Online Safety Bill

John Hayes Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alex Davies-Jones]

No, I will not. I need to make progress; we have a lot to cover and a lot of amendments, as I have outlined.

Under the terms of the Bill, platforms can issue whatever minimum standards they wish and then simply change them at will overnight. In tabling new clause 4, our intention is to ensure that the platforms are not able to avoid safety duties by changing their terms and conditions. As I have said, this group of amendments will give Ofcom the relevant teeth to act and keep everybody safe online.

We all recognise that there will be a learning curve for everyone involved once the legislation is enacted. We want to get that right, and the new clauses will ensure that platforms have specific duties to keep us safe. That is an important point, and I will continue to make it clear at every opportunity, because the platforms and providers have, for far too long, got away with zero regulation—nothing whatsoever—and enough is enough.

During the last Report stage, I made it clear that Labour considers individual liability essential to ensuring that online safety is taken seriously by online platforms. We have been calling for stronger criminal sanctions for months, and although we welcome some movement from the Government on that issue today, enforcement is now ultimately a narrower set of measures because the Government gutted much of the Bill before Christmas. That last minute U-turn is another one to add to a long list, but to be frank, very little surprises me when it comes to this Government’s approach to law-making.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I have to say to the hon. Lady that to describe it as a U-turn is not reasonable. The Government have interacted regularly with those who, like her, want to strengthen the Bill. There has been proper engagement and constructive conversation, and the Government have been persuaded by those who have made a similar case to the one she is making now. I think that warrants credit, rather than criticism.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I completely disagree with the right hon. Member, because we voted on this exact amendment before Christmas in the previous Report stage. It was tabled in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), and it was turned down. It was word for word exactly the same amendment. If this is not anything but a U-turn, what is it?

I am pleased to support a number of important amendments in the names of the hon. Members for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) and for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson). In particular, I draw colleagues’ attention to new clause 3, which would improve the child empowerment duties in the Bill. The Government may think they are talking a good game on child safety, but it is clear to us all that some alarming gaps remain. The new clause would go some way to ensuring that the systems and processes behind platforms will go further in keeping children safe online.

In addition, we are pleased, as I have mentioned, to support amendment 43, which calls for the so-called safety toggle feature to be turned on by default. When the Government removed the clause relating to legal but harmful content in Committee, they instead introduced a requirement for platforms to give users the tools to reduce the likelihood of certain content appearing on their feeds. We have serious concerns about whether this approach is even workable, but if it is the route that the Government wish to take, we feel that these tools should at least be turned on by default.

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I hope to see further work on this Bill in the other place to ensure that vulnerable adults are given the protection that they deserve. That was Joe’s parting wish in the letter that he left to his family—that what happened to him would not happen to others. Let us not lose this opportunity. Let us improve the Bill. The other place has a vital role to play in ensuring that the Bill improves and protects everybody.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

One of the most noticeable changes in my lifetime has been the disheartening debasement of public discourse. The internet—a place for posturing, preening and posing, but rarely for genuine discussion or measured debate—must take much of the blame for that transformative decline, but, while the coarsening of the national conversation is among the most obvious examples of the harm being done by the internet, it is merely the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.

Beyond every superficial banality lurks a growing crisis of depression, decay, misery and malaise, of self-doubt and self-harm, all facilitated by tech companies that profit from exploiting insecurities, doubts and fears. Such companies do not exist simply to facilitate communication; rather, they control and manipulate virtual interaction in ways that play on innate fears.

The social media conglomerates’ entire business model relies on ruthlessly exploiting vast quantities of data harvested from their users. Driven by nothing beyond profit and growth, they have abandoned any notion of duty of care, because their business model depends on monetarising information with little regard to how it is generated or how it is used, even when that puts children at deadly risk.

Perhaps that wilful ignorance is why social media consistently fails to police videos advertising and glamorising illegal channel crossings. The 1,400 minors accompanying the nearly 50,000 crossings last year had their images placed on the internet as poster children for that despicable trade. I am delighted that the work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mrs Elphicke), and her amendment 82, now wisely accepted by the Government, will begin to address that particular wickedness. The amendment will wipe such material from the internet, requiring social media companies to face up to their responsibilities in plying this evil trade.

