Online Safety Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I see my amendments as being probing. I am very keen on having a robust complaints system, including for individuals, and am open to the argument about an ombudsman. I am listening very carefully to the way that that has been framed. I tabled these amendments because while I know we need a robust complaints system—and I think that Ofcom might have a role in that—I would want that complaints system to be simple and as straightforward as possible. We certainly need somewhere that you can complain.

Ofcom will arguably be the most powerful regulator in the UK, effectively in charge of policing a key element of democracy: the online public square. Of course, one question one might ask is: how do you complain about Ofcom in the middle of it all? Ironically, an ombudsman might be somewhere where you would have to field more than just complaints about the tech companies.

I have suggested completely removing Clauses 150 to 152 from the Bill because of my reservations, beyond this Bill and in general, about a super-complaints system within the regulatory framework, which could be very unhelpful. I might be wrong, and I am open to correction if I have misunderstood, but the Bill’s notion of an eligible entity who will be allowed to make this complaint to Ofcom seems, at the moment, to be appointed on criteria set only by the Secretary of State. That is a serious problem. There is a danger that the Secretary of State could be accused of partiality or politicisation. We therefore have to think carefully about that.

I also object to the idea that certain organisations are anointed with extra legitimacy as super-complaints bodies. We have seen this more broadly. You will often hear Ministers say, in relation to consultations, “We’ve consulted stakeholders and civil society organisations”, when they are actually often referring to lobbying organisations with interests. There is a free-for-all for NGOs and interest groups. We think of a lot of charities as very positive but they are not necessarily neutral. I just wanted to query that.

There is also a danger that organisations will end up speaking on behalf of all women, all children or all Muslims. That is something we need to be careful about in a time of identity politics. We have seen it happen offline with self-appointed community leaders, but say, for example, there is a situation where there is a demand by a super-complainant to remove a particular piece of content that is considered to be harmful, such as an image of the Prophet Muhammad. These are areas where we have to admit that if people then say, “We speak on behalf of”, they will cause problems.

Although charities historically have had huge credibility, as I said, we know from some of the scandals that have affected charities recently that they are not always the saviours. They are certainly not immune from corruption, political bias, political disputes and so on.

I suppose my biggest concern is that the function in the Bill is not open to all members of the public. That seems to be a problem. Therefore, we are saying that certain groups and individuals will have a greater degree of influence over the permissibility of speech than others. There are some people who have understood these clauses to mean that it would act like a class action—that if enough people are complaining, it must be a problem. But, as noble Lords will know from their inboxes, sometimes one is inundated with emails and it does not necessarily show a righteous cause. I do not know about anyone else who has been involved in this Bill, but I have had exactly the same cut-and-paste email about violence against women and girls hundreds of times. That usually means a well-organised, sometimes well-funded, mass mobilisation. I have no objection, but just because you get lots of emails it does not mean that it is a good complaint. If you get only one important email complaint that is written by an individual, surely you should respect that minority view.

Is it not interesting that the assumption of speakers so far has been that the complaints will always be that harms have not been removed or taken notice of? I was grateful when the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, mentioned the Free Speech Union and recognised, as I envisage, that many of the complaints will be about content having been removed—they will be free speech complaints. Often, in that instance, it will be an individual whose content has been removed. I cannot see how the phrasing of the Bill helps us in that. Although I am a great supporter of the Free Speech Union, I do not want it to represent or act on behalf of, say, Index on Censorship or even an individual who simply thinks that their content should not be removed—and who is no less valid than an official organisation, however much I admire it.

I certainly do not want individual voices to be marginalised, which I fear the Bill presently does in relation to complaints. I am not sure about an ombudsman; I am always wary of creating yet another more powerful body in the land because of the danger of over-bureaucratisation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

I am happy to meet and discuss this. We are expanding what they are able to receive today under the existing arrangements. I am happy to meet any noble Lords who wish to take this forward to help them understand this—that is probably best.

Amendments 287 and 289 from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, seek to remove the provision for super-complaints from the Bill. The super-complaints mechanism is an important part of the Bill’s overall redress mechanisms. It will enable entities to raise concerns with Ofcom about systemic issues in relation to regulated services, which Ofcom will be required to respond to. This includes concerns about the features of services or the conduct of providers creating a risk of significant harm to users or the public, as well as concerns about significant adverse impacts on the right to freedom of expression.

