Online Safety Bill

John Hayes Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

The Government listened to the views expressed in both Houses and introduced new offences in Committee that will more effectively hold technology companies to account if they fail to protect children. Ofcom will now be able to hold companies and senior managers, where they are at fault, criminally liable if the provider fails to comply with Ofcom’s enforcement notices in relation to specific child safety duties or to child sexual abuse and exploitation on their service.

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

The Minister is setting out a powerful case for how the Government have listened to the overtures in this place and the other place. Further to the interventions from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), the former Culture Secretary, will the Minister be clear that the risk here is under-regulation, not over-regulation? Although the internet may be widely used by perfectly good people, the people who run internet companies are anything but daft and more likely to be dastardly.

[Paul Scully]

This is a difficult path to tread in approaching this issue for the first time. In many ways, these are things that we should have done 10 or 15 years ago, as social media platforms and people’s engagement with them proliferated over that period. Regulation has to be done gently, but it must be done. We must act now and get it right, to ensure that we hold the big technology companies in particular to account, while also understanding the massive benefits that those technology companies and their products provide.

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[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to speak during what I hope are the final stages of the Bill. Given that nearly all the Bills on which I have spoken up to now have been money Bills, this business of “coming back from the Lords” and scrutinising Lords amendments has not been part of my experience, so if I get anything wrong, I apologise.

Like other Members, I want to begin by thanking a number of people and organisations, including the Mental Health Foundation, Carnegie UK, the Internet Watch Foundation, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and two researchers for the SNP, Aaron Lucas and Josh Simmonds-Upton, for all their work, advice, knowledge and wisdom. I also join the hon. Members for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) and for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) in thanking the families involved for the huge amount of time and energy—and the huge amount of themselves—that they have had to pour into the process in order to secure these changes. This is the beginning of the culmination of all their hard work. It will make a difference today, and it will make a difference when the Bill is enacted. Members in all parts of the House will do what we can to continue to scrutinise its operation to ensure that it works as intended, to ensure that children are kept as safe as possible online, and to ensure that Ofcom uses these powers to persuade platforms to provide the information that they will be required to provide following the death of a child about that child’s use of social media.

The Bill is about keeping people safe. It is a different Bill from the one that began its parliamentary journey, I think, more than two years ago. I have seen various Ministers leading from the Dispatch Box during that time, but the voices around the Chamber have been consistent, from the Conservative, Labour and SNP Benches. All the Members who have spoken have agreed that we want the internet to be a safer place. I am extremely glad that the Government have made so many concessions that the Opposition parties called for. I congratulate the hon. Member for Pontypridd on the inclusion of violence against women and girls in the Bill. She championed that in Committee, and I am glad that the Government have made the change.

Another change that the Government have made relates to small high-risk platforms. Back in May or June last year I tabled amendments 80, 81 and 82, which called for that categorisation to be changed so that it was not based just on the number of users. I think it was the hon. Member for Gosport who mentioned 4chan, and I have mentioned Kiwi Farms a number of times in the Chamber. Such organisations cannot be allowed to get away with horrific, vile content that encourages violence. They cannot be allowed a lower bar just because they have a smaller number of users.

The National Risk Register produced by the Cabinet Office—great bedtime reading which I thoroughly recommend—states that both the risk and the likelihood of harm and the number of people on whom it will have an impact should be taken into account before a decision is made. It is therefore entirely sensible for the Government to take into account both the number of users, when it is a significant number, and the extremely high risk of harm caused by some of these providers.

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech, but it is critical to understand that this is not just about wickedness that would have taken place anyway but is now taking place on the internet; it is about the internet catalysing and exaggerating that wickedness, and spawning and encouraging all kinds of malevolence. We have a big responsibility in this place to regulate, control and indeed stop this, and the hon. Lady is right to emphasise that.

[Kirsty Blackman]

The right hon. Gentleman is entirely correct. Whether it involves a particularly right-wing cause or antisemitism—or, indeed, dieting content that drags people into something more radical in relation to eating disorders—the bubble mentality created by these algorithms massively increases the risk of radicalisation, and we therefore have an increased duty to protect people.

