this area. I hope the Minister can reassure us that he and the department will continue to be in dialogue with noble Lords as the Bill goes forward.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 205 in my name, but like other noble Lords I will speak about the group as a whole. After the contributions so far, not least from the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, there is not a great deal left for me to add. However, I will say that we have to understand that privacy is contextual. At one extreme, I know the remarks I make in your Lordships’ House are going to be carefully preserved and cherished; for several centuries, if not millennia, people will be able to see what I said today. If I am in my sitting room, having a private conversation, I expect that not to be heard by somebody, although at the same time I am dimly aware that there might be somebody on the other side of the wall who can hear what I am saying. Similarly, I am aware that if I use the telephone, it is possible that somebody is listening to the call. Somebody may have been duly authorised to do so by reference to a tribunal, having taken all the lawful steps necessary in order to listen to that call, because there are reasons that have persuaded a competent authority that the police service, or whatever, listening to my telephone call has a reason to do so, to avoid public harm or meet some other justified objective agreed on through legislation.

Here, we are going into a sphere of encryption where one assumes privacy and feels one is entitled to some privacy. However, it is possible that the regulator could at any moment step in and demand records from the past—records up to that point—without the intervention of a tribunal, as far as I can see, or without any reference to a warrant or having to explain to anybody their basis for doing so. They would be able to step in and do it. This is the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle: unlike the telephone conversation, where it does not have to be everyone, everywhere, all the time—they are listening to just me and the person to whom I am talking—the provider has to have the capacity to go back, get all those records and be able to show Ofcom what it is that Ofcom is looking for. To do that requires them to change their encryption model fundamentally. It is not really possible to get away from everyone, everywhere, all the time, because the model has to be changed in order to do it.

That is why this is such an astonishing thing for the Government to insert in this Bill. I can understand why the security services and so forth want this power, and this is a vehicle to achieve something they have been trying to achieve for a long time. But there is very strong public resistance to it, and it is entirely understood, and to do it in this space is completely at odds with the way in which we felt it appropriate to authorise listening in on private conversations in the past—specific conversations, with the authority of a tribunal. To do it this way is a very radical change and one that needs to be considered almost apart from the Bill, not slipped in as a mere clause and administrative adjunct to it.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have attached my name to Amendment 25 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and I rise to speak primarily to that. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and agree with every word she has just said. I will draw on two elements of my personal history that she reminded me of. As a journalist in country Australia in the early 1990s—pre-internet days—I worked the night shift, and at least once a week we would get a frantic phone call from a parent calling on behalf of a child along the lines of, “Do you know anything about dolphins?” A school project had just been discovered that needed to be done by the next morning, and the source of information that the parent thought of was, “The local newspaper—they might be able to tell us something!” I am slightly ashamed to say that we had a newspaper to get out and we very quickly told them to go away, so we were not a good source of information in that case. Most people in your Lordships’ House will remember—but most young people will have no recollection of—a time when there was little access to information outside the hours when the library was open or you could go to a bookshop. There were literally no other sources available. We have to consider this amendment in the light of that.

I also want to slightly disagree with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, on the previous group. He suggested that it was only with the arrival of phones that the internet became primarily or significantly a children’s thing. The best I can date it is that either in 1979 or 1980 I was playing “Lemonade Stand” on one of the early Apples. This might have been considered to be a harmful game from some political perspectives, given that it very much encouraged a capitalist mindset, profit taking and indeed the Americanisation of culture—but none the less that was back in 1980, if not 1979, and children were there. If we look back over the history of the internet, we see that some of the companies started out with young people, under the age of 18 in some cases, who have been at the forefront of innovation and development of what we now think of as our social media or internet world. This is the children’s world as much as it is the adults’ world, and that is the reality.

I will pick up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme, who suggested that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was only a guide to government and not law. It is a great pity that the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, is not in her place, because she is far better equipped to deal with this angle than I am. But I will give it a go. Children’s rights are humans’ rights. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most backed and most ratified rights convention—

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

I appreciate what the noble Baroness is saying, but I made a slightly different point. I am suggesting not that what is there was not meant to be law but that it was not written in a form which should be simply directly put in as legislation. It was not drafted in that format on that basis, which is why a direct graft on to a domestic piece of legislation is not quite the way to do it. It is about using that as guidance as to what should be in the law, rather than simply a direct incorporation.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the noble Lord for his clarification, although, speaking not as a lawyer, my understanding is that a human right is a legal right; it is a law—a most fundamental right. In addition, every country in the world has ratified this except for the United States—which is another issue. I also point out that it is particularly important that we include reference to children’s rights in this Bill, given the fact that we as a country currently treat our children very badly. There is a huge range of issues, and we should have a demonstration in this and every Bill that the rights of children are respected across all aspects of British society.

