Online Safety Bill (Fourth sitting)

Kirsty Blackman Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate - 4th sitting
Thursday 26th May 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I saw you nodding, Ms Perry. Do you wish to add anything?

Lynn Perry: I agree. The important thing, particularly from the perspective of Barnardo’s as a children’s charity, is the right of children to remain safe and protected online and in no way compromised by privacy or anonymity considerations online. I was nodding along at certain points to endorse the need to ensure that the right balance is struck for protections for those who might be most vulnerable.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Q Lynn, does the Bill ensure that children are kept as safe as possible online? If not, what improvements need to be made to it so that they are?

Lynn Perry: There are several things that we welcome as a children’s charity. One of them, age verification, has just been mentioned. We are particularly concerned and have written about children’s access to harmful and extreme pornography—they are sometimes only a couple of clicks away from harmful online commercial pornography—and we welcome the age-verification measures in the Bill. However, we are concerned about the length of time that it may take to implement those measures, during which children and young people will remain at risk and exposed to content that is potentially harmful to their development. We would welcome measures to strengthen that and to compel those companies to implement the measures earlier. If there were a commencement date for that, those provisions could be strengthened.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q How much of an impact will the Bill have on the likelihood of children being subjected to online grooming and predatory behaviour?

Lynn Perry: There are some contextual considerations that we have been reflecting on as a charity, influenced by what we have heard from children, young people, parents and carers. We know that more children have had access to digital devices and have spent more time online over the last couple of years in particular. In that sense, we are concerned that the Bill needs to be strengthened because of the volume of access, the age at which children and young people now access digital content, and the amount of time that they spend online.

There are some other contextual things in respect of grooming. We welcome the fact that offences are named on the face of the Bill, for example, but one of the things that is not currently included is the criminal exploitation of children. We think that there is another opportunity to name criminal exploitation, where young people are often targeted by organised criminal gangs. We have seen more grooming of that type during the pandemic period as offenders have changed the ways in which they seek to engage young people. That is another area that we would welcome some consideration of.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q In terms of online gaming, and predators moving children from more mainstream to less regulated platforms, do you think there are improvements in the Bill that relate to that, or do you think more can be done?

Lynn Perry: Grooming does happen within gaming, and we know that online video games offer some user-to-user interaction. Users sometimes have the ability to create content within platforms, which is in scope for the Bill. The important thing will be enforcement and compliance in relation to those provisions. We work with lots of children and young people who have been sexually exploited and abused, and who have had contact through gaming sites. It is crucial that this area is in focus from the perspective of building in, by design, safety measures that stop perpetrators being able to communicate directly with children.

Private messaging is another area for focus. We also consider it important for Ofcom to have regulatory powers to compel firms to use technology that could identify child abuse and grooming.

[Kim Leadbeater]

Q If I could address one question to each witness, that would be fantastic. I do a lot of work with women in sport, including football. Obviously, we have the Women’s Euros coming up, and I have my Panini sticker album at the ready. Do you think the Bill could do more to address the pervasive issue of online threats of violence and abuse against women and girls, including those directed at women in sport, be they players, officials or journalists?

Sanjay Bhandari: I can see that there is something specific in the communications offences and that first limb around threatening communications, which will cover a lot of the things we see directed at female football pundits, like rape threats. It looks as though it would come under that. With our colleagues in other civil society organisations, particularly Carnegie UK Trust, we are looking at whether more should be done specifically about tackling misogyny and violence against women and girls. It is something that we are looking at, and we will also work with our colleagues in other organisations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Miller]

Poppy, do you have anything to add?

Poppy Wood: Yes. I think we could go much further on enforcement. One of the things that I really worry about is that if the platforms make an inadequate risk assessment, there is not much that Ofcom can do about it. I would really like to see powers for Ofcom to say, “Okay, your risk assessment hasn’t met the expectations that we put on you, so we want you to redo it. And while you’re redoing it, we may want to put you into a different category, because we may want to have higher expectations of you.” That way, you cannot start a process where you intentionally make an inadequate risk assessment in order to extend the process of you being properly regulated. I think that is one thing.

