Online Safety Bill (First sitting)

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 24th May 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Thank you. I intend to bring in the Minister at about 10 o’clock. Kirsty Blackman, Kim Leadbeater and Dean Russell have indicated that they wish to ask questions, so let us try to keep to time.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Q I have a few questions, but I will ask them in a short way, and hopefully the witnesses can answer them in a fairly short way too. The chief executive of Ofcom told the Joint Committee on the draft Bill that the Secretary of State’s powers were extremely open ended. You have already touched on this, but do you feel that this will impede Ofcom’s independence as a regulator?

Kevin Bakhurst: There is a particular area on reasons of public policy for the Secretary of State to direct us on codes that we have some concern about. It is more on practicality than independence, but clearly for the platforms, and we have had a lot of discussions with them, the independence of a regulator—that is, a regulatory regime that is essentially about content—is absolutely critical, and it is a priority for us to show that we are independent.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q Do you feel that the Bill will allow you to adequately regulate online gaming, which is how an awful lot of young people use the internet, in a way that will keep them safer than they currently are?

Richard Wronka: Yes, we fully anticipate that gaming services, and particularly the messaging functionality that is often integrated into those services, will be captured within the scope of the regime. We do think that the Bill, on the whole, gives us the right tools to regulate those services.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q My last question is about future-proofing the Bill. Obviously, an awful lot of things will happen in the online world that do not currently happen there, and some of those we cannot foresee. Do you think the Bill is wide enough and flexible enough to allow changes to be made so that new and emerging platforms can be regulated?

Kevin Bakhurst: Overall, we feel that it is. By and large, the balance between certainty and flexibility in the Bill is probably about right and will allow some flexibility in future, but it is very hard to predict what other harms may emerge. We will remain as flexible as possible.

Richard Wronka: There are some really important updating tools in the Bill. The ability for the Secretary of State to introduce new priority harms or offences—with the approval of Parliament, of course—is really important.

[Kim Leadbeater (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

Q Ofcom is required to produce certain codes, for example on terrorism, but others that were floated in the Green Paper are no longer in the Bill. Are you working on such codes, for example on hate crime and wider harm, and if not, what happens in the meantime? I guess that links to my concerns about the democratic importance and journalistic content provisions in the Bill, to which you have alluded. They are very vague protections and I am concerned that they could be exploited by extremists who suddenly want to identify as a journalist or a political candidate. Could you say a little about the codes and about those two particular clauses and what more you think we could do to help you with those?

Richard Wronka: I will cover the codes first. You are absolutely right that the Bill requires Ofcom to publish codes of practice, particularly on CSEA and on terror, as well as on fraudulent advertising and other areas. We are doing the work right now so that we are ready to progress with that process as soon as we get powers and duties, because it is really important that we are ready to move as quickly as possible. We will set out further detail on exactly how we plan to do that in a roadmap document that we are looking to publish before the summer break, so that will provide some of the detail.

A really important point here is that the Bill quite rightly covers a wide set of harms. We are mindful of the fact that the temptation of having a code that covers every single harm could be counterproductive and confusing for platforms, even for those that want to comply and do the right thing. One of the balancing acts for us as we produce that code framework will be to get the right coverage for all the issues that everyone is rightly concerned about, but doing that in a way that is streamlined and efficient, so that services can apply the provisions of those codes.

Richard Wronka: Shall I pick up on the second bit very quickly? I think you are right; this is one of our central concerns about the definitions. As far as possible, this should be a matter for Parliament. It is really important that to know Parliament has a view on this. Ultimately, the regulator will take a view based on what Parliament says. We have some experience in this area, but as Richard said, we recognise the challenge—it is extremely complex. We can see the policy intent of doing it, quite rightly, and the importance of enshrining freedom of expression as far as possible, but Parliament can help to add clarity and, as you rightly say, be aware of some of the potential loopholes. At the moment, someone could describe themselves as a citizen journalist; where does that leave us? I am not quite sure. Parliament could help to clarify that, and we would be grateful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Miller]

Q Is there capacity in the sector to deliver what you are talking about?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I think we need to make capacity. There is some—the NSPCC has its Childline and, as Children’s Commissioner, I have my own advocacy service for children in care. I think this should function in that way, with direct access. So I think that we can create it.

Andy Burrows: May I come in briefly? Our proposals for user advocacy reflect the clear “polluter pays” principle that we think should apply here, to help build and scale up that capacity, but the levy that is covering the direct cost of regulation should also provide really effective user advocacy. That is really important not only to help to give victims what they need in frontline services, but in ensuring that there is a strong counterbalance to some of the largest companies in the world for our sector, which has clear ambition but self-evident constraints.

Dame Rachel de Souza: One of the concerns that has come to me from children—I am talking about hundreds of thousands of children—over the past year is that there is not strong enough advocacy for them and that their complaints are not being met. Girls in particular, following the Everyone’s Invited concerns, have tried so hard to get images down. There is this almost medieval bait-out practice of girls’ images being shared right across platforms. It is horrendous, and the tech firms are not acting quickly enough to get those down. We need proper advocacy and support for children, and I think that they would expect that of us in this groundbreaking Bill.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q There has not been a huge amount of discussion of online gaming in the context of the Bill, despite the fact that for many young people that is the way in which they interact with other people online. Do you think the Bill covers online gaming adequately? A lot of interaction in online gaming is through oral communication—voice chat messages. Do you think that it is possible to properly regulate oral communications in gaming?

Dame Rachel de Souza: Good question. I applaud the Bill for what it does cover. We are looking at a Bill that, for the first time, is going to start protecting children’s rights online, so I am really pleased to see that. We have looked a bit at gaming in the past. In terms of harms, obviously the Bill does not cover gaming in full, but it does cover the safety aspects of children’s experience.

It is always good for us to be looking further. Gaming, we know, has some extremely harmful and individualistic issues with it, particularly around money and the profile of potential grooming and safety. In terms of communications, one of the reasons that I am so concerned about encryption and communications online is that it happens through gaming. We need to make sure that those elements are really firm.

Andy Burrows: It is vitally important that the gaming sector is in scope. We know that there are high-risk gaming sites—for example, Twitch—and gaming-adjacent services such as Discord. To go back to my earlier point about the need for cross-platform provisions to apply here, in gaming we can see grooming pathways that can take on a different character from those on social networks, for example, where we might see abuse pathways where that grooming is taking place at the same time, rather than sequentially from a gaming streaming service, say, to a gaming-adjacent platform such as Discord. I think it is very important that a regulator is equipped to understand the dynamics of the harms and how they will perhaps apply differently on gaming services. That is a very strong and important argument for use advocacy.

I would say a couple of things on oral communications. One-to-one oral communication are excluded from the Bill’s scope—legitimately—but we should recognise that there is a grooming risk there, particularly when that communication is embedded in a platform of wider functionality. There is an argument for a platform to consider all aspects of its functionality within the risk assessment process. Proactive scanning is a different issue.

There is a broader challenge for the Bill, and this takes us back to the fundamental objectives and the very welcome design based around systemic risk identification and mitigation. We know that right now, in respect of oral communications and livestream communications, the industry response is not as developed in terms of detecting and disrupting harm as it is for, say, text-based chat. In keeping with the risk assessment process, it should be clear that if platforms want to offer that functionality, they should have to demonstrate through the risk assessment process that they have high-quality, effective arrangements in place to detect and disrupt harm, and that should be the price of admission. If companies cannot demonstrate that, they should not be offering their services, because there is a high risk to children.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q Do you think it would be reasonable for gaming companies in particular to have a setting whereby children or young people can choose to interact only with people in their friends list? Would that be helpful?

Andy Burrows: I think that aspect is certainly worthy of consideration, because the key objective is that platforms should be incentivised to deliver safety by design initiatives. One area in the Bill that we would like to be amended is the user empowerment mechanism. That gives adults the ability to screen out anonymous accounts, for example, but those provisions do not apply to children. Some of those design features that introduce friction to the user experience are really important to help children, and indeed parents, have greater ownership of their experience.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q Finally, could you explain breadcrumbing a little further? What does it mean and does the Bill tackle it adequately?

Andy Burrows: Child abuse breadcrumbing is a major area of concern for us. The term captures a range of techniques whereby abusers are able to use social networks to facilitate the discovery and the dissemination of child sexual abuse. The activity does not meet the criminal threshold in and of itself, but it effectively enables abusers to use online services as a shop window to advertise their sexual interest in children.

I will give a couple of fairly chilling examples of what I mean by that. There is a phenomenon called “tribute sites”. Abusers open social media accounts in the guise of well-known survivors of child sexual abuse. To all of us in this room, that would look perfectly innocuous, but if you are an abuser, the purpose of those accounts is very clear. In the first quarter of last year, those types of accounts received 6 million interactions.

Another example is Facebook groups. We have seen evidence of Facebook refusing to take down groups that have a common interest in, for example, children celebrating their 8th, 9th and 10th birthdays. That is barely disguised at all; we can all see what the purpose is. Indeed, Facebook’s algorithms can see the purpose there, because research has shown that, within a couple of hours of use of the service, the algorithms identify the common characteristic of interest, which is child sexual abuse, and then start recommending accounts in multiple other languages.

We are talking about a significant way in which abusers are able to organise abuse and migrate it to encrypted chat platforms, to the dark web, and to offender fora, where it is, by definition, much harder to catch that activity, which happens after harm has occurred—after child abuse images have been circulated. We really want breadcrumbing to be brought unambiguously into the scope of the Bill. That would close off tens of millions of interactions with accounts that go on to enable abusers to discover and disseminate material and to form offender networks.

We have had some good, constructive relationships with the Home Office in recent weeks. I know that the Home Office is keen to explore how this area can be addressed, and it is vital that it is addressed. If we are going to see the Bill deliver the objective of securing a really effective upstream response, which I think is the clear legislative ambition, this is an area where we really need to see the Bill be amended.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q You mostly talked about Facebook. Is it mostly the largest social media platforms, or are we talking about some of the smaller ones, such as Discord, which you mentioned? Would you like to see those in scope as well, or is it just the very biggest ones?

Andy Burrows: Those provisions should apply broadly, but it is a problem that we see particularly on those large sites because of the scale and the potential for algorithmic amplification.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Thank you.

[Barbara Keeley]

Q I want to ask about the many tragic cases of teenagers who have died by suicide after viewing self-harm material online. Do you think coroners have sufficient powers to access digital data after the death of a child, and should parents have the right to access their children’s digital data following their death?

Dame Rachel de Souza: Baroness Kidron has done some fantastic work on this, and I really support her work. I want to tell you why. I am a former headteacher—I worked for 30 years in schools as a teacher and headteacher. Only in the last five or six years did I start seeing suicides of children and teenagers; I did not see them before. In the year just before I came to be Children’s Commissioner, there was a case of a year 11 girl from a vulnerable family who had a relationship with a boy, and it went all over the social media sites. She looked up self-harm material, went out to the woods and killed herself. She left a note that basically said, “So there. Look what you’ve done.”

It was just horrendous, having to pick up the family and the community of children around her, and seeing the long-term effects of it on her siblings. We did not see things like that before. I am fully supportive of Baroness Kidron and 5Rights campaigning on this issue. It is shocking to read about the enormous waiting and wrangling that parents must go through just to get their children’s information. It is absolutely shocking. I think that is enough from me.

Andy Burrows: I absolutely agree. One of the things we see at the NSPCC is the impact on parents and families in these situations. I think of Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life, and the extraordinarily protracted process it has taken to get companies to hand over her information. I think of the anguish and heartbreak that comes with this process. The Bill is a fantastic mechanism to be able to redress the balance in terms of children and families, and we would strongly support the amendments around giving parents access to that data, to ensure that this is not the protracted process that it currently all too often is.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q Very briefly, Dame Rachel, I will build on what you were just saying, based on your experience as a headteacher. When I make my school visits, the teachers overwhelmingly tell me how, on a daily basis, they have to deal with the fallout from an issue that has happened online or on social media. On that matter, the digital media literacy strategy is being removed from the Bill. What is your thinking on that? How important do you see a digital media literacy strategy being at the heart of whatever policy the Government try to make regarding online safety for children?

Dame Rachel de Souza: There is no silver bullet. This is now a huge societal issue and I think that some of the things that I would want to say would be about ensuring that we have in our educational arsenal, if you like, a curriculum that has a really strong digital media literacy element. To that end, the Secretary of State for Education has just asked me to review how online harms and digital literacy are taught in schools—reviewing not the curriculum, but how good the teaching is and what children think about how the subject has been taught, and obviously what parents think, too.

