Internet-based Media Companies

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) on securing the debate, and other hon. Members who have spoken. I have a lot of sympathy with some of the points made by the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) and hope that she is successful in persuading the Government to take action. I also agree with many of the points about advertising made by the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), and with those made by my hon. Friends. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South (Mr Harris), who made several interventions, has a point, with regard to our being clear about free speech, and being clear that we should always, whatever our view of something posted on the internet, condemn violence, which is never justified and certainly was not justified in the cases that we have heard about.

When I was a Minister in the Department for Children, Schools and Families in the previous Government, we took forward the Tanya Byron review on internet safety for children, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Devizes. That was an interesting experience. I commend that report to hon. Members, because it is still relevant, even though it is a few years old. At the time, my daughter, who has just started university, was a teenager, and I thought that, as the Minister responsible, I had better look a bit closer at what she was doing online. She had been making videos and putting them on YouTube. I asked her, “Why do you do that?” She said, “I’ve got to think of my followers.” I asked what she meant and she said, “I need to be sure that my fans are getting some good videos.” I had a look, and one of the videos that she made had more than 100,000 views on YouTube. One comment underneath a video—these were Harry Potter fan videos—said, “How old are you?” She replied, “It’s not my policy to reveal my age.” That made me think, during the Tanya Byron review, that having built a swimming pool, the most important thing is not to put up a sign saying, “Danger! Deep end”, but to teach people to swim, and to have the resources to understand the medium they are dealing with, including who is at the other end of an online comment. By and large, although they can be vulnerable, children are quite savvy and intelligent. That proper level of education about the dangers on the internet is the first and strongest protection we can give, before starting to talk about what the Government can do in relation to regulation.

As several hon. Members have said in relation to responsibility, this is relatively new. The internet has emerged as the hugest, most important technological change in the past 20 years, and has changed our lives in a transformational way. It started as a wild west area, but the observations made by the hon. Member for East Hampshire are important and pertinent here, because this is essentially, overwhelmingly, a tool for carrying advertising. In relation to some of the irresponsible things that we see online, including on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, what drives those platforms’ existence, ultimately, is advertising. People advertising on websites are, by and large, companies—often large companies—with corporate social responsibility statements that would not tolerate their brand being associated with some of the things on the internet that we have heard about today, including the activity of trolls, child pornography, and so on.

Turning to public policy, we should hold the advertisers to account, as well as the people who provide the platform, to ensure that we are naming and shaming, and showing companies that purport to be socially responsible corporations where their advertising is appearing, and what it is appearing next to, from time to time. Ultimately, that commercial pressure will force, and is forcing, greater responsibility on to some of the newer companies, such as Facebook, which have only existed for a small number of years. That is important.

In Westminster Hall not so long ago, we debated the way that search engines, because of the algorithms that the hon. Member for East Hampshire mentioned, often throw up results at the top of the page that, say, encourage people to download a music track illegally before they are even offered the opportunity to purchase it legally online.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman makes some important points about the responsibility of advertisers. Will he acknowledge that a development on the internet that a lot of people do not understand is that an advertiser may not know where their advert will appear, because they give agency, effectively, to the search company to put it in context according to its algorithms, providing them with the greatest number of hits?

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

Yes. My answer is that that is not good enough. A company that purports to be corporately socially responsible should insist on knowing where its advertising will end up, and should not just be presented with the result of an impersonal algorithm devised by an advertising company. That is not good enough and not acceptable if a company purports to be corporately socially responsible. That is my point. Companies need to be held to account for ensuring that they care about where their advertising ends up, because if they do not take any interest in that, ultimately that will do reputational damage to their brand.

I want to say a few words about internet trolls and so on. A terrible incident, which hon. Members will have heard about, happened in my constituency a week last Friday. A person drove a van deliberately at people—mainly women and children—killing one of my constituents, Karina Menzies, leaving her three children motherless, and maiming, injuring and traumatising countless others along the way. That was an awful incident. I thank all hon. Members who have expressed their sympathy for my constituents.

Of course, as we know, inevitably there are people out there online who seek to upset, provoke and offend in these cases. Some things that people say in these instances will not be illegal, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South said, but some may be actionable and illegal. Nevertheless, they are offensive and have the capacity to cause public disorder and, in some instances, as we have seen in other tragedies, to lead people to take their own lives, so upsetting is the abuse that they have suffered online. There is, in particular, a strong case to be made for social media organisations to take these matters seriously.

I want to give some small words of praise to Facebook, because after I mentioned some pages of that kind that had appeared in the wake of that incident, it took them down quickly. That is new. Its policies are in the process of being developed. As such companies reach maturity, they will understand that it is unacceptable to hide behind the defence that they simply provide a platform and what appears on it is nothing to do with them. If we were happy for people to paint defamatory or deeply offensive comments about our neighbours, or someone else, on a wall outside our house, we would have to say that we had some responsibility for that wall and what appeared on it, and a responsibility to do something about it, particularly if we were making money out of that process. There is some change, but I sense that it may have been easier for me as a Member of Parliament to contact Facebook and get that action taken than it might have been for some of my constituents.

On every Facebook profile, there is a “Like” button that people can click. Why is there not a button as prominent and clear saying not so much “Dislike”, but “Report abuse”, or whatever? That is the minimum that should be required. When I was a Minister, a social media company called Bebo was quite prominent with young people, although it is less so now—hon. Members probably remember it. It refused time and again to put a prominent button on pages for children to enable them to report abuse, creepy questions or whatever they were encountering on Bebo. That is the minimum that we should expect from these companies.