Internet-based Media Companies

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who made an excellent speech. This is an important, timely debate. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) not just on her speech, but on the excellent work she did in setting up the all-party group and undertaking the inquiry, which raised the profile of the importance of taking clear steps forward to protect children on the net.

Social media companies claim that they have policies to protect users, prevent crime and avoid bullying, but from what we have heard this afternoon, such policies are clearly failing. I, too, have examples from my constituency. A schoolgirl who recently came to see me had been bullied on Tumblr. When she complained and asked the company to deal with it, she was told that it was up to her to identify the perpetrator. Last week, the Internet Watch Foundation published research that shows that 88% of self-generated, sexually explicit online images and videos of young people are taken from their original location and uploaded on to other websites. While some young people might be getting skills, a lot of others clearly are not. Another family in my constituency came to see me. The father had been murdered and they were being bullied and abused on Facebook by the family of the offender, who is in prison. When they complained to the police, the police took no action.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), who is not present, tried to introduce a ten-minute rule Bill after some gangs were involved in a murder in her constituency. The perpetrating gang posted an abusive rap on YouTube and it took months to get Google to remove it. When we met its executives, they said that they had people in the UK monitoring things all the time, but they could not even tell us how many people did that work. They also seemed to be confused about whether they were operating within a British or an American legal framework. As a final example, a young constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) was groomed on Facebook and, unfortunately, murdered by the person who had groomed her. All such episodes, including the ones described by other hon. Members, demonstrate that the current situation must change. Ministers need to be far more energetic in tackling the problems.

What do I think we need to do? First, on free speech, of which there has been some discussion and which is a fundamental human right, it is important to remember that in this country, unlike the United States, free speech is a right with conditions and is to be exercised responsibly. Having the right to free speech is not like holding the ace of spades and being able to trump every other right, such as the right to a fair trial.

Secondly, it is worth thinking about what drives so much of the abusive behaviour on the net. We had a little kerfuffle about that last week. I believe that the cloak of anonymity allows or enables some people to behave in ways that they would not in ordinary life. I do not mean that we should all post our bank account numbers online for everyone to see, or that nicknames should be banned on Twitter, but the idea of moral responsibility requires that a person is identifiable in order to take responsibility. To assert rights, there must be a rights holder. It is therefore a worry that the private regulator of the list of websites in the United States, ICANN—the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—does not know the provenance of a third of its websites, and Nominet’s current consultation on how to verify registrants is helpful and something that we might be able to build on.

The Government as a whole should take the issue seriously. At the moment, we seem to be dealing first with one Minister and then with another—there does not seem to be a proper strategy. For example, in the context of the Defamation Bill, we have raised anonymity with the Minister’s colleagues in the Ministry of Justice; I hope that in the light of what he has heard this afternoon, the Minister will go to those colleagues and seek to strengthen clause 5 of the Bill. As currently drafted, it is not mandatory to include and publicise an e-mail address for complaints on open websites, and a complainant may need a court order even to pursue a case against someone who wishes to remain anonymous, which is a slow and costly process.

Thirdly, the idea of an enforceable code, suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough, is extremely interesting. Abuse on the net, whether of children or adults, whether criminal or simply unpleasant, is a growing problem and the Government are failing in their duty to get to grips with it and to protect our citizens. In an Adjournment debate on 17 September on internet trolling, a Home Office Minister responded and listed some of the legislation that can be used to deal with abuse on the net. At this point, I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South (Mr Harris) that there is a difference between being offended by someone’s views and being subject to harassment on the net, and that distinction is made in the law.

I asked the Library for a list of the pieces of legislation that can be used to tackle the problem and was told that there were seven: the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003, the Protection of Children Act 1999, the Telecommunications Act 1984, the Public Order Act 1986, the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. When I looked at the relevant provisions, many seemed to overlap, so I am not clear whether they are an adequate basis for the sort of code that my hon. Friend the Member for Slough is suggesting, and they certainly present a confusing picture. I want Ministers to initiate a cross-departmental review. Currently, we have shambolic confusion and no coherent strategy from the Government.

In the absence of action by the Government, the Crown Prosecution Service is consulting on the use of the existing criminal law. The Director of Public Prosecutions said:

“Social media is a new and emerging phenomenon raising difficult issues of principle, which have to be confronted not only by prosecutors but also by others including the police, the courts and service providers. The fact that offensive remarks may not warrant a full criminal prosecution does not necessarily mean that no action should be taken. In my view, the time has come for an informed debate about the boundaries of free speech in an age of social media.”

That is an extremely helpful contribution.

The DPP’s remarks highlight another issue. New problems require new solutions, new practices and new skills, not only for the courts but for the police, social workers, teachers and medical staff. Such professions will need to adapt and modify their work and learn new techniques to ensure, for example, that e-crime is taken seriously, that court orders to offenders cover cyber-bullying or that teachers can give good advice to young people. All that is a new burden on the public purse, with special training and awareness-raising needed, for instance.

Many colleagues this afternoon have mentioned that money is an important driver, which brings us to the next area in which the social media companies need to improve their social responsibility: the paying of taxes. It is simply not acceptable that through artificial devices such as extortionate payments for licences they continue to depress profits, so Facebook, with an estimated income from advertising of £175 million in this country, paid no tax in 2011. Google, which in the US estimates its UK income to be more than £2 billion, paid only £3 million in taxes. According to the House of Commons Library, Twitter UK has not even submitted any accounts. Such firms are putting a new and costly burden on the public purse, but they are not acting as responsible corporate citizens. The Government cannot stand back and ignore that. Ministers need to ensure that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs uses all the weapons at its disposal and, if necessary, they need to legislate further in order to crack down on avoidance devices. I suggest to the Minister that that is as important as dealing with the regulations and the code described by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough.