Online Safety Bill

David Davis Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I am grateful to the Minister for the offer to work on that further, but we have an opportunity now to make real and lasting change. We talk about how we tackle this issue going forward. How can we solve the problem of violence against women and girls in our community? Three women a week are murdered at the hands of men in this country—that is shocking. How can we truly begin to tackle a culture change? This is how it starts. We have had enough of words. We have had enough of Ministers standing at the Dispatch Box saying, “This is how we are going to tackle violence against women and girls; this is our new plan to do it.” They have an opportunity to create a new law that makes it a priority harm, and that makes women and girls feel like they are being listened to, finally. I urge the Minister and Members in all parts of the House, who know that this is a chance for us finally to take that first step, to vote for new clause 3 today and make women and girls a priority by showing understanding that they receive a disproportionate level of abuse and harm online, and by making them a key component of the Bill.

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I join everybody else in welcoming the Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), to the Front Bench. He is astonishingly unusual in that he is both well-intentioned and well-informed, a combination we do not always find among Ministers.

I will speak to my amendments to the Bill. I am perfectly willing to be in a minority of one—one of my normal positions in this House. To be in a minority of one on the issue of free speech is an honourable place to be. I will start by saying that I think the Bill is fundamentally mis-designed. It should have been several Bills, not one. It is so complex that it is very difficult to forecast the consequences of what it sets out to do. It has the most fabulously virtuous aims, but unfortunately the way things will be done under it, with the use of Government organisations to make decisions that, properly, should be taken on the Floor of the House, is in my view misconceived.

We all want the internet to be safe. Right now, there are too many dangers online—we have been hearing about some of them from the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), who made a fabulous speech from the Opposition Front Bench—from videos propagating terror to posts promoting self-harm and suicide. But in its well-intentioned attempts to address those very real threats, the Bill could actually end up being the biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history.

There are many reasons to be concerned about the Bill. Not all of them are to be dealt with in this part of the Report stage—some will be dealt with later—and I do not have time to mention them all. I will make one criticism of the handling of the Bill at this point. I have seen much smaller Bills have five days on Report in the past. This Bill demands more than two days. That was part of what I said in my point of order at the beginning.

One of the biggest problems is the “duties of care” that the Bill seeks to impose on social media firms to protect users from harmful content. That is a more subtle issue than the tabloid press have suggested. My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), the previous Minister, made that point and I have some sympathy with him. I have spoken to representatives of many of the big social media firms, some of which cancelled me after speeches that I made at the Conservative party conference on vaccine passports. I was cancelled for 24 hours, which was an amusing process, and they put me back up as soon as they found out what they had done. Nevertheless, that demonstrated how delicate and sensitive this issue is. That was a clear suppression of free speech without any of the pressures that are addressed in the Bill.

When I spoke to the firms, they made it plain that they did not want the role of online policemen, and I sympathise with them, but that is what the Government are making them do. With the threat of huge fines and even prison sentences if they consistently fail to abide by any of the duties in the Bill—I am using words from the Bill—they will inevitably err on the side of censorship whenever they are in doubt. That is the side they will fall on.

Worryingly, the Bill targets not only illegal content, which we all want to tackle—indeed, some of the practice raised by the Opposition Front Bencher, the hon. Member for Pontypridd should simply be illegal full stop—but so-called “legal but harmful” content. Through clause 13, the Bill imposes duties on companies with respect to legal content that is “harmful to adults”. It is true that the Government have avoided using the phrase “legal but harmful” in the Bill, preferring “priority content”, but we should be clear about what that is.

The Bill’s factsheet, which is still on the Government’s website, states on page 1:

“The largest, highest-risk platforms will have to address named categories of legal but harmful material”.

This is not just a question of transparency—they will “have to” address that. It is simply unacceptable to target lawful speech in this way. The “Legal to Say, Legal to Type” campaign, led by Index on Censorship, sums up this point: it is both perverse and dangerous to allow speech in print but not online.

[Damian Collins]

As I said, a company may be asked to address this, which means that it has to set out what its policies are, how it would deal with that content and its terms of service. The Bill does not require a company to remove legal speech that it has no desire to remove. The regulator cannot insist on that, nor can the Government or the Bill. There is nothing to make legal speech online illegal.

[Mr Davis]

That is exactly what the Minister said earlier and, indeed, said to me yesterday when we spoke about this issue. I do not deny that, but this line of argument ignores the unintended consequences that the Bill may have. Its stated aim is to achieve reductions in online harm, not just illegal content. Page 106 of the Government’s impact assessment lists a reduction in the prevalence of legal but harmful content as a “key evaluation” question. The Bill aims to reduce that—the Government say that both in the online guide and the impact assessment. The impact assessment states that an increase in “content moderation” is expected because of the Bill.

A further concern is that the large service providers already have terms and conditions that address so-called legal but harmful content. A duty to state those clearly and enforce them consistently risks legitimising and strengthening the application of those terms and conditions, possibly through automated scanning and removal. That is precisely what happened to me before the Bill was even dreamed of. That was done under an automated system, backed up by somebody in Florida, Manila or somewhere who decided that they did not like what I said. We have to bear in mind how cautious the companies will be. That is especially worrying because, as I said, providers will be under significant pressure from outside organisations to include restrictive terms and conditions. I say this to Conservative Members, and we have some very well-intentioned and very well-informed Members on these Benches: beware of the gamesmanship that will go on in future years in relation to this.

Ofcom and the Department see these measures as transparency measures—that is the line. Lord Michael Grade, who is an old friend of mine, came to see me and he talked about this not as a pressure, but as a transparency measure. However, these are actually pressure measures. If people are made to announce things and talk about them publicly, that is what they become.

It is worth noting that several free speech and privacy groups have expressed scepticism about the provisions, yet they were not called to give oral evidence in Committee. A lot of other people were, including pressure groups on the other side and the tech companies, which we cannot ignore, but free speech advocates were not.