Online Abuse

Siobhan Baillie Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I thank the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for her wide-ranging and powerful opening speech, and my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) for the incredible work he has done with the Committee.

I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about online harms and online abuse. We have heard some positive announcements from the Government, thanks to the Minister’s hard work; no doubt, we will hear more about that in due course. I have spoken before about the misery of the dark cyber streets and alleyways. Our constituents around the country are looking to us to help clean up digital Dodge City. The Government have responded by creating a wide-ranging draft online harms Bill and by taking the extra step of having prelegislative scrutiny, which was incredibly thorough and created the report on which we are concentrating our minds today.

Not all abuse is anonymous—I know that because I get quite a lot of it myself—but the most frightening threats are often from faceless, nameless and cowardly perpetrators, who prevent us from being able to assess and understand the true risk of a post because we do not know who is behind it. I have focused my time on campaigning to tackle anonymous abuse. I promoted a ten-minute rule Bill seeking verification measures, so that social media users could verify their own accounts. Why should only celebrities and MPs, for example, have blue ticks? That should be open to all and be clearly labelled. The Bill would also allow social media users to only follow and be followed by verified accounts. On the issue of verification, the petitions have attracted nearly 700,000 signatures. I thank everybody who has worked so hard to raise this issue.

I have spoken to the new Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and her team on a number of occasions. She has genuinely listened to the concerns of victims and I can see an incredible change of tack in the draft legislation, which addresses much more clearly the daily experience of social media users and the ways in which we can improve that experience.

I came to this issue originally because I received a lot of abuse when I announced my pregnancy, which is bonkers in this day and age. After that, Stroud residents spoke to me about their own experience of online abuse. They were everyday people, such as social workers, Army veterans and schoolgirls. The cyber-flashing issues faced by so many young girls are appalling, and the majority of that comes from anonymous accounts.

This job is very weird on a normal day, but I have been able to talk to some incredibly glamorous, popular and well-followed celebrities. I thank Bobby Norris, Katie Price, Emily Atack, Malin Andersson and others I have spoken to. They have brought to the fore the fact that, while we may look at them as glamorous people who are to be envied, behind the scenes they are suffering so much because of online abuse, which is scary, debilitating and damaging to mental health. Given all the people who are suffering, it is right that the Government have listened and made changes.

A few months ago, I gave a speech on this subject and tried to explain how parents had received abuse following the death of their children or babies. I really struggled, as I will never understand why people wake up in the morning and think it is okay to start sending nasty, threatening, scary or harassing messages to people. It is completely mindless and it needs to be shut down.

Briefly, we know that anonymity and lack of verification mean less self-policing, because users feel less accountable and responsible for their actions. We know that there is less actual policing because it is so difficult to trace people who are anonymous, and the preventive and protective measures can often be dodged—if we block or ban an abusive user on a platform, they just start a new account, as we have heard from other Members present today.

It is worth going over some of the challenges that my proposals to tackle anonymity and to introduced verification rightly received. First, people said that anonymity is a source of protection for marginalised and endangered people—there is a force for good in it. I completely agree that anonymity can not only fuel abuse, but offer a means of protection to enable people to get online. That is why the nuanced approach of giving social media users more choice, as we are suggesting, is so important.

Secondly, this is no magic bullet. The proposal would not stop all abuse online, and it would be wrong to suggest that that would be the case. That will not happen. We have not been able to eradicate bullying in the playground over all the years that that has been going on. However, our proposed measures, which have been added to the Online Safety Bill—I am so grateful for that—along with the creation of a regulator and other measures, will really help to significantly reduce abuse of all forms, but anonymous abuse in particular. People who choose that option can in effect opt out of seeing it.

I will conclude. I have kept my comments relatively short because I talk so often about this matter. I am keen to hear from the Minister and his opposite number, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), about what is to come. What we are seeing so far is very positive. It will be a very lively piece of legislation, not least because it is massive. It is right for such a serious piece of legislation to receive so much scrutiny and challenge. If it has the victims of abuse at its heart, and if we think about the whole range of different people who experience abuse daily and about the campaigning that is happening—supporting the FA with Kick It Out, and the racism and antisemitism groups—it is pretty obvious that this is the right course of action. We will be on the right side of history pushing the Bill through. I thank the Minister and his team for everything that they are doing.