Social Media

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, I too thank my dear brother, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, for securing this short debate. Although I will not reveal to the House the various nicknames that I have accrued over the years—not without my lawyer present—I will admit that I was not very well behaved at school. At the boys’ secondary modern school in Essex that I attended, expectations were staggeringly low and it was easy to meet them. I happily dozed, dreamed and truanted my way through what we used to call the fifth form, and I did not do very well in the O-levels that followed. Shocked by the realisation that work, and not very interesting work at that, was my only option, and because the boys’ school did not really have a sixth form, I enrolled in the girls’ school next door and my life changed. A school is only as good as its teachers, whatever you call it. At that school, the expectations were high and, as a result, my attitude, behaviour, commitment and, indeed, results changed.

If there are no expectations, if bad behaviour has no consequence, then we create a culture rather like the one that we currently have on most of the internet and especially on social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, and below the line—not a place to go—on so many online articles: rudeness, prejudice, uninformed ignorance, hatred of minorities and much worse. Cruelty, harassment and grooming can go unchallenged and even undetected, and no one seems prepared to take responsibility. Young people learn how to self-harm. Everyone has to be Instagram ready. Casual abuse that would not be tolerated anywhere else is considered normal. And instead of changing it, instead of saying that it should not be this way, we teach our children resilience, as if somehow homophobic, racist or sexist bullying was inevitable. It is not, which is why the civilised and civilising aspiration of this charter offers hope by raising the expectation of how we behave and how we are treated online.

Some will scoff and polish their put-downs: “The Church of England says it’s nice to be nice to each other. How nice. But what difference will it make?” Actually, quite a lot. I learned how to treat others well not because of my innate goodness—that is the secular ethical fallacy—but because of a culture of high expectations in family, school, community and church, as well as scouts, guides, trade unions, you name it. Many organisations have high expectations about what is right and acceptable. It was these bodies that helped me to tame those other instincts that dwell alongside that which is good: envy, avarice, vengeance, vanity, hubris, violence and greed. They are within us all. I am a moral maze, and I need help and guidance to become more than where my unchecked instincts may take me if I am left alone. Alongside all the tremendous goods that the digital age brings us, there is online a terrible isolation as I rant and rage from the privacy of my own phone, no longer seeing the humanity of the person who has simply become the object of my scorn—although of course once I have clicked “Accept”, everyone is looking at me.

The charter is just the beginning; it sets a standard that will help us all be the best we can be. But the internet itself, especially those who profit most from the monopolies that we have allowed to develop, also needs to be designed by agreed ethical principles, such as the 10 principles that the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, has alluded to in the Select Committee report, Regulating in a Digital World, and then regulated fairly and fearlessly by a new body, such as a digital authority, with powers to oversee all this work. Have the Government considered this far-reaching proposal again, as it was, if not dismissed, certainly not taken up in their original response to that report.

I welcome the Government’s decision to establish a statutory duty of care on internet providers to take responsibility for the safety of their users, because self-regulation is not working. Moderation processes are unacceptably opaque and slow. As with any other public space or public organisation, there must be expectations of behaviour that we all sign up to.

The charter represents a big step forward. It is good that the Church of England has been able to take a lead in this way, but that is only half the job. It addresses what each one of us can do individually to moderate our own behaviour and raise expectations. Drawing on the report, Regulating in a Digital World, whose far-reaching ethical vision has still not been fully embraced, I call upon the Government to do the other half.

Regulating in a Digital World (Communications Committee Report)

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, I too want to say what a great honour—and, indeed, an education—it has been to serve on the Communications Select Committee for this House, and to have had a small say in the production of this important report. It is always a great joy to follow the noble Lord, Lord Gordon, and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, who has chaired our committee with such wit and patience.

The Government have already committed themselves to making the United Kingdom the safest place in the world to be online. The ideas in this report explain that this does not necessarily require more regulation, but a different approach to regulation. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is one of the big moral challenges of our day. We need to get it right, especially for our children, for there are no longer two worlds, the online and offline, but the one digital environment that we all inhabit and that needs a set of principles to govern not just its oversight but its future development.

When I take my child to the park or cinema, go to a restaurant, travel by public transport, go shopping or, to escape the hustle and bustle of either this place or my day job, lie on the beach or snooze on a park bench in Parliament Square, those who own and manage these spaces have responsibilities to those of us who use them. These responsibilities are laid out in legislation overseen by various different bodies. However, behind it is the principle that we have responsibilities of mutual care and respect. If the salad Niçoise I order in the restaurant is dressed with bleach, or the film has no guidance about the appropriate age for a child to watch it, or the deck chair I hire gives me splinters in unmentionable places—I will not say what I was going to say; I have to remember I am a Bishop; with this outfit it should not be difficult—those who have responsibility for the space are liable.

