Easter Adjournment

Luke Evans Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)]

I have learned since coming into Parliament that there are many pleasant surprises in this place—indeed, your becoming the Chair during this debate, Mr Vickers, is one—and it is another pleasant surprise to see the Deputy Chief Whip, the Treasurer of His Majesty’s Household, my right hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), here in Westminster Hall to respond to us. I am much more accustomed to seeing him sitting next to me as we fight for the A5 to be improved between Tamworth and Hinckley, in my patch.

Today, I will talk about my surprise at the constant phone calls I have received about the use of TikTok. There is no more timely or pleasant a surprise than to have at least an hour in which to talk about the ins and outs of TikTok. I come at the subject as someone without any technical expertise in digital programming, but with a curiosity and an appetite to keep up with the times and to try to hold on to my youth by picking up these tools. When Facebook first came out in the UK, I was on it, starting in 2004. I try to use these kinds of tools to find out a little bit more about them, which I find interesting.

With so much going on with TikTok, the likes of social media and, of course, artificial intelligence, we as a society are left in a very interesting place as to how we should deal with these things. I am privileged enough to be able to ask questions of the people who matter and to try to come up with some ideas about how we can deal with such issues. Over the next hour—well, probably the next five minutes—I will talk a little bit about my background, including how I became interested in this area, what I see at the moment and the way I see things going in the future.

I came into this area through my work on body image. Many Members will know that I campaign about social media and the warped sense that we create around the body, particularly body proportions—simply, scaling up biceps, slimming down waists, making breasts larger—in our pursuit of what we as a society deem beautiful. This also has an impact on mental health. More recently, my work has led me to consider the use of steroids. We know that there are between 500,000 and 1 million people in the UK using steroids, mainly to try to fit an aspiration of what they want to look like. Such issues lead to huge problems societally, from people simply feeling bullied or not good enough, which leads to anxiety, depression and—in the worst cases—to suicide, eating disorders, and heart attacks and strokes if they are addicted to steroids.

Social media has a lot to answer for. I knew nothing about TikTok when I came into Parliament. I did not meet TikTok representatives until, after I had met Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, they offered to meet me during the pandemic. I thought that I needed to know a little bit more about what TikTok was, because, like many people, I assumed that it was just people—particularly young women—dancing and talking. How wrong could I have been?

TikTok is an incredible community, because it is so varied and diverse. It is no wonder that at least 16 million people in the UK use it and that it is still growing very fast. The reason for that is the ability to seek knowledge and to learn very, very quickly on such a user-friendly platform. It is engaging, exciting and really easy to use. That is where I saw an opportunity, from my side, to try to explain the role of Parliament. What do we do on a daily basis? How is legislation introduced? Why do we only shake each other’s hand once? Why do we turn round in Prayers? What even are Prayers? How do we form an opinion? What does a Committee look like? How does a piece of legislation go through? What does a parliamentary private secretary do? I have shared videos on all those subjects. There is even the question of how we decide where we sit, when we sit and what that looks like. There is a huge amount of public fascination out there with how we deal with and what we do in our niche, which is politics.

To give Members an idea of how powerful TikTok is, a simple video about how people sit in Parliament and where the Speaker is was seen by 750,000 people. However, it goes even further than that. During the tributes to the Queen, I was the 274th speaker out of the 283 speakers on the day, sitting there for 10 hours, explaining that and reading a poem that had gone viral on social media. My video about all that has been seen by 1.9 million people. That is the power of this app.

TikTok is so user-friendly is because it is easy to interact, to duet or to stitch—that is, people can made videos straight away with someone else when they are both looking at TikTok. That is the beauty of it, but, of course, that in itself is part of the problem.

Where does that leave us now? In the last few weeks, I have seen a lot of concern and caution, and hype and hysteria. That came out particularly in the congressional hearing in America. I have not watched all four or five hours of the CEO taking questions, but having spent three years on a Select Committee, I have some understanding of how those questions are formulated, the briefings and what people are trying to elicit. What struck me was that lack of understanding from some on the panel and the lack of clarity from the tech companies that were answering the questions.

What do I mean by that? For hon. Members who have never used these apps, some of the questions might seem quite silly, but they have a serious undertone. It is important to ask how the apps connect to the wi-fi, but a child would know that apps need to connect to the wi-fi. The question underneath that needs to be: once it is connected to the wi-fi, what else can it connect to?

