Social Media: Deaths of Children

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates in which one has a developing feeling of sympathy with the Minister who is going to reply. Unfortunately, that feeling does not always survive the Minister’s speech. We will see what happens today.

It is quite clear that the internet and the online world are something that we have not really wanted to address that fully in the past. The whole system has been a little stand-offish, finding that it is a little frightening and moves very quickly. Most of us are probably happier if somebody younger than us, often our children, explains how the damned thing works.

Having said that, it is quite clear now that, in the greatest traditions of legislation, there are problems that we must deal with. One of those problems is that people feel that they are in a space where they cannot be touched, where they can do what they like and indulge themselves, and where money-making activities and things such as this are not things that the rest of society can get at, and it is none of their business to get in there.

This was brought home to me by a family friend, and this relates directly to the last point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, in her opening remarks. I live in the village of Lambourn, in the “valley of the racehorse”, and one of my family friends down there is a trainer whose daughter is an up-and-coming jockey. He discovered that after a couple of bad rides his daughter was being threatened with being raped and killed. He was quite appalled when he discovered that this is regarded as fairly normal. The real problem started when he went to the police, who said, “Oh well, we’re not really going to do anything about it”.

We must have a structure where we can intervene on this, as we would on other occasions. That is one of the things that must come out of this. There are technical points—on algorithms, how you follow things through, and how the people running these sites generate interest, money or indulgence—but the fact of the matter is that we must have a very clear guide as to how we will get in and make sure that there is a price if people break any rules, laws or structures. This could be one of the restrictions. It would not stop everything, but it would give us a structure to go down.

We need knowledge from sites that suicide victims have used. We need to be able to get in and use this control, which we regard as normal everywhere else—we have laws, and if you break them, we enforce them. The police, of course, will need help with new structures. If, when the Minister replies, he could give us an idea of what this enforcement structure will be like and the Government’s thinking about it, he would have taken the first step. Not only do we need to have these structures, but people have to know about them and the fact that society has decided that we are not going to put up with this anymore. That is one of the key points here.

I will not try to follow my noble friend’s experience and technical detail on this, because I cannot. But the principle behind this must be that the Government take this seriously, act and state publicly that this happens. If they do not, we will carry on having this problem again and again, and people will not react and do something about it because it is easier just to hope that it goes away.