Online Abuse

Chris Philp Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2022 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Chris Philp)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Sir Roger. Colleagues will be pleased to hear that I do not anticipate taking up the entire two hours that remain.

First, I associate myself with the remarks made by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), and by the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) about the terrible events unfolding in Ukraine, which are being debated in the Chamber at the moment. I know that we are all deeply concerned and want to send our thoughts, prayers and more to the people of Ukraine, who are suffering so terribly.

I congratulate and thank the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North for introducing the debate with such eloquence and passion. I extend those thanks and congratulations to the hundreds of thousands of people across the whole United Kingdom who signed the petitions, whose voices are being heard today, and especially to those who took the time and the trouble to organise the petitions, including Bobby Norris, who has done a huge amount of work in this vital area. I am sure that we all want to pay tribute to him.

Although the online world presents enormous opportunities for communication, research and better understanding one another, there is no question but that, as the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North put it at the very beginning, in many areas of enormous concern people are suffering terrible abuse that affects their day-to-day lives in the most awful and unimaginable ways. More than that, on occasion, people are subjected to abuse that is straightforwardly illegal and deserves criminal prosecution.

The Government fully recognise the problems in the online space, and the devastating impact that they can have on victims. We also recognise the fact that women, girls, people in the LGBT+ community, members of ethnic minorities, and others, very often—as the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North said at the beginning—suffer disproportionately severe forms of abuse online, simply because of who they are. That is a point that the shadow Minister also made very powerfully. It is simply unacceptable, and it is essential that we take action.

The draft Online Safety Bill is the principal vehicle through which action will be taken. It is a huge piece of legislation, as Members have mentioned, and I want to touch on some of the points raised about it during the debate. The shadow Minister asked about timing. It is true that it has been some time in preparation—from the White Paper, to the draft Bill presented last May, to the Joint Committee’s prelegislative work through the autumn and up until just before Christmas. I would like to take the opportunity to pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), who chaired that Committee, which did fantastic work. Its report has almost 200 pages and we have been devouring every single one of them. To answer the question about timing, the introduction of the updated Bill is very imminent. I will not give a precise date, because it is still subject to collective Government agreement, but it is a matter of a small number of weeks, if I can put it that way. I hope that that gives an indication that it is extremely imminent and that all that work is about to come to fruition.

I want to make it clear that the Government have been in very careful listening mode for the past nine or 10 months since publication. We have, of course, listened to the Joint Committee and its report. The Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport also produced a report, and Members who have been raising points about the Bill in Parliament and elsewhere. As Members will have gathered, significant changes will be made to the Bill on introduction. It will be very different, in a number of significant ways, when it is introduced very shortly, compared with the draft version published last May. That is due to the work that parliamentarians and other stakeholders—some children’s charities were mentioned earlier—have done. We want to take every opportunity to make sure that the Bill is as good as it can be. It is not really a party political issue, is it? I am sure there will be areas to improve, but when the Bill is introduced I hope that the House of Commons will get behind it and speak as one for the whole country, because we all have the same objectives. I think that the scrutiny that has already taken place has been an example of Parliament at its best, and I hope that when the Bill goes through the House it will be another example of Parliament working at its best.

I want to pick up on a few points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe. Obviously, I cannot pre-announce all of the updates that will be in the Bill. Some have been announced already. He made important points about ensuring clarity on how the different provisions will operate. We have already made it clear that we will specify the priority illegal offences, and social media firms will have to be proactive in preventing such illegal things from appearing online. That will be a first step towards providing some of the clarity referred to by my hon. Friend. There is then the question of how we bring similar clarity in the area of legal but harmful; there will be more to say on that in the very near future.

Whether or not the illegal act or illegal thing is a priority item, there will be a duty to take action where any illegal activity occurs online. Critically, that particular duty applies to all platforms, regardless of size, so even the smaller ones that are not category 1 will have to take action—proactive action for priority illegal harms, and retrospective action for everything else that is illegal. Similarly, on things that are legal but harmful to children, which is obviously a major area of concern, that duty will apply to all platforms where children are likely to be significantly present, regardless of the size of the platform. The only qualification on size applies to the area of legal but harmful to adults, where the obligations sit with the larger, category 1 companies. I want to make clear, however, that the Bill as previously drafted in May also applied to all platforms, regardless of size, the obligations relating to content that is illegal and legal but harmful to children. That point came up a couple of times.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who unfortunately has had to go to another meeting, raised points in his speech about the exposure of children to pornography. He was quite right to raise those points: 51% of 11 to 13-year-olds are exposed to online pornography. The overwhelming majority of parents want that to stop and, as the shadow Minister said, just a couple of weeks ago the Government made an announcement making it clear that the provisions on pornography would be expanded to cover all online pornography, including commercial pornography, which was previously outside the scope of the Bill. That vital change has been announced already and will be in the Bill on introduction, as will the obligations on the face of the Bill to adopt age-assurance measures to prevent children under 18 from accessing pornography. Again, that is an important change to make the Bill a lot stronger than it was in its first draft. I hope that that gives a foretaste, a flavour, of the way changes are being made to the Bill to ensure that we really do prevent the terrible abuse that we have heard about this afternoon.