Then, going back to the point about categorisation, I think that Ofcom should be given the power to recategorise companies quickly. If you think that a category 2B company should be a category 1 company, what powers are there for Ofcom to do that? I do not believe that there are any for Ofcom to do that, certainly not to do it quickly, and when we are talking about small but high-risk companies, that is absolutely the sort of thing that Ofcom should be able to do—to say, “Okay, you are now acting like a category 1 company.” TikTok, Snapchat—they all started really small and they accelerated their growth in ways that we just could not have predicted. When we are talking about the emergence of new platforms, we need to have a regulator that can account for the scale and the pace at which these platforms grow. I think that is a place where I would really like to see Ofcom focusing.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q I have a question for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. I raised some of your stats on reporting with Meta—Facebook—when they were here, such as the number of reports that are responded to. They basically said, “This is not true any more; we’re now great”—I am paraphrasing, obviously. Could you please let us know whether the reporting mechanism on major platforms—particularly Facebook—is now completely fixed, or whether there are still lots of issues with it?

Eva Hartshorn-Sanders: There are still lots of issues with it. We recently put a report out on anti-Muslim hatred and found that 90% of the content that was reported was not acted on. That was collectively, across the platforms, so it was not just Facebook. Facebook was in the mid-90s, I think, in terms of its failure to act on that type of harmful content. There are absolutely still issues with it, and this regulation—this law—is absolutely necessary to drive change and the investment that needs to go into it.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Q I have a quick question for Poppy, although I am afraid it might not have a quick answer. How much of an impact does the algorithmic categorisation of things—the way we are fed things on social media—have on our lives? Do you think it is steering people towards more and more extreme content? Or is it a totally capitalist thing that is not harmful, and just something that sells us things every so often?

Poppy Wood: I think it goes without saying that the algorithmic promotion of harmful content is one of the biggest issues with the model we have in big tech today. It is not the individual pieces of content in themselves that are harmful. It is the scale over which they spread out—the amplification of them; the targeting; the bombardment.

If I see one piece of flat-earth content, that does not necessarily harm me; I probably have other counter-narratives that I can explore. What we see online, though, is that if you engage with that one piece of flat-earth content, you are quickly recommended something else—“You like this, so you’ll probably like that”—and then, before you know it, you are in a QAnon conspiracy theory group. I would absolutely say that the algorithmic promotion of harmful content is a real problem. Does that mean we ban algorithms? No. That would be like turning off the internet. You have to go back and ask, how it is that that kind of harm is promoted, and how is it that we are exploiting human behaviour? It is human nature to be drawn to things that we cannot resist. That is something that the Bill really needs to look at.

In the risk assessments, particularly for illegal content and content that is harmful to children, it explicitly references algorithmic promotion and the business model. Those are two really big things that you touched on in the question. The business model is to make money from our time spent online, and the algorithms serve us up the content that keeps us online. That is accounted for very well in the risk assessments. Some of the things around the safety duties do not necessarily account for that, just because you are risk assessing for it. Say you identify that our business model does promote harmful content; under the Bill, you do not have to mitigate that all the time. So I think there are questions around whether the Bill could go further on algorithmic promotion.

If you do not mind, I will quickly come back to the question you asked Eva about reporting. We just do not know whether reporting is really working because we cannot see—we cannot shine a light into these platforms. We just have to rely on them to tell us, “Hey, reporting is working. This many pieces of content were reported and this many pieces of content were taken down.” We just do not know if that is true. A big part of this regime has to be about transparency. It already is, but I think it could go much further in enabling Ofcom, Government, civil society and researchers to say, “Hey, you said that many pieces of content were reported and that many pieces of content were taken down, but actually, it turns out that none of that is true. We are still seeing that stuff online.” Transparency is a big part of the solution around understanding whether reporting is really working and whether the platforms are true to their word.

[Caroline Ansell (Eastbourne) (Con)]

Q May I ask a follow-up question on that? Poppy, you referenced risk assessments. Would you value and welcome more specifics around quality standards and minimum requirements on risk assessments? My main question is about privacy and anonymity, but I would appreciate a word on risk assessments.

Poppy Wood: Absolutely. I know that children’s groups are asking for minimum standards for children’s risk assessments, but I agree that they should be across the board. We should be looking for the best standards that we can get. I really do not trust the platforms to do these things properly, so I think we have to be really tough with them about what we expect from them. We should absolutely see minimum standards.