Online Anonymity and Anonymous Abuse

Claire Coutinho Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on securing this debate. It is always a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield).

My constituent Frankie was subject to online stalking, which started on social media but escalated to severe harassment in the workplace, including incredibly offensive emails sent to both her and her colleagues. That caused serious distress for Frankie. While the police were able to track down her online stalker, because the stalker was based in a different jurisdiction—they were based in Scotland, a very long way from East Surrey, and had happened upon her almost by accident—nothing could be done, leaving that person free to go on and abuse again.

Although I welcome the online harms work that we are doing and the work of the Law Commission to improve the duty of care and to look at how we can boost our offences regime for online communications, I refer Members to the Law Commission’s language about the practical barriers to enforcement. It talks about the sheer scale of abusive and offensive online communications. That means that we must seek to prevent some of these communications; we cannot just use an offence regime to police them.

I want to touch briefly on free speech. We know that women are more abused online, we know that that inhibits them from expressing their views, and we know that that puts them off standing for office. I just wonder whether we are ensuring that we look at whose free speech we are protecting.

We also know that online anonymity can be very beneficial to people, whether they are whistleblowers, domestic abuse victims or people who just enjoy the uninhibited conversations that they can find online, but we know that, as more and more people go online, we will have more and more of these cross-jurisdiction problems. From 2 billion in 2015, we expect 7 billion people to be online in 2030. We cannot just act unilaterally on this issue; we need to look at what we can do to work with our partners across the world, because more and more of these trolls may not be based in the UK.

From stalking to harassment, grooming, scamming, extremism, fake news and political interference, we know that the anonymity of online interaction is doing harm, and there is therefore much merit in the proposals put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud. We should be considering those and all other policies that we can to try to inhibit some of the anonymous abuse that we have seen.