I will not get diverted into a whole range of those, but I point noble Lords to a report to the United Nations from the Equality and Human Rights Commission in February this year that highlighted a number of ways in which children’s rights are not being lived up to in the UK. The most relevant part of this letter that the EHRC sent to the UN stresses that it is crucial to preserve children’s rights to accessible information and digital connectivity. That comes from our EHRC.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Russell, who referred to the fact that we live in a global environment, and of course our social media and the internet is very much a global world. I urge everyone who has not done so to look at a big report done by UNICEF in 2019, Global Kids Online, which, crucially, involved a huge amount of surveys, consultation and consideration by young people. Later we will get to an amendment of mine which says that we should have the direct voice of young people overseeing the implementation of the Bill. I am talking not about the NGOs that represent them but specifically about children: we need to listen to the children and young people.

The UNICEF report said that it was quite easy to defend access to information and to reputable sources, but showed that accessing entertainment activities—some of the things that perhaps some grandparents in this Chamber might have trouble with—was associated with the positive development of digital skills. Furthermore, the report says:

“When parents restrict children’s internet use”—


of course, this could also apply to the Government restricting their internet use—

“this has a negative effect on children’s information-seeking and privacy skills”.

So, if you do not give children the chance to develop these skills to learn how to navigate the internet, and they suddenly go to it at age 18 and a whole lot of stuff is out there that they have not developed any skills to deal with, you are setting yourself up for a real problem. So UNICEF stresses the real need to have children’s access.

Interestingly, this report—which was a global report from UNICEF—said that

“fewer than one third of children had been exposed to”

something they had found uncomfortable or upsetting in the preceding year. That is on the global scale. Perhaps that is an important balance to some of the other debates we have had in your Lordships’ House on the Bill.

Other figures from this report that I think are worth noting—this is from 2019, so these figures will undoubtedly have gone up—include the finding that

“one in three children globally is … an internet user and …. one in three internet users is a child”.

We have been talking about this as though the internet is “the grown-ups’ thing”, but that is not the global reality. It was co-created, established and in some cases invented by people under the age of 18. I am afraid to say that your Lordships’ House is not particularly well equipped to deal with this, but we need to understand this as best we possibly can. I note that the report also said, looking at the sustainable development goals on quality of education, good jobs and reducing inequality, that internet access for children was crucial.

I will make one final point. I apologise; I am aware that I have been speaking for a while, but I am passionate about these issues. Children and young people have agency and the ability to act and engage in politics. In several nations on these islands, 16 and 17 year-olds have the vote. I very much hope that that will soon also be the case in England, and indeed I hope that soon children even younger than that that will have the vote. I was talking about that with a great audience of year nines at the Queen’s School in Bushey on Friday with Learn with the Lords. Those children would have a great opportunity—

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, we have a very full order of business to get through, so I encourage the noble Baroness to remain on topic.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I think that is on topic. If 16 and 17 year-olds are voting, they have a right to access internet information about voting. I suggest that that is on topic.

My final point—for the pleasure of the noble Lord—is that historically we have seen examples where blocks and filters have denied children and young people who identify as LGBTQI+ access to crucial information for them. That is an example of the risk if we do not allow them right of access. On the most basic children’s right of all, we have also seen examples of blocks and filters that have stopped access to breastfeeding information on the internet. Access is a crucial issue, and what could be a more obvious way to allow it than by writing in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

The quip works, but political rights are not quips. Political rights have responsibilities, and so on. If we gave children rights, they would not be dependent on adults and adult society. Therefore, it is a debate; it is a row about what our rights are. Guess what. It is a philosophical row that has been going on all around the world. I am just suggesting that this is not the place—

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am sorry, but I must point out that 16 and 17 year-olds in Scotland and Wales have the vote. That is a political right.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

And it has been highly contentious whether the right to vote gives them independence. For example, you would still be accused of child exploitation if you did anything to a person under 18 in Scotland or Wales. In fact, if you were to tap someone and it was seen as slapping in Scotland and they were 17, you would be in trouble. Anyway, it should not be in this Bill. That is my point.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th May 2023 Lords Chamber

We should also remember from our history that what is labelled as false by a minority of people can be invaluable scepticism, challenging a consensus and eventually allowing truth to emerge. The fact—the truth—was once that the world was flat. Luckily, the fact-checkers were not around to ban the minority who challenged that view, and now we know a different truth.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have attached my name to Amendments 52 and 99 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, respectively signed by the noble Lords, Lord Bethell and Lord Clement-Jones, and Amendment 222 in her name. I entirely agree with what both the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said. The noble Lord in particular gave us a huge amount of very well-evidenced information on the damage done during the Covid pandemic—and continuing to be done—by disinformation and misinformation. I will not repeat what they said about the damage done by the spread of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination falsehoods and the kind of malicious bots, often driven by state actors, that have caused such damage.