On who can make super-complaints, any organisation that meets the eligibility criteria set out in secondary legislation will be able to submit a super-complaint to Ofcom. Organisations will be required to submit evidence to Ofcom, setting out how they meet these criteria. Using this evidence, Ofcom will assess organisations against the criteria to ensure that they meet them. The assessment of evidence will be fair and objective, and the criteria will be intentionally strict to ensure that super-complaints focus on systemic issues and that the regulator is not overwhelmed by the number it receives.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

To clarify and link up the two parts of this discussion, can the Minister perhaps reflect, when the meeting is being organised, on the fact that the organisations and the basis on which they can complain will be decided by secondary legislation? So we do not know which organisations or what the remit is, and we cannot assess how effective that will be. We know that the super-complainants will not want to overwhelm Ofcom, so things will be bundled into that. Individuals could be excluded from the super-complaints system in the way that I indicated, because super-complaints will not represent everyone, or even minority views; in other words, there is a gap here now. I want that bit gone, but that does not mean that we do not need a robust complaints system. Before Report at least—in the meetings in between—the Government need to advise on how you complain if something goes wrong. At the moment, the British public have no way to complain at all, unless someone sneaks it through in secondary legislation. This is not helpful.

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

As I said, we are happy to consider individual complaints and super-complaints further.

--- Later in debate ---

The Bill is an opportunity to improve all of this. There are pieces of very good practice and, clearly, areas where not enough is being done and too much very harmful content—particularly content that is posted with the express intent of causing harm—is being allowed to circulate. I hope that, through the legislation and by getting these protocols right, we can get to the point where we are both preventing lower-risk people moving into a higher-risk category and enabling people already in a high-risk category to get the help, support and advice that they need. Nowadays, online is often the primary tool that could benefit them.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as usual, the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, has explained with some nuance the trickiness of this area, which at first sight appears obvious—black and white—but is not quite that. I want to explore some of these things.

Many decades ago, I ran a drop-in centre for the recovering mentally ill. I remember my shock the first time that I came across a group of young women who had completely cut themselves up. It was a world that I did not know but, at that time, a very small world—a very minor but serious problem in society. Decades later, going around doing lots of talks, particularly in girls’ schools where I am invited to speak, I suddenly discovered that whole swathes of young women were doing something that had been considered a mental health problem, often hidden away. Suddenly, people were talking about a social contagion of self-harm happening in the school. Similarly, there were discussions about eating disorders being not just an individual mental health problem but something that kind of grew within a group.

Now we have the situation with suicide sites, which are phenomenal at exploiting those vulnerabilities. This is undoubtedly a social problem of some magnitude. I do not in any way want to minimise it, but I am not sure exactly how legislation can resolve it or whether it will, even though I agree that it could do certain things.

Some of the problems that we have, which have already been alluded to, really came home to me when I read about Instagram bringing in some rules on self-harm material, which ended up with the removal of posts by survivors of self-harm discussing their illness. I read a story in the Coventry Evening Telegraph—I was always interested because I ran the drop-in centre for the recovering mentally ill in Coventry—where a young woman had some photographs taken down from Instagram because they contained self-harm images of her scars. The young woman who had suffered these problems, Marie from Tile Hill, wanted to share pictures of her scars with other young people because she felt that they would help others recover. She had got over it and was basically saying that the scars were healing. In other words, it was a kind of self-help group for users online, yet it was taken down.

It is my usual problem: this looks to be a clear-cut case, yet the complexities can lead to problems of censorship of a sort. I was really pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, stressed the point about definitions. Search engines such as Google have certainly raised the problem of a concern, or worry, that people looking for help—or even looking to write an essay on suicide, assisted suicide or whatever—will end up not being able to find appropriate material.

I also want to ask a slightly different question. Who decides which self-harms are in our definitions and what is the contagion? When I visit schools now, there is a new social contagion in town, I am afraid to say, which is that of gender dysphoria. In the polling for a newly published report Show, Tell and Leave Nothing to the Imagination by Jo-Anne Nadler, which has just come out, half of the young people interviewed said that they knew someone at their school who wanted to change gender or had already, while one in 10 said that they wanted to change their gender.

That is just an observation; your Lordships might ask what it has to do with the Bill. But these are actually problem areas that are being affirmed by educational organisations and charities, by which I mean that organisations that have often worked with government have been consulted as stakeholders. They have recommended to young women where online to purchase chest binders, which will stop them developing, or where and how to use puberty blockers. Eventually, they are affirming double mastectomies or castration. By the way, this is of course all over social media, because once you start to search on it, TikTok is rife with it. Algorithmically, we are reminded all the time to think about systems: once you have had a look at it, it is everywhere. My point is that this is affirmed socially.

