Social Media and Screen Use: Young People’s Health

Jo Swinson Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Norman Lamb]

The hon. Lady makes a valuable point, and I am conscious that teenagers and young people can get online access to advice, guidance and support to help them through difficult periods of their life, and encourage them to seek help from others. We must recognise that and ensure that our approach to this issue is balanced, both recognising the potential harms and understanding the positive aspects of social media.

[Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend and his Committee on the production of this excellent report. Does he agree that as new technology develops, and particularly as we hand more control over to algorithms, there is an urgent need to ensure that ethical considerations are fully thought through at the design stage? In addition to the specific regulation that he envisages, we also need a more general code of data ethics—a sort of Hippocratic oath, perhaps, for developers and data scientists—to ensure that those principles are thought through as technology is developed. Would he support my campaign for such a code to be named after Ada Lovelace?

[Norman Lamb]

I thank my hon. Friend for that contribution, and I would support her campaign. I also agree about the importance of designing ethics into the way that algorithms operate. Indeed, this week our Committee took evidence from the head of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, and there is an important discussion to be had. Although there are rapid developments on the ground with the Government using algorithms in all sorts of different ways, we do not fully understand how to ensure an ethical framework that protects people from bias and can be built into the data used by algorithms. If such bias become embedded into the algorithms there are very dangerous potential outcomes, and my hon. Friend is correct to say that we need to get this right.