As I have said, I am pleased to see the positive changes that have been made as a result of Opposition pressure and the uncompromising efforts of those in the House of Lords, especially Baroness Kidron, who has been nothing short of tenacious. Throughout the time in which we have been discussing the Bill, I have spoken to Members of both Houses about it, and it has been very unusual to come across anyone who knows what they are talking about, and, in particular, has the incredible depth of knowledge, understanding and wisdom shown by Baroness Kidron. I was able to speak to her as someone who practically grew up on the internet—we had it at home when I was eight—but she knew far more about it than I did. I am extremely pleased that the Government have worked with her to improve the Bill, and have accepted that she has a huge breadth of knowledge. She managed to do what we did not quite manage to do in this House, although hopefully we laid the foundations.

I want to refer to a number of points that were mentioned by the Minister and are also mentioned in the letters that the Government provided relating to the Lords amendments. Algorithmic scrutiny is incredibly important, and I, along with other Members, have raised it a number of times—again, in connection with concern about radicalisation. Some organisations have been doing better things recently. For instance, someone who searches for something may begin to go down a rabbit hole. Some companies are now putting up a flag, for instance a video, suggesting that users are going down a dark hole and should look at something a bit lighter, and directing them away from the autoplaying of the more radical content. If all organisations, or at least a significant number—particularly those with high traffic—can be encouraged to take such action rather than allowing people to be driven to more extreme content, that will be a positive step.

I was pleased to hear about the upcoming researcher access report, and about the report on app stores. I asked a previous Minister about app stores a year or so ago, and the Minister said that they were not included, and that was the end of it. Given the risk that is posed by app stores, the fact that they were not categorised as user-to-user content concerned me greatly. Someone who wants to put something on an Apple app store has to jump through Apple’s hoops. The content is not owned by the app store, and the same applies to some of the material on the PlayStation store. It is owned by the person who created the content, and it is therefore user-to-user content. In some cases, it is created by one individual. There is no ongoing review of that. Age-rating is another issue: app stores choose whatever age they happen to decide is the most important. Some of the dating apps, such as match.com, have been active in that regard, and have made it clear that their platforms are not for under-16s or under-18s, while the app store has rated the content as being for a younger age than the users’ actual age. That is of concern, especially if the companies are trying to improve age-rating.

On the subject of age rating, I am pleased to see more in the Bill about age assurance and the frameworks. I am particularly pleased to see what is going to happen in relation to trying to stop children being able to access pornography. That is incredibly important but it had been missing from the Bill. I understand that Baroness Floella Benjamin has done a huge amount of work on pushing this forward and ensuring that parliamentarians are briefed on it, and I thank her for the work that she has done. Human trafficking has also been included. Again, that was something that we pushed for, and I am glad to see that it has been put on the face of the Bill.

I want to talk briefly about the review mechanisms, then I will go on to talk about end-to-end encryption. I am still concerned that the review mechanisms are not strong enough. We have pushed to have a parliamentary Committee convened, for example, to review this legislation. This is the fastest moving area of life. Things are changing so dramatically. How many people in here had even heard of ChatGPT a year and a half ago? How many people had used a virtual reality headset? How many people had accessed Rec Room of any of the other VR systems? I understand that the Government have genuinely tried their best to make the Bill as future-proof as possible, but we have no parliamentary scrutiny mechanisms written in. I am not trying to undermine the work of the Committee on this—I think it is incredibly important—but Select Committees are busy and they have no legislative power in this regard. If the Government had written in a review, that would have been incredibly helpful.

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[Damian Collins]

The draft Bill was published in April 2021, so it is fantastic that we are now discussing its final stages after it has gone through its processes in the House of Lords. It went through pre-legislative scrutiny, then it was introduced here, committed to the Bill Committee, recommitted, came back to the House, went to the Lords and came back again. I do not think any Bill has had as much scrutiny and debate over such a long period of time as this one has had. Hon. Members have disagreed on it from time to time, but the spirit and motivation at every stage have never been political; it has been about trying to make the Bill the best it can possibly be. We have ended up with a process that has seen it get better through all its stages.