If drafted correctly, this Bill is an opportunity for Britain to lead the way in curbing the specious, sinister, spiteful excesses of the internet age. For all their virtue signalling, the tech giants’ lack of action speaks louder than words. Whether it is facilitating the promotion of deadly channel crossings or the day-to-day damage done to the mental health of Britain’s young people, let us be under no illusion: those at the top know exactly the harm they wreak.

Whistleblowing leaks by Frances Haugen last year revealed Mr Zuckerberg’s Meta as a company fully aware of the damage it does to the mental health of young people. In the face of its inaction, new clause 2, tabled by my hon. Friends the Members for Stone (Sir William Cash) and for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates), whom I was pleased and proud to support in doing so, makes tech directors personally legally liable for breaches of their child safety duties. No longer will those senior managers be able to wash their hands of the harm they do, and no longer will they be able to perpetuate those sinister algorithms, which, rather than merely reflecting harm, cause harm.

Strengthening the powers of Ofcom to enforce those duties will ensure that the buck stops with tech management. Like the American frontier of legend, the virtual world of the internet can be tamed—the beast can be caged—but, as GK Chesterton said:

“Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.”

The greedy, careless tech conglomerates cannot be trusted to check themselves. This Bill is a welcome start, but in time to come, as the social media beast writhes and breathes, Parliament will need to take whatever action is necessary to protect our citizens by quenching its fearful fire. fearful fire.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

First and foremost, as we approach the remaining stages of this Bill, we must remember its importance. As MPs, we hear stories of the dangers of online harms that some would not believe. I think it is fair to say that those of my generation were very fortunate to grow up in a world where social media did not exist; as I just said to my hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim (Paul Girvan) a few minutes ago, I am really glad I did not have to go through that. Social media is so accessible nowadays and children are being socialised in that environment, so it is imperative that we do all we can to ensure that they are protected and looked after.

I will take a moment to discuss the importance of new clause 2. There are many ongoing discussions about where the responsibility lies when it comes to the regulation of online harms, but new clause 2 ultimately would make it an offence for service providers not to comply with their safety duties in protecting children.

The hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) has described the world of social media as

“a modern Wild West, a lawless and predatory environment”—

how true those words are. I put on record my thanks to her and to the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) for all their endeavours to deliver change—they have both been successful, and I say well done to them.

Some 3,500 online child sexual offences are recorded by the police every month. Every month, 1.4 million UK children access online porn, the majority of which is degrading, abusive and violent. As drafted, the Bill would not hold tech bosses individually liable for their own failure in child and public safety. New clause 2 must be supported, and I am very pleased that the Government are minded to accept it.

Fines are simply not enough. If we fail to address that in the Bill, this House will be liable, because senior tech bosses seem not to be. I am minded, as is my party, to support the official Opposition’s new clause 4, “Safety duties protecting adults and society: minimum standards for terms of service”.

New clause 8 is also important. Over the last couple of years, my office has received numerous stories from parents who have witnessed their children deal with the consequences of what an eating disorder can do. I have a very close friend whose 16-year-old daughter is experiencing that at the moment. It is very hard on the family. Social media pages are just brutal. I have heard of TikTok pages glorifying bulimia and anorexia, and Instagram pages providing tips for self-harm—that is horrendous. It is important that we do not pick and choose what forms of harm are written into the Bill. It is not fair that some forms of harm are addressed under the Bill or referred to Ofcom while others are just ignored.

Communication and engagement with third-party stakeholders is the way to tackle and deal with this matter. Let us take, for example, a social media page that was started to comment on eating disorders and is generally unsafe and unhelpful to young people who are struggling. Such a page should be flagged to healthcare professionals, including GPs and nurses, who know best. If we can do that through the Bill, it would be a step in the right direction. On balance, we argue that harmful content should be reserved for regulations, which should be informed by proper stakeholder engagement.

I will touch briefly on new clause 3, which would require providers to include features that child users may use or apply if they wish to increase their control over harmful content. Such features are currently restricted to adults. Although we understand the need to empower young people to be responsible and knowledgeable for the decisions they make, we recognise the value of targeting such a duty at adults, many of whom hold their parental responsibilities very close to their hearts. More often than not, that is just as important as regulation.

