Online Safety Bill

Debate between Ronnie Cowan and Damian Collins

Report stage
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ronnie Cowan]

I absolutely agree. We can also look at this from the point of view of gambling reform and age verification for that. The technology is there, and we can harness and use it to protect people. All I am asking is that we do not let this slip through the cracks this evening.

[Damian Collins]

We have had an important debate raising a series of extremely important topics. While the Government may not agree with the amendments that have been tabled, that is not because of a lack of seriousness of concern about the issues that have been raised.

The right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) spoke very powerfully. I have also met Leigh Nicol, the lady she cited, and she discussed with me the experience that she had. Sadly, it was during lockdown and it was a virtual meeting rather than face to face. There are many young women, in particular, who have experienced the horror of having intimate images shared online without their knowledge or consent and then gone through the difficult experience of trying to get them removed, even when it is absolutely clear that they should be removed and are there without their consent. That is the responsibility of the companies and the platforms to act on.

Thinking about where we are now, before the Bill passes, the requirement to deal with illegal content, even the worst illegal content, on the platforms is still largely based on the reporting of that content, without the ability for us to know how effective they are at actually removing it. That is largely based on old legislation. The Bill will move on significantly by creating proactive responsibilities not just to discover illegal content but to act to mitigate it and to be audited to see how effectively it is done. Under the Bill, that now includes not just content that would be considered to be an abuse of children. A child cannot give consent to have sex or to appear in pornographic content. Companies need to make sure that what they are doing is sufficient to meet that need.

It should be for the regulator, Ofcom, as part of putting together the codes of practice, to understand, even on more extreme content, what systems companies have in place to ensure that they are complying with the law and certainly not knowingly hosting content that has been flagged to them as being non-consensual pornography or child abuse images, which is effectively what pornography with minors would be; and to understand what systems they have in place to make sure that they are complying with the law and, as hon. Members have said, making sure that they are using available technologies in order to deliver that.