I want to come from a different angle. I think we were—until time prevented it, unfortunately—going to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, which would have been a valuable contribution to this debate. Her expert medical perspective would have been very useful. I think that she and I were the only two Members in the Committee who took part in the passage of the Medicines and Medical Devices Act. I think it was before the time of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell—he is shaking his head; I apologise. He took part in that as well. I also want to make reference to discussions and debates I had with him over changes to regulations on medical testing.

The additional point I want to make about disinformation and misinformation—this applies in particular to Amendment 222 about the independence of the advisory committee on disinformation and misinformation—is that we are now seeing in our medical system a huge rise in the number of private actors. These are companies seeking to encourage consumers or patients to take tests outside the NHS system and to get involved in a whole set of private provision. We are seeing a huge amount of advertising of foreign medical provision, given the pressures that our NHS is under. In the UK we have had traditionally, and still have, rules that place severe restrictions on the direct advertising of medicines and medical devices to patients— unlike, for example, the United States, where it is very much open slather, with some disastrous and very visible impacts.

We need to think about the fact that the internet, for better or for worse, is now a part of our medical system. If people feel ill, the first place they go—before they call the NHS, visit their pharmacist or whatever—is very often the internet, through these providers. We need to think about this in the round and as part of the medical system. We need to think about how our entire medical ecology is working, and that is why I believe we need amendments like these.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes two incredibly important points. We are seeking to give people greater agency on their own health and the internet has been an enormous bonus in doing that, but of course that environment needs to be curated extremely well. We are also seeking to make use of health tech—non-traditional clinical interventions, some of which do not pierce the skin and therefore fall outside the normal conversation with GPs—and giving people the power to make decisions about the use of these new technologies for themselves. That is why curation of the health information environment is so important. Does the noble Baroness have any reflections on that.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. He has made me think of the fact that a particular area where this may be of grave concern is cosmetic procedures, which I think we debated during the passage of the Health and Care Act. These things are all interrelated, and it is important that we see them in an interrelated way as part of what is now the health system.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to a number of amendments in this group. I want to make the point that misinformation and disinformation was probably the issue we struggled with the most in the pre-legislative committee. We recognised the extraordinary harm it did, but also—as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said—that there is no one great truth. However, algorithmic spread and the drip, drip, drip of material that is not based on any search criteria or expression of an opinion but simply gives you more of the same, particularly the most shocking, moves very marginal views into the mainstream.

I am concerned that our debates over the last five days have concentrated so much on content, and that the freedom we seek does not take enough account of the way in which companies currently exercise control over the information we see. Correlations such as “Men who like barbecues are also susceptible to conspiracy theories” are then exploited to spread toxic theories that end in real-world harm or political tricks that show, for example, the Democrats as a paedophile group. Only last week I saw a series of pictures, presented as “evidence”, of President Biden caught in a compromising situation that gave truth to that lie. As Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner for her contribution to the freedom of expression, said in her acceptance speech:

“Tech sucked up our personal experiences and data, organized it with artificial intelligence, manipulated us with it, and created behavior at a scale that brought out the worst in humanity”.


That is the background to this set of amendments that we must take seriously.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said, Amendment 52 will ensure that platforms undertake a health misinformation risk assessment and provide a clear policy on dealing with harmful, false and misleading information. I put it to the Committee that, without this requirement, we will keep the status quo in which clicks are king, not health information.

It is a particular pleasure to support the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, on his Amendments 59 and 107. Like him, I am instinctively against taking material down. There are content-neutral ways of marking or questioning material, offering alternatives and signposting to diverse sources—not only true but diverse. These can break this toxic drip feed for long enough for people to think before they share, post and make personal decisions about the health information that they are receiving.

I am not incredibly thrilled by a committee for every occasion, but since the Bill is silent on the issue of misinformation and disinformation—which clearly will be supercharged by the rise of large language data models—it would be good to give a formal role to this advisory committee, so that it can make a meaningful and formal contribution to Ofcom as it develops not only this code of conduct but all codes of conduct.

Likewise, I am very supportive of Amendment 222, which seeks independence for the chair of the advisory body. I have seen at first hand how a combination of regulatory capture and a very litigious sector with deep pockets slows down progress and transparency. While the independence of the chair should be a given, our collective lived experience would suggest otherwise. This amendment would make that requirement clear.

