Online Abuse

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones]

My hon. Friend is exactly right, and I will come to that point later in my remarks.

Online, those with visible disabilities are often mocked for how they look. Those with learning difficulties are targeted for sexual or financial exploitation. Some of the terms used—I will repeat them only to show how vile they are—such as “mong”, “retard” and “spastic”, are as vile as the worst terms of racist abuse; yet they are often not treated in the same way. People even join Facebook groups that disabled people use for support so that they can steal images and transform them into so-called jokes or memes online.

My hon. Friend is entirely right; the disabled people we spoke to were very clear that the abuse that they get online reflects attitudes in society. That is why our report called for more education. We found that 21% of young adults would avoid speaking to a disabled person. Unless we break down those barriers, things will not change. I am sorry that the Government were rather dismissive of that recommendation in their response.

Disabled people were also clear that the abuse had increased since 2010, when certain politicians started to ramp up the rhetoric about benefit fraudsters and scroungers, despite knowing that, even on the worst estimate, benefit fraud is only 1% of the spending. In many estimates, it is less than that. That should be a reminder to everybody that such rhetoric has an impact on real people living their day-to-day lives.

We were clear that part of the way to counter the abuse is to promote more positive images of disabled people. After all, they are 20% of the population, and 19% of the working-age population. They are our friends, neighbours and work colleagues; yet they are seldom visible, either in the media or Government campaigns. That is why we recommended that the Government ensure that there are positive images of disabled people in all their campaigns, events and advertising.

The Government’s response says that they used a picture of a disabled person in a campaign on transport because disabled people often have problems with transport. It would be an understatement to say that that comprehensively misses the point. We do not want always to see pictures of disabled people who have problems—indeed, sometimes they themselves are seen as the problem. We want to see pictures of disabled people going about their everyday lives at work, at leisure and contributing to society, as they do.

That kind of misunderstanding is everywhere. It leads to a situation in which disabled people who report abuse are often told to go offline. That is as unacceptable in the 21st century as it would be to tell a black person or a disabled person not to go down the high street in case they get abused. When that happens, disabled people face a double whammy: first, their health is damaged by the constant abuse—Members of this House ought to know how that feels—and then they are denied opportunities that would improve their health, in volunteering or in work, and their social circle is narrowed. For those who are in work, constantly having to change their details to avoid abuse leads to loss of employment opportunities or promotion.

We cannot do anything about this problem until we start to understand it, but people do not. For example, we became aware during our inquiry that a lot of the abuse related to football, with people using disability terms as insults. Shockingly and appallingly, they were using the name of Harvey Price, who is a child and a football fan, to insult someone on their ability as a footballer. We wrote to the footballing organisations—the Professional Footballers Association, Kick It Out, the Football Association, the Premier League and the English Football League—but only one replied before our inquiry concluded. The Premier League’s reply was about access to football grounds and abuse at the grounds—it just did not get it. It is shocking that some of those organisations did not reply at all; it is shameful, in fact, because clubs and footballers have a great influence on their fans. I hope that in future they will use their position to call out hatred of disabled people in the same way that they have rightly called out racism associated with the game.

It is that lack of understanding that leads to disabled people being categorised as children and to their voices not being heard. We have therefore recommended that in future the Government should consult disabled people explicitly and directly on all matters that concern them—not those who claim to speak on their behalf, but disabled people themselves.

We were bemused about why social media companies have failed to engage with people who could be among their strongest advocates. What engagement there has been has come too late and has often been too little. For example, where people with learning difficulties are concerned, Facebook told us that it thought its how-to videos made easy-read guidelines unnecessary, while Google said that it thought its community guidelines met the easy-read guidelines. Disabled people disagreed: they do not.

Twitter told us that it thought that simplifying its policies would make them harder to understand, yet easy-read versions are frequently produced of complex documents such as health consultations, tenancy agreements and even—dare I say it—Select Committee reports. It is not that the guidance and expertise needed to produce easy-read versions are not available; it is that social media companies have never thought to seek that guidance and act on it.