I would absolutely like to see the tech companies putting some significant funding into supporting education of this kind; it is exactly the kind of thing that they should be working together to provide. So we need to look at this issue from many aspects, not least education.

Obviously, in a dream world I would like really good and strong digital media literacy in the Bill, but actually it is all our responsibility. I know from my conversations with Nadhim Zahawi that he is very keen that this subject is taught through the national curriculum, and very strongly.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q I have a quick question on parental digital literacy. You mentioned the panel that you put together of 16 to 21-year-olds. Do you think that today’s parents have the experience, understanding, skills and tools to keep their children properly safe online? Even if they are pretty hands-on and want to do that, do you think that they have all the tools they need to be able to do that?

Dame Rachel de Souza: It is a massive concern to parents. Parents talk to me all the time about their worries: “Do we know enough?” They have that anxiety, especially as their children turn nine or 10; they are thinking, “I don’t even know what this world out there is.” I think that our conversations with 16 to 21-year-olds were really reassuring, and we have produced a pamphlet for parents. It has had a massive number of downloads, because parents absolutely want to be educated in this subject.

What did young people tell us? They told us, “Use the age controls; talk to us about how much time we are spending online; keep communication open; and talk to us.” Talk to children when they’re young, particularly boys, who are likely to be shown pornography for the first time, even if there are parental controls, around the age of nine or 10. So have age-appropriate conversations. There was some very good advice about online experiences, such as, “Don’t worry; you’re not an expert but you can talk to us.” I mean, I did not grow up with the internet, but I managed parenting relatively well—my son is 27 now. I think this is a constant concern for parents.

I do think that the tech companies could be doing so much more to assist parents in digital media literacy, and in supporting them in how to keep their child safe. We are doing it as the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. I know that we are all trying to do it, but we want to see everyone step up on this, particularly the tech companies, to support parents on this issue.

[Chris Philp]

Q Can I start by thanking the NSPCC and you, Dame Rachel, and your office for the huge contribution that you have made to the Bill as it has developed? A number of changes have been made as a result of your interventions, so I would just like to start by putting on the record my thanks to both of you and both your organisations for the work that you have done so far.

Could you outline for the Committee the areas where you think the Bill, as currently drafted, contains the most important provisions to protect children?

Dame Rachel de Souza: I was really glad to see, in the rewrite of the Online Safety Bill, a specific reference to the role of age assurance to prevent children from accessing harmful content. That has come across strongly from children and young people, so I was very pleased to see that. It is not a silver bullet, but for too long children have been using entirely inappropriate services. The No. 1 recommendation from the 16 to 21-year-olds, when asked what they wish their parents had known and what we should do, was age assurance, if you are trying to protect a younger sibling or are looking at children, so I was pleased to see that. Companies cannot hope to protect children if they do not know who the children are on their platforms, so I was extremely pleased to see that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dean Russell]

Q In terms of the timing, once the Bill comes into law, there may be a period where it is enforced to set everything up. Are both your platforms already gearing up to make sure you fulfil the requirements of the Bill from day one?

Katy Minshall: I am glad you asked that question. The problem with the Bill is it depends on so many things that do not exist yet. We are looking at the Bill and thinking how we can prepare and start thinking about what is necessary, but in practice, content that is harmful to adults and harmful to children has not been set out yet. So much of the Bill depends on secondary legislation and codes of practice, and as I described earlier in the question from Alex Davies-Jones, there are such real workability questions around exemptions and ID verification that I worry there would be the risk of substantial delays at the other end, which I do not think anyone wants to see.

Ben Bradley: It is the same from our perspective. We have our community guidelines and we are committed to enforcing those at the moment. A lot of the detail of the Bill will be produced in Ofcom’s codes of practice but I think it is important we think about operationalising the process, what it looks like in practice and whether it is workable.