Finally, and in a way most importantly, Amendment 224 would allow Ofcom to consider after the effect whether the code of conduct is necessary. This strikes a balance between adding to its current workload, which we are trying not to do, and tying one hand behind its back in the future. I would be grateful to hear from the Minister why we would not give Ofcom this option as a reasonable piece of future-proofing, given that this issue will be ever more important as AI creates layers of misinformation and disinformation at scale.

--- Later in debate ---

We need to equip society—children and adults—so that they can make knowledgeable and intelligent use of the internet. We have focused on the harm that the internet does, but the proper use of it can have a very positive impact. The previous debate that we had about misinformation and disinformation highlighted the importance of media literacy.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and I join her in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for introducing this group very clearly.

In taking part in this debate, I declare a joint interest with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in that I was for a number of years a judge in the Debating Matters events to which she referred. Indeed, the noble Baroness was responsible for me ending up in Birmingham jail, during the time that such a debate was conducted with the inmates of Birmingham jail. We have a common interest there.

I want to pick up a couple of additional points. Before I joined your Lordships’ Committee today I was involved in the final stages of the Committee debate on the economic crime Bill, where the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, provided a powerful argument—probably unintentionally—for the amendments we are debating here now. We were talking, as we have at great length in the economic crime Bill, about the issue of fraud. As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, highlighted, in the context of online harms fraud is a huge aspect of people’s lives today and one that has been under-covered in this Committee, although it has very much been picked up in the economic crime Bill Committee. As we were talking about online fraud, the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, said that consumers have to be “appropriately savvy”. I think that is a description of the need for education and critical thinking online, equipping people with the tools to be, as he said, appropriately savvy when facing the risks of fraud and scams, and all the other risks that people face online.

I have attached my name to two amendments here: Amendment 91, which concerns the providers of category 1 and 2A services having a duty, and Amendment 236, which concerns an Ofcom duty. This joins together two aspects. The providers are making money out of the services they provide, which gives them a duty to make some contribution to combatting the potential harms that their services present to people. Ofcom as a regulator obviously has a role. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Knight, who said that the education system also has a role, and there is some reference in here to Ofsted having a role.

What we need is a cross-society, cross-systems approach. This is where I also make the point that we need to think outside the scope of the Bill—it is part of the whole package—about how the education system works, because media literacy is not a stand-alone thing that you can separate out from the issues of critical thinking more broadly. We need to think about our education system, which is far too often, for schools in particular, where we get pupils to learn and regurgitate a whole set of facts and then reward them for that. We need to think about how our education system prepares children for the modern online world.

There is a great deal we can learn from the example—often cited but worth referring to—of Finland, which by various tests has been ranked as the country most resistant to fake news. A very clearly built-in idea of questioning, scrutiny and challenge is being encouraged among pupils, starting from the age of seven. That is something we need to transform our education system to achieve. However, of course, many people using the internet now are not part of our education system, so this needs to be across our society. A focus on the responsibilities of Ofcom and the providers has to be in the Bill.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, over the last decade, I have been in scores of schools, run dozens of workshops and spoken to literally thousands of children and young people. A lot of what I pass off as my own wisdom in this Chamber is, indeed, their wisdom. I have a couple of points, and I speak really from the perspective of children under 18 with regard to these amendments, which I fully support.

Media literacy—or digital literacy, as it is sometimes called—is not the same as e-safety. E-safety regimes concentrate on the behaviour of users. Very often, children say that what they learn in those lessons is focused on adult anxieties about predators and bullies, and when something goes wrong, they feel that they are to blame. It puts the responsibility on children. This response, which I have heard hundreds of times, normally comes up after a workshop in which we have discussed reward loops, privacy, algorithmic bias, profiling or—my own favourite—a game which reveals what is buried in terms and conditions; for example, that a company has a right to record the sound of a device or share their data with more than a thousand other companies. When young people understand the pressures that they are under and which are designed into the system, they feel much better about themselves and rather less enamoured of the services they are using. It is my experience that they then go on to make better choices for themselves.

Secondly, we have outsourced much of digital literacy to companies such as Google and Meta. They too concentrate on user behaviour, rather than looking at their own extractive policies focused on engagement and time spent. With many schools strapped for cash and expertise, this teaching is widespread. However, when I went to a Google-run assembly, children aged nine were being taught about features available only on services for those aged over 13—and nowhere was there a mention of age limits and why they are important. It cannot be right that the companies are grooming children towards their services without taking full responsibility for literacy, if that is the literacy that children are being given in school.

