Online Safety Bill

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I absolutely agree. Of course, good law is a good system, not a good person.

I turn to the comments that I was going to make. Uncharacteristically, I am a little confused about this issue and I would love the Minister’s help. My understanding on reading the Bill very closely is that self-harm and suicide content that meets a legal definition will be subject to the priority illegal content duties. In the case of children, we can safely anticipate that content of this kind will be named primary priority content. Additionally, if such content is against the terms of service of a regulated company, it can be held responsible to those terms. It will have to provide a user empowerment tool on category 1 services so that it can be toggled out if an adult user wishes. That is my understanding of where this content has already been dealt with in the Bill. To my mind, this leaves the following ways in which suicide and self-harm material, which is the subject of this group of amendments, is not covered by the Bill. That is what I would like the Minister to confirm, and I absolutely stand by to be corrected.

In the case of adults, if self-harm and suicide material does not meet a bar of illegal content and the service is not category 1, there is no mechanism to toggle it out. Ofcom has no power to require a service to ensure tools to toggle self-harm and suicide material out by default. This means that self-harm and suicide material can be as prevalent as they like—pushed, promoted and recommended, as I have just explained—if it is not contrary to the terms of service, so long as it does not reach the bar of illegal content.

Search services are not subject to these clauses— I am unsure about that. In the case of both children and adults, if self-harm and suicide material is on blogs or services with limited functionality, it is out of scope of the Bill and there is absolutely nothing Ofcom can do. For non-category 1 services—the majority of services which claim that an insignificant number of children access their site and thus that they do not have to comply with the child safety duties—there are no protections for a child against this content.

I put it like that because I believe that each of the statements I just made could have been fixed by amendments already discussed during the past six days in Committee. We are currently planning to leave many children without the protection of the safety duties, to leave vulnerable adults without even the cover of default protections against material that has absolutely no public interest and to leave companies to decide whether to promote or use this material to fuel user engagement—even if it costs well-being and lives.

I ask the Minister to let me know if I have misunderstood, but I think it is really quite useful to see what is left once the protections are in place, rather than always concentrating on the protections themselves.

[Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, in her Amendment 96 and others in this group. The internet is fuelling an epidemic of self-harm, often leading to suicide among young people. Thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, I have listened to many grieving families explaining the impact that social media had on their beloved children. Content that includes providing detailed instructions for methods of suicide or challenges or pacts that seek agreement to undertake mutual acts of suicide or deliberate self-injury must be curtailed, or platforms must be made to warn and protect vulnerable adults.

I recognise that the Government acknowledge the problem and have attempted to tackle it in the Bill with the new offence of encouraging or assisting serious self-harm and suicide and by listing it as priority illegal content. But I agree with charities such as Samaritans, which says that the Government are taking a partial approach by not accepting this group of amendments. Samaritans considers that the types of suicide and self-harm content that is legal but unequivocally harmful includes information, depictions, instructions and advice on methods of self-harm or suicide, content that portrays self-harm and suicide as positive or desirable and graphic descriptions or depictions of self-harm and suicide.

With the removal of regulation of legal but harmful content, much suicide and self-harm content can remain easily available, and platforms will not even need to consider the risk that such content could pose to adult users. These amendments aim to ensure that harmful self-harm and suicide content is addressed across all platforms and search services, regardless of their functionality or reach, and, importantly, for all persons regardless of age.

In 2017 an inquiry into suicides of young people found suicide-related internet use in 26% of deaths in under-20s and 13% of deaths in 20 to 24 year-olds. Three-quarters of people who took part in Samaritans’ research with Swansea University said that they had harmed themselves more severely after viewing self-harm content online, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, pointed out. People of all ages can be susceptible to harm from this dangerous content. There is shocking evidence that between 2011 and 2015, 151 patients who died by suicide were known to have visited websites that encouraged suicide or shared information about methods of harm, and 82% of those patients were over 25.

Suicide is complex and rarely caused by one thing. However, there is strong evidence of associations between financial difficulties, mental health and suicide. People on the lowest incomes have a higher suicide risk than those who are wealthier, and people on lower incomes are also the most affected by rising prices and other types of financial hardship. In January and February this year the Samaritans saw the highest percentage of first-time phone callers concerned about finance or unemployment—almost one in 10 calls for help in February. With the cost of living crisis and growing pressure on adults to cope with stress, it is imperative that the Government urgently bring in these amendments to help protect all ages from harmful suicide and self-harm content by putting a duty on providers of user-to-user services to properly manage such content.

