Online Safety Bill

Henry Smith Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins]

It was a pleasure to serve alongside the hon. Lady on the Joint Committee. There are clear new offences relating to knowingly false information that will cause harm. As she will know, that was a Law Commission recommendation; it was not in the draft Bill but it is now in the Bill. The Government have also said that as a consequence of the new National Security Bill, which is going through Parliament, we will bring in a new priority offence relating to disinformation spread by hostile foreign states. As she knows, one of the most common areas for organised disinformation has been at state level. As a consequence of the new national security legislation, that will also be reflected in schedule 7 of this Bill, and that is a welcome change.

The Bill requires all services to take robust action to tackle the spread of illegal content and activity. Providers must proactively reduce the risk on their services of illegal activity and the sharing of illegal content, and they must identify and remove illegal content once it appears on their services. That is a proactive responsibility. We have tabled several interrelated amendments to reinforce the principle that companies must take a safety-by-design approach to managing the risk of illegal content and activity on their services. These amendments require platforms to assess the risk of their services being used to commit, or to facilitate the commission of, a priority offence and then to design and operate their services to mitigate that risk. This will ensure that companies put in place preventive measures to mitigate a broad spectrum of factors that enable illegal activity, rather than focusing solely on the removal of illegal content once it appears.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his appointment to his position. On harmful content, there are all too many appalling examples of animal abuse on the internet. What are the Government’s thoughts on how we can mitigate such harmful content, which is facilitating wildlife crime? Might similar online protections be provided for animals to the ones that clause 53 sets out for children?

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend raises an important point that deserves further consideration as the Bill progresses through its parliamentary stages. There is, of course, still a general presumption that any illegal activity that could also constitute illegal activity online—for example, promoting or sharing content that could incite people to commit violent acts—is within scope of the legislation. There are some priority illegal offences, which are set out in schedule 7, but the non-priority offences also apply if a company is made aware of content that is likely to be in breach of the law. I certainly think this is worth considering in that context.

In addition, the Bill makes it clear that platforms have duties to mitigate the risk of their service facilitating an offence, including where that offence may occur on another site, such as can occur in cross-platform child sexual exploitation and abuse—CSEA—offending, or even offline. This addresses concerns raised by a wide coalition of children’s charities that the Bill did not adequately tackle activities such as breadcrumbing—an issue my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight), the Chair of the Select Committee, has raised in the House before—where CSEA offenders post content on one platform that leads to offences taking place on a different platform.

We have also tabled new clause 14 and a related series of amendments in order to provide greater clarity about how in-scope services should determine whether they have duties with regard to content on their services. The new regulatory framework requires service providers to put in place effective and proportionate systems and processes to improve user safety while upholding free expression and privacy online. The systems and processes that companies implement will be tailored to the specific risk profile of the service. However, in many cases the effectiveness of companies’ safety measures will depend on them making reasonable judgments about types of content. Therefore, it is essential to the effective functioning of the framework that there is clarity about how providers should approach these judgments. In particular, such clarity will safeguard against companies over-removing innocuous content if they wrongly assume mental elements are present, or under-removing content if they act only where all elements of an offence are established beyond reasonable doubt. The amendments make clear that companies must consider all reasonably available contextual information when determining whether content is illegal content, a fraudulent advert, content that is harmful to children, or content that is harmful to adults.