Online Safety Bill (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Dean Russell and Barbara Keeley

Committee stage
Tuesday 14th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Barbara Keeley]

I very much agree. We cannot emphasis that enough, and it is useful that my hon. Friend has set that out, adding to what I was saying.

Amendment 55 sets out the details of the information that Ofcom must request to be provided in a transparency report in new paragraph 31A. First, transparency disclosures required by the Bill should include how large companies allocate resources to tackling harm in different languages —an issue that was rightly raised by the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire. As we heard from Frances Haugen, many safety systems at Meta have only a subset of detection systems for languages other than English. Languages such as Welsh have almost no safety systems live on Facebook. It is neither fair nor safe.

When we consider that more than 250 languages are spoken in London alone, the inconsistency of safety systems becomes very concerning. Charities have warned that people accessing Facebook in different languages are being exposed to very different levels of risk, with some versions of Facebook having few or none of the safety systems that protect other versions of the site in different languages.

When giving evidence to the Committee last month, Richard Earley disclosed that Meta regulated only 70 languages. Given that around 3 billion people use Facebook on a monthly basis across the world, that is clearly inadequate.

[Dean Russell]

One of the things we found on the Joint Committee last year was the consistent message that we should not need to put this Bill in place. I want to put on the record my continued frustration that Meta and the other social media platforms are requiring us to put this Bill in place because they are not doing the monitoring, engaging in that way or putting users first. I hope that the process of going through the Bill has helped them to see the need for more monitoring. It is disappointing that we have had to get to this point. The UK Government are having to lead the world by putting this Bill in place—it should not be necessary. I hope that the companies do not simply follow what we are putting forward, but go much further and see that it is imperative to change the way they work and support their users around the world.

[Barbara Keeley]

I thank the hon. Gentleman and I agree. It is a constant frustration that we need this Bill. We do need it, though. In fact, amendment 55 would really assist with that, by requiring those services to go further in transparency reporting and to disclose

“the languages in which the service has safety systems or classifiers”.

We need to see what they are doing on this issue. It is an easily reported piece of information that will have an outsized impact on safety, even for English speakers. It will help linguistic groups in the multilingual UK and around the world.

Reporting on language would not be a big burden on companies. In her oral evidence, Frances Haugen told the Committee that large platforms can trivially produce this additional data merely by changing a single line of code when they do their transparency reports. We must not become wrapped up in the comfort of the language we all speak and ignore the gaping loophole left for other languages, which allows harms to slip through.