Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill

Dean Russell Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

May I take this opportunity to wish you, Madam Deputy Speaker, all Members of the House and all members of House staff a very merry Christmas?

Following the publication of the Joint Committee’s report on the draft Online Safety Bill on Tuesday, I want to take this opportunity to inform the House of its publication and the key themes that we have addressed. The Joint Committee was formed as a pre-legislative scrutiny Committee by order of this House and the House of Lords on the last sitting day before the summer recess. Anyone who has been involved in a Joint Committee of this nature knows that, because it has a clear deadline to hit, it is inevitably a race against time. Although we had the summer recess to plan and prepare for our hearings in September, we effectively had around 11 to 12 sitting weeks, including some of the conference recess, to produce our report. The report was concluded on the last day of the Joint Committee’s existence last Friday and then published on Tuesday this week.

Before addressing the report, I thank the members of the Joint Committee, who worked so hard throughout the inquiry and produced a unanimous report. It was genuinely a very collaborative process to which all members of the Joint Committee contributed. To have completed that and produced a unanimous report without division among the members shows the strength of feeling and the importance and strength of working closely together through that.

I also thank the staff of the Joint Committee, particularly the Commons Clerk, David Slater, who led a very impressive team of Clerks and advisers. Without their herculean efforts, we would not have completed the project within the timeframe that we were given by the Government. The Joint Committee held oral evidence sessions with 50 witnesses, received 200 written evidence submissions and produced a report of 192 pages, totalling around 60,000 words, so it was a huge effort to produce what I think is an important report.

The draft Bill has been of considerable interest to Members of the House. We organised a roundtable to enable Members to contribute directly to the work of the Joint Committee, as well as other roundtables working with the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics. The high number of written evidence submissions also demonstrates the high level of interest in this issue. For those of us who have been following the debate closely over a number of years, the Bill feels like it has been a long time coming. I think that is because it is anticipated and wanted, but we should still remember that this Parliament will be the first in the world to introduce such a comprehensive piece of legislation to create regulation for the online world. Other Parliaments in the world are discussing that and the European Union is discussing it, but we have gone further. When the Bill is introduced before the end of this Session, as I believe the Government intend, it will be the first such comprehensive Bill in the world to seek parliamentary approval.

In addition to my thanks to the members and the staff of the Joint Committee, I thank the ministerial team and the Secretary of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, as well as the Bill team officials, with whom we had a very constructive and open dialogue throughout the inquiry. It was good to see them stand by the commitments Ministers made that they wanted the scrutiny process to be open and genuine. The Bill was by no means locked down when it was given to us and the Secretary of State herself has gone on the record to say that she expects the Bill to change as a consequence of the work of the Joint Committee. That is good to hear and important.

The reason the Bill has been so anticipated is because the online world has become central to our lives. It is where we work. It is where we stay in touch with our family and friends. It is where people play games. It is where people get their news and information. It has become our public square. But people are rightly asking, “What kind of place is that public square?” It is increasingly an environment where, for too many people, it is the forum in which they are abused. It is the forum in which their vulnerabilities are targeted and exploited. It is the forum through which hate speech has become normalised. We are seeing a disturbing trend of that affecting offline behaviour, too. People are more likely to be subject to attacks because of their race, sexual orientation or gender. People are more likely to become victims of scams and frauds through the internet. People are more likely to receive egregious disinformation that could damage public health, or interfere and undermine the integrity of elections. We see that taking place around the world, but we experience it at home as well. As Members of Parliament, we are often subject to abuse. We often have constituents who come to us who have been the victims of abuse. They say, “What can be done about this? What can the social media companies do?”

There is a presumption that the law applies equally in all areas, but I think we all know that the law being applied online has become a very difficult place. It is difficult to get social media companies to take responsibility for the systems they have created and the activity of the users on their platforms. We have to recognise that the Bill does not just address content moderation. We are not just looking at harmful and abusive content that has no place on the internet; we are looking at the systems that create an audience for that content, too. The bigger area of harm is done by the amplification of content on these platforms. If abuse was being directed by someone shouting in the street, ultimately that person would probably be arrested and moved on, but it is difficult to control it when that voice of abuse is being amplified to millions of people. That is what the systems of social media companies do and they should be accountable for those systems. They have designed and built those systems to hold the engagement of users, because the more often they visit the site, the longer they are on it and the more engaged they are, the more valuable they are to the platforms and the more advertising they can sell.

