Online Safety Bill

George Howarth Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am relieved to finally speak on Third Reading of this important Bill. We have had a few false dawns along the way, but we are almost there. The Bill has seen parliamentary dramas, arcane procedures and a revolving door of Ministers. Every passing week throws up another example of why stronger online regulation is urgently needed, from the vile Andrew Tate and the damning Molly Russell inquest to threats to democracy and, most recently, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and ripping up of its rules.

The power of the broadcast media in the past was that it reached into everybody’s living rooms. Today, in the digital age, social media is in every room in our home, in every workplace, in every school, at every event and, with the rise of virtual reality, also in our heads. It is hard to escape. What began as ideas on student campuses to join up networks of old friends are now multibillion-pound businesses that attract global advertising budgets and hold hugely valuable data and information on every aspect of our lives.

In the digital age, social media is a central influence on what we buy, often on what we think, how we interact and how we behave. The power and the money at stake are enormous, yet the responsibilities are minimal and the accountability non-existent. The need to constantly drive engagement and growth has brought with it real and actual harms to individuals, democracy, our economy, society and public health, with abusers and predators finding a new profitable home online. These harms are driven by business models and engagement algorithms that actively promote harmful content. The impact on children and young people can be particularly acute, even life-threatening.

It is for those reasons and others that, as a country and on a cross-party basis, we embarked many years ago on bringing communications from the analogue era into the digital age. Since the Bill was first mooted, we have had multiple Select Committee reports, a Joint Committee and even two Public Bill Committees. During that time, the pace of change has continued. Nobody had even heard of TikTok when we first discussed the Bill. Today, it is one of the main ways that young people get their news. It is a stark reminder of just how slow-moving Government legislation is and how we will probably need to return to these issues once again very soon—I am sorry to break that to everybody—but we have got there for now. We will at least establish a regulator with some tough powers, albeit with a much narrower scope than was originally conceived.

[Sir George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

I warmly endorse what my hon. Friend is saying. Does she agree with the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), who intervened on the Secretary of State, that further work is needed to prevent platforms from promoting different forms of eating disorders?

[Lucy Powell]

I absolutely endorse those comments and I will come on to that briefly.

We never thought that the Online Safety Bill was perfect and we have been trying to work with the Government to improve it at every stage. Some of that has paid off and I put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) for her truly brilliant work, which has been ably supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley). I thank the various Ministers for listening to our proposals on scam ads, epilepsy trolling and dealing with small but high harm platforms, and I thank the various Secretaries of State for their constructive approaches. Most of all, I, too, thank the campaigners, charities and families who have been most affected by the Bill.

I welcome today’s last-minute concessions. We have been calling for criminal liability from the start as a means to drive culture change, and we look forward to seeing the detail of the measure when it is tabled in the other place. I also welcome that the Bill will finally outlaw conversion practices, including for trans people, and will take tougher action on people traffickers who advertise online.

On major aspects, however, the Government have moved in the wrong direction. They seem to have lost their mettle and watered down the Bill significantly by dumping whole swathes of it, including many of the harms that it was originally designed to deal with. There are still protections for children, albeit that age verification is difficult and many children pass themselves off as older online, but all the previous work on tackling wider harms has been dropped.

In failing to reconcile harms that are not individually illegal with the nature of powerful platforms that promote engagement and outcomes that are harmful, the Government have let the big tech companies off the hook and left us all more at risk. Online hate, disinformation, sensationalism, abuse, terrorism, racism, self-harm, eating disorders, incels, misogyny, antisemitism, and many other things, are now completely out of scope of the Bill and will continue to proliferate. That is a major loophole that massively falls short of the Bill’s original intention.

I hope that the other place will return to some of the core principles of the duty of care, giving the regulator wider powers to direct terms and conditions, and getting transparency and accountability for the engagement algorithms and economic business models that monetise misery, as Ian Russell described it. I am confident that the other place will consider those issues carefully, sensitively and intelligently. As I have said, if the Bill is not strengthened, it will fall to the next Labour Government to bring in further legislation. For now, I am pleased to finally be able to support the Online Safety Bill to pass its Third Reading.