Thirdly, as the Government’s own 2021 media literacy strategy set out, good media literacy is one line of defence from harm. It could make a crucial difference in people making informed and safe decisions online and engaging in a more positive online debate, at the same time as understanding that online actions have consequences offline.

However, while digital literacy and, in particular, critical thinking are fundamental to a contemporary education and should be available throughout school and far beyond, they must not be used as a way of putting responsibility on the user for the company’s design decisions. I am specifically concerned that in the risk-assessment process, digital literacy is one of the ways that a company can say it has mitigated a potential risk or harm. I should like to hear from the Minister that that is an additional responsibility and not instead of responsibility.

Finally, over all these years I have always asked at the end of the session what the young people care about the most. The second most important thing is that the system should be less addictive—it should have less addiction built into it. Again, I point the Committee in the direction of the safety-by-design amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Russell that try to get to the crux of that. They are not very exciting amendments in this debate but they get to the heart of it. However, the thing the young people most often say is, “Could you do something to get my parents to put down their phones?” I therefore ask the Minister whether he can slip something into the Bill, and indeed ask the noble Lord, Lord Grade, whether that could emerge somewhere in the guidance. That is what young people want.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 25th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, so few of us are involved in this discussion that we are now able to write each other’s speeches. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, for articulating some of my concerns, probably more elegantly than I will myself. I will focus on two amendments in this group; in fact, there are lots of interesting things, but I will focus on both the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton.

On the issue of proactive steps to remove listings of knives for young people, I am so sympathetic to this because in a different area of my life I am pretty preoccupied with the problem of knife crime among young people. It really bothers me and I worry about how we tackle it. My concern of course is that the police should be working harder to solve that problem and that we cannot anticipate that the Bill will solve all social problems. There is a danger of removing the focus from law enforcement in a real-world problem, as though removing how you buy the knife is the issue. I am not convinced that that helps us.

I wanted to reflect on the kind of dilemmas I am having around this in relation to the story of Mizzy that is doing the rounds. He is the 18 year-old who has been posting his prank videos on TikTok and has caused quite a stir. People have seen him wandering into strangers’ homes uninvited, asking random people in the street if they want to die, running off with an elderly lady’s dog and making fun of Orthodox Jews—generally speaking, this 18 year-old is obnoxious. His TikTok videos have gone viral; everybody is discussing them.

This cruelty for kicks genre of filming yourself, showing your face full to the camera and so on, is certainly abhorrent but, as with the discussion about knife crime, I have noticed that some people outside this House are attempting to blame the technology for the problem, saying that the videos should have been removed earlier and that it is TikTok’s fault that we have this anti-social behaviour, whereas I think it is a much deeper, broader social problem to do with the erosion of adult authority and the reluctance of grown-ups to intervene clearly when people are behaving badly—that is my thesis. It is undoubtedly a police matter. The police seem to have taken ages to locate Mizzy. They eventually got him and charged him with very low offences, so he was on TV being interviewed the other evening, laughing at how weak the law was. Under the laws he was laughing at, he could freely walk into somebody’s house or be obnoxious and get away with it. He said, “We can do what we want”. That mockery throws up problems, but I do not necessarily think that the Bill is the way to solve it.

That leads me to my concerns about Amendment 268AA, because Mizzy was quoted in the Independent newspaper as saying:

“I’m a Black male doing these things and that’s why there’s such an uproar”.


I then went on a social media thread in which any criticism of Mizzy’s behaviour was described as racist harassment. That shows the complexity of what is being called for in Amendment 268AA, which wants platforms to take additional steps

“to combat incidents of online racially aggravated harassment”.

My worry is that we end up with not only Mizzy’s TikTok videos being removed but his critics being removed for racially harassing him, so we have to be very careful here.

Amendment 268AA goes further, because it wants tech companies to push for prosecution. I really think it is a dangerous step to encourage private companies to get tangled up in deciding what is criminal and so on. The noble Lord, Lord Allan, has exactly described my concerns, so I will not repeat them. Maybe I can probe this probing amendment. It also broadens the issue to all forms of harassment.

By the way, the amendment’s explanatory statement mentions the appalling racist abuse aimed at footballers and public figures, but one of the fascinating things was that when we number-crunched and went granular, we found that the majority of that racist abuse seemed to have been generated by bots, which takes us to the position of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, earlier: who would you prosecute in that instance? Bots not even based in the UK were generating what was assumed to be an outbreak of racist abuse among football fans in the UK, but the numbers did not equate to that. There were some people being racist and vile and some things that were generated in these bot farms.

To go back to the amendment, it goes on to broaden the issue out to

“other forms of harassment and threatening or abusive behaviour”.