One of the questioners asked about following pupils and using facial recognition. The CEO is completely right to say that they need that to map pupils to know where the sunglasses go. Anyone who has played with the app, particularly the “bold glamour” filter, which has gone viral, will know that it is incredibly powerful in changing one’s shape and the way one looks in a very subtle way. Naturally, the technology needs to be able to pick up those facial points to be able to do that, so the CEO was correct to say that the app follows the user’s face. The question is, what happens with that data? When is it being done, and when else is the company using it? Those questions were not answered in that hearing. In my private meetings, I cannot get answers to those kinds of questions. There lies the concern. This is not just aimed at TikTok; it relates to Instagram and Snapchat—all the platforms have a similar problem. When we flick on and load up an app, it asks for permission to use the microphone or camera, and we have to do that to interact with the app, but to what end, how far and what does that mean? That is the crux.

I will bypass the issue of where the data goes and TikTok being owned by ByteDance—frankly, even as a politician, I do not know whether the Chinese Communist party has access to that data. After listening to the hearing, I am not sure that anyone else is quite sure either. Those are some of the obscurities in the debate. We need to think much more about what we need to know, what can be done with this technology and, more importantly, what is being done with it. The realms of possibility and probability are very different.

That comes down to managing risk. The public and, indeed, politicians have a particularly poor grasp of the difference between absolute and relative risk. As a GP, I spent a lot of my time dealing with this issue. If I told someone that the risk of taking the contraceptive pill had gone up twofold, they would panic, but if I told them that it had gone up from one in 20,000 to two in 20,000, that is not as scary. We need to know the absolute and relative risks of using this data, and for whom.

It is right for the Government to ban an app on Government devices if the risk is high, given the fact that the Prime Minister is probably a high-value target, but does that apply to a teenager who is watching educational videos? We simply do not know, and that is the problem for someone sitting in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and trying to find the answers to such questions. By shining a light on this issue and having this debate, I hope that we can get some transparency on what is going on with our data, what it looks like and what the capabilities are.

That leads me on to where we should be going in the future. We are at the forefront of the AI technology revolution. In this debate at Christmas, I delivered the first speech written by OpenAI with ChatGPT. We are already on the fourth iteration of ChatGPT. For hon. Members who do not know what that means, it is quite literally able to design an app by looking at something written on a napkin. It will deliver speeches. It will write copy. Many MPs may well be using it to answer hundreds of items of correspondence and give their opinions, because it can source data from across the internet, condense it all and use it in a practicable way. It is fundamentally changing the way in which we as society use this data.

Some Members may have seen that Elon Musk has put out a letter saying that we should pause AI development for six months because of the dangers of AI. Now, I think that is probably an exaggeration, but he makes a point for this House to consider: we need to think very hard and very quickly about how we can ensure that AI development is done safely, but in a way that does not stifle innovation and investment or stop the UK being one of the world leaders in this field.

I am pleased to see the Government bringing forward Data Protection and Digital Information (No. 2) Bill and their AI White Paper. Fundamentally, underneath this whole issue are two parts: data and algorithms. The sheer scale of the data we can draw on means that inherent biases are built in and no one can give an answer as to why an algorithm has made its decision. With some probability, they will be able to say it is likely to have made a decision, but if it is scouring the entirety of the Department for Work and Pensions’ records across the Department’s existence to decide the right amount of support someone should receive without rigorous human oversight, we are going to be in real trouble. Imagine that happening with passport applications or applications to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and even into the financial world and back into social media.

This is all happening at pace right in front of our eyes. We, as the public and as legislators, need to better understand what data we have, who it is about and who it is for, why we are using it and how long we are going to allow people to do that. While that will start to help with transparency, for the algorithms themselves we need much more accountability regarding who uses them and how they are used. When I put this to the likes of TikTok, Facebook or anyone else in the click-based economy, I am simply told, “It’s commercially sensitive,” or, “We have a team. It’s very complicated and difficult over here.” That simply is not good enough, because either maliciously or by accident people are being sent huge amounts of content and we rely more and more on algorithms.

To my mind, as a simple person who has stepped into this with no expertise but with the privilege of having the opportunity to ask questions to those who lead and think in this field, there is space for a regulator of algorithms to link the issue to data—not in every single Department or looking into every single niche, but to try to bring this all together. There is a danger that if we outsource this issue to the finance world, or have specific ones for social media or health, they may diverge. We need the specialisms in how this works, but we also need to work in a similar fashion to the way the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency dealt with the vaccines: we must regulate as we move forward at the pace of industry. If we can do that now that we have the Brexit benefits of being free to set our own regulation, we have a real opportunity to set the course for the rest of the world on this area.

To come full circle, I will follow the Government guidance and keep using TikTok. We must think very carefully about how we should secure and use our data, but, of course, as that advice changes as we learn more, we should all take that on board. We should all think very carefully about what we are doing and make those changes accordingly.

[Martin Vickers (in the Chair)]

I now call the SNP spokesperson, Chris Stephens.