To conclude, we have seen too many suicides and too much danger emerge from online and social media. Social media has the potential to be an educational and accessible space for all, including young people. However, there must be safety precautions for the sake of young people, who can very easily fall into traps, as we are all aware. In my constituency, we have had a spate of suicides among young people—it seems to be in a clique of friends, and that really worries me. This is all about regulation, and ensuring that harmful content is dealt with and removed, and that correct and informed individuals are making the decisions about what is and is not safe. I have faith that the Minister, the Government and the Bill will address the outstanding issues. The Bill will not stop every online evil, but it will, as the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) said, make being online safer. If the Bill does that, we can support it, because that would be truly good news.

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[Lia Nici]

My hon. Friend is correct. Often, senior managers are high-profile individuals with PR budgets that are probably larger than those of many countries. If we think about fines, they would just put those fines into their business plans, so fines would not effect a cultural change, as my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge has said on many occasions. We need cultural change to ensure that companies say, “What are we doing to make sure that children are being protected?” That is why I wholeheartedly support the new clause.

I also thank the Secretary of State, Ministers and officials, who have talked through issues with Back Benchers and taken them seriously. That means that we are where we need to be, which is fantastic. As a child of the 1970s and a parent, I never envisaged that we would have to be having these kinds of conversations with our children about what they are coming across: “Mum, what is this? Should I go and find a needle to inject this into myself?”. That is the kind of horrifying content that parents and teachers come across. Schools do a fantastic job with their digital footprint training to ensure that we can start to have such conversations.

[Sir John Hayes]

The opponents of our cause claim that we are curbing freedom, but in fact, it is not freedom that these people offer. They turn their addicts into the slaves of cruel, callous conglomerates.

[Lia Nici]

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. If freedom means that our children become collateral damage for harmful and dangerous people, we need to have some real conversations about what freedom is all about.

Thankfully, as a child of the 1970s, my only experience was of three television channels. My hon. Friends the Members for Stone and for Penistone and Stocksbridge are like Zorro and Tonto coming to save the villagers in a wild west town where all the baddies are waiting to annihilate them. I thank them for that and I look forward to supporting the Bill all the way.

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[Dean Russell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. One of the real horrors is that, as I understand it, Facebook was not going to release—I do not want to break any rules here—the content that his daughter had being viewing, to help with the process of healing.

If I may, I want to touch on another point that has not been raised today, which is the role of a future Committee. I appreciate that is not part of the Bill, but I feel strongly that this House should have a separate new Committee for the Online Safety Bill. The internet and the world of social media is changing dramatically. The metaverse is approaching very rapidly, and we are seeing the rise of virtual reality and augmented reality. Artificial intelligence is even changing the way we believe what we see online and at a rate that we cannot imagine. I have a few predictions. I anticipate that in the next few years we will probably have the first No. 1 book and song written by AI. We can now hear online fake voices and impersonations of people by AI. We will have songs and so on created in ways that fool us and fool children even more. I have no doubt that in the coming months and years we will see the rise of children suing their parents for sharing content of them when they were younger without permission. We will see a changing dynamic in the way that young people engage with new content and what they anticipate from it.

[Sir John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is making a valuable contribution to the debate, as I expected he would having discussed it with him from the very beginning. What he describes is not only the combination of heartlessness and carelessness on the part of the tech companies, but the curious marriage of an anarchic future coupled with the tyranny of their control of that future. He is absolutely right that if we are to do anything about that in this place, we need an ongoing role for a Committee of the kind he recommends.

[Dean Russell]

I thank my right hon. Friend for those comments. I will wrap up shortly, Mr Deputy Speaker. On that point, I have said before that the use of algorithms on platforms is in my mind very similar to addictive drugs: they get people addicted and get them to change their behaviours. They get them to cut off from their friends and family, and then they direct them in ways that we would not allow if we could wrap our arms around them and stop it. But they are doing that in their own bedrooms, classrooms and playgrounds.

I applaud the work on the Bill. Yes, there are ways it could be improved and a committee that looks at ways to improve it as the dynamics of social media change will be essential. However, letting the Bill go to the other place will be a major shift forwards in protecting our young people both now and in the future.