Again, this is much more complicated in today’s climate, because those kinds of accusation can be deployed for bad faith reasons, particularly against public figures.

We have an example close to this House. I hope that Members have been following and will show solidarity over what has been happening to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, who is chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and tasked with upholding the equality law but is at the centre of a vicious internal row after her officials filed a dossier of complaints about her. They have alleged that she is guilty of harassment. A KC is being brought in, there are 40 complaints and the whole thing is costing a fortune for both taxpayers and the noble Baroness herself.

It coincided with the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, advising Ministers to update the definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 to make clear that it refers to biological sex and producing official advice clarifying that trans women can be lawfully excluded from female-only spaces. We know how toxic that whole debate is.

Many of us feel that a lot of the accusations against the noble Baroness are ideologically and politically motivated vexatious complaints. I am distressed to read newspaper reports that say that she has been close to tears and has asked why anyone would go into public service. All this is for the crime of being a regulator upholding and clarifying the law. I hope it does not happen to the person who ends up regulating Ofcom—ending up close to tears as he stands accused of harassment, abusive behaviour and so on.

The point is that she is the one being accused of harassment. I have seen the vile abuse that she has received online. It is completely defamatory, vicious abuse and yet somehow it ends up being that, because she does not provide psychological safety at work and because of her views, she is accused of harassment and is the one in the firing line. I do not want us to introduce that kind of complexity—this is what I have been worried about throughout—into what is banned, removed or sent to the police as examples of harassment or hate crime.

I know that is not the intention of these amendments; it is the unintended consequences that I dread.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 262 in my name, although in speaking after the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who suggested that the grown-ups should control anti-social behaviour by young people online, I note that there is a great deal of anti-social behaviour online from people of all ages. This is relevant to my Amendment 262.

It is a very simple amendment and would require the Secretary of State to consult with young people by means of an advisory board consisting of people aged 25 and under when reviewing the effectiveness and proportionality of this legislation. This amendment is a practical delivery of some of the discussion we had earlier in this Committee when we were talking about including the Convention on the Rights of the Child in the Bill. There is a commonly repeated phrase, “Nothing about us without us”. It was popularised by disability activists in the 1990s, although in doing a little research for this I found that it originates in Latin in Poland in the 15th century. So it is an idea that has been around for a long while and is seen as a democratic standard. It is perhaps a variation of the old “No taxation without representation”.

This suggestion of an advisory board for the Secretary of State is because we know from the discussion earlier on the children’s rights amendments that globally one in three people online is a child under the age of 18. This comes to the point of the construction of your Lordships’ House. Most of us are a very long way removed in experiences and age—some of us further than others. The people in this Committee thinking about a 12 year-old online now are parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. I venture to say that it is very likely that the Secretary of State is at least a generation older than many of the people who will be affected by its provisions.

This reflects something that I also did on the Health and Care Bill. To introduce an advisory panel of young people reporting directly to the Secretary of State would ensure a direct voice for legislation that particularly affects young people. We know that under-18s across the UK do not have any role in elections to the other place, although 16 and 17 year-olds have a role in other elections in Wales and Scotland now. This is really a simple, clear, democratic step. I suspect the Minister might be inclined to say, “We are going to talk to charities and adults who represent children”. I suggest that what we really need here is a direct voice being fed in.

I want to reflect on a recent comment piece in the Guardian that made a very interesting argument: that there cannot be, now or in the future, any such thing as a digital native. Think of the experience of someone 15 or 20 years ago; yes, they already had the internet but it was a very different beast to what we have now. If we refer back to some of the earlier groups, we were starting to ask what an internet with widespread so-called generative artificial intelligence would look like. That is an internet which is very different from even the one that a 20 year-old is experiencing now.

It is absolutely crucial that we have that direct voice coming in from young people with experience of what it is like. They are an expert on what it is like to be a 12 year-old, a 15 year-old or a 20 year-old now, in a way that no one else can possibly be, so that is my amendment.

Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd June 2023 Lords Chamber

I say all this as someone who is regularly piled on. I noticed when I started to speak that the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, is in her place. I remember my shock and horror when I saw the abuse she got some seven years ago and subsequently—really vicious, vile, horrible abuse for her political stance. Such abuse often takes a very sexualised form if you are a woman. So I can say from my lived experience that I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of vile, horrible, misogynistic pile-ons, and so do Joanna Cherry, Rosie Duffield and a lot of people involved in contentious political issues. We need to make politics more civil by having the arguments and the debates and not mischaracterising, delegitimising or demonising people. I am just not sure that a criminal intervention here is going to help. I think it might make matters worse.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said in introducing this group some time ago, it is very diverse. I shall comment on two aspects of the amendments in this group. I entirely associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Allan, who really nailed the problems with Amendment 266, and I very much support the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws; I would have signed them if I had caught up with them.