A number of hon. Members asked about enforcement, because clearly it is all very well writing in obligations to stop illegal activity and to control abuse, but if the enforcement measures are not there, then, as the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North and others said, the legislation is toothless. I will not comment on the police, the prosecution, side of this—because that is for my colleagues in the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice—other than to observe that 20,000 extra police officers are being recruited and I hope that some of them can direct their attention to such issues.

The shadow Minister has said that it is important that the Bill is enforced domestically, here in the United Kingdom, and that we do not rely on people in California. That is of course why Ofcom is being appointed as the regulator. There was a question about resourcing. Between the Government and Ofcom, we will put an extra £110 million over two years into resourcing up in order to prepare for the Bill’s coming into force, and thereafter Ofcom will raise the money that it needs to operate by charging fees to the social media companies themselves. The £110 million has been agreed already; that was in the spending review a few months ago, so the resourcing for Ofcom is hardwired in. As for its ability to then take enforcement action, it clearly has the power to levy fines of up to 10% of global income for these social media firms. Although it depends on the geographic distribution of sales, 10% of global income is almost certain to be more than 100% of UK income, because the UK tends to be responsible for between 5% and 8% of those firms’ global revenue, so the fines amount to over a year’s worth of UK revenue. That obviously is for any company a significant amount of money.

The Bill already contains criminal liability provisions that make named individuals liable if they do not, for example, provide information to Ofcom as regulator. They commence a couple of years down the line. I do not want to pre-empt what we may do in that area, but we have been listening very carefully to parliamentarians and we are studying extremely carefully proposals that have been made. We may well have some more to say on that topic in the near future.

The shadow Minister asked about the Metaverse, which has been around for only a few weeks, and what the Bill will mean for that. The Bill has been crafted as it has to make it technology-agnostic and future-proof, because we realise that what is around today will be different tomorrow. The fact that the Metaverse has popped up in the last few weeks is evidence of that. The horrifying abuse of children in the Metaverse that the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North described will be covered by the Bill as drafted, because what she described is clearly harmful to children. When the Bill passes, as I hope it will, there will therefore be a duty on Meta to prevent that from happening. In fact, that would be the case even if it was not Meta and was a smaller company, because the bits of the Bill on content that is harmful to children apply to all companies where children are likely to be significantly present. Therefore, what the shadow Minister described on Meta would be in the scope of the Bill as we will present it.

I want to touch on the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) and on anonymity. I pay enormous tribute to the campaign that she has run. She has been a persuasive, powerful and persistent—in a nice way—advocate for changes, and her ten-minute rule Bill had enormous support from both sides of the House. On Friday, in response to the campaign that my hon. Friend and other MPs from both sides of the House ran, we therefore announced with great pleasure that we would make changes to the Bill and have a requirement for category 1 firms to give all users the choice to have their identity verified, and then give users the choice about whether or not to interact with people. That level of user choice and user empowerment will be powerful. I thank my hon. Friend again and congratulate her on her campaign. I agree, as the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North said in her speech and as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud acknowledged, that although that measure will go a long way towards helping, it is not in itself a silver bullet. It is a very good measure, but we need to do more to prevent online abuse. The Bill will do more to tackle abuse, whether it is perpetrated by those who are anonymous or those who are not, because, as my hon. Friend said, much of the abuse is not anonymous. Shamefully, much of it is done in people’s own name, so that needs to be tackled as well.

I have tried to touch on the comments that colleagues have made, but I hope that everybody here and those listening will clearly understand that the Government and the whole House of Commons strongly sympathise and agree with the points made by the petitioners, and I suspect by millions of our fellow citizens up and down the country. When the updated Bill is introduced in the very near future, we aim to make it better and stronger to ensure that our fellow citizens—especially children, but including everybody who suffers abuse—are far better protected than they are today. I hope the Bill will serve as an example around the world and keep people in this country safe online for many years to come.