Online Harms

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts

Monday 8th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, I too welcome this White Paper. We have heard it heralded from the Front Bench week after week, and it is great to see it arrive. However, it deals with only part of the problem. That is, it is a paper about the private harms that may be done—for example, by cyberbullying, fraud or extremist material. All of those matter, but there is another set of harms: harms to public goods, democracy, culture and the standards of the media. The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the other place recently had an interesting report on disinformation and fake news which discussed some of those harms—including those which I can loosely indicate by referring to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

We are beginning to understand that there are people campaigning within democracies that our regulation cannot reach. The electoral commissioner cannot reach those harms. Is the proposal to reach those harms as well, or is that for another day? I fear that if we do not deal with those harms relatively soon, we will regret it. Political campaigning may be undertaken not only by legitimate, registered political parties and individuals, but also by non-citizens, other states, businesses and the security apparatuses of other states. I believe these public, online harms to democracy should be of the utmost concern to us, but they are little discussed in this White Paper.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, I agree that those are serious issues and need to be addressed. We have made it clear in the White Paper the harms that are in scope, but have also been very open about those that are not. We have said that we are addressing some of the really serious issues on the internet which the noble Baroness describes as private harms. We have said that we cannot deal with everything, but we are dealing with matters such as disinformation and potential assaults on democracy. We do not want to duplicate within one big White Paper, followed by legislation, all the harms connected to the internet. We have said that we are not dealing with competition law, intellectual property violation, fraud, data protection and so on, but I absolutely accept that they are very important issues. The Cabinet Office is due to report on them soon, and it is right that that department, which has responsibility for the constitution, should be dealing with it. We have not neglected those problems.