Something like Katy mentioned in terms of the user empowerment duties, how prescriptive those would be and how those would work, not just from the platforms of today but for the future, is really important. For TikTok, to use a similar example on the user empowerment duties, the intent is to discover content from all over the world. When you open the app, you are recommended content from all sorts of users and there is no expectation that those would be verified. If you have opted into this proposed user empowerment duty, there is a concern that it could exacerbate the risk of filter bubbles, because you would only be receiving content from users within the UK who have verified themselves, and we work very hard to make sure there is a diverse range of recommendations in that. I think it is a fairly easy fix. Much like elsewhere in the Bill, where Ofcom has flexibility about whether to require specific recommendations, they could have that flexibility in this case as well, considering whether this type of power works for these types of platforms.

To use the example of the metaverse, how would it work once the metaverse is up and running? The whole purpose of the metaverse is a shared environment in which users interact, and because the Bill is so prescriptive at the minute about how this user empowerment duty needs to be achieved, it is not clear, if you were verified and I were unverified and you had opted not to see my content but I moved something in the shared environment, like this glass, whether that would move for everyone. It is a small point, but it just goes to the prescriptiveness of how it is currently drafted and the importance of giving Ofcom the flexibility that it has elsewhere in the Bill, but in this section as well.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q I have a few questions, starting with Twitter, in relation to young people using the platform. How do you currently make sure that under-13s do not use the platform? What actions do you take to ensure that happens? Going forward, will that change?

Katy Minshall: At present, we follow the industry standard of age self-declaration. How you manage and verify identity—whether using a real-name system or emerging technologies like blockchain or documentation—is at the heart of a range of industries, not just ours.

Technology will change and new products that we cannot even envisage today will come on to the market. In terms of what we would do in relation to the Bill, as I said, until we see the full extent of the definitions and requirements, we cannot really say what exact approach we would take.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q To follow up on that, you said that there is agreement internally and externally that your service is mostly used by over-18s. Does that mean that you do not think you will have a responsibility to undertake the child safety duties?

Katy Minshall: My understanding of the Bill is that if there is a chance a young person could access your service, you would be expected to undertake the child safety duties, so my understanding is that that would be the case.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q Okay. Ben, for TikTok, how do you currently ensure that under-13s are not using your service, and how is that likely to change with the Bill coming in?

Ben Bradley: We are a strictly 13-plus platform. There are basically two approaches to preventing under-age access to our platform. The first is preventing them from signing up. We are 12+ rated in the app stores, so if you have parental controls on those app stores, you cannot download the app. We also have a neutral age gate, which I think is similar to Twitter’s. We do not ask people to confirm whether they are over 13—we do not ask them to tick a box; instead we ask them to enter their date of birth. If they enter a date of birth that is under 13, they are blocked from re-entering date of birth, so they cannot just keep trying. We do not say that it is because they are under age; we just say, “TikTok isn’t right for you right now.” That is the first step.

Secondly, we proactively surface and remove under-age users. Whenever a piece of content is reported on TikTok, for whatever reason, the moderator will look at two things: the reason why it was reported and also whether the user is under 13. They can look at a range of signals to do that. Are they wearing a school uniform? Is there a birthday cake in their biography? Do they say that they are in a certain year of school? They can use those signals.

We actually publish every quarter how many suspected under-13s we remove from our platform. I think we are currently the only company to publish that on a quarterly basis, but we think it is important to be transparent about how we are approaching this, to give a sense of the efficacy of our interventions.

On what specifically might change, that is not clear; obviously, we have to wait for further guidance from Ofcom. However, we did carry out research last year with parents and young people in five countries across Europe, including the UK, where we tested different ideas of age assurance and verification, trying to understand what they would like to see. There was not really a single answer that everyone could get behind, but there were concerns raised around data protection and privacy if you were handing over this type of information to the 50 or 60 apps that might be on your phone.

One idea, which people generally thought was a good one, was that when you first get a device and first sign into the app store, you would verify your age there, and then that app store on that device could then pass an additional token to all the apps on your phone suggesting that you are of a certain age, so that we could apply an age-appropriate experience. Obviously that would not stop us doing everything that we currently do, but I think that would be a strong signal. If that were to move forward, we would be happy to explore that.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q Both of your sites work very heavily on algorithms for the content that is put towards people. If you are in the top tweets feed on Twitter, you get algorithmically derived or chosen content, and TikTok is even more heavily involved in algorithms. How will this Bill affect the algorithms that you use, particularly regarding some of the content that may get more and more extreme, for example, if people are going down that route? In terms of the legal but harmful stuff that is likely to come through, how will the Bill affect the algorithms that you use, and is it possible to do that? Does it work?

