Freedom of Speech

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for securing this timeless debate and for his excellent speech. Indeed, it should have been evidence to the Joint Committee on online harms; I hope that he will consider forwarding it to the members, who might well be inspired. I declare an interest as a member of both that committee and the Communications and Digital Committee of your Lordships’ House.

The Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill agreed its report at 10 o’clock this morning; it will be published next Tuesday. It has been a very good experience, along the lines of what has already been referenced in this debate, in terms of working well together, the collegiate nature of what we were about and the determination, despite the limited time that we were allocated, to report in the best interests of the public. The report is embargoed so I and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who will speak later, cannot quote or anticipate it, but I think that noble Lords will be able to read in what I am about to say one or two of the things that may well appear on Tuesday—do not tell the chair.

The report attempts, I hope successfully, to deal holistically with the issues already raised by several Members of your Lordships’ House on how to protect freedom in the digital world and counteract the adverse impact on freedom of expression that arises from the systemic risks created—and they are created—by the social media companies themselves in pursuit of their business plans. It is true that the online world has revolutionised our lives; the underlying systems, designed to service business models, shape the way in which we experience it.

As the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury said, algorithms decide what we see, hear and experience, like it or not. Keeping users online, regardless of what they are looking at, is the true business aim of the companies involved. This can result in amplifying the false over the true, the extreme over the considered and the harmful over the benign. There are of course huge benefits from this brave new world, but there is a human cost, which can sadly be counted in events in Myanmar, in the persistent failure to raise the level of vaccination against Covid-19, in mob violence on Capitol Hill and in children and vulnerable adults being damaged by exposure to illegal content.

Based on the evidence that we saw during the committee’s work, it is my view that, for far too long, online services have argued that they should not be held accountable for the design of their services and that regulation should not be applied to mitigate the risks presented by the content and activity that society has deemed unacceptable. This must change. I hope that our report will start that process. Because of the embargo, I cannot say more, but I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, will be able to add a little more for your Lordships’ delectation and delight later in the debate.

I will use the rest of my time to talk about a particular problem related to the world that we are now entering, namely the retention of our records, so that we can learn from the experiences that we are all having online. Noble Lords will be aware of statutory deposit, which has existed in this country since 1662 and is well known. It obliges publishers to place at least one copy of everything that they publish physically in the UK and Ireland, from books to music and maps, at one of the six designated copyright libraries.

When I was director of the British Film Institute, I led a campaign to extend statutory deposit to moving image material, because I believed that that also has a lot to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of the world. As a result—it was only a partial success, I am afraid—we have extensive collections of broadcast television, held in the BFI National Archive at Berkhamsted. The BBC archive is also well maintained and looked after and we should be grateful for that. The situation for film and sound recordings is less satisfactory, as all the material in the collections is deposited on a voluntary basis and the collections are therefore not complete.

In 2013, the Government introduced new regulations that required digital publications to be systematically preserved. Since then, the six designated copyright libraries have automatically collected UK websites at least once a year to gather a snapshot of what they contain. Some important websites, such as news sites, are collected daily. They also collect e-books, electronic journals and videos, so we have a good collection of this material, but it is a tiny fraction of the material that we all know is available on the internet. You cannot base knowledge and research, or indeed future policy, on snapshots.

Access to this material is extremely limited: historic pages for only 19,000 or so websites can be accessed through the UK Web Archive’s online portals, in person at the copyright libraries and only after explicit permission has been granted by the creators to allow access—if they can be traced. The framework also permits only one researcher to use a piece of material at any one time, which is surely a rather otiose limitation when talking about digital materials.

When he comes to respond, I hope that the Minister will accept that there is an issue here that needs further investigation and that action will be needed to ensure that the record of the internet and the impact that it undeniably has on all our lives, for good or ill, is not being ignored in the process of learning from it. I would be happy to meet him to discuss this point if he thinks that that would be helpful.