Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill

David Johnston Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady, and I congratulate her on her election as Chair of the Home Affairs Committee.

The Joint Committee received evidence on this important issue, and we discussed this and other issues with Interpol. We believe that the general principle behind the online safety regime should be that illegality should not exist in these online spaces and communities. If links to such sites are being shared by special interest groups on broader social media platforms, the companies should have a responsibility to address that. The basic principle is that encouraging illegality should not have a place on social media.

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend and his Committee for their work on this issue. Does he agree that, as big tech companies can analyse our search histories to suggest purchases and can even read our messages to suggest a reply, it is ludicrous for them to say that the sorts of things we want them to do to keep people safer are too difficult?

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. These companies are engaging in mass surveillance and data gathering to target their users with ads. The same technology and data they use to target people with ads and other information, such as recommending content through recommendation tools, could be used to stop bad things happening. We discussed this throughout the inquiry and in the report. He is right that it is not that it cannot be done; it is that there has not been a requirement in law for it to be done, and that there has been no regulator with proper investigatory powers checking whether the companies are actually doing it.