Online Anonymity and Anonymous Abuse

Laura Trott Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con) [V]]

I, alongside everyone else, want to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on securing such an important debate. I start with the basic principle that what is illegal offline must be illegal online. If a person shouts and threatens to murder someone in the street, if they threaten to rape them, if they are racist, if they stalk someone: these are crimes and people must be held accountable for them. However, by enabling anonymity online, we are allowing people to get away. We are encouraging lawlessness and that must be stopped.

We have heard many reasons today why anonymity is important, such as if someone is a whistleblower, if they are a victim of sexual assault or if they are simply writing a blog about something that is not their day job. These are all reasons why anonymity is important, but a person must waive that right when they commit a crime. At the moment, it is far too difficult for the police to find out who the perpetrators are. It can take up to a year in some cases, even in very serious cases, to track down the authors of these offending tweets and so on. That is what we have to change.

My hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) was absolutely right when he said that we need to see more action from social media companies, but we also need to clear up the law, so that it is simple and easy for the police to track down perpetrators. Tackling anonymity is important, because it not just shields criminals, but encourages lawlessness. My hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) talked earlier about the Law Commission’s finding that anonymity facilitates and encourages abusive behaviours. My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud was absolutely right when she said that it is just a hop, skip and a jump between people behaving badly online and that translating into violence on the street.

We have spoken a lot this week, and in preceding weeks, about how we absolutely need to tackle violence against women. When we see data from Amnesty International on the number of women affected, it does even more to build the case that we need to tackle anonymity. We need to make sure people are held accountable for what they do online, and we need to make sure that the absolutely shocking stories we have heard today cannot be repeated. The Government are doing a lot in the online harms Bill, and this would be a worthy addition.