We have a phrase for this in the English language: common sense. However, common sense is rooted in a thoughtful and developed moral tradition whereby we recognise our common humanity and resolve to live by an agreed set of principles and standards. The digital world cannot be exempt from this moral framework. Neither is it sufficient for regulators to mitigate and alleviate its worst excesses. Why should we have to ask Facebook to take things down? Would it not be better if they were never put up in the first place?

This need not curb free speech. In fact, in the ever-increasing world of fake news and all the rest of it, it might be the salvation of free speech—for freedom is not freedom to say what I like and do as I please without regard to others, but to be free to do what we must to serve the good of all.

Self-regulation is manifestly failing. A few powerful companies dominate the digital landscape. They say they are platforms, with little or no responsibility for those who walk upon them, but they are actually public spaces with a duty of care to those who enter. I am pleased that the Government have embraced that concept but they seem reluctant to fully embrace the principles-based approach to the internet that this report recommends. The principles-based approach is, yes, to regulation but also, critically, it is to policy and development so that we might create a different future. We believe that will require an overarching body, as the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, has explained, that we call the digital authority. However, if we do this it might break the Gordian knot of a tangle of competing bodies and rules and therefore hold the possibility of the UK taking a lead on an issue that is significantly rising up the agenda of public concern and we ask the Government to look at it again. Those clever algorithms which are so good at selling us stuff could be used to design the internet differently. What is now required is the political will to make it happen.

Finally, I remind the House of the regulations which have already been introduced. Several bishops, including myself, recently wrote to the Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, in support of what I think is called—the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, will correct me later if I have got it wrong—the kids’ code that has been put forward in draft. We made the point that the online world shares the offline world’s ethical duty to differentiate between children and adults and to respect and protect both the vulnerable and the marginalised in the digital world.

We cited the example—hey, we are bishops and this is the way we do things—of Jesus’s most famous story of the Good Samaritan, where the Good Samaritan crosses boundaries in order to transcend the normal ways in which we do things in the different social and political jurisdictions we inhabit. Likewise, the tech sector and the digital world need to accept the demands of responsibility above profitability and to acknowledge their corporate responsibility to uphold the common good. We are concerned that the Government may row back from their commitment to introduce this code and fulfil their responsibility to children.

In the coming days, we will write to the Secretary of State on this matter. However, importantly, for this debate today, let us not keep reimagining a better future without also grasping the opportunity for that future to start today.

Online Safety

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I agree, which is why we are already consulting with our international partners. There are different views of how the internet should be taken forward, but for child protection and the more egregious things that social media companies do, there is an issue of internationalism, not least how regulations are enforced. That is something we are considering, and one of the benefits of doing it in the traditional way of having a Green Paper, a White Paper and then legislation is that we will continue to have consultation with noble Lords, which we are prepared to listen to. We will set out the views of where we think we are going, but we are open to consultation as well.

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, instead of simply—and importantly—mitigating the harms done on the internet, might we consider a step change about designing the whole thing differently? Does the Minister agree that, instead of thinking about Facebook, Twitter and the like as platforms, if we thought about them as public spaces, required to have a duty of care like any other public space and be regulated accordingly, we would find ourselves in a different place? Is this something the Government are considering?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I agree with the right reverend Prelate, and that is something the Government are considering.

Children and Young People: Digital Technology

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, an unregulated digital environment is causing moral decay. There is no time to reiterate the various harms that are being caused, but they are deep-seated, corrosive and pervasive. Just last week I was at a school in Essex talking to 7 to 11 year-olds about their use of a game called TikTok. All of them were using it. The lower age limit for using it is 13. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, pointed out, the digital world assumes that all users are equal and all users are adults, whereas in fact one-third of users worldwide are children. Therefore, their health, well-being and development require us to ensure that the internet, and the many ways that children access it, are as safe as they can be. This has usually meant creating special safe places for children or safety options that can be activated.

