Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal
Debate between Lizzi Collinge and Emily Darlington(5 days, 7 hours ago)
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Emily Darlington
I completely agree and I am going to come to that.
I recently met the NSPCC, the Internet Watch Foundation and the police forces that deal with this issue, and they told me that there are easy technological fixes when someone uploads something to a site with end-to-end encryption. For those who do not know, we use such sites all the time—our WhatsApp groups, and Facebook Messenger, are end-to-end encryption sites. We are not talking about scary sites that we have not heard of, or Telegram, which we hear might be a bit iffy; these are sites that we all use every single day. Those organisations told me that, before someone uploads something and it becomes encrypted, their image or message is screened. It is screened for bugs to ensure that they are not sharing viruses, but equally it could be screened for child sexual abuse images. That would stop children even sharing these images in the first place, and it would stop the images’ collection and sharing with other paedophiles.
My hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger) is absolutely right: 63% of British parents want the Government to go further and faster, and 50% feel that our implementation has been too slow. That is not surprising; it took seven years to get this piece of legislation through, and the reality is that, by that time, half of it was out of date, because technology moves faster than Parliament.
Lizzi Collinge
My hon. Friend has been talking about the dangers that children are exposed to. Does she believe that parents are equipped to talk to their children about these dangers? Is there more we can do to support parents to have frank conversations with their children about the risks of sharing images and talking to people online?
Emily Darlington
I completely agree. As parents, we all want to be able to have those conversations, but because of the way the algorithms work, we do not see what they see. We say, “Yes, you can download this game, because it has a 4+ rating.” Who knows what a 4+ rating actually means? It has nothing to with the BBFC ratings that we all grew up with and understand really well. Somebody else has decided what is all right and made up the 4+ rating.
For example, Roblox looks as if it is child-ready, but many people might not understand that it is a platform on which anyone can develop a game. Those games can involve grooming children and sexual violence; they are not all about the silly dances that children do in the schoolyard. That platform is inhabited equally by children as it is by adults.