Online Anonymity and Anonymous Abuse

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

Well done the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) for securing this debate. I stand here today as a Liberal and I am a great supporter of free speech, but I have no difficulty in drawing a line between free speech and online abuse. I thank the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) for lightening up this rather dark debate with his joke about breathalysing people before they go on Facebook, but what we have heard from all around the Chamber is a horrific litany of disgusting abuse online.

Online abuses have a real-world impact. We cannot just take refuge in dualism. We cannot say that the online world is different from the real world, because it is not. As we know, we have seen the final, awful result of some of this, which is that young people and other people have taken their own lives.

On anonymity, the hon. Gentleman, the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) and the hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) made the very sensible point that, of course, anonymity has its place in all this. It can provide much needed support for whistleblowers, for minorities finding a safe online space for self-expression, and for victims of physical abuse connecting with a support network. The conversation about anonymity is difficult and we may have to make trade-offs in what the Bill contains. We may not like some of the trade-offs, but at the end of the day, it would be much more worrying if the online safety Bill did not get to the heart of the issue. I sincerely hope that it will.

Let us face it: we already take a variable approach. If somebody wants to buy alcohol—booze—they have to prove that they are of a certain age; they have to prove who they are. If someone wants to get a certain job, take out some sort of loan and or make a financial transaction, they have to prove who they are, so there is a precedent for such proof. Lastly, we have the technical know-how to tackle this issue. It is out there and we can use it.

I want to make it very clear to the Government that it will not be easy but we have to get the identification issue sorted out. It would be a hugely valuable achievement to pull this one off, because I never again want to hear the sort of stuff that I have been hearing in this debate, such as how the hon. Member for Stroud and many others have had this dreadful stuff flung at them. It is just the lowest of the low.