Picking up on the comments of the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) and others, the question of ongoing scrutiny of the regime is an important one. In the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee—the Joint Committee that I chaired—there was a recommendation that there should be a post-legislative scrutiny Committee or a new Joint Committee, perhaps for a limited period. The pre-legislative scrutiny Committee benefited enormously from being a Committee of both Houses. Baroness Kidron has rightly been mentioned by Members today and she is watching us today from the Gallery. She is keeping her scrutiny of the passage of the Bill going from her position of advantage in the Gallery.

We have discussed a number of new technologies during the Bill’s passage that were not discussed at all on Second Reading because they were not live, including the metaverse and large language models. We are reassured that the Bill is futureproof, but we will not know until we come across such things. Ongoing scrutiny of the regime, the codes of practice and Ofcom’s risk registers is more than any one Select Committee can do. The Government have previously spoken favourably of the idea of post-legislative scrutiny, and it would be good if the Minister could say whether that is still under consideration.

[Sir John Hayes]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, echoing the comments of Members on both sides of the House. He is absolutely right that, as well as the scale and character of internet harms, their dynamism is a feature that Governments must take seriously. The problem, it seems to me, is that the pace of technological change, in this area and in others, does not fit easily with the thoroughness of the democratic legislative process; we tend to want to do things at length, because we want to scrutinise them properly, and that takes time. How does my hon. Friend square that in his own mind, and what would he recommend to the Government?

[Damian Collins]

The length of the process we have gone through on this Bill is a good thing, because we have ended up with probably the most comprehensive legislation in the world. We have a regulator with more power, and more power to sanction, than anywhere else. It is important to get that right.

A lot of the regulation is principle-based. It is about the regulation of user-to-user services, whereby people share things with each other through an intermediary service. Technology will develop, but those principles will underpin a lot of it. There will be specific cases where we need to think about whether the regulatory oversight works in a metaverse environment in which we are dealing with harms created by speech that has no footprint. How do we monitor and scrutinise that?

One of the hardest challenges could be making sure that companies continue to use appropriate technology to identify and mitigate harms on their platforms. The problem we have had with the regime to date is that we have relied on self-reporting from the technology companies on what is or is not possible. Indeed, the debate about end-to-end encryption is another example. The companies are saying that, if they share too much data, there is a danger that it will break encryption, but they will not say what data they gather or how they use it. For example, they will not say how they identify illegal use of their platform. Can they see the messages that people have sent after they have sent them? They will not publicly acknowledge it, and they will not say what data they gather and what triggers they could use to intervene, but the regulator will now have the right to see them. That principle of accountability and the power of the regulator to scrutinise are the two things that make me confident that this will work, but we may need to make amendments because of new things that we have not yet thought about.

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[Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)]

I rise to speak to Lords amendment 231 on visible identity verification. I will not press the amendment to a vote. I have had several discussions with Ministers and the Secretary of State, and I am grateful for their time. I will explain a little more.

The dry nature of the amendment masks the fact that the issue of identity verification—or lack of it—affects millions of people around the country. We increasingly live our lives online, so the public being able to know who is or is not a real person online is a key part of the UK being the safest the place to be on the internet, which is the Bill’s ambition. Unfortunately, too often it feels as though we have to wade through nutters, bots, fake accounts and other nasties before coming to a real person we want to hear from. The Bill takes huge steps to empower users to change that, but there is more to do.

Hon. Members will recall that I have campaigned for years to tackle anonymous abuse. I thank Stroud constituents, celebrities and parents who have brought to me sad stories that I have conveyed to the House involving abuse about the deaths of babies and children and about disabled children. That is absolutely awful.

Alongside a smart Stroud constituent and Clean Up The Internet—a fantastic organisation—we have fought and argued for social media users to have the option of being verified online; for them to be able to follow and be followed only by verified accounts, if that is what they want; and, crucially, to make it clear who is and is not verified online. People can still be Princess Unicorn if they want, but at the back end, their address and details can be held, and that will give confidence.

[Sir John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Umberto Eco, the Italian philosopher, described the internet as the empire of imbeciles, and much of social media is indeed imbecilic—but it is much worse than that. My hon. Friend is right that the internet provides a hiding place for the kind of malevolence she has described. Does she agree that the critical thing is for the Government to look again at the responsibility of those who publish this material? If it were written material, the publisher would have a legal liability. That is not true of internet companies. Is that a way forward?