The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, talked about causing alarm and distress. I can draw on my own experience here, thinking about when someone randomly starts to post you pictures of crossbows. I think about what used to happen when I was a journalist in Bangkok, when various people used to get hand grenades posted into their letterbox. That was not actively dangerous—the pin was not pulled; it was still held down—but it was clearly a threat, and the same thing happens on social media.

This is something of which I have long experience. In 2005, when I was the founder of the feminist blog Carnival of Feminists, I saw the kinds of messages that the noble Baronesses have referred to, which in the days before social media used to be posted as comments on people’s blogs. You can still find the blog out there—it ran from 2005 to 2009—but many of its links to other blogs will be dead because they were often run by young women, often young women of colour, who were driven to pull down their blogs and sometimes were driven off the internet entirely by threatening, fearsome messages of the type that the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, referred to. We can argue about the drafting here—I will not have any opinion on that in detail—but something that addresses that issue is really important.

Secondly, we have not yet heard the Government’s introductions to Amendment 268AZA, but the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, provided us with the information that it is an amendment to create the offence of encouraging or assisting self-harm. I express support for the general tenor of that, but I want to make one specific point: so far as I can see, the amendment does not have any defence or carve-out for harm-reduction messages, which may be necessary.

To set the context here, figures from the Royal College of Psychiatrists say that about one in 10 young people self-harm at some stage in their youth, and the RCP says those figures are probably an underestimate because they are based on figures where medical professionals actually see them so the number is probably significantly higher than that. An article in the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing from 2018 entitled “Self-cutting and harm reduction” is focused on in-patient settings, but the arguments in it are important in setting the general tone. It says that

“harm reduction in all its guises starts from the premise that the end goal”—

that is, to end self-harm entirely—

“is neither necessarily nor inevitably abstinence”,

which cannot be the solution for some people. Rather,

“the extinction of some particular form of behaviour may not be realistic for, or even desired by, the individual”.

So you may find messages that say, “If you are going to cut yourself, use a clean blade. If you do cut yourself, look after the wound afterwards”, but there is a risk that those kinds of well-intentioned, well-meaning and indeed expert messages could be caught by the amendment. I googled self-harm and harm reduction, and the websites that came up included Self Injury Support, which provides expert advice; a number of mental health trusts and healthcare trusts; and, indeed, the royal college’s own website.

The noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, was trying to address this issue with Amendment 268AZC, which would allow the DPP to authorise prosecutions, but it seems to me that a better approach would be to have in the government amendment a statement saying, “We acknowledge that there will be cases where people talk about self-harm in ways that seek to minimise harm rather than simply stopping it, and they are not meant to be caught by this amendment”.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, it seems a very long time since we heard the introduction from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, but it was useful in setting this helpful and well-informed debate on its way. I am sure the whole Committee is keen to hear the Minister introducing the government amendments, even at this very late stage in the debate.

I would like to make reference to a few points. I was completely captivated by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, who invoked the 10 commandments. I say to him that one can go to no higher order, which I am sure will support the amendments that he and his colleagues have put forward.

I will refer first to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Kennedy. At a minimum, they are interesting because they try to broaden the scope of the current offences. I believe they also try to anticipate the extent of the impact of the government amendments, which in my view would be improved by my noble friend’s amendments. As my noble friend said, so many of the threats that are experienced online by, and directed towards, women and girls are indirect. They are about encouraging others: saying “Somebody should do something terrible to you” is extremely common. I feel that here is an opportunity to address that in the Bill, and if we do not, we will have missed a major aspect. I hope that the Minister will take account of that and be positive. We can all be relaxed about whether the amendments need to be made, but the intent is there.

That part of the debate made a strong case to build on the debate we had on an earlier day in Committee about violence against women and girls, which was led by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and supported by noble Baronesses and noble Lords from all sides of the House. We called upon the Minister then to ensure that the Bill explicitly includes the necessary amendments to make it refer to violence against women and girls because, for all the reasons that my noble friend Lady Kennedy has explained, it is considerably greater for them than for others. Without wishing to dismiss the fact that everybody receives levels of abuse, we have to be realistic here: I believe that my noble friend’s amendments are extremely helpful there.

This is a bit in anticipation of what the Minister will say—I am sure he will forgive me if he already has the answers. The noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Allan, referred particularly to the coalition of some 130 individuals and organisations which have expressed their concerns. I want to highlight those concerns as well, because they speak to some important points. The groups in that coalition include the largest self-harm charity, Self Injury Support, along with numerous smaller self-harm support organisations and, of course, the mental health charity Mind. Their voice is therefore considerable.

