Online Safety Bill

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, as a former journalist and online publisher, I welcome this Bill. It is imperfect, of course, but it is much needed, as can be seen by the deeply disturbing data around online media and its impact on the young and vulnerable.

I believe that the free-for-all nature of the digital age requires us to build far more rigorous layers of protection and regulation than ever before. I say this having benefited myself hugely as an entrepreneur both from freedom of expression and information and from the extraordinary reach of online media. However, in this digital era of business to consumer as well as consumer to consumer—whether via social media or user-generated content—we cannot let freedom of expression trump all else. Users need protection from not just unscrupulous organisations but each other.

This is about addressing damaging behaviour and unhealthy lifestyles that the digital world has engendered, especially among the young—and not just in the well-documented areas of online hate, abuse and bullying but around increasing obesity, falling levels of exercise, declining levels of academic performance and, some argue, lower economic productivity. The need for teaching media literacy could not be any more clear.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, pointed out, children come across pornography online from as young as the age of seven and more than 50% of 11 to 13 year-olds in the UK have accessed pornography. Even more staggering to me is that, by the age of 18, 79% of young people have been exposed to violent porn. Such exposure has contributed to surging increases in mental ill-health, child abuse, bullying, violence and sexual assault. The evidence is overwhelming—just read the research from the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, Parent Zone and many others.

This issue is so serious and widespread that, like the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and many others, I believe that, although it is well intentioned, the tightening regulation and guidance in Part 5 of the Bill do not go far enough. We must grasp the nettle and insist that all pornography sites, without exception, adopt robust, and ideally standardised, age-verification technology, as we have for online gambling. Given the nature of many of these sites, can we really trust them to abide by a new code of practice and expect Ofcom to enforce it effectively?

I accept that social media is a much more complex beast, but here too I believe the time has come for age verification. TikTok claims to have a minimum age requirement of 13, yet Ofcom reports that 42% of our eight to 12 year-olds are on that platform. Much of the content is unsuitable for children, but TikTok monetises traffic whatever your age. Elon Musk take note: more than 40% of young people in this country have accessed porn via Twitter.

The majority of our children and grandchildren are being exposed to a barrage of disturbing content at the most formative stages of their lives. They need protection. Yes, the implementation of mandatory AV will depress audiences and revenues. It will raise privacy issues and there will be loopholes. But in my view the social benefits far outweigh the costs.