We also found that most disabled people, like the rest of us, were confused by the fact that policies are called different things on different sites. Even more importantly, reporting mechanisms are often not accessible to disabled people. Shockingly, we heard again and again that when disabled people have reported hate speech, often nothing has been done.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech and is setting out some really unbelievable issues that need to be taken on board and tackled to protect disabled people online and offline. Does she agree that some of the issues result from the fact that the legislation that covers these crimes is so old? I see from the Library briefing that the most recent applicable legislation is from 1997, and some of it goes back to 1861. That is not to say that it is not good or appropriate legislation, but it is clear that our legislative guidelines are so out of date that they cannot take into consideration the modern world and the challenges that disabled people face online.

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Lady makes a very valid point. I will move on to legislation shortly.

Our inquiry has led us to conclude that social media companies do not employ enough moderators, or enough suitably trained moderators, to deal with this abuse. Given how much profit they are making, that is frankly scandalous. We also found that there is a lot of confusion about what is the responsibility of social media companies and what is the responsibility of the police. That confusion is often fed by the social media companies themselves.

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[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Ryan, and to speak in this debate. I pay tribute to Katie Price and her work. It is fantastic to see her mother Amy in the Public Gallery— I know we are not supposed to refer to folk there, but I think it is okay to break the rule sometimes. It is also fantastic to see that we have a British Sign language interpreter. That language is one of the most beautiful in the world, literally bringing language to life. To see simultaneous interpretation here in the Westminster Hall Chamber is fantastic. I hope that the House authorities will consider it for all our debates, including in the main Chamber, and that the Minister will respond to that in due course.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones). She and I are becoming season ticket holders, which is what one of my colleagues calls us regulars here in Westminster Hall. The reality is that while Brexit rages on, little else is in the public psyche or even in the main Chamber, so Westminster Hall is really the place where we are discussing and tackling the other big issues of the day.

Online harms, online bullying and bullying of people whether they are disabled, LGBT, women or from our trans community are totally unacceptable. The report produced by the hon. Lady’s Committee is outstanding and I hope that the Government take the recommendations seriously. She went through them in specific detail, but the statement that stood out for me was on the feelings of disabled people about their lack of representation—that we are not hard to find but we are easy to ignore—and it should shame us all that that is how so many disabled people feel.

Hon. Members have referred to intersectionality. The hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) made particular reference to it, and to the work of Seyi who worked in her office and of Seyi’s company, Glitch. That is particularly stark. I regularly meet members of the LGBT disabled community, and they say that women who are LGBT and disabled are some of the most marginalised people, not just online but offline.

The fact that the Committee consulted tech firms, police and disabled people—across the whole spectrum of stakeholders—is to be commended. The lack of response or the poor response of football teams and that sector in general gives me a sense of deep shame. As the SNP’s digital, culture, media and sports spokesperson, I care passionately about diversity in sport. I am a passionate football fan and occasional player, but it is clear to me that a lot of online abuse comes from football fans. Katie and Harvey have obviously felt that keenly, and it is so disgusting. We absolutely need to get to the heart of that; we need to name and shame those clubs.

To be fair, I know—in particular in Scotland but across the UK—that many clubs do a lot of positive work to tackle abuse and online harm, but we must do more. We must hold teams to account, because clearly many football fans hide behind the guise of their online profiles to spread vile abuse, driving many people offline. They give the vast majority of football fans a bad name—the reality is that the vast majority are peaceful, decent folk who just want to support their team, whether in the stadiums or online.

Poor responses from Government are disappointing, and I want to believe that the Minister and her Government can do better, so while I may disagree with them in many areas and feel let down by them on many counts, their White Paper on online harms was hugely ambitious and a massive step in the right direction. We in the SNP and in the Scottish Government very much support its intentions. We would like to see it go further, and the intentions and the suggestions in the Committee report are particularly significant.

I refer specifically to recommendation 18 of the report, about how

“social media companies be required to demonstrate that they have consulted and worked in partnership with disabled people themselves”.

The hon. Member for Warrington North spoke passionately about that. I suggest—I wonder whether she and the Minister will consider this—that we talk specifically to those tech firms about quotas in the jobs that do the monitoring and regulating online. I saw a piece in the media fairly recently about how moderators were having a particularly difficult time due to being harmed by the content that they were having to moderate. We all know that in police forces across the UK, people who deal with online paedophilia, pornography and all those kinds of issues do those jobs for specific periods of time only.

