Online Safety Bill

Debate between Vicky Ford and Marcus Fysh

Report stage
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)]

Legislating in an online world is incredibly complex and full of pitfalls, because the digital world moves so fast that it is difficult to make effective and future-proof legislation. I do not want to wind up my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) by mentioning Europe, but I am proud to have worked alongside other British MEPs to introduce the GDPR, which the tech companies hated—especially the penalties.

The GDPR is not perfect legislation, but it fundamentally transformed how online actors think about the need to protect personal data, confidentiality and privacy. The Bill can do exactly the same and totally transform how online safety is treated, especially for children. I have been a proud champion of the Internet Watch Foundation for more than a decade and I have worked with it to tackle the hideous sexual abuse of children online. As a children’s Minister during the Bill’s passage, I am aware of the serious harms that the online world can and does pose, and I am proud that Ministers have put protecting children at the front of the Bill.

Along with other hon. Members, I have signed new clause 2. If, God forbid, hospital staff were constantly and repeatedly causing harm to children and the hospital boss was aware of it but turned a blind eye and condoned it, we would all expect that hospital boss to end up in the courts and, if necessary, in prison. Tech bosses should have the same. I thank the Government for saying that they will go along with the Irish style legislation here, and I look forward to their doing so.

My amendments—amendment 83 and new clause 8, which was not in scope—relate to eating disorders. Amendment 83 is intended to make it very clear that eating disorders should be treated as seriously as other forms of self-harm. I would like to thank everybody in the Chamber who spoke to me so kindly after I spoke in the last debate about my own experience as a former anorexic and all those outside the Chamber who have since contacted me.

Anorexia is the biggest killer of all mental illnesses. It is a sickness that has a slow and long-burning fuse, but all too often that fuse is deadly. There has been a terrifying rise in the number of cases, and it is very clear that social media posts that glamorise eating disorders are helping to fuel this epidemic. I am talking not about content that advertises a diet, but egregious content that encourages viewers to starve themselves in some cases—too many cases—to death. Content promoting eating disorders is no less dangerous than other content promoting other forms of self-harm; in fact, given the huge numbers of people suffering from eating disorders—about 1.25 million people in this country—it may be considered the most dangerous. It is dangerous not only for children, but for vulnerable adults.

My amendment, as I have said, endeavours to make it clear that content promoting eating disorders should be treated in the same way and as seriously as content promoting other forms of self-harm. I thank all those who signed it, including former Health Ministers and Digital Ministers, the current Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) and the current and former Chairs of the Women and Equalities Committee, my right hon. Friends the Members for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) and for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller). I hope the fact that MPs of such experience have signed these amendment sends a clear message to those in the other place that we treat this issue very seriously.

My amendment 83 is not the clearest legal way in which to manage the issue, so I do not intend to press it today. I thank the Secretary of State, the Minister responsible for the Bill and the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), who I know want to move on this, for meeting me earlier today and agreeing that we will find a way to help protect vulnerable adults as well as children from being constantly subjected to this type of killing content. I look forward to continuing to work with Ministers and Members of the other place to find the best legally watertight way forward.

[Mr Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), who made a very powerful speech, and I completely agree with her about the importance of treating eating disorders as being of the same scale of harm as other things in the Bill.

I was the media analyst for Merrill Lynch about 22 years ago, and I made a speech about the future of media in which I mentioned the landscape changing towards one of self-generated media. However, I never thought we would get to where it is now and what the effect is. I was in the Pizza Express on Gloucester Road the other day at birthday party time, and an 11-year-old boy standing in the queue was doomscrolling TikTok videos rather than talking to his friends, which I just thought was a really tragic indication of where we have got to.

Digital platforms are also critical sources of information and our public discourse. Across the country, people gather up to 80% of information from such sources, but we should not have trust in them. Their algorithms, which promote and depromote, and their interfaces, which engage, are designed, as we have heard, to make people addicted to the peer validation and augmentation of particular points of view. They are driving people down tribal rabbit holes to the point where they cannot talk to each other or even listen to another point of view. It is no wonder that 50% of young people are unhappy or anxious when they use social media, and these algorithmic models are the problem. Trust in these platforms is wrong: their promotion or depromotion of messages and ideas is opaque, often subjective and subject to inappropriate influence.

It is right that we tackle illegal activity and that harms to children and the vulnerable are addressed, and I support the attempt to do that in the Bill. Those responsible for the big platforms must be held to account for how they operate them, but trusting in those platforms is wrong, and I worry that compliance with their terms of service might become a tick-box absolution of their responsibility for unhappiness, anxiety and harm.

What about harm to our public sphere, our discourse, and our processes of debate, policymaking and science? To trust the platforms in all that would be wrong. We know they have enabled censorship. Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter files has shown incontrovertibly that the big digital platforms actively censor people and ideas, and not always according to reasonable moderation. They censor people according to their company biases, by political request, or with and on behalf of the three-letter Government agencies. They censor them at the behest of private companies, or to control information on their products and the public policy debate around them. Censorship itself creates mistrust in our discourse. To trust the big platforms always to do the right thing is wrong. It is not right that they should be able to hide behind their terms of service, bury issues in the Ofcom processes in the Bill, or potentially pay lip service to a tick-box exercise of merely “having regard” to the importance of freedom of expression. They might think they can just write a report, hire a few overseers, and then get away scot-free with their cynical accumulation, and the sale of the data of their addicted users and the manipulation of their views.

The Government have rightly acknowledged that addressing such issues of online safety is a work in progress, but we must not think that the big platforms are that interested in helping. They and their misery models are the problem. I hope that the Government, and those in the other place, will include in the Bill stronger duties to stop things that are harmful, to promote freedom of expression properly, to ensure that people have ready and full access to the full range of ideas and opinions, and to be fully transparent in public and real time about the way that content is promoted or depromoted on their platforms. Just to trust in them is insufficient. I am afraid the precedent has been set that digital platforms can be used to censor ideas. That is not the future; that is happening right now, and when artificial intelligence comes, it will get even worse. I trust that my colleagues on the Front Bench and in the other place will work hard to improve the Bill as I know it can be improved.