A more comprehensive online safety regime for all ages will also increase protections for children, as research has shown that age verification and restrictions across social media and online platforms are easily bypassed by them. As the Bill currently stands, there is a two-tier approach to safety which can still mean that children may circumnavigate safety controls and find this harmful suicide and self-harm content.

Finally, user empowerment duties that we debated earlier are no substitute for regulation of access to dangerous suicide and self-harm online content through the law that these amendments seek to achieve.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for introducing the amendments in the way she did. I think that what she has done, and what this whole debate has done, is to ask the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, posed: we do not know yet quite where the gaps are until we see what the Government have in mind in terms of the promised new offence. But it seems pretty clear that something along the lines of what has been proposed in this debate needs to be set out as well.

One of the most moving aspects of being part of the original Joint Committee on the draft Bill was the experience of listening to Ian Russell and the understanding, which I had not come across previously, of the sheer scale of the kind of material that has been the subject of this debate on suicide and self-harm encouragement. We need to find an effective way of dealing with it and I entirely take my noble friend’s point that this needs a combination of protectiveness and support. I think the combination of these amendments is designed to do precisely that and to learn from experience through having the advisory committee as well.

It is clear that, by itself, user empowerment is just not going to be enough in all of this. I think that is the bottom line for all of us. We need to go much further, and we owe a debt to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for raising these issues and to the Samaritans for campaigning on this subject. I am just sorry that my noble friend Lady Tyler cannot be here because she is a signatory to a number of the amendments and feels very strongly about these issues as well.

I do not think I need to unpack a great deal of the points that have been made. We know that suicide is a leading cause of death in males under 50 and females under 35 in the UK. We know that so many of the deaths are internet-related and we need to find effective methods of dealing with this. These are meant to be practical steps.

I take the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, not only that it is a social problem of some magnitude but that the question of definitions is important. I thought she strayed well beyond where I thought the definition of “self-harm” actually came. But one could discuss that. I thought the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, saying that we want good law, not relying on good people, was about definitions. We cannot just leave it to the discretion of an individual, however good they may be, moderating on a social media platform.

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I ask the Minister to make this Bill come true on that purpose.

[Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 97 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. We must strengthen the Bill by imposing an obligation on Ofcom to develop and issue a code of practice on violence against women and girls. This will empower Ofcom and guide services in meeting their duties in regard to women and girls, and encourage them to recognise the many manifestations of online violence that disproportionately affect women and girls.

Refuge, the domestic abuse charity, has seen a growing number of cases of technology-facilitated domestic abuse in recent years. As other noble Lords have said, this tech abuse can take many forms but social media is a particularly powerful weapon for perpetrators, with one in three women experiencing online abuse, rising to almost two in three among young women. Yet the tech companies have been too slow to respond. Many survivors are left waiting weeks or months for a response when they report abusive content, if indeed they receive one at all. It appears that too many services do not understand the risks and nature of VAWG. They do not take complaints seriously and they think that this abuse does not breach community standards. A new code would address this with recommended measures and best practice on the appropriate prevention of and response to violence against women and girls. It would also support the delivery of existing duties set out in the Bill, such as those on illegal content, user empowerment and child safety.

I hope the Minister can accept this amendment, as it would be in keeping with other government policies, such as in the strategic policing requirement, which requires police forces to treat violence against women and girls as a national threat. Adding this code would help to meet the Government’s national and international commitments to tackling online VAWG, such as the tackling VAWG strategy and the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse.

The Online Safety Bill is a chance to act on tackling the completely unacceptable levels of abuse of women and girls by making it clear through Ofcom that companies need to take this matter seriously and make systemic changes to the design and operation of their services to address VAWG. It would allow Ofcom to add this as a priority, as mandated in the Bill, rather than leave it as an optional extra to be tackled at a later date. The work to produce this code has already been done thanks to Refuge and other charities and academics who have produced a model that is freely available and has been shared with Ofcom. So it is not an extra burden and does not need to delay the implementation of the Bill; in fact, it will greatly aid Ofcom.

The Government are to be congratulated on their amendment to include controlling or coercive behaviour in their list of priority offences. I would like to congratulate them further if they can accept this valuable Amendment 97.

[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.