Online Harms Consultation

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Oliver Dowden]

Yes, I do, and I thank my hon. Friend for her question. These kinds of financial penalties we are proposing will cause all senior executives to sit up and think. The last thing one would want to do in a senior management position in such a company is to expose it to such a high level of fine, but we will still, ultimately, reserve the criminal sanction as well, in the way I have set out.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

The Select Committee on Home Affairs has spent many years being deeply frustrated by the weak responses of social media companies to our urging them to take action against hateful extremism and online child abuse, so I welcome the measures the Secretary of State has announced. The Government response states that

“the regulator will have the power to require companies to use automated technology…to identify illegal child sexual exploitation and abuse content or activity on their services, including, where proportionate, on private channels.”

Will he confirm that that means major platforms will need to use this automated technology on the end-to-end encrypted private channels? What proportionality test is he applying here, given that child sexual abuse is clearly so abhorrent and wrong in all circumstances? When will it ever be disproportionate to pursue this?

[Oliver Dowden]

The right hon. Lady raises important points. On private channels, companies will be expected to use emergent technology to check for this sort of thing happening. The point about proportionality is that clearly we cannot expect them to individually, through human activity, spot this kind of thing; they will have to rely on artificial intelligence and so on. So as the regulator becomes confident that those technologies work, it will expect the firms in question to use it. There is a slightly separate issue about end-to-end encryption, and she will be familiar with the sort of conversations the Home Secretary and I are having with Facebook, for example, on that. Encryption cannot be used as an excuse to get out of being subject to this legislation, and we would expect firms that use end-to-end encryption still to take measures to protect against child abuse and exploitation, for precisely the reasons the right hon. Lady sets out.