Ben Bradley: TikTok does not take a filter bubble approach. When you first open the app, you express areas of content that you are interested in and then we recommend content. Because it is short-form, the key to TikTok’s success is sending you diverse content, which allows you to discover things that you might never have previously expressed interest in. I use the example of Nathan Evans, a postman who went on to have a No. 1 song with “Wellerman”, or even Eurovision, for example. These are things that you would not necessarily express interest in, but when they are recommended to you, you are engaged. Because it is short-form content, we cannot show you the same type of material over and over again—you would not be interested in seeing 10 30-second videos on football, for example. We intentionally try to diversify the feed to express those different types of interests.

Katy Minshall: Our algorithms down-rank harmful content. If you want to see an example live on Twitter, if you send a tweet and get loads of replies, there is a chunk that are automatically hidden at the bottom in a “view more replies” section. Our algorithm works in other ways as well to down-rank content that could be violating our rules. We endeavour to amplify credible content as well. In the explore tab, which is the magnifying glass, we will typically be directing you to credible sources of information—news websites and so on.

In terms of how the Bill would affect that, my main hope is that codes of practice go beyond a leave up or take down binary and beyond content moderation and think about the role of algorithms. At present on Twitter, you can turn the algorithm off in the top right-hand corner of the app, on the sparkle icon. In the long term, I think what we will be aiming for is a choice in the range of algorithms that you could use on services like Twitter. I would hope that the code of practice enables that and does not preclude is as a solution to some of the legal but harmful content we may have in mind.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q Just one more question. We know that women and minorities face more abuse online than men do. Is that something that you have found in your experience, particularly Twitter? What are you doing to ensure that the intersectionality of harms is considered in the work that you are doing to either remove or downgrade content?

Katy Minshall: That is absolutely the case and it has been documented by numerous organisations and research. Social media mirrors society and society has the problems you have just described. In terms of how we ensure intersectionality in our policies and approaches, we are guided by our trust and safety council, which is a network of dozens of organisations around the world, 10 of which are here in the UK, and which represents different communities and different online harms issues. Alongside our research and engagement, the council ensures that when it comes to specific policies, we are constantly considering a range of viewpoints as we develop our safety solutions.

[Kim Leadbeater]

Q Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses. I share your concerns about the lack of clarity regarding the journalistic content and democratic content exemptions. Do you think those exemptions should be removed entirely, or can you suggest what we might do to make them clearer in the Bill?

Katy Minshall: At the very least, there must be tighter definitions. I am especially concerned when it comes to the news publisher exemption. The Secretary of State has indicated an amendment that would mean that services like Twitter would have to leave such content up while an appeals process is ongoing. There is no timeline given. The definition in the Bill of a news publisher is, again, fairly vague. If Ben and I were to set up a news website, nominally have some standards and an email address where people could send complaints, that would enable it to be considered a news publisher under the Bill. If we think about some of the accounts that have been suspended from social media over the years, you can absolutely see them creating a news website and saying, “I have a case to come back on,” to Twitter or TikTok or wherever it maybe.

Ben Bradley: We share those concerns. There are already duties to protect freedom of expression in clause 19. Those are welcome. It is the breadth of the definition of journalistic and democratic content that is a concern for us, particularly when it comes to things like the expediated and dedicated appeals mechanism, which those people would be able to claim if their content was removed. We have already seen people like Tommy Robinson on the far right present themselves as journalists or citizen journalists. Giving them access to a dedicated and expediated appeals mechanism is an area of concern.

There are different ways you could address that, such as greater clarity in those definitions and removing subjective elements. At the minute, it is whether or not a user considers their content to be journalistic; that it is not an objective criterion but about their belief about their content.

Also, if you look at something like the dedicated and expediated appeals mechanism, could you hold that in reserve so that if a platform were found to be failing in its duties to journalistic content or in its freedom of expression duties, Ofcom could say, like it can in other areas of the Bill, “Okay, we believe that you need to create this dedicated mechanism, because you have failed to protect those duties.”? That would, I think, minimise the risk for exploitation of that mechanism.