Online Safety Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathcarron (Con)]

My Lords, it has been well observed that the social media companies and YouTube are now the public square—only, of course, they are not public at all but privately owned companies whose primary concern is to earn profits for their shareholders in the normal way. Against this, the reality is that we have effectively outsourced our censorship to Silicon Valley AI bots, and, faced with the prospect of enormous fines for breaching the new laws, these private companies are going to programme the AI bots on the side of caution. The bots, after all, have no way of knowing the legal cut-off point of mature teenagers and immature adults, and, of course, the censoring bot has no sense of irony or satire or parody or context.

The threat to free speech will therefore now come from two sources. First, as we have seen from the Twitter files, from Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth report and from Matt Hancock’s diaries, Governments covertly lean on the platforms to suppress dissent from the official line. Secondly, the threat will come from these private companies instructing the bots not to go anywhere near anything that might upset the Governments. In this sense, both have crossed the line between attacking disinformation and attacking dissent, and the ability to express dissent is at the core of freedom of speech. We therefore now have the reality of big government and big tech working together to suppress freedom of expression.

I am looking forward to initiating or supporting any amendments that will check the power of government or big tech to shut down legitimate questioning voices, which, from the Great Barrington declaration to the Wuhan lab-leak theory to the ineffectiveness of masks to the collateral damage caused by the lockdowns, over and over again have often proved to be closer to the truth than the official government line at the time.

I would like to use the few moments left to support resistance to restricting end-to-end encryption, to support the initiatives of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, on age verification, and to follow the lead of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on child safety initiatives.