To emphasise what has already been outlined, the concern with the current amendments is that they are somewhat broad and equivalent to an offence of glamorising self-harm, which was rejected by the Law Commission in its consultation on the offence. That followed concern from the Magistrates’ Association and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners that the offence would be ambiguous in application and complex to prosecute. It also risks criminalising people in distress, something that none of us want to see.

In addition, the broadness of the offence risks criminalising peer support and harm reduction resources, by defining them as capable of “encouraging or assisting” when they are in fact intended to help people who self-harm. This was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, today and in respect of her Private Member’s Bill, which we debated very recently in this Chamber, and I am sure that it would not be the Minister’s intention.

I would like to emphasise another point that has been made. The offence may also criminalise content posted by people who are in distress and sharing their own experiences of self-harm—the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, referred to this—by, for example, posting pictures of wounds. We do not want to subject vulnerable people to litigation, so let us not have an offence which ends up harming the very people it aims to protect. I shall be listening closely to the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Allan. He reminded me of significant reports of the huge amount of exploitation in the digital sector that has come from identification of photos. A great deal of that is human labour, even though it is often claimed to have been done through machine intelligence.

In speaking to this late but important amendment, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Knight, for giving us the chance to do so, because, as every speaker has said, this is really important. I should declare my position as a former newspaper editor. I distinctly recall teasing a sports journalist in the early 1990s when it was reported that journalists were going to be replaced by computer technology. I said that the sports journalists would be the first to go because they just wrote to a formula anyway. I apologise to sports journalists everywhere.

The serious point behind that is that a lot of extreme, high claims are now being made about so-called artificial intelligence. I declare myself an artificial-intelligence sceptic. What we have now—so-called generative AI—is essentially big data. To quote the science fiction writer, Ted Chiang, what we have is applied statistics. Generative AI relies on looking at what already exists, and it cannot produce anything original. In many respects, it is a giant plagiarism machine. There are huge issues, beyond the scope of the Bill, around intellectual property and the fact that it is not generating anything original.

None the less, it is generating what people in the sector like to describe as hallucinations, which might otherwise be described as errors, falsehoods or lies. This is where quotes are made up; ideas are presented which, at first glance, look as though they make sense but fall apart under examination; and data is actively invented. There is one rather famous case where a lawyer got himself into a great deal of trouble by producing a whole lot of entirely false cases that a bot generated for him. We need to be really careful, and this amendment shows us a way forward in attempting to deal with some of the issues we are facing.

To pick up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, about the real-world impacts, I was at an event in Parliament this week entitled “The Worker Experience of the AI Revolution”, run by the TUC and Connected by Data. It highlighted what has happened with a lot of the big data exercises already in operation: rather than humans being replaced by robots, people are being forced to act like robots. We heard from Royal Mail and Amazon workers, who are monitored closely and expected to act like machines. That is just one example of the unexpected outcomes of the technologies we have been exercising in recent years.

I will make two final comments. First, I refer to 19th-century Luddite John Booth, who was tortured to death by the state. He was a Luddite, but he was also on the record as saying that new machinery

“might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society were differently constituted”.

History is not pre-written; it is made by the choices, laws and decisions we make in this Parliament. Given where we are at the moment with so-called AI, I urge that caution really is warranted. We should think about putting some caution in the Bill, which is what this amendment points us towards.

My final point relates to an amendment I was not allowed to table because, I was told, it was out of scope. It asked the Secretary of State to report on the climate emissions coming from the digital sector, specifically from artificial intelligence. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said that it will operate on a vast scale. I point out that, already, the digital sector is responsible for 3% of the world’s electricity use and 2% of the world’s carbon emissions, which is about the same as the airline sector. We really need to think about caution. I very much agree with everyone who said that we need to have more discussions on all these issues before Report.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, this is a real hit-and-run operation from the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. He has put down an amendment on my favourite subject in the last knockings of the Bill. It is totally impossible to deal with this now—I have been thinking and talking about the whole area of AI governance and ethics for the past seven years—so I am not going to try. It is important, and the advisory committee under Clause 139 should take it into account. Actually, this is much more a question of authenticity and verification than of content. Trying to work out whether something is ChatGPT or GPT-4 content is a hopeless task; you are much more likely to be able to identify whether these are automated users such as chatbots than you are to know about the content itself.

I will leave it there. I missed the future-proofing debate, which I would have loved to have been part of. I look forward to further debates with the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, on the deficiencies in the White Paper and to the Prime Minister’s much more muscular approach to AI regulation in future.