Would it not be better to turn this whole approach on its head? With any other public space, be it a cinema, a shopping mall or a city square, our assumption is that this is a safe place for all ages to gather and therefore safe for children. Regulation and, where necessary, legislation supports this view and then we create dedicated spaces for adults—not the other way round. In the cinema we do this through film classification. In a public park or a city square we do it through public order legislation. The internet is a public space. Indeed, for children and young people it is the public space. This means that regulation and guidance to make the internet safe by design are all the more necessary. Far from inhibiting the internet, as some vested interests claim, it will enable the internet to be the democratic, creative and liberating space it is meant to be. It is the lack of regulation that makes it dangerous and debilitating. Achieving a common standard does not make the internet restrictive for adults; it just means that we apply the same principles to all parts of our common life.

Let me put it another way. In the 1970s we added fluoride to water and to toothpaste. Dental hygiene was transformed. We stopped dealing with the symptoms of tooth decay and designed a way of improving everybody’s health. There is an important philosophical question here. What sort of world do we wish to build in this digital age? It is no good shrugging our shoulders and saying that it is all too difficult. Nor is it acceptable for Facebook, Google and Amazon to say that they are not to blame because they are just platforms. They curate the way we receive the information they gather, and this gives them a powerful editorial voice. Increasingly they are publishers as well, and their big bucks distort the whole ecosystem of our media economy. They are creating monopolies that it is hard to imagine us tolerating in any other industry.

The forthcoming report of the Communications Committee—on which it has been my privilege and education to sit, alongside the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron—will present some recommendations on how we might regulate the internet. Most of all, we need to make it safe by design, and teach children how to inhabit it. Without this, we will sell them short and allow the liberating genius of the internet to be compromised and stymied. In other walks of life, if it were your child in the betting shop or flicking through a pornographic magazine, with their worldview being shaped by an increasingly narrow echo chamber of gossip, speculation and fake news, you would want to do something about it. That is our job. We need to find a way of putting fluoride in the internet.

Internet Safety

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

Yes, I agree that that is important for all people online, not just children.

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, may I extend this question a little further? This is such an important issue and our generation will be judged on it as the internet and digital age takes over. Noble Lords will know those clever algorithms that are so good at selling us things—if we buy one thing they will try to sell us something else. Those could be turned towards the interests of internet safety by advancing something called safety by design. What consideration are the Government giving to much more forward-thinking legislation not just to support bodies such as the Council for Internet Safety, but to introduce measures to make our inhabiting of the digital world safer and more creative?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

Yes, the right reverend Prelate makes a good point. That is why the Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper set out the need for the industry to think safety first by designing products and platforms in a way that makes them less likely to cause harm. We need to make that as simple as possible for the industry and we need to be aware of the impact on SMEs and growing companies. The White Paper will address this issue further and will, for example, examine the case for a set of safety-by-design guidelines for the industry. It will also set out the Government’s approach to the use of safety technology.

Channel 4: Privatisation (Communications Committee Report)

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, I, too, am a member of the House of Lords Communications Committee. We normally meet on a Tuesday afternoon, so it is nice to have our meeting through the medium of this debate, in which members past and present can speak to each other. I thank other noble Lords for joining in as well. I also want to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Best, for the wise and winsome way he chaired the committee for three years and, in particular, for helping us to produce this report, which we dare to think has made a bit of a difference.

To put it simply, there is nothing quite like Channel 4. I realise that some people may think that bishops arrive fully formed, like ships in full sail, from a production line over the river at Lambeth, but all of us have other lives both past and present. In my early 20s I worked for several years in the film industry and saw at first hand the huge boost that was made to British film by Channel 4. I remember going to a meeting in 1979 which was held to discuss the very possibility of Channel 4 as a publicly owned public service broadcaster but funded by advertising, and being inspired and excited by the different perspectives that Channel 4 might offer—and so it has. In many areas, Channel 4 has pioneered a broad diversity of views and voices, most recently, as has been said many times in the debate, the Paralympics.

Unlike some other broadcasters, Channel 4 gets the fact that diversity in the UK today cannot just mean regional accents. Here I think I need to say of the latest things coming from the Government that, while of course we need to support the regions, to understand Britain today we need to move beyond regional accents to the other things that shape us culturally and ethically. I would like to see all public service broadcasters do much more in this area. That is because to understand our own national diversity and at the same time create greater coherence and commitment to each other within that diversity, we need to see what it is that creates community and belonging through the variety of narratives that shape a world view and an ethical framework for inhabiting the world. In the past this may have happened through belonging to a town, a county or a nation. It was underpinned by shared values that often had their roots in a common religious tradition. Today, however, it is just as likely to happen through a multiplicity of faiths or through other cultural and subcultural ways of belonging.

