Social Media: Deaths of Children

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to one particular issue that the noble Baroness has raised, quite rightly in my opinion, in this debate and in the report of the Draft Online Safety Bill Joint Committee, of which I know she was a very active member. This is the question of access to data from the accounts of people who have sadly taken their own lives where there is a view that it may reveal something useful and important for their grieving relatives.

I do this as somebody who used to work for a social media platform and took part in the decision-making process on responding to requests for data in these tragic circumstances. In the internal debate, we had to weigh two potential harms against each other. It was obvious that refusing to disclose data would add to the pain and distress of grieving families, which the noble Baroness eloquently described for us, and, importantly, reduce opportunities for lessons to be learned from these awful situations. But there was also a fear that disclosing data might lead to other harms if it included sensitive information related to the connections of the person who had passed away.

The reluctance to disclose is sometimes described as being for “privacy reasons”. We should be more explicit; the concern in these cases is that, in trying to address one tragedy, we take an action that leads to further tragedy. The nightmare scenario for those discussing these issues within the companies is that another young person becomes so distressed by something that has been disclosed that they go on to harm themselves in turn. This genuine fear means that platforms will likely err on the side of non-disclosure as long as providing data is discretionary for them. If we want to solve this problem, we need to move to a system where disclosure is mandated in some form of legal order. I will briefly describe how this might work.

Families should not have to go directly to companies at a time of serious distress; they should instead be able to turn to a specialist unit within our court system which can assess their request and send disclosure orders to relevant companies. The noble Baroness eloquently described the problem we have with the status quo, where people approach companies directly. The platforms would then be required to provide data to the courts, which would need to be able to carry out two functions before making it available to families and coroners as appropriate.

First, they should be able to go through the data to identify whether there are particular sensitivities that might require them to withhold or effectively anonymise any of the content. To the extent possible, they should notify affected people and seek consent to the disclosure. In many cases, the platforms will have contact details for those individuals. Secondly, they must be able to consider any conflicts of law that might arise from disclosure, especially considering content related to individuals who may be protected by laws outside of the jurisdiction of the UK courts. This would need to include making decisions on content where consent has been withheld. If we could set up a structure such as this, we could have a workable regime that would work for all interested parties.

A few minutes is obviously not long enough to cover all these issues in detail, so I will publish a more comprehensive post on my blog, which is aptly named regulate.tech. I thank the noble Baroness for creating an opportunity to consider this important issue, one I am sure we will return to during the passage of the online safety Bill.