Draft Online Safety (List of Overseas Regulators) Regulations 2024

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2024 General Committees

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Betts. I very much welcome the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham.

I want to make a brief point about harmful online content that relates to suicide and self-harm. Throughout the passage of the Online Safety Bill, I worked with a family in my constituency. My constituent Joe Nihill took his own life at the age of 23 after accessing online harmful suicide-related content. His family, his mother Catherine and his sister-in-law Melanie have waged a really courageous campaign to ensure that what happened to him would not happen to others. Before he sadly took his own life, Joe left a letter asking them to take action against the very disturbing online phenomenon of people encouraging, advising, facilitating and even arranging to provide substances for suicide.

Joe’s family were pleased to meet Ministers, and they were pleased to see the progress that has been made on this legislation, although of course we want it to go further. In relation to their campaign, I want to put on the record the fundamental importance of international co-operation. One of the great blocks that they faced when campaigning against harmful suicide-related content on the website that Joe accessed was that it appeared to be based in another country, the United States. Towards the end of last year, an ITV News story revealed that the website that my constituent accessed before taking his own life had been linked to the deaths of more than 50 people in the UK alone. The website discussed methods of suicide and even offered encouragement to users.

The positive news is that anyone who visits the site now is met with a banner saying that its content violates our country’s new Online Safety Act and will not be viewable by the public. That is very welcome, and it has happened as a result of Ofcom pressure. That is an example of the importance of international co-operation, although it needs to go further. Some of the people online who are peddling this dangerous content and manipulating others—especially those who are facing hard times in their lives and are vulnerable, regardless of their age—are very much the kind of obsessive individuals who I am afraid will go from small platform to small platform and from this location to that location to preserve their harmful online content.

We need to go further, but I am glad that the Minister says that the list of countries and agencies will be under constant review. Unless the international co-operation that we have talked about today is taken further, the fight against harmful suicide-related content online will not be won. I will thank the Minister for his comments.