Online Safety Bill

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 19th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend, and I will come on to talk about that shortly.

The Online Safety Bill is an important step towards strong, independent regulation. We welcome the Bill’s overall aim: the duty of care framework based on the work of the Carnegie Trust. I agree with the Secretary of State that the safety of children should be at the heart of this regulation. The Government have rightly now included fraud, online pornography and cyber-flashing in the new draft of the Bill, although they should have been in scope all along.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lucy Powell]

I am not going to give way, sorry.

Before I get onto the specifics, I will address the main area of contention: the balance between free speech and regulation, most notably expressed via the “legal but harmful” clauses.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

For too long, the tech giants have been able to dismiss the harms they create for the people we represent because they do not take seriously their responsibility for how their products are designed and used, which is why this legislation is vital.

The Bill will start to change the destructive culture in the tech industry. We live simultaneously in online and offline worlds, and we expect the rules and the culture to be the same in both, but at the moment, they are not. When I visited the big tech companies in Silicon Valley as Secretary of State in 2014 to talk about online moderation, which was almost completely absent at that stage, and child abuse images, which were not regularly removed, I rapidly concluded that the only way to solve the problem and the cultural deficit I encountered would be to regulate. I think this Bill has its roots in those meetings, so I welcome it and the Government’s approach.

I am pleased to see that measures on many of the issues on which I have been campaigning in the years since 2014 have come to fruition in this Bill, but there is still room for improvement. I welcome the criminalisation of cyber-flashing, and I pay tribute to Grazia, Clare McGlynn and Bumble for all their work with me and many colleagues in this place.

[Wera Hobhouse]

Scotland banned cyber-flashing in 2010, but that ban includes a motivation test, rather than just a consent test, so a staggering 95% of cyber-flashing goes unpunished. Does the right hon. Lady agree that we should not make the same mistake?

[Mrs Miller]

I will come on to that shortly, and the hon. Lady knows I agree with her. This is something the Government need to take seriously.

The second thing I support in this Bill is limiting anonymous online abuse. Again, I pay tribute to the Football Association, with which I have worked closely, Glitch, the Centenary Action Group, Compassion in Politics, Hope not Hate and Kick It Out. They have all done a tremendous job, working with many of us in this place, to get to this point.

Finally, I support preventing children from accessing pornography, although I echo what we heard earlier about it being three years too late. It is shameful that this measure was not enacted earlier.

The Minister knows that three demands are coming his way from me. We need to future-proof our approach to the law in this area. Tech moves quickly—quicker than the Government’s approach to legislation, which leaves us playing whack-a-mole. The devious methods of causing harm change rapidly, as do the motivations of perpetrators, to answer the point raised by the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse). What stays the same is the lack of consent from victims, so will the Government please look at that as a way of future-proofing our law? A worrying example of that is deepfake technology that creates pornographic images of women. That is currently totally lawful. Nudification software is commercially available and uses images—only of women —to create nude images. I have already stated publicly that that should be banned. It has been in South Korea and Taiwan, yet our law is playing catch-up.

The second issue that the Government need to address is the fact that they are creating many more victims as a result of this Bill. We need to make sure that victim support is in place to augment the amazing work of organisations such as the Revenge Porn Helpline. Finally, to echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), let me say that this is a complex area, as we are proving with every speech in this debate. I pay tribute to the Select Committee Chair, who is no longer in his place, and the Joint Committee Chair, but I believe that we need a joint standing committee to scrutinise the implementation of this Bill when it is enacted. This is a world-class piece of legislation to change culture, but we also need other countries to adopt a similar approach. A global approach is needed if this is to work to end the wild west.