ONLINE SAFETY BILL (First sitting)

Rachel Maclean Excerpts

Committee stage (re-committed clauses and schedules)
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Kirsty Blackman]

Thank you, Sir Roger. It was helpful to hear the Minister’s clarification of age assurance and age verification, and it was useful for him to put on the record the difference between the two.

I have a couple of points. In respect of Ofcom keeping up to date with the types of age verification and the processes, new ones will come through and excellent new methods will appear in coming years. I welcome the Minister’s suggestion that Ofcom will keep up to date with that, because it is incredibly important that we do not rely on, say, the one provider that there is currently, when really good methods could come out. We need the legislation to ensure that we get the best possible service and the best possible verification to keep children away from content that is inappropriate for them.

This is one of the most important parts of the Bill for ensuring that we can continue to have adult sections of the internet—places where there is content that would be disturbing for children, as well as for some adults—and that an age-verification system is in place to ensure that that content can continue to be there. Websites that require a subscription, such as OnlyFans, need to continue to have in place the age-verification systems that they currently have. By writing into legislation the requirement for them to continue to have such systems in place, we can ensure that children cannot access such services but adults can continue to do so. This is not about what is banned online or about trying to make sure that this content does not exist anywhere; it is specifically about gatekeeping to ensure that no child, as far as we can possibly manage, can access content that is inappropriate for kids.

There was a briefing recently on children’s access to pornography, and we heard horrendous stories. It is horrendous that a significant number of children have seen inappropriate content online, and the damage that that has caused to so many young people cannot be overstated. Blocking access to adult parts of the internet is so important for the next generation, not just so that children are not disturbed by the content they see, but so that they learn that it is not okay and normal and understand that the depictions of relationships in pornography are not the way reality works, not the way reality should work and not how women should be treated. Having a situation in which Ofcom or anybody else is better able to take action to ensure that adult content is specifically accessed only by adults is really important for the protection of children and for protecting the next generation and their attitudes, particularly towards sex and relationships.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

I wish to add some brief words in support of the Government’s proposals and to build on the comments from Members of all parties.

We know that access to extreme and abusive pornography is a direct factor in violence against women and girls. We see that play out in the court system every day. People claim to have watched and become addicted to this type of pornography; they are put on trial because they seek to play that out in their relationships, which has resulted in the deaths of women. The platforms already have technology that allows them to figure out the age of people on their platforms. The Bill seeks to ensure that they use that for a good end, so I thoroughly support it. I thank the Minister.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

There are two very important and distinct issues here. One is age verification. The platforms ask adults who have identification to verify their age; if they cannot verify their age, they cannot access the service. Platforms have a choice within that. They can design their service so that it does not have adult content, in which case they may not need to build in verification systems—the platform polices itself. However, a platform such as Twitter, which allows adult content on an app that is open to children, has to build in those systems. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North mentioned, people will also have to verify their identity to access a service such as OnlyFans, which is an adult-only service.