I am not clear how much transparency there is about the profile of moderators and their range of backgrounds, but it stands to reason that if there are more people who are disabled, LGBT and from the BAME community, they will bring their specific perspectives to the moderation of content. That is the same principle that the Government brought forward to get companies to publish their gender pay gaps. Although the legislation had flaws, it has been quite effective from a societal perspective because it has made companies stop and think carefully about what they need to do and the profile of the people they employ. That would be a sensible way forward and something that perhaps we can encourage tech companies to get behind.

The right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) paid tribute to his constituents Katie and Harvey Price and Katie’s mother, Amy. Katie has put her head above the parapet. The notion that people in public life, whether celebrities, politicians or whoever else, should just suck it up is a piece of nonsense. As politicians, we deserve to be criticised and critiqued. We expect robust criticism and debate, but we do not expect—and neither should any celebrity or a member of their family—to be routinely abused and persecuted. There has been persecution of Katie and her son Harvey, which cannot continue. I commend her work, and we in the SNP and other across the House will do everything we can to help.

The right hon. Gentleman also referred to the inadequacy of legislation and policing resources. We have to look at police budgets and the resources that we allocate. The digital world has brought a massive change to the challenges of cyber-crime and the online world. People want police to be on the street. A close member of my family is a local bobby; we commend our police forces and officers, who do an incredibly difficult job, but we have to remember where the threats are and make sure that the police are properly resourced and supported.

Similarly, as I mentioned in my intervention on the hon. Member for Warrington North, legislation is piecemeal and all over the place. We need to take a holistic look at the legislative framework to make sure that it properly tackles the bullying of disabled people or anyone from any group online and offline. I hope the Minister will take the report seriously. It concerns me that, although Committees of the House do fantastic work and put a huge amount of time and effort into reports, quite often those reports are put on a shelf and left to gather dust. The actions suggested and all the work involved are not taken forward. For the sake of Katie, Harvey and every disabled person or anyone else who is abused online, I hope that this report will not be put on a shelf to gather dust. I hope that the Minister will take it very seriously and will enact the sensible recommendations in it.

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[Margot James]

I thank the hon. Lady very much for her support. It is very important that we work across parties in this area. We have welcomed the Labour party’s input to these deliberations, and some of the ideas that it put forward found their way into the White Paper.

[Hannah Bardell]

I will follow on from that intervention, because the Minister will also find friends on the SNP Benches. It is important that we work cross-party to challenge the big tech firms. Given that a former Member of this place is now in a very senior role in Facebook, I would like to think that it understands and appreciates the strength of feeling on this issue across the House. Only by working cross-party and taking on the tech companies head on will we get them to get in line and get this sorted.

[Margot James]

I agree; a cross-party approach is much more powerful. We want to spend our time not arguing across the Floor of the House, but on confronting the tech companies with the responsibility that they should bear, and on representing and championing citizens, who deserve better.

The SNP spokesperson, the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock—[Interruption.]. I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant)—I clearly need to know my Scottish constituencies better. I apologise to both hon. Members. I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution and for the outrage he expressed on behalf of his constituents.

The SNP spokesperson is the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell). I share her shock that the majority of football authorities did not even deign to respond to the letters from the Petitions Committee demanding that they become part of the solution against the horrendous level of abuse that seems to emanate from the world of football. Sadly, racism in football has still not been dealt with, but at least they are engaged in tackling that. I will speak to the Minister for Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Mims Davies), to seek her support to get the football authorities to engage on the abuse of disabled people.

[Hannah Bardell]

The Minister is being generous in giving way. I do not think that the Petitions Committee wrote to any clubs or authorities in Scotland—I make no criticism; that is just an observation. I would be happy to help facilitate contact with them, and I suggest that a copy of the Committee’s report should go to every football club in the United Kingdom, along with a letter calling them to a meeting where we have cross-party representation at which we can eyeball them and tell them just how strongly people in this House feel about their clubs and the action they need to take.