Imagine a situation whereby, in society offline, some young woman who has an eating disorder and weighs 4 stone comes to you and says “Look, I’m so fat”. If you said, “Yes, of course you’re fat—I’ll help you slim”, we would think it was terrible. When that happens online, crudely and sometimes cruelly, we want to tackle it here. If some young woman came to you and said, “I want to self-harm; I feel so miserable that I want to cut myself”, and you started recommending blades, we would think it was atrocious behaviour. In some ways, that is what is happening online and that is where I have every sympathy with these amendments. Yet when it comes to gender dysphoria, which actually means encouraging self-harm, because it is a cultural phenomenon that is popular it does not count.

In some ways, I could be arguing that we should future-proof this legislation by including those self-harms in the definition put forward by the amendments in this group. However, I raise it more to indicate that, as with all definitions, it is not quite as easy as one would think. I appreciate that a number of noble Lords, and others engaged in this discussion, might think that I am merely exhibiting prejudice rather than any genuine compassion or concern for those young people. I would note that if noble Lords want to see a rising group of people who are suicidal and feel that their life is really not worth living, search out the work being done on detransitioners who realise too late that that affirmation by adults has been a disaster for them.

On the amendments suggesting another advisory committee with experts to advise Ofcom on how we regulate such harms, I ask that we are at least cautious about which experts. To mention one of the expert bodies, Mermaids has become controversial and has actually been advocating some of those self-harms, in my opinion. It is now subject to a Charity Commission investigation but has been on bodies such as this advising about young people. I would not think that appropriate, so I just ask that some consideration is given to which experts would be on such bodies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I start by commending my noble friend Lady Morgan on her clear introduction to this group of amendments. I also commend the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on her powerful speech.

From those who have spoken so far, we have a clear picture of the widespread nature of some of the abuse and offences that women experience when they go online. I note from what my noble friend Lady Morgan said that there is widespread support from a range of organisations outside the Committee for this group of amendments. She also made an important and powerful point about the potential chilling effect of this kind of activity on women, including women in public life, being able to exercise their right to freedom of expression.

I feel it is important for me to make it clear that—this is an obvious thing—I very much support tough legal and criminal sanctions against any perpetrator of violence or sexual abuse against women. I really do understand and support this, and hear the scale of the problem that is being outlined in this group of amendments.

Mine is a dissenting voice, in that I am not persuaded by the proposed solution to the problem that has been described. I will not take up a lot of the Committee’s time, but any noble Lords who were in the House when we were discussing a group of amendments on another piece of legislation earlier this year may remember that I spoke against making misogyny a hate crime. The reason why I did that then is similar, in that I feel somewhat nervous about introducing a code of conduct which is directly relevant to women. I do not like the idea of trying to address some of these serious problems by separating women from men. Although I know it is not the intention of a code such as this or any such measures, I feel that it perpetuates a sense of division between men and women. I just do not like the idea that we live in a society where we try to address problems by isolating or categorising ourselves into different groups of people, emphasising the sense of weakness and being victims of any kind of attack or offence from another group, and assuming that everybody who is in the other group will be a perpetrator of some kind of attack, criticism or violence against us.

My view is that, in a world where we see some of this serious activity happening, we should do more to support young men and boys to understand the proper expectations of them. When we get to the groups of amendments on pornography and what more we can do to prevent children’s access to it, I will be much more sympathetic. Forgive me if this sounds like motherhood and apple pie, but I want us to try to generate a society where basic standards of behaviour and social norms are shared between men and women, young and old. I lament how so much of this has broken down, and a lot of the problems we see in society are the fault of political and—dare I say it?—religious leaders not doing more to promote some of those social norms in the past. As I said, I do not want us to respond to the situation we are in by perpetuating more divisions.

I look forward to hearing what my noble friend the Minister has to say, but I am nervous about the solution proposed in the amendments.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, not least because she became a dissenting voice, and I was dreading that I might be the only one.

First, I think it important that we establish that those of us who have spent decades fighting violence against women and girls are not complacent about it. The question is whether the physical violence we describe in the Bill is the same as the abuse being described in the amendments. I worry about conflating online incivility, abuse and vile things said with physical violence, as is sometimes done.

I note that Refuge, an organisation I have a great deal of respect for, suggested that the user empowerment duties that opted to place the burden on women users to filter out their own online experience was the same as asking women to take control of their own safety and protect themselves offline from violence. I thought that was unfair, because user empowerment duties and deciding what you filter out can be women using their agency.