Online Safety Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

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Wednesday 12th July 2023 Lords Chamber

I believe that there is a case to answer by the Government. Things are moving very fast—I entirely understand that it is difficult to keep up, in a sense, with the changes—but the metaverse should not be beyond the scope of the Bill and nor should the environments created by it. If we do not include that kind of provider environment in its scope, we will fail our children and vulnerable adults and we will be falling down on the job. We have waited five years to get the Bill through, so to knowingly pass a Bill without the right provisions and the proper future-proofing would be grossly negligent. I beg to move.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for tabling the amendment. If I had been quicker, I would have added my name to it, because he may— I use the word “may” advisedly, because I am not sure—have identified quite a serious gap in terms of future-proofing. As far as I understand it, in a somewhat naive way, the amendment probes whether there is a gap between provider-generated content and user-generated content and whether provider-generated content could lead to a whole lot of ghastly stuff on the metaverse without any way of tackling it because it is deemed to have fallen outside the scope of the Bill.

I am grateful to Carnegie UK for having tried to talk me through this—it is pretty complicated. As a specific example, I understand that a “Decentraland” avatar pops up on gaming sites, and it is useful because it warns you about the dangers of gambling and what it can lead to. But then there is the problem about the backdrop to this avatar: at the moment, it seems to be against gambling, but you can see how those who have an interest in gambling would be quite happy to have the avatar look pretty hideous but have a backdrop of a really enticing casino with lots of lights and people streaming in, or whatever. I am not sure where that would fit, because it seems that this type of content would be provider-generated. When it comes to the metaverse and these new ways of interacting with 3D immersion, I am not clear that we have adequately caught within the Bill some of these potentially dangerous applications. So I hope that the Minister will be able to clarify it for us today and, if not, possibly to write between now and the next time that we debate this, because I have an amendment on future-proofing, but it is in a subsequent group.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I am interested to hear what the Minister says, but could he also explain to the House the difference in status of this sort of material in Part 5 versus Part 3? I believe that the Government brought in a lot of amendments that sorted it out and that many of us hoped were for the entire Bill, although we discovered, somewhat to our surprise, that they were only in Part 5. I would be interested if the Minister could expand on that.