Too often, the platforms work on the assumption that all engagement is good, that engagement in itself is a positive metric, because people would not go on the platforms if they were not enjoying it. But we all know the nature of addiction is that people return to things they know are harmful and damaging to them. It was interesting to hear Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who gave evidence to the Joint Committee, cite research from within Facebook showing how vulnerable teenage girls were suffering heightened anxiety and depression as a consequence of their experience of using Instagram, but felt, at the same time, that they could not not use the platform because all their friends were on it and they could not miss out. It is disturbing not just to see those problems discussed in cold research documents, but to know that the companies themselves know that and are still not doing enough to act on it.

That is why we now have to move to a regulatory regime for social media companies, big search engines and other big online firms, where it is the laws passed in this Parliament that apply and terms of service written in silicon valley are not the guiding principle for regulation. The Joint Committee’s central recommendation for the online safety Bill is that Ofcom, as the independent regulator, should set mandatory codes of practice, based on existing laws in this country, that will deal with the worst kinds of illegal content, such as child abuse and content that promotes and glamorises terrorism. We should also bring into force the equalities legislation—people expect to be respected and not to be abused because of their race, sexual orientation or gender, and that should apply online as well. The regulator’s job should be to set the standards for the companies and explain to them what they are expected to do.

We greatly welcome the work of the Law Commission in suggesting specific new offences, particularly in respect of knowingly sharing false information on social media platforms with the intention of causing physical harm or severe psychological harm to other users. The commission suggests making the promotion of self-harm, which is a particular problem with vulnerable younger users of social media platforms, a specific new offence. We also should create new offences around cyber-flashing. The law needs to keep up to speed with new technology, and people who use new technology to abuse others should know that the law will come for them.

The report also addresses the issue of anonymity, about which many Members have spoken. Anonymity can play an important role in helping victims of abuse and people who speak out against oppressive regimes to speak truth to power when they might be fearful of doing so in their own name, but it is also used by some as a shield to abuse others, in the belief that anonymity will protect them and allow them to commit acts for which they would otherwise be charged and face prosecution. The Committee believes that in such circumstances people should be traceable: we should be able to identify people who abuse others and a request from law enforcement to get that information readily and speedily should be complied with. There should be traceability and people should know that, even if they do not post in their own name, they can be traced if they abuse others and break the law.

Age assurance is another important issue that the Committee considered. We are particularly concerned that children can be vulnerable and can access content—particularly adult content—to which they should not have access all too easily on the internet. Companies are not doing enough to address that, so we say that they should have effective age-assurance policies in place.

Finally, the key principle that underpins the Bill as it stands and that we think is very important is that the regulator has the power to inspect and audit the companies. We will not be reliant on self-declared information and reports from those companies but will have the ability to get for ourselves information that is too often supplied to the outside world only by brave whistleblowers and investigators who speak out about it. We should have access to that information and know on what basis the companies make decisions, and the companies should be liable for big fines if they do not comply with the legislation. We agree with the Secretary of State that individual named directors should also have liability if the companies are in flagrant breach, and there should be redress for individual users.

I encourage all Members to add the report to their Christmas reading list.

[Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)]

First, as a member of the Joint Committee on the draft Online Safety Bill, I thank my hon. Friend for his words.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill will have a profound impact on real people—especially vulnerable people and young children—like Zach Eagling? He has cerebral palsy and epilepsy and was targeted with cruel flashing images, as many people have been on social media to trigger seizures, cause harm to their lives and potentially even risk death. The Bill will, in its own small way, not only help those people but make sure that people like Zach are supported through our support of the proposed Zach’s law. It will also make sure that tech firms are held to account for the harm that they may do.

[Damian Collins]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who has spoken out strongly on the targeting of people with epilepsy both in Committee and elsewhere. That is a clear example of how some people can be badly abused: people who are known to have epilepsy are deliberately targeted with flashing images that the sender knows will trigger a seizure and cause them physical harm. This practice should have no place on the internet and the companies should be working to stop it and close it down, and they should make sure that action is taken against the accounts that do it. That is one of the clear recommendations in our report and I completely agree with my hon. Friend on that.