Online Abuse

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) for securing the debate. We have already heard many striking and distressing personal accounts today and I am honoured to follow the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell).

As we have heard, there has been a frightening increase in online abuse, digital crime and hate crime. Many Members have been affected, as have numberless people outside this House. Children, too, have been affected. The national police lead said last November that 50% of all reported crime now has an online component. It is evident that the law has not kept up with criminal activity. Online platform providers are, at best, slow to address abuse. They should be far more effective and rigorous in holding both abusers and themselves to account.

For all those reasons, in March this year I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill on this very issue, drafted by Harry Fletcher of the Digital-Trust. There are over 30 statutes passed over many decades that cover online abuse crime. My Bill would place responsibility on the Government to consolidate them all. Many online activities may or may not be against the law—the Bill would clarify that. For example, it would be an offence to install a webcam on a person without their permission or without legitimate reason. In addition, it would be illegal to repeatedly locate, listen to or watch a person without legitimate purpose. The Bill would restrict the sale of spyware to persons over 16 only. It would also be wrong for a person to take multiple images of a person, unless it was in the public interest to do so, without that person’s permission and where the intent was not legitimate—we have heard about a number of such cases today. The Bill would make the law stronger on abusive content. Again, police officers are uncertain about what is and is not a crime, and they are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of abuse they see. We have also heard about inconsistencies of approach by the police. The Bill would make it clear that it is an offence to post images online where the intention is to humiliate or abuse the victim. It would also create an offence to post any message that is discriminatory or would incite abusive activity. All those new offences would, if put into action, carry on conviction a sentence of up to 12 months’ custody.

Any new powers for the police or the Crown Prosecution Service would, of course, have limited impact without changes to culture and training. The police must take online abuse and hate crime seriously. The Bill would therefore place a responsibility on the Secretary of State for Education to ensure that all establishments include sessions that warn children and students of the risks of online services. We know that this is happening in our schools and that it is an ongoing issue. Tokenistic approaches to the curriculum will not be sufficient. The Home Office would be tasked with ensuring that the police are trained and that they record complaints of digital hate crimes and abuse.

Finally, the Bill would place duties on providers of online services to adhere to codes of professional standards, to publish safety impact assessments and to co-operate fully with the police in any ongoing investigation. The relevant Ministers should ensure that the best quality standards are followed across the industry.

I am sure that we all have a number of case studies that we could discuss. Someone who contacted me wishes to remain anonymous, so I shall respect that, but I very much wanted to raise his case because it involves Facebook. The gentleman in question is a teacher. Before I was fortunate enough to arrive in this place about a year ago, I was also a teacher. I was very much aware of how vulnerable teachers are to comments from pupils and others and also, given the importance of child protection, how that vulnerability can be used against teachers and how little protection they have.

This gentleman contacted me earlier this week to express his frustration at Facebook. Despite having no Facebook account himself, pupils had stolen images from his websites and used them to create a false Facebook page in his name. This page then attracted other pupils at the school. At one stage, the headteacher, who not unusually had little understanding or experience of Facebook, suspected the teacher of deliberately attracting pupils. If the pupils had not finally admitted to creating the false page, the teacher could easily have lost his job. He was effectively unable to prove that he was not responsible for the page.

In this instance, the victim stated that the police could only advise him to contact Facebook, but in his experience Facebook was unhelpful—here I am summarising the magnitude of the problems he had with it. First, the teacher had to get the password details from the pupils before the page could be taken down. Secondly and importantly, in raising questions about data protection, it became apparent that the teacher had to apply to the Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland, because that is where Facebook’s international office is based. All law, except that of the United States and Canada, has to be handled through that data protection commissioner. It seems that Facebook has broad expectations of users’ behaviour, but is unwilling to take much responsibility, if any, as a platform for that behaviour. There is a worrying lack of procedures to take down false sites, with the onus entirely on the victims to prove their identity. Facebook and other sites need to be held to account for the nature of the services they provide to users, and for whether those services incorporate proper care for both customers and the public at large.

It is not good enough for Twitter to tell me how to hide myself away and block messages from certain people—I had one of these messages when I last looked at Twitter about 20 minutes ago. I want those people and Twitter held to account if there are unacceptable messages on my Twitter account. Finally, I believe that the nature of how social media providers fulfil their duty of care to private individuals requires far fuller parliamentary scrutiny, and I await the Minister’s response.