If anyone gets this in British broadcasting, it is Channel 4. Its challenging remit to provide diverse and alternative views is therefore significant enough in itself, but the fact that it is a public service broadcaster funded by advertising means that, unlike every other superficially similar broadcaster one could name, its motive is profit not for the good of its shareholders but for the further development of its ambitious and adventurous programming. Therefore, as has been well put by the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Sherbourne, to privatise the broadcaster would not only be to compromise it but to be in danger of destroying it. Whatever any potential buyer may promise when it signs the cheque, the need to deliver a profit as the end in itself is bound to erode the diversity of its programmes, especially those which attract less in advertising. Many of the people we interviewed during our inquiry pointed out that it will be the adventurous, diverse and alternative programmes that are likely to suffer most. Similarly, as other noble Lords have emphasised, moving out of London seems unnecessary since all the advertisers are in London. Any financial savings would soon be swallowed up by train fares, travelling back to the very place the organisation had just vacated.

The report speaks for itself and, along with others, I am glad that the Government have responded so positively to it. However, let me emphasise that there are two areas where Channel 4 needs to improve its game. The first is programmes for children, where, in recent years, Channel 4 has not really done anything much at all. The second, where it has particular responsibilities, is programmes for children and young people. Both Sharon White, the chief executive of Ofcom, and the Children’s Media Foundation have challenged Channel 4 on this issue. Sadly, the reason there are fewer programmes for those age groups is probably commercial: children’s programmes just do not attract sufficient advertising. However, if Channel 4 wishes to continue to operate in the way it does—rightly, in my view—it really cannot use that argument, since that is the very argument it employs in defence of its status and funding arrangement. It cannot have it both ways. If Channel 4 is to be a public service broadcaster financed by advertising, it needs to use the more profitable programmes to support those that are less so, such as those for children.

Channel 4 is a hugely innovative and successful broadcaster with a unique place in the hugely creative British broadcasting economy. The Government and our nation need to be proud of what we have achieved in broadcasting in this country and ensure that this intricate, fairly fragile—as the whole world of advertising changes in a digital era—but nevertheless effective media ecosystem is not damaged by unnecessary interference. However, Channel 4 must be held to account, particular on programmes for children and young people, so that it continues to produce a range of broadcasting with an ever-greater diversity of views and voices, and so that we are not just better informed and entertained but better able to understand who we are—and see it reflected on the box.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 10th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jay, for enabling us to discuss the EU data protection package alongside the Data Protection Bill, but I will address my comments to the Bill.

Although I also welcome the rights and protections for children that the Bill offers, not least the right to be forgotten, there is one very important point of detail where reconsideration is urgently needed, which has already been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, namely the age of consent for children to give their personal information away online in exchange for products and services without a parent or guardian needing to give their permission. The proposals in Clause 8, as we have already heard, set this age of consent at 13. However, a recent YouGov survey of the public commissioned by the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, shows very little support for this. Indeed, a whopping majority of 81% thought the age should be set at either 16 or 18. The Bill’s Explanatory Notes state that the Government have chosen this age—the youngest possible allowed under the incoming GDPR rules—because it is,

“in line with the minimum age set as a matter of contract by some of the most popular information society services which currently offer services to children (e.g. Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram)”.

In other words, a de facto standard age of consent for children providing their personal information online has emerged, and that age has been set by the very companies that profit from providing these services to children. It might be that 13 is an appropriate age for consent by children to give their information away online, but surely that should be decided in other ways and with much greater reference to the public, and I do not think this has happened. It is certainly at odds with the results of this recent survey.

Moreover, Growing Up with the Internet, the recently published report of the Select Committee on Communications, on which I am privileged to serve, examined the different ways in which children use the internet through the different stages of childhood. We received lots of evidence that lumping together all young people between the ages of 13 and 18 was really not helpful, and that much more research was needed. To bow to the commercial interests of Facebook and others therefore feels at the very least premature, and the example of its usefulness given in the Explanatory Notes—that this would somehow ease access to,

“educational websites and research resources”,

so that children could “complete their homework”—somewhat naïve, particularly in the light of other conclusions and recommendations from the Growing Up with the Internet report, not least that digital literacy, alongside reading, writing and arithmetic, should be considered a “fourth R”; that the Government should establish the post of a children’s digital champion at the centre of government; that children must be treated online with the same rights, respect and care that has been established through regulation offline; and that all too often commercial considerations seem to be put first. So 13 might be the right age but it might not, and at the very least, further consultation with the public and with parents is needed.