Internet-based Media Companies

Gregory Campbell Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Mactaggart]

My hon. Friend is right, but what happened was completely predictable. Responsible publishers choose not to publish things that are designed to provoke. I have not seen the video, but I persuaded someone in my office to, and the clear intention of the material is absolutely to provoke. It was irresponsible for YouTube to carry the video.

In its response, Google, rather like my hon. Friend, uttered pious words about free speech and the first amendment, but I would like to make some observations about that. Google is an exceptionally profitable business. It is not a charity, or an agency that can lay claim to moral or political leadership in any credible way. I say that not just because of the mounting number of times Google is being hauled, in relation to other parts of the internet, before the courts and regulators and losing. The company seems to be highly selective about the parts of the law that it wishes to observe.

Many Muslims in the UK and throughout the world—some of whom reacted in the way my hon. Friend described, and some of whom simply demonstrated peacefully outside Google’s UK headquarters—were deeply offended by the video and by YouTube’s failure to remove it, except in the two countries where the company acknowledged that there might be violent protests. I understand that YouTube has now also disabled links to the clip in at least two other countries, including India. It became clear, therefore, as the tragedy of the video unfolded, that the company did not have an absolute fixed position that it would defend to the nth degree. It was a movable feast, but it moved too slowly, and only after too many people had died, been injured or had their property destroyed. That highlights the inadequacy, or at any rate the inconsistency, of YouTube’s processes. I have looked at those processes so that I can try to advise people who have been hurt by the video, and the processes are almost deliberately opaque and make it hard for people to find any mechanism to address their hurt.

I shall not address the issues that the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) has led on in Parliament, because she wants to speak later, and I want other Members to have a chance to contribute to this debate, but I am concerned that decisions—the Muslim video is one example—appear to be taken on an ad hoc basis. A codified, publicly available system would help to show that Google—this applies to other companies, too—is serious about its responsibilities. The companies need to grow up. They are not young cowboys battling on the wilder edges of a new territory about which we know little; we now know a lot, and it is time that that was reflected in the behaviour of internet businesses.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

The hon. Lady is outlining the thrust of her powerful argument against the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter, but she has not said what sanctions, if she were successful and her campaign moved to a logical conclusion, a Parliament in an individual nation state might apply that could protect the people whom she and I seek to defend.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

The hon. Gentleman is right that I have not stated the sanctions that Parliament could apply, because in this debate I am arguing, in the first place, for the industry to grow up, take responsibility and properly self-regulate, and not to say, “Oh, whoops, we are being embarrassed, so we are going to do something,” or, “Oh, whoops, it is dangerous in that country, so we will sort it there.” I am saying, “Come on; you are in the last chance saloon, and you need to take responsibility. If you do it well and right, the Minister will not need to intervene, but if you do not, I will be the first person, not just in this Chamber but in the House, arguing for much more powerful regulation.” That is not where I want to go first. I expect companies not to be surprised when they get it wrong, and to ensure that they put in place proper mechanisms to protect not just vulnerable internet users, but all of us.

My final point is about child abuse images. The Internet Watch Foundation is a model and example to the rest of the world, but it addresses only a narrow, albeit important, part of the internet—the web and newsgroups. Figures recently released by five police forces in England and Wales—Cambridgeshire, Dyfed-Powys, Humberside, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire—show that between 2010 and mid-2012, they seized 26 million pornographic images of children, which is an incredibly troubling number, but think about this: someone calculated that that might mean that more than 300 million images were seized across the country in the same period. Not only does that beggar belief, but it tells us that something is definitely not working as it should. Somehow or other, the industry and all of us need to up our game and confront such harm.